Nelder: Peak Oil Isn't Dead

Chris Nelder's article: 'Peak oil isn't dead; it just smells that way' is a helpful and relatively recent update on the peak oil discussion.

Since at least 2005 there has been a massive increase in the financial investment to fund production in oil.  This has been paid for by higher prices for fuel.  The result, however, has been merely a rough global plateau of production in crude oil since that time.  Global demand keeps rising as population and expectations rise also.  So other forms of liquid fuel (such as ethanol) have been employed to supplement supply.  However the energy intensity and the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) of these alternative fuels is significantly lower than for crude oil.

The world, in summation, already has an energy-related transport crisis in the respect that the fuel we use to run our vehicles is now much, much more expensive than it was compared to a decade ago and the prices continue to rise at a faster rate than our incomes do.  The result can only be reflected in a lower general standard of living without changes in lifestyle.

The Jilted and the Landless

Britain has gone to pot and its the fault of the baby boomer generation says two media journalists (Ed Howker from 'The Spectator' magazine and Shiv Malik from the 'Sunday Times' and 'Prospect' magazine).  If it wasn't for the short-term horizons and rampant consumerism of the British people from my generation then those young adults of today - those born from 1979 and later - would be enjoying a good supply of cheaper, better quality housing, as well as jobs that paid a reasonable remuneration and were also secure.  It is claimed that the denial of those things has led to their "postponement of adulthood" and a lifestyle of poverty and aimlessness. [1]

The crisis in Britain, as described in Malik and Howker's book 'Jilted Generation' is particularly relevant because it is also mirrored in most so-called 'first-world' nations today.  I have no real argument against their description of the predicament of the post 1979ers but a lot of the analysis of this book lacks depth and historical understanding.

It may be quite normal for young adults to pin the blame for things gone wrong on the generation who came before and I can relate to that.   Who would argue against the proposition that there aren't, indeed, huge numbers of baby boomers who should be accepting a great deal of responsibility for the dire situation that our offspring find themselves in now. Many boomers have wielded high levels of decision-making power in our political and social institutions.

Howker and Malik, however, fail to describe the global trends and forces that acted upon the their parents' generation. In addition, barely recognise the extent to which many baby boomers very actively engaged in a rebellious backlash against the very unsustainable materialistic lifestyle and attitudes that these same authors rage against now.  There did exist, after all in the 1960s and 1970s, a notable counter-culture stratum of society, and it wasn't ever all about drugs and other politically naive distractions.  One of the most fundamental aspects of the youth counter-culture, for instance, was the 'Back to the Land Movement'. [2]  In the 1960s and 1970s young people flocked to rural areas with the aim of creating a simpler, better way of existing free from many of the constraints of what they saw as a dysfunctional and (ultimately) unsustainable mainstream society.  Though 'back to the land movements' have existed long in time 

"...what made the later phenomenon of the 1960s and 1970s especially significant was that the rural-relocation trend was sizable enough that it was identified in the American demographic statistics..."[2]

A strong belief existed in the 1970s that a movement onto rural land would result in lower housing costs, better living standards, improved health, and general wellbeing.  One would engage directly in organic agriculture and home building and, through these actions, earth-centred lifestyles and communities would become self-sustaining.  The hope existed that a new culture would emerge and spread quickly and widely enough to avoid a 'limits to growth' catastrophe in the new millennium.  

Needless to say, that dream didn't pan out.

Time and opportunity constraints mean that the full explanation of political and social trends that begin to explain the failure of counter-culture (such as concentration of power, consumerisation of politics, etc) cannot be explored here.  However, the issues that relate to the availability/cost of land are, perhaps, where it might be the most fruitful for an inquirer to explore reasons for the degeneration in civil life and severe depletion of common wealth (in the 'rich' industrialised nations at least).

Land, the authors of 'Jilted Generation' acknowledge,  is "the major cost in the purchase of a home" [3].   Lack of land (in terms of decentralised ownership) may be the very reason why 93% of homes built in London between 2000 and 2010 have been "poky one and two-bedroom flats." [4] The fact that less than one percent of Britain's population own it entire base of farmland [5] might explain why a 'back to the land movement' cannot exist there. 

For surely land is the only form of genuine cultural escape when we find ourselves living out an empty materialism - expressed as 'consumerism' - in a deprived 'dollars-and-cents' reality.

Brenda Rosser

REFERENCES:
Picture:  Drop City was an artists' community that formed in southern Colorado in 1965. Abandoned by the early 1970s, it became known as the first rural "hippie commune".

[1]  'Jilted Generation - How Britain has Bankrupted its Youth' by Ed Howker and Shiv Malik.  Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre.  Published 2010.  ISBN: 978-184831-198-5

[2] Back-to-the-land movement, Wikipedia

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-to-the-land_movement

[3]  Page 41:   'Jilted Generation - How Britain has Bankrupted its Youth' by Ed Howker and Shiv Malik.  Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre.  Published 2010.  ISBN: 978-184831-198-5

[4]  Page 213:   'Jilted Generation - How Britain has Bankrupted its Youth' by Ed Howker and Shiv Malik.  Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre.  Published 2010.  ISBN: 978-184831-198-5

[5]  Reclaim the Fields

Ed Hamer discovers a European youth movement taking action on the issue of access to agricultural land.  http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/reclaim-fields

Why has austerity led to disaster in Greece?

Greece is in sharp economic free-fall. “20% real decline since 2008” (as reported on 30th April 2013). In 2012 the real value of government revenues and spending reached a ten-year low.  However, because of the sharp economic contractions, government revenues and spending as a share of GDP reached an all-time high (44.7% of GDP and 54.8% of GDP respectively).  The high level of government spending is speculated by some to have nothing to do with interest rates…social benefits are noted as the highest portion of Greece’s government expenditure (46% of primary spending in 2012) whilst wages represented 25%, goods and services 9.8% and ‘other items’ (includes recapitalisation of Greece’s banks) 19%.

Maria Markantonatou describes the terrible social consequences of a financial austerity program that hasn't solved the national fiscal and debt problems after all.  Unemployment rose to 25.4% in August 2012 whilst those still in paid employment experienced a very rapid deterioration in their pay and conditions.  Jobs have become very insecure and many do not provide enough income for basic sustenance. Homelessness increased by 25% within a two year period (2009-2011). Others report that children and families are going hungry and long queues in Greece for food give-aways are viewed on recent television reports.

Markantonatou has postulated on the reasons why austerity programs were introduced in the first instance.  She writes that:

·       national economies are being treated as banks,

·       banks are regarded as the most important of social institutions,

·       there's been a retreat of regulation from the mid 1970s,

·       basic social provision has been financialised (social security and health insurance),

·       a belief that lower wages makes a nation more competitive and attracts investors,

·       states have prioritised the strengthening of the global financial system and its rescue [over a wide range of other solutions.]  See:

Diagnosis, Treatment, and Effects of the Crisis in Greece.  A “Special Case” or a “Test Case”?

States now cede their ability to create currency and then, having no control over the levers of finance, attempt to bail out large corporations.  How can this scenario be interpreted other than a radical handover of sovereignty to unelected and unaccountable entities.  Or is it that states are, in the absence of justice, simply "vast systems of robbery".

Money or Power, or Cheap Energy?

"…The international monetary system also now faces a clear and present danger: currency wars. Virtually every major country is seeking depreciation, or at least non-appreciation, of its currency to strengthen its economy and create jobs....The “target list” of manipulators for priority policy response identified... includes China, Denmark, Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Switzerland and Taiwan, which accounted for half the estimated amount of unjustified intervention in 2011 ....Japan should be put on a “watch list,” ... Most of the remaining intervention is by major oil exporters, both members of OPEC led by Saudi Arabia and non-members such as Norway and Russia. ...

....John Connally [four days after the Nixon shocks of August 1971 when a global currency war led the US to abandon the gold standard]:

“I appre­ciate the advice from you gen­tlemen and want to share my own phi­los­ophy with you before we break up: the for­eigners are out to screw us and our job is to screw them first. Thank you and goodbye.”

From C Fred Bergsten's 'Currency Wars, the Economy of the United States and Reform of the International Monetary System'

[Common denominator 1971, 2013:  Peaks in oil production.]

Did economic growth in the 1960s make us happy?

I believe it is now common knowledge that mainstream economic theory doesn't take account of the role of energy and other natural resources in making economic growth possible, or at least promoting it. In any case, I'm not sure that anybody really understands how the Gross Domestic Product of their nation was continuing to grow for decade after decade whilst the quality of many lives was simultaneously diminishing as each year passed.  Is economic growth merely a statistical measure? If it is, why is it so important?

We are told that it is good for Government to take in steadily-increasing revenues.  The essence of this occurrence is meaningless unless it translates into more and better government services.

How shall we collectively profit from the large corporation, in the long term, when they employ Asian workers in long low-paid daily shifts?   Around the year 2000 an extra billion workers joined the global labour force.  Is it no surprise that our conditions of employment and wages are in gradual free-fall.

In sum most monetary transactions today have very little to do with actually producing services and things of real value for people.  At the same time, the intensity of commercial exploitation seems to be ramped up with every passing month.

In the 1960s, the vast excess of money had not yet thrown a monkey wrench into the machine of investment. [1]  It was a different world.  The level of production of real things sold per capita was much higher than it is now in the world's richest industrialised nations.

Therefore, I believe that it would be helpful for the baby boomers like myself to try and remember what the lives of our more privileged parents were like in their decades of so-called 'peak prosperity'. In their time, the purported social joy of the 'economic growth' experience was at its historical summit.  The 'happy days' of the 1960s was an era when a middle class family could be supported by one full time and secure job only.

This week I finished reading a book allegedly written by a descendant of the poet John Keats (who shares his name).  The book is entitled 'The New Romans - an American Experience'.  It was published in 1969 when the author was 49 years of age.  So, Mr Keats was born in 1920 (he died in 2000) and experienced the Great Depression when he was a teenager 'sowing his oats'.  At the age of 21 he was recruited into the military to serve in World War II and, at the end of the war, he and his young bride and two year old son found themselves living in a small apartment twenty minutes by bus from downtown Washington on the east coast of the USA.

Keat's observed that the post World War II way of life in the US was absolutely different from any American way of life he remembered, and it fascinated him.  The nation's vast apartment housing projects with housing developments that "were sold to veterans for nothing down other than a promise to pay an inflated price for thirty years" were a fact of life for "hundreds of thousands of young people like ourselves."  He details many aspects of the ordinary, but revolutionised, life of he and his peers and provides insightful reflections on the ubiquitous emptiness of the experience for most people.

"...people cannot live in machines that are run by systems....five square miles of the same thing...an immense area [that was] ...filled with the same kind of people...same age, same number of small children, same kind of problems and possessions...same kind of jobs [mostly in Government]."

Keats spelt it out.  Life for his generation became a kind of 'rat race'.  America was impersonal.  To its people it provided mass housing, mass markets, massive corporations, massive government, mass media and massive boredom.  The human response, he writes, to such an inhuman system is "inventive circumvention".  This sounds very credible.  I've read that the disastrous spate of 'deregulation' of the world's global financial markets came about due to the powerlessness of regulators to cope with the creative circumvention of global players, for instance.

A novel thing for our mainstream (mass) media to do would be to focus on the great questions of our time.  Questions such as:

how things are produced and who decides?

• who gets to be bailed out and why?
• what is capitalism when government and corporations share an interlocking directorate of the same managers?
• how can life be less impersonal?
• should we diminish the role of 'the market' in favour of the cooperative or altruistic provision of human and environmental need?

I know that I don't want to see people living under the concentrated power of big government or big business.  I think my values are more in tune with those of the traditional family farmer and householder in the nineteenth century.  It is the incorporation into my life of a much greater role for community as well as genuine individual effort and labour and a much smaller role for corporations.

I'd like to be a recognisable human being.  Who wouldn't?  

REFERENCES:
[1]  The Tangled Relationship Between Wealth and Money - And why we're focusing on the wrong economic 'fixes'

by John Michael Greer

Tuesday, January 22, 2013, 8:43 AM

http://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/80556/tangled-relationship-wealth-money

Manufacturing a criterion of judgement

Almost anyone who has viewed images such as those, for example, presented by Edward Burtynsky would probably feel a high degree of anxiety.  For surely, the implications behind the emergence of giant urban-industrial wastelands are staggering.  Nature has been "pronounced dead" and is "desacrilised".  Writer Theodore Roszak noted this observation 40 years ago in 1972.  

Roszak warned then that "as time goes on, the technocracy is bound to grow exquisitely adept at distracting protest and tranquilising anxiety.  He prophesied that "the bulk of our brainpower and governmental energy will one day be employed concocting cover stories, propagating ingenious alibis, and applying public relations" with a "vast mandarin establishment of professional obfuscators" "at the top of our society"[1].  

And so it passed.  

The vital questions of our time were kept from public perusal in a corporate/government media skilled up in the art of lying with (mostly) true assertions.

Half a century ago, one might ask, who in the world knew that climate change, global financial crises, resource depletion and peak oil were coming?  Well, plenty of people did! There were countless prophets of the historical horizon.  Individuals - isolated but ubiquitous - employed personal strategies to scale down, drop excess power and create a physically liveable and sustainable environment where they could.  Remnants of protected nature and human scale production are still evident.  They are hard to locate, being often well outside the down-to-earth and "tough-minded dollars-and-cents realism" of our towns and cities.

As the world entered a global food crisis earlier this decade it seems wise for one to be cautious when talking about life as being more than simply living by bread alone. It is apt, I believe, to point to a "wasteland of the spirit" in this "fully developed society" that Roszak so skilfully vilified some time ago:

"...dignity begins to mean something besides (though not instead of) a full stomach....and certainly something very different from equal access to an air-conditioned nightmare."

Last month in the Calder valley of Tasmania currants and berries were harvested. Figs will ripen in February, pears in April.  This small farming venture is incomplete and poorly co-ordinated.  Technical intelligence is not in evidence.  

Discontent led me to this place but I feel that my reality has expanded.  Perhaps there is an escape from an urban-industrial imperative. 

REFERENCES:

[1] Edward Burtynsky's 'Manufactured Landscapes' presentation 2012:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=U2Dd4k63-zM

[1]  'Where the Wasteland Ends - Politics and Transcendence in Post Industrial Society' Theodore Roszak.  Faber and Faber 1972.  ISBN 0 571 10581 5