ClubOrlov

Giant Monsters

2009-11-23T01:26:00.015-05:00

A few years ago I bought a sailboat from a fellow who I am sure wishes to remain unnamed, but who at the time made much of his boat restoration skills. He had made a number of alterations to the boat, some ambitious, some less so, while I was, at the time, quite inexperienced. In spite of my relative inexperience, I was already able to discern certain imperfections in the results of the seller's efforts. But I was very impressed with the boat itself (and the boat did turn out to be quite excellent) and so I chose to gloss over these slight imperfections in the seller's workmanship.

For such a large man, the seller had a very soft and gentle tone of voice. He did disclose some things along the way that should have alarmed me. I believe that the reason they didn't was because his tone of voice had a calming, soothing effect on me. For instance, he could have said something like "I ran of caulk while installing this thing, so I mounted it on a slice of cheese from my lunchbox" and I probably would have thought "Mmm... cheese... lunch?" Also, the boat had recently returned from an extended ocean cruise, and the seller looked quite alive to me, leading me to think that none of these imperfections was life-threatening. And so I bought the boat.

As I already mentioned, it turned out to be an excellent boat, but I turned out to be overly nonchalant about the non-life-threatening nature of the seller's workmanship. During our shakeout cruise most things that could break did break, causing me to question many of the seller's practices and techniques. Is it proper to cut pieces out of random structural elements with a reciprocating saw in order to make room for one's head? (Apparently the seller was one or two inches taller than the boat's designer had considered it to be humanly possible.) Is a piece of Masonite an acceptable substitute when the manufacturer specifies that a block of hardwood should be used to mount the autopilot? Is it sufficiently safety-conscious to seal a disconnected through-hull by plugging it with a rubber stopper from the inside? The good part in all this was that I, in the process of tackling these questions, along with a multitude of similar ones, one by one or in combination, sometimes in circumstances when I had my hands full just sailing the boat, gained immeasurably in knowledge and in confidence.

Although confronting these questions one by one, sometimes in challenging circumstances, was an excellent (though sometimes unnerving) way to learn, eventually I realized that there was an important first question that I ought to ask of each thing on the boat: "Did the seller do it?" If he did it, then the next question would be, "What does it take it to rip out and replace it?" If it is neither very hard nor very expensive, then that is automatically the next step. If it is, then the third question becomes, "What's wrong with it?" If answering this question turns out to involve ripping it out and replacing it, then so be it, but leaving a stone unturned would not be conducive to either peace of mind or safety, because, although there are now very few of them left, I am yet to find A Thing He Did that does not have major issues.

To be fair, the seller did do one very good thing: he kept afloat and sold to me a very good boat. Also, I can't fault him for trying to maintain a boat on a shoestring (I actually have immense respect for people who are able to do that well). Whatever he does, and however he does it, it clearly works for him. I see him leaping about the spindrift-covered deck in the midst of a howling tempest clutching a hammer and a screwdriver. Maybe he is happy, maybe he is sad, who knows...

As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, consistency is "the hobgoblin of little minds." I agree, but I would go a step further and ardently wish that each and every little mind had such a hobgoblin to call its own. If someone's work is consistently excellent, that is better than sporadically excellent work. Although much excellent work can be undone by a single reputation-destroying, career-ending blunder, short of that, sporadic excellence is better than none at all. But if someone's work is more often than not of an abysmally ghastly quality and in general a monstrous travesty, then consistency can still be its one redeeming quality. If it is consistent, then one knows what to do with it, all of it, at once, and not waste any time trying to cherry-pick salvageable exceptions where none might exist.

Allow me to present an example. Suppose you are wondering whether a particular public institution has any particular merit that would serve to justify its continued existence. It might be the health care system, or national defense, or the tax code, or any number of other similar boondoggles. We might consider each institution in and of itself, apart from all the others, to see whether it is consistently bad, or whether it has some redeeming qualities. Or we might save ourselves a lot of time by asking ourselves just one simple question: "Is it Bolshevik?" Because if it is Bolshevik, then that tells us right away that it is just one element of a perfectly monstrous entity called the USSR. This particular monstrous entity is already defunct, and so there is no need for us to go out and slay it, but were it not, we would know immediately that none of its institutions are in need of reform, because what would be the point? Making a perfect monster into an imperfect monster does not seem like a worthy goal.

Allow me to present another example. Currently in the USA we now live surrounded by institutions that many of us readily concede are quite broken, but it still takes most of us considerable effort to declare any of them irredeemable. It is natural for us to look for redeeming qualities, to think that a certain negative outcome is the result of a mistake rather than the fullest possible expression of its true nature. It takes time and effort to collect enough evidence to be able to declare, based on a preponderance of evidence, that what we have here is something perfectly monstrous, and then to be ready to debate people who hold opposing viewpoints. Few of us are equipped to handle the task of outright condemnation. There are some experts whose job it is to condemn buildings, to decommission vessels, and to sentence people to death, and they sometimes have to exercise judgment, but mostly they just follow rules. And when there are no rules to follow, we are all helpless.

This is where monsters come in handy: we all know what we must do to them. Like so many things that bedevil our lives, they have a notional rather than a physical reality, but in spite of that the effect they have on our lives can be quite real. Take corporations: the term "corporation" is actually a clever misnomer, because a corporation is, in fact, incorporeal — lacking a body. It has many of the same rights as a person, but in place of a body it has a "corporate veil" which, once pierced, usually reveals some cringing nincompoop who screwed up the paperwork and is now personally liable for his corporation's debts and transgressions. Since a corporation has personhood but lacks a body, it is, in a technically precise way, a phantom. Like other kinds of monsters, it is immortal, and very specific steps must be followed in order to kill it. Now, not all phantoms are monsters, but I hope you will agree that the potential is there.

Just like us, monsters must follow certain rules. Vampires must drink human blood and stay out of the sun. Werewolves must turn into wolves and start mauling people at the sight of the full moon. Zombies must eat brains. Corporations must produce high share prices and dividends for their shareholders. This last one seems comparatively innocuous, but it is sufficiently abstract to make the transition between mere immortal phantomhood and complete monstrousness quite automatic, because usually there are both monstrous and non-monstrous ways to create value for shareholders, and the monstrous ways are often more profitable in the short run. Some corporations may not seem particularly monstrous at the moment, but given their monstrous propensities we can never let down our guard.

Monsters require different treatment from most other things out there. We don't generally try to reform them. There is hardly a point in teaching a vampire good hygiene (rinse between meals, please!) or in muzzling a werewolf and clipping its claws, or in making zombies eat a balanced diet and observe Lent. Rather, we generally prefer to slay them. There are specific ways to kill various monsters. A vampire is dispatched by driving an aspen stake through its heart. Werewolves are shot with silver bullets. Zombies require a shotgun blast to the head. Corporations dissolve upon being doused with red ink, a bit like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Now, a question arises with regard to the USA: is it more of a country (like, say, France) or is it more of a corporation (like, say AIG or GM or GS)? Looking at its politics, it is apparent that it is more of a country club than a country. Corporations are clearly the ones in charge, through electoral campaign donations, lobbyists, and the revolving door between corporate and government positions. The periodic electoral monkey-business and fake media frenzy are just there as an ad campaign to keep the brand fresh. It does seem more and more like a corporate entity, with a small and shrinking number of shareholders, whose latest scheme (now that the whole thing is spiraling the drain) is to have the government print lots of money just so that they can pocket huge sums of it.

Just as a vampire must drink blood, the USA is compelled by its corporate nature to produce value for its shareholders, and the only way it can do so in a collapsing economy is by printing money. Monstrous, isn't it? So, how many more buckets of red ink will it take before we all get to hear "I'm dissolving! I'm dissolving!"? If you are not quite ready to hear that, then I recommend that you run home immediately, bar the door and get busy with the garlic and the crucifixes. Slaying monsters is not for everyone, you know.

Interview — Radio New Zealand

2009-11-14T21:31:00.007-05:00

Sunday Morning with Chris Laidlaw

Russian-born and now resident in the US, Dmitry Orlov has a theory that the United States is heading for collapse just as the Soviet Union did — and for the same reasons: a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil, a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget, and ballooning foreign debt. He talks to Chris Laidlaw about what he calls ‘The Superpower Collapse Soup’.

At the end of the interview, I misspoke when Chris basically asked me whether I was pushing Green agenda (NZ Green party polls in the single digits). I should by now be used to interviewers' attempts to pigeonhole me and marginalize my opinions. What I should have said is this:

Any resemblance between what I might advocate and a political agenda (Green or otherwise) is purely coincidental. Green politics is still politics, and politics of any stripe has precious little to offer when it comes to surviving collapse. Politics is at best a distraction, and has the potential to make a bad situation much worse. In the aftermath of a collapse, politics can lead to civil war, ethnic cleansing and genocide. I am particularly opposed to the attempt to coerce people into a one-dimensional "political spectrum."

On the other hand, Phillip Adams of Radio Australia actually called me an anarchist (but was kind enough to cut that bit out of the program prior to broadcast). The NZ interview was broadcast live. Oh well.

Podcast is available here.

The Oceans are Coming Part II — Living on the Land

2009-11-13T22:09:00.021-05:00

Are you still talking about Cyclone Nargis? Have you ever heard of Cyclone Nargis? Here’s a reminder: on 1 May 2008 a weakening low-pressure system suddenly picked up energy as it approached Burma from the Bay of Bengal. By the second day of this rapid strengthening, Cyclone Nargis was blowing in excess of 135MPH and made landfall on the low-lying southern coast of Burma armed with vast reserves of cyclonic energy, a storm surge beneath, and constant heavy rain from above. The Irrawaddy Delta was devastated, causing at least 140,000 human deaths. Most of us have forgotten about it.

One reason you may have heard of Cyclone Nargis at the time, is that for a short while it was the cause of a major diplomatic incident, with the Burmese Junta refusing to accept aid and assistance from the West, while continuing with a meaningless referendum. Another reason you may have heard of Cyclone Nargis is because you live near to Burma; and there’s the rub – proximity is the single most important factor in deciding whether a story is newsworthy in the mainstream media, and until Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana in 2005, devastating coastal flooding was just something that happened to “other people” as far as the vast majority of Americans were concerned.

That’s not going to change anytime soon – it’s partly down to our natural tendency for prioritising the local and the immediate, for survival reasons; but to a large extent it is also down to the cultural conditioning that exists in most civilisations in order to only value that which benefits the system that you are deemed to be part of. If you are American then that means that anything that doesn’t affect America, doesn’t matter. You can safely repeat that mantra for any civilised nation. It’s not necessarily good, but it’s true.

In Part I of this article, we examined the best available research, and, given the current best forecast of 2 metres and the consistent tendency of climate forecasters to undershoot their own subsequent observations, we concluded that a 4 metre sea level rise over the course of this century is quite likely.

In this part, we focus on two areas that are most familiar to the two authors, and also relevant to the majority of readers: Dmitry is going to look at the likely impact of future sea-level rise on the Eastern Seaboard of the USA, not just in terms of the direct effects of flooding on habitation, but the many different indirect effects that sea-level rise will have; Keith is going to do the same for the east coast of England and the Netherlands, two places that have seen their fair share of flooding in the past, and are bound to suffer in the future.

The view from New England, by Dmitry Orlov

When it comes to addressing the effects of sea level rise that is expected to occur over the course of this century, there are many ways to immerse yourself in the subject. You might do some reading and make some field trips, talk to knowledgeable people, attend some seminars, and write some research papers. Or you might take an entire year to slowly traverse the landscape in question, and get a feel for it through a lot of direct observation, which is what I did. I spent about a year sailing around the Eastern Seaboard of North America, from the submerged coastal mountain range that is the coast of Maine north of Portland to the shifting sand dunes of St. Augustine in Florida, and most points in between, looking at both nature and historic sites along the way.

There certainly is nature to be found further inland, but rather few historic sites. It is very important to understand that, unlike the ancient and compact settlement patterns of Europe, and unlike its dense and active network of navigable rivers and canals, North America consists of a rather narrow but thickly settled coastal zone known as the Northeast Corridor, and the vast expanse of Wild West. Historically, the colonies survived through ocean trade. Until the advent of coal-fired railroads, the only parts of the interior that were economically viable were the ones that were within easy reach of a navigable waterway. Even then many inland settlers found grain to be too bulky for trade, and used it to make whiskey. The Erie Canal made Chicago a town rather than just a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. The reason was simple: before the advent of railroads, it cost as much to transport cargo 30 or so miles overland as it did to ship it across the ocean. Until a railroad was built across Massachusetts, goods shipped from Chicago to Boston via the Erie Canal had to be loaded onto barges and floated down the Hudson River to New York, then transferred to schooners that took them up the coast.

It is also very important to understand that global trade is not, as one unfortunately often hears, only possible thanks to fossil fuels. Until the 1920s much of the shipping in Boston Harbour was by sail. Most of the ships were relatively small, with vast numbers of schooners of around 60 feet and crews of 10 or fewer. The age of container ships, bulk carriers, roll-on roll-offs (ROROs), and other monstrous oil-thirsty craft is quite recent, while the history of global trade is ancient, and proceeded in one of two ways: on foot (leading caravans of pack animals) or by sail. It is also important to note that coal never became competitive with sail in transporting bulk goods, and sail-based shipping persisted until the age of the marine diesel engine, which burns bunker fuel (a slightly upgraded crude oil). This substance will most likely no longer be available in the vast quantities required just a few decades from now, and certainly well before the end of the century. It seems plausible to think that the age of fossil fuels will end as it started, with oil giving way to coal, giving way to wind.

And so, in looking at the future of North America, it makes sense to examine historical settlement patterns and patterns of trade. Even after the powerful economic stimulant of fossil fuels is no longer flowing freely, the perennial choice will remain the same: make and ship trade goods, or remain backward and poor. The transportation options will once again be largely limited to the waterways, with the vast landlocked areas of North America becoming stagnant backwaters, unable to trade, and steadily depopulating. Many people look at the end of the fossil fuel age and envision a future that is much more local; and surely it will be, but what they do not envision is the effect of a radically altered transportation topology. The current tightly interconnected transportation mesh of rail links, highways, and airports will be gone; and in its place will arise a sparse, seasonal network favouring single modes of transport for each link (pack animal, river barge, or ocean sailboat), heavily weighted in favour of water transport, and even more heavily weighted in favour of sail. Transporting a few tons of cargo per crew member across the Atlantic will require a few weeks' worth of rations for the crew members and a bit of sailcloth for the ship, but the wind will still be free. Hauling the same amount of freight across the Appalachian mountain range, which runs the length of the Eastern Seaboard, would become something of an epic undertaking.

Looking, once again, at the historical settlement patterns along the Eastern Seaboard, it becomes clear that how prosperous and populous any given coastal settlement becomes has a lot to do with how good a harbour it has. The Carolinas present an excellent example of this: their climates and populations are broadly similar, yet North Carolina is poor while South Carolina is prosperous. The difference can be brought down to a single, overwhelming factor: South Carolina's Charleston Harbour. This is a splendid deep-water harbour, sheltered, with a wide inlet. North Carolina is dominated by Cape Hatteras, an area of shifting shoals and wide, shallow bays. To make matters worse, the Cape brings together the warm Gulf Stream, flowing north and turning east, with the terminus of the cold Labrador Current flowing south, and the mixture of the two creates a lot of unsettled weather. To make matters worse yet, it is within reach of tropical cyclones, which shift sand dunes, close and open ocean inlets, and play havoc with coastal communities that depend on access to the ocean. While Charleston Harbour is a major asset, Cape Hatteras is a world-class hazard to navigation. And so South Carolina grew rich by importing African slaves and exporting rice, indigo, and cotton through Charleston Harbour; while North Carolina, with its many shoals and few and treacherous navigable ocean inlets, developed no major towns and subsisted largely through fishing.

I've looked closely at many of the successful port towns, large and small, along the Eastern Seaboard: Portland, Newburyport, Salem, Boston, Newport, New York, Charleston, and St. Augustine, plus a few others. All of these have accumulated centuries of history, much of it connected with the sea and, hence, with faraway peoples and places, and this makes them major tourist destinations. The quality of the harbour, it turns out, had much to do with the relative success of a port: Boston's excellent harbour, with a wide channel and ample anchorages with good holding ground in the lee of a good set of sheltering harbour islands, allowed Boston to compete with New York in transatlantic trade. But beyond geological luck, something else stands out: the quality of the transition between water and land. In every good port there are dredged and marked approaches to piers and jetties, good seawalls high enough to keep out most storm surges, and dry land beyond, which is solid and graded flat. Over its long history as a port town, a hilly town, such as Portland, Boston, or New York, slowly grows an apron of land that is just high enough to be out of reach of most waves. Although some of these shoreline reinforcements are the result of ambitious projects (the cut-stone embankment in Newburyport is a good example), many of them are the result of a slow process of accretion by generations of people plying maritime trades, adjusting the shoreline to different uses by floating in and dumping rip-rap and solid fill, building seawalls, jetties and piers, seeing them pruned back by storms, and learning their lessons. Just how close to the margin these old structures already are became apparent to me last summer: during high tide, and thanks to the extra two feet of water we got for no adequately understood reason, some of the older, abandoned piers in Salem, Massachusetts were awash.

Most of these structures have been designed hundred-year floods in mind, presumably because having to rebuild them every century or so is not such a bad thing. But then, given the expected ocean level rise, every hundred years will become every 10, then every year, and then every neap tide, then every high tide when there is an easterly wind, and then permanently awash at high tide. Who would be up to the thankless task of piling up more rocks and driving in more pilings, just to see them washed away a decade or so later? A related problem is the silting up of channels caused by accelerated erosion. Once waves can reach a stretch of land that hitherto only had to contend with rainwater and snow melt, it often dissolves catastrophically, and what was for centuries a waterside pasture or marshland protected by a bit of rock is transformed within a season or two into a gradually sloping mud flat. The mud then gets scoured out by each tide and settles in the deepest spots, which are the navigation channels. At what point everyone will decide that all of this very temporary shoring up and dredging is just too much work is entirely unclear, but it seems likely that enough other problems will occur at the same time to make the question moot. As we prepare to say "hello" to the rising waters, we should also prepare to bid "adieu" to deep-draught dockage.

What other problems might we have? The United States Environmental Protection Agency was nice enough to publish some approximate maps, colour-coding the results of an ocean level rise of up to 1.5m as red and up to 3.5m as blue for the entire Atlantic coast of North America. Since I am particularly well-acquainted with Boston, that part of their map drew my attention first. The resolution is not very high, but sometimes precision is superfluous. If you expect to find yourself standing on the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Massachusetts Avenue in 2050, should you expect the water be up to your navel, your nipples, or your eyeballs? Certainly, this would not be the map to consult on that particular occasion, but then would that be a time to consult a map at all? Broad brushstrokes are perfectly fine for the purposes of this discussion, just as a wrecking ball need not be swung with any great precision.

But to start with, here is a neat and tidy map of Boston within its current shoreline. Entering Boston Harbour from the Atlantic, we pass between Deer Island with its sewage treatment plant on the right and Long Island on the left. We proceed down the main channel into the inner harbour, passing between City Point on our left and Logan International Airport on our right. Past that, on our left we find the port of South Boston, which handles container ships, and the World Trade Centre, where cruise ships dock, while on our right is East Boston with its one remaining shipyard and marina, but where once the mighty clipper ships for the China tea trade were built. Further down the channel, we round the downtown with its skyscraper-studded financial district on our left. To our right is Mystic River, which has a liquefied natural gas tanker terminal, a dock for scrap iron barges, and a car ferry port. Turning further left, we pass Charlestown Navy Yard and the Charles River Dam (which should have properly been called the Charles River Pumping Station). Beyond is the Charles River Basin, ringed by lovely waterside parks, which, on good days and bad, are full of bicyclists and joggers. The river itself is also normally quite full of sailing dinghies, rowing sculls, canoes, and kayaks. Three large universities — Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and Boston University — are located right on the river, and each has a boathouse. (Northeastern University is landlocked, but has a boathouse nevertheless.)

Before the Charles River Dam was built, Charles River was brackish and tidal, and smelled rather bad. The pumping station houses several large diesel engines that drive turbines that pump down the river during high tides and heavy rains, to prevent the river from leaving its banks. I have spent a year or so living at a marina directly downstream of the dam, and have observed that the pumping station does not run very often, but when it does it is quite an impressive sight. The tidal range is about 3 metres, and so with a 1.5-metre rise it would have to be running over half of the time, a 3m rise would force it to run continuously, and a 4m rise would likely put it underwater for good.

And here is the map prepared by our friends at the EPA. What's red goes under at 1.5 metres rise, what's blue goes under at 3.5m rise, tan is either dry or uncovers at low tide at 3.5 metres rise (distinction not shown), and light blue is currently water. As we enter the harbour, Deer Island on our right is now again an island because the dam connecting it to the town of Winthrop is gone, as is much of Winthrop. Long Island, the barrier island on our left, is mostly washed out as well. Logan International Airport still has its control tower above water, but now only caters to sea planes. Port of South Boston and World Trade Centre are no more; same with East Boston's shipyard facilities. Downtown stands as an island, but is rather hard to reach because all the highway tunnels are underwater, as are the docks. Mystic River facilities are gone as well. Charles River Dam is out of commission, and Charles River Basin is once again brackish and tidal all the way upstream to Watertown (off the map to the left), so-called because it has another, smaller dam, and supplied all of Boston's water before an aqueduct was built to a reservoir quite far away. Prior to closing their doors, MIT, Harvard, and Boston University have spent the remainder of their rapidly dwindling endowments on dikes, dams, and pumping stations, to no avail.

To be perfectly candid, looking at this map does not fill me with optimism for the future of our fair City on a Hill. It seems that in due course it will turn into a landscape studded with abandoned wrecks of buildings standing knee-deep in a swirling colloidal suspension of excrement and garbage. What are the chances of preserving road access, or the electric grid, or water and sewer services under such conditions? And is it worth anyone's trouble to even try, if it is understood that another decade will bring another few centimetres of ocean level rise, and that in response the shoreline will move a few kilometres further inland? Would it not be wiser to abandon entire areas as the water comes in, understanding that once it is in, it is there to stay?

But that leaves open an important question: What about Boston as a port? The same question applies to any other port, or, for that matter, just about any stretch of shoreline, for, as we will see in Part III, Boston's case is quite typical. Suppose you are a planter, happily growing wheat close enough to the coast to walk it down to the waterline with the help of some mules, and you would like to exchange that wheat (baked into hard biscuits and packed in waterproof tins) with some sailors in exchange for a few bottles of wine, some chocolate, and some silk cloth for a bridal gown (life goes on, you know). You pack the tins in panniers, strap the panniers onto your mules, and walk in stately procession toward the coast (mules aren't exactly swift animals, and 1 mile per hour is what they generally peg out at). With port facilities permanently submerged, where do you intersect with your sailor friends to effect the exchange?

Things are not as hopeless as they would seem. After all, we did manage to colonise the entire planet using sailboats and without any port facilities to start with. A variety of techniques, some ancient, some decidedly twenty-first century, can be brought to bear to solve this problem. The problem most people face in adapting to the rapidly transforming landscape is not technical but psychological: they will insist on attempting to run their existing systems until they crash, simply because they have so much invested in them. This will mean that most people will simply deal themselves out of the game, and that the volume of global trade will diminish, perhaps by several orders of magnitude. But it will not stop altogether, and may eventually recover somewhat.

In The European Lowlands by Keith Farnish

Walking the grassy embankment between the tidal River Orford and the dusty fields of East Suffolk, it becomes starkly clear what sea level rise would mean to this part of the English coast. As I walk northwards the brackish water laps the broken-down concrete sills and oozes through the cracks, eroding away silt from the dike that I am striding along. Marsh Samphire seems to glow in the October sun; a tasty treat, but rare enough to be a delicacy in these parts. To my left, a cloud of dust is whipped up by the breeze, helped on its way by the harrows of a tractor: it’s been a dry month, and the frail earth is easily moved by the action of the wind. Weak, exhausted soil; the result of decades of relentless tillage in a land that is dependent upon constant drainage via a highly complex system of ditches and waterways.

The land here may be flat and low, but there is enough height on Orford Ness to mean that I can’t make out the North Sea, even from the top of this dike. But I can hear it as it washes through the stones that make up this ephemeral spur of land and then pulls back, moving the shingle in eddies down the coast. Farmland to my left; seas to my right – what must the people who live here think?

Constant dread, would be one expectation; but somehow I don’t think that is the case. If we make our way 100 miles north-west to the Fenlands of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, then we experience a world of sea-level denial:

The Middle Level is the central and largest section of the Great Level of the Fens, reclaimed by drainage during the mid-17th Century.

Its river system consists of over 120 miles (190 kilometres) of watercourses most of which are also navigations and has a catchment of just over 170,000 acres (70,000 hectares).

The efficient operation of the system is vital to the safety and prosperity of over 100,000 people who live and work in the area. But for the operations of the Commissioners and boards, much of the fen land would be under water for much of the year, accesses from higher ground would be cut-off and many of the present land uses, which are taken for granted, would be impossible.

Stern warnings indeed, but calmed by the claims of the Middle Level Commission; something we also see for another of the large Internal Drainage Boards (IBDs), that of South Holland, a 95,000 acre part of Lincolnshire, which states: "Although the entire area is at considerable theoretical risk of river flooding and inundation from the sea, the actual risk is substantially reduced by the work that we do in partnership with Local Authorities, the Environment Agency and Natural England."

Everything will be fine if they do their job? There is a clue in the word “fine”, as the balancing act between inundation and successful drainage rests on the finest of lines; something you can easily see if you enter a very conservative 2 metre sea level rise into the Firetree global flood map:

That’s the Fenlands gone, then, in all practical sense. Plug in something approaching the more dramatic scenarios discussed in Part One of this series, and you see what can only be described as an entirely new landscape: a 5 metre rise creates a larger North Sea, extending southwards to Cambridge, and taking a five mile slice off the Lincolnshire coast. No more holidays in Skegness and, probably more significantly, about 10 Gigawatts of electricity generation capability (about 15% of the UK total) is at or below sea level. That’s just in one particular part of England; on a larger scale, given the propensity for nuclear power stations to be on the coast and coal-fired power stations to be near rivers (for cooling water), a five metre rise in sea level would pretty much have the UK’s power supply bollixed. You won’t see that in any official reports.

Back to the fertile croplands of the Fens, and neither will you see this startling fact mentioned: the pumping station at St Germans, two miles south-west of Kings Lynn, is just about the only thing preventing the aforementioned 170,000 acres of Fenland (the Middle Level) from flooding, even without sea-level rise. It would only take a power failure during a heavy period of rain or a high spring tide, with the sluice gates down, to quickly engulf the area. With a 5 metre rise, the new state-of-the-art system – due to be completed in 2010 – will be underwater all the time. With a storm surge, like that experienced in 1953, a mere two metre rise should suffice to flood the whole of the Middle Level, with the St Germans pumping station sputtering to an ungainly halt. If you want to see the one thing that lies between safety and the flooding of 265 square miles of land, click on this link. Comforting, isn’t it?

Do you know what it would mean to bring marshland back to the East of England on the kind of scale envisaged with just a modest sea-level rise? Not only will the land become unstable for the majority of buildings currently in the area, and totally incapable of supporting agriculture of any kind beyond sheep grazing; the Fenlands, the Broads, and the East Suffolk, Essex and Kent coasts will experience the unwelcome return of malaria. Malaria in the UK; something that up until the urgent Canutian shoring up of the coast in the 19 c. was tolerated as an occupational hazard by the few who lived there, but would be a scourge upon modern towns and cities. As MJ Dobson writes, in a sobering paper on the incidence of malaria in England:

On every count, the marshland populations recorded the highest adult and child mortality rates. Average crude death rates were as high as 60, 70 or 80 per 1000 — levels which could be two to three times those of neighbouring non-marshland parishes. Life expectancy at birth was little more than 30 years for the sickly marshland residents and nearly half of all recorded deaths occurred at age 10 years or below. Burial patterns from year to year and season to season were also extremely volatile in the marshes and there was a very close correspondence between fluctuations in summer temperatures and the level of mortality in the autumn and following spring. The hottest summers were always followed by the unhealthiest and most mortal times in the marshlands.

A marshy land experiencing rising temperatures: this could be any coastal region in the world, coming to a time near you.

Dutch Denial

Never underestimate the Dutch: apart from being a race of phenomenally linguistic people who have found an almost perfect social balance between freedom and responsibility, at least compared to the rest of the civilised world, they also manage to keep a level head when a fifth of the Netherlands is only inhabitable by humans because of thousands of miles of dikes.

I suppose when you have to squint far into the past to see the deadliest of floods experienced by your people, knowing that in the last 100 years only one flood event has taken a significant number of lives, then a feeling of safety is bound to embrace you to a certain extent. But what if you do peer back?

1717 is regarded as the year of the last great flood in the Netherlands; the Christmas Flood which is estimated to have led to the deaths of 14,000 people in a single night. Return to 1570, and the All Saints flood is said to have taken many thousands of lives. Similarly in 1530, 1421, 1404, 1287... St Lucia’s Flood in 1287 washed away between 50 and 80 thousand rural lives in the low-lying central plains of Holland. Back and back, a pattern of death that should serve to haunt the cultural memories of the Dutch – it really should, regardless of how safe things may feel at the moment:

Of all the United Provinces, Frieseland and Groningen have suffered, and continue to suffer, most from these floods. Exposed to the full rage of the north, north-west, and west winds, the waters of the angry Atlantic and Polar seas rush towards these provinces, pour through the inlets of its barrier reef – the Helder, (Hels-deur – hell’s door) the Vlie, and the more northern gates – heap them up in the inland Zuyder Zee, burst or overtop its dykes, and spread themselves over the country, sometimes to the very borders of Hanover. Thousands of men and cattle perish, the gates of the barriers become widened, and the dominion of the inland sea enlarged.

This paragraph, from E. and R. Littell’s “Living Age” (1848) predates any major engineering works, apart from the piecemeal implementation of thousands of local dikes, which were only ever meant to provide temporary respite from flooding. A remarkable plan, albeit primarily motivated by the desire for more farmland and population space, appeared in Modern Mechanix in 1930 (courtesy of the Strange Maps Blog), proposing the construction of a 450 mile long, 30 metre high wall across the central North Sea, with another slightly smaller one curving every which way to block off the southern end.

Absurdly impractical, as well as ecologically and politically ruinous, perhaps; but the construction of the Afsluitdijk (literally “Closure Dike”) across the mouth of the 2,000 square mile Zuiderzee between 1927 and 1933, was certainly close to the limits of engineering in that period, and is still the largest single land “reclamation” project ever completed. The word “reclamation” is quoted intentionally, for what exactly is “reclaimed” when the oceans are banished from a place where they once existed?

This assertiveness, the almost messianic approach to claiming for a nation what was never its property, is foolhardy at best, and pathological at worst. What was once ocean can never truly be land unless the cycles of the climate deem it to be so – and we are undoubtedly taking them in the opposite direction. If we wilfully claim ascendancy over the incumbent waters, as the Dutch and the British have done over the last 800 years or so in their respective lowlands, then eventually the mindset that dominates is one of impregnability.

But the waters will return, not only to the coastline of eastern England as the sluice gates fail, but also to overtop the Afsluitdijk which is just 7 metres high. Remember back in Part One, when the 1953 flood reached 4.55 metres above the Normal Amsterdam Water Level? Well, the risk is increasing all the time; not only as the sea level rises, but as the energy in the oceans increases and – something that is the epitome of risk – the population grows inexorably. The denial culture that blossoms behind coastal defences is alive and well in the Netherlands, according to Maaskant, Jonkman and Bouwer:

The projected population growth in flood prone areas is higher than the average in the Netherlands between 2000 and 2040. Due to this effect the potential number of fatalities is projected to increase by 68% on average for 10 different flood scenarios, not including impacts from climate change and sea level rise. Just sea level rise of 0.30 m leads to an average 20% increase in the number of fatalities. The combined impact of sea level rise and population growth leads to an estimated doubling in the potential number of fatalities. Taking into account increasing probability of flooding due to sea level rise and extreme river discharges, the expected number of fatalities could quadruple by 2040.

(“Future risk of flooding: an analysis of changes in potential loss of life in South Holland”, Environmental Science & Policy, 2009)

“Reclaimed land” is an anachronism because you cannot reclaim what you never had – the sea will reclaim the land soon; sooner than you can imagine.

* * *

For a while yet, coastal destruction caused by sea level rise will be seen as something that happens to someone else, somewhere else (or to you, but then that's just your bad luck). Social inertia will follow its usual course, causing people to insure themselves against fires and other minor accidents, sweat the little details of public health and safety, fight terrorism, while steadfastly ignoring the elephant in the room that is about to sit down on their heads. At what point will it become obvious to just about everyone that the gods saw their plans, laughed at them, and then cancelled them? Will it then be too late to do anything to prepare, or will those near the coast simply join the ranks of environmental migrants? And if you do start taking steps to prepare now, will you be viewed as a harmless eccentric, an alarmist crackpot, or a dangerous subversive?

In response to these questions, we are sure to hear a chorus of "Gloom and doom!" Ah, the "doomers" and the doomed, what beautiful music they make! Be that as it may; In Part III of this series, we will leave questions of denial and social inertia and political climate nonsense behind, and concentrate on What Might Work.

Keith Farnish is author of "Time's Up! An Uncivilized Solution To A Global Crisis" (http://www.timesupbook.com) and also writes The Earth Blog and The Unsuitablog. He enjoys being a husband and dad, walking around and growing things.

Further reading:
Climate Change Puts Trillions of Dollars in Assets at Risk Along U.S. Coasts

A Brisk Day in Hell

2009-11-05T21:04:00.006-05:00

Today the Wall Street Journal ran an interview with Mike Ruppert (who got me started by publishing my first article on his site, From The Wilderness). It is a sympathetic article, in which the subject of the imminent, inevitable collapse of industrial civilization is afforded a calm and thoughtful treatment.

Feed that to your donkey!

[Watch the trailer for the film "Collapse" which features Mike, and which, not coincidentally, opens tomorrow.]

Anthropoclastic Climate Change

2009-11-01T02:14:00.013-05:00

When I published the previous article about the ever-more-dire forecasts of ocean level rise, little did I know that I was blundering into the midst of a "climate change debate." But then many readers reacted to this article by making comments to the effect that "climate change is a hoax" or that I am "just like Al Gore." Since that article reviews and attempts to interpret of some of the most authoritative, conservative and consensus-based scientific reports available, it should not have given rise to any controversy at all.

A potentially controversial part of the article relates to its highlighting the fact that consensus estimates exclude certain categories of risk, which may be quite severe but are at present poorly understood. Given this high level of uncertainty, the scientists are being cautious in incorporating them in their estimates. This is understandable: a physician would no doubt think twice before telling a patient that she has anywhere between 3 months and 30 years left. On the other hand, if your doctor tells you that you are about to die... sometime, then you would be within your rights to seek a second opinion. But few people raised objections based on that.

I feel that discussion of climate change need not become mired in controversy. The controversy results from the fact that an attempt is being made to package and sell climate change as part of a political process: "Catastrophic climate change will result unless we curtail harmful industrial activity." This is the idea behind various international initiatives to limit greenhouse gas emissions, such as Kyoto and now Copenhagen. Scientific data goes in one end, enlightened policy comes out the other, and Nobel prises are handed out. The public at large is polarised into those who clap and cheer and say "The sooner the better!" and those who shake their heads or hurl invectives. There are also a few thoughtful individuals who variously think that international climate change legislation is the work of the Illuminati who are creating a world government, that the topic of climate change can best be tackled by studying sunspot activity while leaving the rest up to the miraculous workings of the free market, and that carbon dioxide does not cause a greenhouse effect but is simply the stuff makes champagne so delightfully bubbly (the latter proposition does require more research; please send along samples for me to test).

Consider, however, the following allegory. Imagine that I am walking along a mountain ridge, while in a swank châlet in the valley below some scientists, politicians and progressive industrialists are meeting, discussing climate change mitigation while drinking Glüwein and sampling amusing local cheeses and sausages. And then I, inadvertently (for I would never do such a thing on purpose!) dislodge a boulder. The boulder goes hurtling off the ridge and down the boulder-strewn slope, dislodging other boulders, and soon there is an avalanche of boulders, all following unpredictable paths as boulders are wont to do, but some clearly aiming for the châlet full of scientists and politicians. Alarmed by the approaching tumult, the scientists whip out their binoculars and their laptop computers, do a bit of plotting, and declare with great confidence: "This avalanche is being caused by Dmitry Orlov dislodging boulders from the ridge above and it is very likely that this châlet will be destroyed as a result!" And then the politicians decide to act on this authoritative, rigorously researched, consensus-based report, and propose an immediate forced evacuation of the châlet. They also sign an international treaty making it illegal for Dmitry Orlov to dislodge any more boulders from the ridge above said châlet. I, of course, do desist from dislodging any more boulders (wasn't going to anyway). The avalanche somehow magically misses the châlet, leaving it completely intact, and tumbling harmlessly into a ravine. The scientists and the politicians all die in any case, because, you see, the Glüwein they were drinking was contaminated with something lethal. Later on, the swank châlet is destroyed by an asteroid.

Confused? Sometimes a good way to clarify a point of confusion is to introduce a new term. Allow me to add a word to your vocabulary: "anthropoclastic," consisting of "anthropo-" (from Gr. anthropos, man) and "-clastic (from Gr. klastos, broken into pieces). It's a very proper-sounding yet virtually unused term. "Anthropoclastic climate change" is reminiscent of "anthropogenic climate change," which is a theory that climate change is being triggered by human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas), agriculture (through deforestation, bovine flatus and so on), cement manufacturing, leaking or flaring gas into the atmosphere, chemical manufacturing... the list is very long. Anthropogenic climate change is the theory that these human activities are highly disruptive of the climate. Anthropoclastic climate change is the theory that a highly disrupted climate, which is what we already have, is highly disruptive of human activities, and, in consequence, highly destructive of human life. The anthropogenic theory is a case of man pointing the accusatory finger at man, while the anthropoclastic theory is a case of man pointing the accusatory finger at nature. I will leave it up to you to decide which of the two gestures is the the most futile, but, futile gestures aside, I believe that there are steps to be taken to let us survive climate change, and that these steps should be given due consideration before too long.

I hope that focusing specifically on the anthropoclastic dimensions of climate change will eliminate most of the fruitless debate or political nonsense that clouds so many minds, because climate change per se is something we can all observe first-hand. Some of the particularly compelling bits of evidence require a trip to an exotic locale, such as the arctic tundra, the glaciers in Greenland, the Antarctic ice shelves or the ocean above the Arctic Circle, and since not all of us can make such a trip, or have the prior experience and knowledge to interpret what we would see there, we have to trust the observations of others. Take, for instance, what David Barber, Canada’s Research Chair in Arctic System Science at the University of Manitoba, said to the Canadian Parliament on the disappearance of the arctic ice pack that had persisted for tens of thousands of years: "We are almost out of multi-year ice in the northern hemisphere... I’ve never seen anything like this in my 30 years of working in the high Arctic... From a practical perspective, we almost have a seasonally ice-free Arctic now.”

Those who are loathe to trust the testimony of experts and prefer to only trust their own eyes can see for themselves. To be able to make your own observations, it would help for you to be one of the old people who have lived in one place their entire life, deriving some part of their sustenance and inspiration from the natural world that surrounds them, and are thus forced to pay attention to it. Short of that, some of your evidence would have to be second-hand: you could find a few people like that, and ask them if they've seen any big changes as far as the weather and such, trees and animals and so forth. If it looks to them as if you are really willing to listen, you will walk away with an earful, believe me! All around the world, but especially far north, we have, at the very least, entered a long period freak weather.

In case it helps, I will share with you some of my own observations. I grew up on the Gulf of Finland in Russia, which is occupied Finnish territory. Before the Revolution the Finns were part of the Russian Empire, and sometime after they became independent they allied with Nazi Germany and started arming themselves against Russia. Then Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and shortly thereafter the Soviet Union invaded Finland and reconquered Karelia (Kariela), Finland's easternmost province. I grew up in Kuokkala; the neighbouring town was Kilomäki, but once the Russians switched the signs at the railroad stations, few people besides my grandparents seemed to remember what they were.

In spite of the expulsion of the Finns, growing up in Karelia exposed me to Finnish cross-country ski culture at an early age. The per capita count of skis per household was quite ridiculously high. Attics were packed full of old wooden skis, and an entire branch of science was devoted to ways of waxing them. After I conquered all of the local hills, and the maze of cross-country trails that fanned out throughout the neighbouring forests (sometimes I was towed by a large and disobedient family dog) I ventured out onto the Gulf, all the way out to the shipping lane kept clear by icebreakers, and back to terra firma.

One winter a huge storm blew up and toppled many layers of thick ice floes onto the beach. It didn't completely melt until mid-summer, and we had to climb over the ice barefoot to go wading across clean yellow sand to swim in fresh, cold, crystal-clear pale blue water. A few years after that my family moved away, and twenty years later, when I came back to visit my childhood haunts, the formerly pristine waterline wore a thick coat of rotting algae, the water was tepid and murky, and wading in it wasn't advised due to the risk of catching hepatitis, Giardia and an assortment of intestinal parasites.

The Gulf of Finland still freezes, and in 2003 it froze solid, to a depth of 80 centimetres (2.6 feet) but for many other bodies of water the ice has become unreliable. One of my Finnish friends grew up in Vermont (a small mountainous province that borders Canada) where he used to drive a laden van across the ice of Lake Champlain, navigating by shore lights. He tells me that by mid-winter the ice used to be thick, smooth, solid, and blown free of snow. If you try making that passage today, you are more than likely to drown. The following chart tells the story in numbers: it shows the number of years per decade that the lake froze over by a given month [source].

If strangely warm winters have become the norm, what about the summers? Last summer, while living on a sailboat in the middle Salem Harbour, Massachusetts, I decided to scrub my (boat's) bottom. And so I donned a snorkel, fins and the obligatory Speedos, grabbed a brush and jumped overboard. I emerged almost an hour later, not the least bit chilled, but encrusted with tiny shrimp which took quite some time to pick off. New England coastal waters are not supposed to be this tepid. Nor was I the only one who noticed the change. Salem News had this to say about it: "In July, ocean surface temperatures reached the highest ever recorded during that month, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. NOAA began keeping records in 1880... The average global water temperature in July is around 63 degrees [F, 17.2C], according to NOAA's National Climatic Data Centre in Asheville, [North Carolina]. On Tuesday, the ocean temperature at the buoy closest to Beverly and Salem was nearly 73 degrees [F, 22.2C] according to the NOAA Web site."

Thus, you don't have to think that humans caused climate change, or that humans can stop climate change before it is too late, but my feeling is that either you will agree that strange and dramatic climatic changes are afoot, or you just haven't done your homework. On this issue, I just don't see that there is any room for legitimate debate. The evidence is in.

It is also not controversial that the unusual climactic conditions are affecting the ability of farmers to grow food. I don't have to look too far to find examples: in New England, where I live, farmers are receiving federal disaster aid, because they lost over half of their crop. According to the Massachusetts congressional delegation, which petitioned for federal relief, "rain was 148 percent above normal in June, which was also the sixth coolest June on record in both Boston and Worcester, and likely the second cloudiest June on record since 1885. In July, rainfall was 200 percent above normal, with corresponding lower temperatures." "Corn growers in Norfolk County saw 83 percent of the value of their crop destroyed. In Essex County, strawberry growers could not bring more than 35 percent of their crop to market" reported the Boston Globe.

New England is by no means a unique case; everywhere you look, agriculture is under assault from the shifting climate. The barrage of strange weather makes it increasingly difficult for farmers to decide what to plant and when and where to plant it. According to the paleoclimatologist J.P. Steffensen, the stable climate that has prevailed during the previous 10,000 years is what made agriculture possible:

You can ask, Why didn't human beings make civilisation fifty thousand years ago? You know that they had just as big brains as we have today. When you put it in a climatic framework, you can say, "Well, it was the ice age. And also this ice age was so climatically unstable that each time you had the beginning of a culture they had to move. Then comes the present interglacial — ten thousand years of very stable climate. The perfect conditions for agriculture. If you look at it, it's amazing. Civilisations in Persia, in China, and in India start at the same time, maybe six thousand years ago. They all developed writing and they all developed religion and they all built cities, all at the same time, because the climate was stable. I think that if the climate would have been stable fifty thousand years ago it would have started then. But they had no chance.

Steffensen is a neo-catastrophist — a climatologist who believes in abrupt, catastrophic climate shifts. So is just about every other climatologist. They base their belief not on some exotic theory or complex computer model; in fact, they are often at a loss to explain the underlying mechanisms. Instead, they simply cannot disregard the overwhelming empirical evidence they have collected. Still, even after listening to a neo-catastrophist tell it like it is, I find no reason to think that agriculture will fail everywhere at once, and result in instant mass starvation. It seems more likely that, as agriculture becomes less and less reliable, malnutrition will become chronic in many places, resulting in high death rates, low birth rates and high childhood mortality, and an overall dwindling of the population over several generations.

Anthropoclastic climate change does not have to be a catastrophe, but it can be made catastrophic by clinging on to a failing agricultural model of food production. If we insist that farmers produce monoculture cash crops on the industrial model, we shall surely all starve. But if instead people make a concerted effort to reclaim the entire landscape, both rural and urban, for informal food production, growing edible plant species on former golf courses, parking lots, cemeteries, town greens, suburban back yards, urban rooftops and balconies, and front lawns of stately homes, then it seems quite likely that, no matter which way the climate lurches in a given year, something somewhere will be bearing fruit, enough to make it to the next season.

Wild foods can make a difference as well. Last summer, the forests of New England were full of berries that went unpicked. We did not pick any berries this year, but we did get a chance to pick some wild mushrooms, which had a fine year. As I write this, garlands of wild mushrooms are drying in our hallway. Man doth not live by mushrooms alone, but it's a start. And start we should, the sooner the better, but certainly before the shelves in the shops are bare, and so are the ones in your pantry. Mitigating anthropoclastic climate change will not be up to the politicians or the scientists or the industrialists, it will be up to me and to you.

The Oceans are Coming

2009-10-18T18:17:00.016-04:00

By Keith Farnish and Dmitry Orlov

This article is the first part of a three-part series, which considers the effect of global warming on ocean level rise, and examines life with constantly advancing seas from two perspectives: that of the landlubber and that of the seafarer.

[Update, November 2009: The Copenhagen Diagnosis, the heavily peer-reviewed interim update to the IPCC AR4, further validates the sea-level rise assumptions we used in this article: "By 2100, global sea-level is likely to rise at least twice as much as projected by Working Group 1 of the IPCC AR4; for unmitigated emissions it may well exceed 1 meter. The upper limit has been estimated as ~ 2 meters sea level rise by 2100. Sea level will continue to rise for centuries after global temperatures have been stabilized, and several meters of sea level rise must be expected over the next few centuries."]

Part I: The Global Mistake

In September 2009 the latest global temperature rise projections released by the Hadley Centre, part of the British Meteorological Office indicated an average rise of 4 degrees Celsius (that’s a balmy 7.2°F) by 2055 given a business as usual scenario. Some places will be a bit more stable, but the places that particularly matter – the ice caps, the methane-rich permafrosts in northern Canada and Siberia, and the Amazon rainforest – will be melting, off-gassing, and burning, respectively. The report offers some detail on what that would feel like:

In a 4°C world, climate change, deforestation and fires spreading from degraded land into pristine forest will conspire to destroy over 83 per cent of the Amazon rainforest by 2100... in a 4°C world there will be a mix of extremely wet monsoon seasons and extremely dry ones, making it hard for farmers to plan what to grow. Worse, the fine aerosol particles released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels could put a complete stop to the monsoon rains in central southern China and northern India... the people most vulnerable to a 4°C rise are also least able to escape it. At 4°C, the poor will struggle to survive, let alone escape.

And what of that lodestone, global sea level? This happens to be a very interesting question, because ocean levels are set to rise dramatically. According to UCLA scientists, the last time carbon dioxide levels were as high as they are today was 15 million years ago. At that time, the sea level was between 20 and 36 metres higher (75 to 120 feet), there was no permanent ice cap in the arctic, and very little ice in Antarctica or Greenland. That is where we are headed. The only remaining question is, How long will it take us to get there?

The authors of the Hadley Centre report predict a rise of just 1.4 metres by 2100. The IPCC in their 2007 4th Assessment Report predicted something like half a metre by 2100 based on a combination of the fattening of the oceanic envelope caused by thermal expansion and the increased runoff from glaciers and minor ice sheets. None of this sounds particularly catastrophic just yet, but then it turns out that these predictions are not based on anything particularly relevant: the British Antarctic Survey, in 2008, made it clear that the IPCC had not included the source of nearly 100% of the world’s potential ice melt – the major ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland – simply because they had little idea of how the ice caps would behave in a heating world:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlighted the issue by suggesting that current knowledge is inadequate to estimate confidently the contribution that ice sheets might make to sea-level rise in coming centuries. While technology makes sea-level rise easier to observe, and we can predict some contributions to future sea-level rise with increasing certainty, we cannot yet fully predict the ice sheets’ contribution. There is thus a risk that sea-level rise could be higher than the (incomplete) estimates provided by the IPCC.

Thus, the most peer-reviewed piece of climate science ever written turns out to be completely inadequate when it comes to estimating the level of disruption associated with a very important aspect of climate change: the rising seas. If Antarctica contains 90% of the world’s land ice (sea ice, like that in the Arctic, does not directly cause the oceans to rise when it melts) and Greenland contains most of the rest, then what’s going to happen when they start to melt with a vengeance, and when are they going to start melting? Official science is mute on the subject.

What Do We Know?

There are some things that we do know. Based on the volume of ice lying upon the landmass of Greenland, it is quite possible to estimate how far the oceans would rise, should all of it melt away: something in the region of 7.2 metres. That may not seem like a lot, but, as you will see in Part 2 of this series, it will be enough to have devastating consequences for the lower lying parts of the world, which, not coincidentally, are the locations of some of the world’s largest cities. (In fact, there is something you can do to make reading this article more exciting: find out how high above sea level you live, and, as you read along, keep checking to see if your head is still above water.)

Rapid, dramatic change beggars the imagination. The Greenland Ice Sheet is massive, having formed during the first cycle of the most recent major glacial period, and our instinct tells us that it should remain stable in all but the most extreme conditions. It is disconcerting to know that the onset of an ice age can take as little as two decades, implying that an equally sudden melt cannot be ruled out. It is also disconcerting to know that the conditions required for a sudden melt are pretty much guaranteed to occur, and that, in fact, the ice sheet is already melting. We don't have to imagine it. All we have to do is observe:

For the first time since measurements were started [in 2002], the extremely warm summer of 2007 saw a decrease in the ice mass at high altitudes (above 2,000 metres). It also became clear that the ice loss is advancing towards the North of Greenland, particularly on the west coast. The areas around Greenland, particularly Iceland, Spitsbergen and the northern islands of Canada, seem to be particularly badly affected.

This analysis, by the team controlling the GRACE satellite system, is essentially saying that conditions like those in 2007 are able to counteract the damping effect of even the thickest parts of Greenland’s ice sheet. So, when will all the ice melt? There are two schools of thought, but they basically come down to when the temperature of Greenland increases by either 4°C or 8°C above the mean global average of the last 100 years.
Four degrees... haven’t we seen that first figure before? In fact, a global rise of 4 degrees corresponds to a considerably larger rise of Arctic temperatures: conventionally this is between 5 and 6 degrees, but if you look at the 2009 Hadley Centre forecasts, a global rise of 4 degrees actually corresponds to an 8 degree rise across much of Greenland. Pick any number you like, but Greenland is melting.

WAIS To Go?

We can take some comfort in the thought that the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet would take at least 100 years once it reached that temperature. But it accounts for just 10% of the global ice volume, the other 90% being locked away in the seemingly impermeable heart of Antarctica. Or not: the East Antarctic ice sheet (that’s the big blob that surrounds the South Pole just off-centre) seems to be quite stable, and should remain that way for the next few centuries, but West Antarctica (the peninsula that reaches north toward South America) is not stable at all. The WAIS (West Antarctic Ice Sheet) is largely below sea level, having over several million years pushed down and scoured out the bedrock beneath it, but because of its huge area, the part of it that is above water still manages to comprise around 10% of the total Antarctic ice volume. If this were to melt then the oceans would rise by another 5 metres, in addition to the thermal expansion of 1.4 metres, plus whatever has been sloughed off the Greenland ice sheet, giving us 13.6 metres, or close to 45 feet. (Is your head still above water? Please check again now.)

Icebergs and glaciers have been calving from West Antarctica at an accelerating rate over the last decade, which groups such as the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) have been carefully monitoring, with increasing alarm. In 2002, to most glaciologists’ horror, the entire Larsen B ice shelf disintegrated. It consisted largely of floating ice, and so despite the immense size of the shelf, this development had no effect on sea levels. But it did presage a new era of rapid ice movement, never before recorded in the modern era. It also had another, even more sinister side-effect on West Antarctica:

An ice bridge connecting the Wilkins Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula to Charcot Island has disintegrated. The event continues a series of breakups that began in March 2008 on the ice shelf, and highlights the effect that climate change is having on the region. Images from the NASA Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensors on the Terra and Aqua satellites showed the shattering of the ice bridge between March 31, 2009 and April 6, 2009. The loss of the ice bridge, which was bracing the remaining portions of the Wilkins ice shelf, will now allow a mass of broken ice and icebergs to drift into the Southern Ocean.

The Wilkins is following a pattern of instability and rapid collapse that many Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves have experienced in recent years. Scientists think that the dramatic loss of these ice shelves, which have existed for hundreds to thousands of years, is an important sign of climate change in the Southern Hemisphere. The loss of an ice shelf can also allow the glaciers that feed into it to start flowing ice into the ocean at an accelerated rate, contributing to a rise in global sea levels.

The last phrase is the most important one; at the moment there is no major concern about the status of most of the WAIS, and the temperature seems to be holding, but if the ice shelves are no longer able to hold back the progress of the glaciers, then they will accelerate towards the sea, themselves causing further instability within the WAIS. Going back to the Hadley Centre article again, it was thought that Greenland was invulnerable to change not so many years ago, but the map produced by the Centre shows warming of between 4 and 10 degrees by 2055. This would still keep the vast majority of Antarctica well below freezing; but ice under extreme pressure can exhibit unusual patterns of behaviour, including increasing internal temperature and self-lubrication. This is what often happens at the bases of deep glaciers, allowing them to slide even when temperatures are well below freezing. The results may continue to confound and horrify glaciologists for years to come while sending the rest of us scampering for higher ground.

A Storm Surge of Forecasts

2001 was the first year we were able to say with any scientific certainty what was likely to happen to global sea level. It seems strange that it should take so long to provide forecasts, but until a consensus on global temperature rise had been achieved, via the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (TAR), then the (supposedly) largest element of the sea level rise equation – the aforementioned thermal expansion – could not be included.

So what did the IPCC say back in 2001? If you read their report, you will discover that of the absolute maximum 0.5 metre rise by 2090, predicted by this august group of scientists, a whopping 74% was due to thermal expansion, with 11cm (22%) dependent on glacier and ice cap melting (mountaintops, essentially), and a miserly 2cm attributable to the possible melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. But then in this report the absolute worst case “business as usual” model shows a 2°C rise by 2050, which we now know to have been a bit shy of the mark.

Then, in 2007, the landmark 4th Assessment Report raised the bar in both possible temperature rise (from 5.6°C to 6.4°C by 2100) and global sea level rise, to... wait for it... 0.57 metres! Of this new figure, which hardly seems to reflect the immense strides made in feedback loop analysis in the intervening six years, 38 cm or 67% of the rise is attributable to thermal expansion. With this in mind, it would pay to reflect on the types of changes described in this essay, and consider what the IPCC would have predicted had ice sheet melt been included in the final version.

Forward to 2009, and two papers jump out. The first, from the relatively conservative Dr Mark Siddall at the University of Bristol is now talking about a possible rise of 0.82 metres by the end of this century, which is based on the IPCC 4AR maximum temperature of 6.4°C. The second paper, by Grinsted, Moore and Jevrejeva, again based on the IPCC maximum, suggests that a 1.3 metre rise by 2100 is not out of the question. How much of this can be attributed to Greenland and Antarctica is uncertain, but predicting the future based on thermal expansion plus a paleological record of a few thousand years, during which both ice sheets remained fully intact and temperatures never rose above 1.5°C seems a pretty poor basis upon which to predict future tipping points!

If we are to take the two papers at face value and strike a mean of 1.06 metres, by overlaying the latest predictions of temperature rise – which are double the IPCC predictions – we get at least 2 metres globally. That’s just thermal expansion plus a few hundred glaciers and mountaintop ice caps. Now consider what happens when you include the following:

Tipping point effects above 8°C in Greenland
Unknown effects of similar temperature increases on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet
Increases in storm surge height and storm intensity caused by a rise in oceanic and atmospheric energy levels due to temperature rise
Increases in inland flooding due to convectional storms upon hardpan (parched clay soils) and more energetic rainstorms from temperature increases

The last two are the inevitable effects of increasing atmospheric energy due to higher temperatures, and are critical because most coastal flooding is the result of either coastal storm surges and high winds, inland flooding inundating river catchments, or a combination of the two. The flooding of eastern England and the Netherlands in 1953, which resulted in the deaths of around 2,500 people, was a combination of a low pressure storm surge, an intense North Sea storm and a high spring tide. Without any inference of global sea level rise, the water rose along the North Sea coast by 4.5 metres.

Via Denmark and the German curve, the storm got closer to the Dutch coast. On the night of the 31st of January, the storm over the North Sea got even stronger, reaching gales of force 11. The Dutch coast was being hit with force 10 winds. The storm continued, and in the south-western Netherlands, wind speeds of force 9 were measured for 20 consecutive hours. The power of the storm drove the water so high that the water was unable to retreat away sufficiently. There was no ebb tide.

Shortly after midnight, the maximum whip up of the water was measured - the wind drove the water up to 3.1 metres. Three hours later, there was a spring tide. Through the combination of this spring tide, and the huge whipping up of the water, at 3hr24, the highest recorded water level was reached - 4.55 metres above NAP (Normal Amsterdam Water Level).

The dikes were not designed to hold such high water levels, and [at] around 3 o’clock that night, the first dikes broke through...

* * *

And so there we have it. A few degrees warmer, a few metres higher, and a couple of decades later, and there we will be, floating about, holding on to other things that float, perching in tree limbs and on rooftops, and hoping to be rescued. We know where we are going to end up eventually: at least 20 metres (65 feet) higher. The one thing we still do not know is how long it will take for us to get there.

We could keep waiting for the scientific community to settle on a consensus forecast, but this may take so long that it will have to be delivered through a snorkel. However, we can already observe that the doubling period of scientific climate forecasts is uncomfortably short, and, to provide for a margin of safety, we should at least double the latest estimates. If the latest forecast is for 2 metres this century, let us assume that we will see at least 4, and plan accordingly.

But do the exact forecasts even matter? We already know enough to say that there is a high probability that ocean levels will rise, significantly, within the lifetimes of most of the people alive today, disrupting the patterns of daily life for much of the world's population, which tends to be clustered along the coastlines and the navigable waterways. We also know that ocean levels will continue to rise far into the future, until they are 20 to 36 metres higher than they are today. We know that continuous coastal erosion and salt water inundation, coastal flooding and displacement of coastal populations, which number in the billions, toward higher ground, will be normal and expected. We also know that there is a high chance these changes will occur based on present carbon dioxide levels, regardless of what is being currently proposed by the governments of the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

However, what we do not know is perhaps most important of all if you are in the middle of all this. We have not considered what ways of inhabiting the changing coastal landscape will remain viable. How will we have to adapt if any of us are to avoid being swept up in a continuous, endless surge of refugees feeling for higher ground, abandoning all they own and all they know? These are the questions that the next two parts of this series of articles will examine.

Keith Farnish is author of "Time's Up! An Uncivilized Solution To A Global Crisis" (http://www.timesupbook.com) and also writes The Earth Blog and The Unsuitablog. He enjoys being a husband and dad, walking around and growing things.

A Faint Odour of Melons

2009-10-16T22:22:00.006-04:00

There is an awful lot of rather fruitless discussion of finance going on these days. People hold public disputations on whether we have inflation (and you'd think we do if you've been forced to pay for your own food lately!) or deflation (certainly a fact if you've been trying to unload real estate!), or perhaps both of these at the same time? One thing is certain: a faint odour of one sort or another pervades the US financial system, and, as usual, we in the US are the last to know. Perhaps we need to coin a new term: indiflation, anyone, to go with your indigestion? Or would you prefer dysflation, to go with your dyspepsia? Alas, currency collapse and devaluation are simply not part of the lexicon. The experience will be a rude awakening for many people, and perhaps something as rude as this requires a euphemism. I propose we refer to it as "smelling the melons." And so, in the interest of making the discussion more fruitful (pun intended) and of offering new and exciting ways of thinking about things that are smelly, ugly and worthless, and doubtlessly for your sheer reading pleasure as well, I have gratuitously cut, pasted and global-replaced a favourite passage from the classic by Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat [Chapter IV].

I remember a friend of mine, buying a couple of suitcases of US Dollars at Liverpool. Splendid US Dollars they were, ripe and mellow, and with a two hundred horse-power scent about them that might have been warranted to carry three miles, and knock a man over at two hundred yards. I was in Liverpool at the time, and my friend said that if I didn’t mind he would get me to take them back with me to London, as he should not be coming up for a day or two himself, and he did not think the US Dollars ought to be kept much longer.
“Oh, with pleasure, dear boy,” I replied, “with pleasure.”

I called for the US Dollars, and took them away in a cab. It was a ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during conversation, referred to as a horse. I put the US Dollars on the top, and we started off at a shamble that would have done credit to the swiftest steam-roller ever built, and all went merry as a funeral bell, until we turned the corner. There, the wind carried a whiff from the US Dollars full on to our steed. It woke him up, and, with a snort of terror, he dashed off at three miles an hour. The wind still blew in his direction, and before we reached the end of the street he was laying himself out at the rate of nearly four miles an hour, leaving the cripples and stout old ladies simply nowhere.

It took two porters as well as the driver to hold him in at the station; and I do not think they would have done it, even then, had not one of the men had the presence of mind to put a handkerchief over his nose, and to light a bit of brown paper.

I took my ticket, and marched proudly up the platform, with my US Dollars, the people falling back respectfully on either side. The train was crowded, and I had to get into a carriage where there were already seven other people. One crusty old gentleman objected, but I got in, notwithstanding; and, putting my US Dollars upon the rack, squeezed down with a pleasant smile, and said it was a warm day.

A few moments passed, and then the old gentleman began to fidget.

“Very close in here,” he said.

“Quite oppressive,” said the man next him.

And then they both began sniffing, and, at the third sniff, they caught it right on the chest, and rose up without another word and went out. And then a stout lady got up, and said it was disgraceful that a respectable married woman should be harried about in this way, and gathered up a bag and eight parcels and went. The remaining four passengers sat on for a while, until a solemn-looking man in the corner, who, from his dress and general appearance, seemed to belong to the undertaker class, said it put him in mind of dead baby; and the other three passengers tried to get out of the door at the same time, and hurt themselves.

I smiled at the black gentleman, and said I thought we were going to have the carriage to ourselves; and he laughed pleasantly, and said that some people made such a fuss over a little thing. But even he grew strangely depressed after we had started, and so, when we reached Crewe, I asked him to come and have a drink. He accepted, and we forced our way into the buffet, where we yelled, and stamped, and waved our umbrellas for a quarter of an hour; and then a young lady came, and asked us if we wanted anything.

“What’s yours?” I said, turning to my friend.

“I’ll have half-a-crown’s worth of brandy, neat, if you please, miss,” he responded.

And he went off quietly after he had drunk it and got into another carriage, which I thought mean.

From Crewe I had the compartment to myself, though the train was crowded. As we drew up at the different stations, the people, seeing my empty carriage, would rush for it. “Here y’ are, Maria; come along, plenty of room.” “All right, Tom; we’ll get in here,” they would shout. And they would run along, carrying heavy bags, and fight round the door to get in first. And one would open the door and mount the steps, and stagger back into the arms of the man behind him; and they would all come and have a sniff, and then droop off and squeeze into other carriages, or pay the difference and go first [class].

From Euston [Station], I took the US Dollars down to my friend’s house. When his wife came into the room she smelt round for an instant. Then she said:

“What is it? Tell me the worst.”

I said:

“It’s US Dollars. Tom bought them in Liverpool, and asked me to bring them up with me.”

And I added that I hoped she understood that it had nothing to do with me; and she said that she was sure of that, but that she would speak to Tom about it when he came back.

My friend was detained in Liverpool longer than he expected; and, three days later, as he hadn’t returned home, his wife called on me.
She said:

“What did Tom say about those US Dollars?”

I replied that he had directed they were to be kept in a moist place, and that nobody was to touch them.

She said:

“Nobody’s likely to touch them. Had he smelt them?”

I thought he had, and added that he seemed greatly attached to them.

“You think he would be upset,” she queried, “if I gave a man a sovereign to take them away and bury them?”

I answered that I thought he would never smile again.

An idea struck her. She said:

“Do you mind keeping them for him? Let me send them round to you.”

“Madam,” I replied, “for myself I like the smell of US Dollars, and the journey the other day with them from Liverpool I shall ever look back upon as a happy ending to a pleasant holiday. But, in this world, we must consider others. The lady under whose roof I have the honour of residing is a widow, and, for all I know, possibly an orphan too. She has a strong, I may say an eloquent, objection to being what she terms 'put upon.' The presence of your husband’s US Dollars in her house she would, I instinctively feel, regard as a 'put upon'; and it shall never be said that I put upon the widow and the orphan.”

“Very well, then,” said my friend’s wife, rising, “all I have to say is, that I shall take the children and go to an hotel until those US Dollars are destroyed. I decline to live any longer in the same house with them.”

She kept her word, leaving the place in charge of the charwoman, who, when asked if she could stand the smell, replied, “What smell?” and who, when taken close to the US Dollars and told to sniff hard, said she could detect a faint odour of melons. It was argued from this that little injury could result to the woman from the atmosphere, and she was left.

Édition française

2009-10-16T14:08:00.008-04:00

Je suis heureux de proposer à mes lecteurs francophones quelques-uns de mes écrits les plus importants traduits par Tancrède Bastié et par Jean-Christophe Godart (dans l'ordre chronologique).

Leçons post-soviétiques pour un siècle post-américain

Combler le "retard d'effondrement "

Les cinq stades de l'effondrement

Les meilleures pratiques de l'effondrement social

Définancialisation, Démondialisation, Relocalisation

Obama Wins Gorbachev's Peace Prize

2009-10-09T17:53:00.005-04:00

[Dutch translation available here.]

I've said it here before: Obama is the new Gorbachev, the smiling face behind the crumbling imperial façade, the personable, non-threatening loser. Gorbachev got his Nobel Consolation Prize in October 1990; a little less than a year later the USSR was no more and he was unemployed.

In awarding him the Peace Prize, the Nobel committee actually did some good: by reaffirming his legitimacy as a leader, it helped to weaken the hand of the conservative forces within Russia, which later staged an unsuccessful coup in an effort to reclaim control of the dissolving empire.

Gorbachev certainly deserves credit for making sure that the USSR disintegrated with a whimper and not a bang. May Barak Obama be just as successful in completing the dissolution of the USA, quietly and without any undue bloodshed. Moving forward, I wish him a long and happy unemployment.

Gorbachev wins Nobel peace prize

By Jonathan Steele in Moscow
Tuesday 16 October 1990
guardian.co.uk

"President Gorbachev yesterday won the world's biggest consolation prize. He took the Nobel peace award for losing the Cold War, becoming the first communist leader to win the trophy worth £360,000 after dismantling the system his party spent 70 years creating.

"The Nobel prize committee in Oslo did not quite put it that way. It cited Mr Gorbachev for "his leading role in the peace process" which today characterises parts of the world....

"In Moscow, hit by shortages of basic foods and consumer goods, the mood was more reserved. When the president of the Supreme Soviet, Anatoly Lukyanov, announced the news to MPs, they applauded for barely five seconds. Gennady Gerasimov, the foreign ministry spokesman, said: "We must remember, this certainly was not the prize for economics..."

...Nor is it the prize for economics this time around! If anything, the financial hole the USSR left behind was a whole lot smaller.

Now, some people think that Obama isn't doing a good job. He isn't. That's because it's not a good job. It's not even a bad job. It's a downright terrible job. But somebody's got to do it, and that somebody just won a Nobel prize, so he must be doing something right.

Elephant, Anyone?

2009-09-29T01:44:00.002-04:00

Just a quick note. This morning, Jim Kunstler published this:

"In my father's house are many mansions Surely one of them has a room with no elephants in it...."

And, if you read his piece, you may have asked yourself, "What elephants?" Well, how about this one:

Good night!

Marketing in a Small Town - Interview No. 3

2009-09-26T18:13:00.008-04:00

Dmitry Davydov runs a popular Russian-language blog. Periodically we correspond, and publish the correspondence. [Here's the Russian original.]

DD: In the American (and not just American) media, one can periodically read about the barbaric Sharia law, according to which women can be stoned to death. Or about an eight-year-old Saudi girl who was sold into marriage to settle her family's debts. There are entire Web sites devoted to "stupid laws", especially in the southern states, according to which, for instance, it is illegal to have sex completely naked. However, few can see the absurdity and the barbarous nature of many U.S. laws on intellectual property, according to which one can be fined ten thousand dollars for downloading a song or a movie from a torrent (China, Russia and the Ukraine, where piracy flourishes, are considered uncivilized and legally underdeveloped). You once said (albeit in a different context), that those who pay for software are fools. It would be nice to know your opinion of the system of intellectual rights specifically and the U.S. legal system in general. Does it do more harm or good, and why are you convinced that the "legal-police-prison" complex will be one of the first victims of collapse?

DO: One of the main foundational insights of the Anglo-Saxon civilization (if can be honored by the use of such a bombastic term) is that unenlightened people are easier to control than enlightened ones. The effects of this can be seen in the fact that in all English-speaking countries there is a very stable layer of low-class people (the so called "underclass") and, except for a bit of lip service, it does not occur to anyone to remedy this situation. It can also be seen in the eagerness of the elites to impersonate British aristocracy by copying their strange habits and customs, as well as in the worship of the British throne by members of the general public, even in countries which shed considerable blood to win their independence from the empire. This can also be seen in the education system, which, except for the most privileged, strives to teach a trade, rules of conduct and obedience, rather than to expand the mental horizon. Not long ago, the acquisition of certain "dangerous" kinds of knowledge was even banned: for example, sailors on British vessels were forbidden to study navigation, and only officers were allowed to know how to chart a course or to pilot a vessel into a harbor. The same tendency can be observed in the Anglo-Saxon system of justice: the language of lawyers bears little resemblance to normal English, and everything is done to ensure that members of the public are not in a position to understand the meaning of not just the laws, but even of the contracts and agreements which they are forced to sign in order to gain access to employment, housing or medical care. Inconvenient laws are studiously ignored. For example, in the US court system, a jury has the right of nullification: they have the right to reject any law as invalid and to acquit the defendant regardless of his "guilt" under a law they see as unjust. So here's a proven method: If you are summoned as a juror, and you do not wish to serve, all you need to do is write the words "I believe in jury nullification" on the form, and the court will send you home at once! In the area of intellectual property rights, although the original copyright system protected the rights of inventors and authors, now it has become a way to ration access to information depending on one's ability to pay. All countries have to participate in this system to some extent in order to be able to defend and protect their own interests, but they should not be too zealous in the implementation of these laws, which are often inconsistent with the public interest. In the current situation, any attempt by the United States to enforce their system of intellectual property rights against citizens of other countries can be successfully ignored, if correctly assisted by the local governments. As for the legal-police-prison complex in the U.S., there is no longer any need to make predictions: the gaps in the budgets of many states are such that they are forced to prematurely release hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Already in several of the most depressed cities in the U.S. murders are not prosecuted due to lack of police resources. All of this is all starting to look more like ordinary lawlessness than like a system of legal terror.

DD: Recently on CNN there was a report about the U.S. mission to the moon. The Indians are planning to land there in 2020, the Russians and Americans in 2025, and the Chinese in 2030. I think that the popularity of conspiracy theories about the staging of those events is that we find it hard to imagine that we can not repeat the achievements of three decades ago without a huge effort. Meanwhile, examples similar to the lunar program are starting to occur more and more frequently. Experts say that Russia has lost the ability to produce modern weapons on a large scale for quite trivial reasons, such as lack of sufficiently skilled metalworkers, because the system of training them has collapsed. How justified are we in fearing that we (the world in general, not just Russia) are starting to slip back in time in terms of technology?

DO: In the end, the history of human trips to space will engender new myths: the primitive idols of the future will not be winged, but will sit astride rockets dressed in spacesuits. These trips were only possible thanks to large-scale industrial systems based on the use of fossil hydrocarbons, reserves which have already been exhausted, on average, about half. It will not be possible to exhaust them completely: the technological rollback has already started. It starts long before a particular resource is completely exhausted. To maintain homeostatic equilibrium, an industrial system requires a continuous flow of investment, and in order for this to happen capital must continually be created. If, say, the profitability of a coal mine is inversely proportional to shaft depth, it is enough to get to a depth at which the income is not sufficient to continue to update equipment, and the mine will close, regardless of how much coal there is left in it. But such a rational approach is rarely taken. Rather than make a difficult but timely decision, everyone begins to economize on safety, defer repairs, take on debt and so on. Periodically, the idea comes up that the situation can be improved if only everyone would show more zeal or ingenuity. We certainly all need some level of technology, and we all ought to stop to think hard which technologies can be sustained at a continually decreasing level of extraction of various natural resources. Instantly the thought occurs that aerospace technologies will not make it onto this list.

DD: How important are science and technology in modern society, as an ideology, or, if you like, a religion? Why do people prefer to believe that the problem will be solved by hanging solar panels on the roof and buying an electric car, although obviously a more simple solution would be to change the lifestyle so that one's dependence on the car is minimal?

DO: I have thought about this long and hard, and came to the conclusion that it all comes down to a very basic question: "How to please a girl?" After all, any modern, progressive, educated and attractive person begins to scoff if you take away her flush toilet and substitute a bucket, or if she has to go shopping leading a donkey, or if, instead of a shower, she is invited to go and stoke a sauna. From time immemorial status in society has been determined by access to luxury goods. As society becomes richer, luxuries turn into necessities. And when society starts to grow poorer again, it turns out that there is no going back. That is, there is a way back, but it is blocked by the innate tendencies of our clever species. My wife and I spent two years living aboard a very attractive and practical yacht slightly less than 10 meters in length at the waterline, and although the wife understands everything very well, even she cannot stop herself from casting a sideways glance when a yacht like Abramovich's walks past us, and from making some comment, like "Oh, now this I understand, this is the real thing!" And there is no point in explaining to her that what we have here on board is a very high level of civilization, while Abramovich is just an ordinary consumer. It is very hard, gentlemen, to change the lifestyle, but not change the woman! If someone succeeds in this, then he is a hero and a genius, and we should all learn from him. In the meantime, we are going to live in an apartment, and put the boat on the hard, and install all sorts of solar panels, water heaters, and other technological junk.

DD: There are quite a number of people who view the current crisis not as financial or economic, but as a moral crisis and a crisis of rationality. We have developed an entire system, or even multiple systems, that require you to constantly lie and deceive in order to make it into the upper middle class. I mean all of these brokers, bankers, brand managers and so on. This same "plague" has afflicted the academic community, where economic theories are completely independent of reality and common sense. Even in everyday life there is a huge rollback of rationality - otherwise a film like "The Secret", Tony Robbins, "positive thinking" and training for "personal growth" would never have become so popular. What's next - a new renaissance or a new Dark Age? How strong is the relationship between the crisis and questions of world-view, faith and culture?

DO: I do not see a fundamental difference between lying in financial and economic realms and lying as a moral and rational matter. Financial and economic lies are that you can endlessly stimulate economic growth, despite the fact that the natural resources and the soil are wearing out, that forests are being cut down, that the environment and the climate have been disrupted, and that investments in high technology do not pay. The moral and rational lies are that economic growth is a good thing, indeed, a necessary thing, otherwise all will be very bad. In the West these lies are taught well at prestigious universities like Harvard, and countries wishing to participate in the global economy have to recruit their graduates to help their central banks and finance ministries to lie on their behalf. Putting it politely, the ability to lie is the ability to pretend. And now our credentialed liars are all pretending that the crisis has ended. Has it really, or is this just the end of the first turn of the crisis spiral, with no end in sight? After all, whether or not you lie, you cannot run away from reality. I do not know whether the coming age will be Dark Age, but I am sure that it will be rather dim. After all, the art of lying has displaced a lot of useful knowledge.

DD: In Ireland, you talked about the fact that modern methods of warfare are economically inefficient. That is, you can equip twenty thousand rebels with Kalashnikov rifles (AK-47) and grenades, and they will successfully resist a army that uses tanks and aircraft, that cost tens of millions of dollars. However, guerrilla actions are effective only for defensive purposes, and not conquest. Theoretically, the crisis could lead to Americans being forced to curtail their activities in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US really are the main aggressors in the world now, but I have major doubts that, as soon as the aircraft carriers are mothballed, we will live in peace and harmony, all will lay down their arms and begin to "work the earth."

DO: People fight for all sorts of reasons, and I am sure that military actions in some parts of the world will continue after the disappearance of US from the global battlefield. There is no doubt that Kalashnikovs and grenades have given the poor throughout the world to the ability to bravely defend themselves against the most technologically equipped army. Wars either pay off or the aggressor goes bankrupt, and wars against today's poor but very successful guerrillas pay off much worse than wars against rich, peaceful and defenseless nations (of which there are none left). Americans are still fighting, because they are fighting on credit, but when at last their funding runs out, I suspect that this whole style of war will finally recede into the past. Certainly, there will be plenty of small and large-scale slaughter, particularly in heavily overpopulated and impoverished countries, but for this even Kalashnikovs are not needed. For example, in Rwanda the Hutu tribe did an excellent job with machetes, while the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia quite successfully strangled a lot of people with plastic bags. I do not know how many more countries will follow such a path, but in general I think that, thanks to the successes of modern guerrilla practice, the profitability of military action will continue to decrease.

Маркетинг в маленьком городе - Интервью №3

2009-09-23T08:33:00.008-04:00

Дмитрий Давыдов - автор популярного русскоязычного блога. Периодически мы переписываемся, а переписку публикуем.

(For the Russian-challenged: click here for a lousy English machine translation.)

(UPDATE: My readers have successfully shamed me into providing a proper translation.)

ДД: В американской (да и не только) прессе, можно периодически прочитать статьи про дикие законы шариата, когда женщин забрасывают камнями. Или о том, как Саудовскую девочку 8 лет отдали за муж за долги. Есть специальные сайты о «глупых законах», особенно в южных штатах, где нельзя заниматься сексом полностью голым. Однако мало кто видит абсурдность и дикость многих американских законов об интеллектуальном праве, где вас могут оштрафовать на 10 тысяч долларов за скачивание песен или фильмов с торрентов (Китай, Россия или Украина, где пиратство процветает – считаются нецивилизованными и юридически отсталыми) . Вы однажды сказали (правда в ином контексте), что те кто платит за программное обеспечение – дураки. Хотелось бы узнать ваше мнение о системе интеллектуального права конкретно и юридической системе США вообще. От нее больше вреда или пользы, почему вы уверенны в том, что «юридически-полицейско-тюремный» комплекс будет одной из первых жертв коллапса?

ДО: В основу англосаксонской цивилизации (если ее можно почтить столь высокопарным словом) заложена мысль, что темным народом управлять легче, чем просвещенным. Это прослеживается и в том, что во всех англоязычных странах существует вполне стабильная прослойка низов (т. наз. "underclass") которой, кроме как на словах, никому не приходит в голову чем-либо помочь, и в желании элит примазаться к британской аристократии, копируя их странные повадки и обычаи, и в преклонении широких слоев населения перед британским престолом даже в странах, немалой кровью отвоевавших свою независимость от империи. Это можно увидеть и в системе образования, которая, кроме как для самых привилегированных, стремиться обучить ремеслу, правилам поведения и послушанию, а не расширить кругозор. Не так давно на некоторые "опасные" познания даже накладывался запрет: например, морякам на британских суднах запрещено было изучать навигацию, и только офицерам было дозволено знать, как выбрать курс и как провести судно в гавань. Та же тенденция прослеживается и в англо-саксонской юстиции: язык адвокатов мало похож на нормальный английский, и всё сделано для того, чтобы рядовой член общества не был в состоянии сам понять смысл не только законов, но даже контрактов и соглашений, которые он вынужден подписывать, чтобы получить работу, жильё или медицинское обслуживание. Неудобные законы тщательно замалчиваются. Например, присяжные в американской ситеме имеют право нуллификации: они имеют право признать любой закон недействительным и оправдать подсудимого независимо от его "вины". Так вот испытанный метод: если Вас вызывают в суд как присяжного, а служить Вам не хочется, то Вам достаточно написать на анкете слова "I believe in jury nullification" и суд немедленно отправит вас домой! В сфере интеллектуального права, хотя изначально система авторских прав защищала права изобретателей и авторов, теперь она превратилась в способ нормировать доступ к информации в зависимости от платежеспособности. Все страны вынуждены в той или иной мере участвовать в этой системе, чтобы иметь возможность отстаивать и защищать собственные интересы, но им не стоит слишком усердствовать в проведении в жизнь этих законов, часто идущих вразрез с интересами общества. В сложившейся ситуации, любая попытка со стороны США добиться соблюдения их интеллектуальных прав гражданами других держав, при должном содействии местных правительств, может успешно игнорироваться. А что касается юридически-тюремного комплекса в самих США, то тут уже и предсказывать ничего не надо: бреши в бюджетах многих штатов таковы, что они вынуждены досрочно отпускать сотни тысяч заключенных. Уже в нескольких из наименее благополучных городов США убийства не преследуются по закону из-за нехватки полицейских. Всё это больше походит на обыкновенное беззаконие, чем на юридический террор.

ДД: Недавно по CNN был репортаж об американской миссии на Луну. В следующий раз на Луну планируют приземлиться (вернее прилуниться) индусы в 2020, русские и американцы в 2025 и китайцы в 2030. Мне кажется, что популярность теории заговоров об инсценировки тех событий заключается в том, что нам трудно представить, что мы не можем повторить достижения тридцатилетней давности без колоссальных усилий. Между тем, примеры, сходные с лунной программой, встречаются все чаще. Эксперты говорят, что Россия потеряла возможность масштабного производства современных вооружений по достаточно тривиальным причинам – не хватает достаточно квалифицированных токарей и рабочих, а система их подготовки разрушена. Насколько обосновано опасаться того, что мы (мир вообще, а не только Россия) начинаем откатываться назад в технологическом плане?

ДО: В конечном счете, история человеческих походов в космос породит новые мифы: примитивные идолы будущего будут не крылаты, а сидеть верхом на ракетах и одеты в скафандры. Походы эти были возможны только благодаря масштабным индустриальным системам, основанным на использовании ископаемых углеводов, природные запасы которых истрачены уже в среднем где-то наполовину. Истратить их целиком не удастся: технологический откат уже начался. Он начинается задолго до того, как той или иной ресурс оказывается целиком исчерпан. Чтобы поддерживать гомеостатическое равновесие индустриальная система нуждается в непрерывном потоке капиталовложений, а для этого она этот капитал должна непрерывно создавать. Если, скажем, доходность шахты обратно пропорциональна ее глубине, то достаточно докопаться до глубины, при которой доходов не хватает, чтобы продолжать обновлять технику, и шахту придется закрыть независимо от того, сколько в ней еще осталось угля. Но такой рациональный подход удается редко. Вместо того, чтобы принять трудное но своевременное решение, все начинают экономить на технике безопасности, откладывать ремонт, влезать в долги и так далее. Периодически всплывает идея, что дело можно поправить, если только проявить рвение или изобретательность. Технологии всем безусловно нужны, и всем не помешало бы задуматься о том, какие технологии сохранят рентабельность при постоянно снижающихся уровнях добычи всевозможных природных ресурсов. Сразу закрадывается мысль, что космос в этот список не войдет.

ДД: Насколько важную роль играют наука и технологии в современном обществе, как идеология или, если хотите, религия? Почему люди охотней верят в то, что проблема решиться тем, что мы повесим солнечные элементы на крышу и купим электромобиль, вместо того, хотя очевидно более простым решением было бы поменять стиль жизни таким образом, чтобы зависимость человека от автомобиля была минимальной?

ДО: Я как раз об этом долго и упорно думал, и пришел к выводу, что всё сводится к элементарному вопросу: "Чем порадовать девушку?" Ведь современная, прогрессивная, образованная и привлекательная особа начинает фыркать, если у нее отбирают унитаз и подставляют ведерко, или если на рынок ей приходится ходить с осликом наповоду, или если вместо душа ей предлагают истопить баньку. Испокон веков статус в обществе определялся доступом к предметам роскоши. По мере того как общество становится богаче, предметы роскоши превращаются в предметы первой необходимости. А когда общество начинает беднеть, то оказывается, что назад хода нет. То есть он есть, но ему препятствуют врожденные склонности нашего хитрого вида. Мы с женой два года прожили на очень симпатичной и практичной яхте чуть меньше 10 м. длины по ватерлинии, и хотя жена всё прекрасно понимает, она не может не покосить глазом неласково когда мимо нас проходит яхта вроде как у Абрамовича, и не отпустить замечания вроде "О, вот это я понимаю, вот это вещь!" И нет смысла объяснять, что у нас тут на борту очень высокий уровень цивилизации, а Абрамович - заурядный потребитель. Очень трудно, господа, поменять стиль жизни, но не поменять при этом девушку! Если кому-нибудь это удается, то он - герой и гений, и давайте все у него учиться. А мы пока будем жить в квартире, а яхту поставим на ремонт и встроим туда много разных солнечных панелей, водогревов и прочей технологической фигни.

ДД: Есть достаточно большое количество людей, которые рассматривают нынешний кризис не как финансовый или экономический, а как морально-рациональный. Мы вырастили целую систему или даже системы, где надо постоянно обманывать и врать для того, чтобы пробиться в upper middle class. Я имею в виду все этих брокеров, банкиров, бренд-менеджеров и так далее. Эта же «чума» поразила академические круги, где экономические теории стали совершенно независимы от реальности и здравого смысла. Даже на бытовом плане идет колоссальный откат от рациональности – иначе бы фильм Секрет, Тони Роббинс, «позитивное мышление» и тренинги «личностного роста» никогда бы не были так популярны. Что дальше – новый ренессанс или новый Dark Age? Насколько сильна связь кризиса с вопросами мировоззрения, веры и культуры?

ДО: Я не вижу принципиальной разницы между финансово-экономическим враньем и враньем морально-рациональным. Финансово-экономическое враньё - это что можно до бесконечности стимулировать экономический рост, невзирая на то, что недра и почва изнашиваются, леса вырубаются, экология и климат подорваны, а капиталовложения в высокие технологии не окупаются. Морально-рациональное враньё - это что экономический рост вещь хорошая, более того, необходимая, иначе всем станет очень плохо. На западе этому вранью хорошо учат в знаменитых университетах вроде Гарварда, и страны, желающие поучаствовать в мировой экономике, вынуждены назначать их выпускников заведовать своими центральными банками и министерствами финансов, чтобы было кому за них врать. Выражась вежливо, умение врать - это умение делать вид. И вот сейчас наши дипломированные вруны делают вид, что кризис закончился. Но закончился ли он, или это только закончился первый виток кризисной спирали, а конца ей не видать? Ведь, ври не ври, а от реальности не убежишь. Не знаю, будет ли грядущий век темным, но уверен, что он будет серым. Ведь искусство врать получено вместо каких-либо стоящих познаний.

ДД: В Ирландии вы говорили о том, что современные методы ведения военных действий являются экономически неэффективными. Мол, можно выделить двадцать тысяч повстанцам на Калашниковы и фугасы, и они будут успешно сопротивляться армии, которая использует танки и самолеты, которые стоят десятки миллионов долларов. Однако партизанские действия эффективны только в оборонительных целях, а не наступательных. Чисто теоретически, кризис может привести к тому, что американцы свернут свою деятельность в Ираке и Афганистане. США действительно являются основными агрессорами в мире сейчас, однако у меня большие сомнения в том, что как только «авианосцы встанут на прикол», мы заживем в мире и согласии, все сложат оружие и начнут «пахать землю».

ДО: Люди воюют по разным причинам, и я уверен, что военные действия в той или иной части света будут продолжаться и после исчезновения США с мирового поля боя. Бесспорно, что Калашниковы и фугасы дали беднякам всей планеты возможность доблестно защищаться против самой технологически оснащенной армии. Войны либо окупаются, либо агрессор банкротится, а войны против современных нищих но весьма успешных в бою партизан окупаются куда хуже, чем войны против богатых, миролюбивых, и беззащитных (каковых в мире осталось очень мало). Американцы всё еще воюют, потому что они воюют в долг, но когда их финансовые ресурсы наконец иссякнут, подозреваю, что и весь этот стиль войны отойдет наконец в прошлое. Безусловно, будет много мелкой и крупной резни, особенно в сильно перенаселенных и бедных странах, но для этого и Калашниковы не нужны. Например, в Руанде племя Хуту прекрасно справлялось с помощью мачете, а в Камбодже Красные кхмеры вполне успешно передушили кучу народа пластиковыми мешками. Не знаю, сколько еще будет таких неблагополучных стран, но в целом я думаю, что, благодаря успехам современной партизанской практики, доходность военных акций будет продолжать идти вниз.

Beg Like a Pirate

2009-09-21T08:15:00.001-04:00

On a calm and sunny autumn Monday, the old pirate awoke in his berth on his anchored derelict vessel with the usual fierce rum-induced hangover. He rowed himself ashore in his little dink, pirated a spot for it at a private dock, took the bus downtown to the Social Security office, hobbled up to the counter on his peg leg, thrust forward his arm-hook, glared at the clerk with his remaining eyeball, and said: "Arr! I want my disability compensation!"

To which you might say, "What?! Why should we devote scarce public resources to the support of, of all people, a pirate? Sure, he lacks stereoscopic vision and is missing the odd appendage, but he could still sober up long enough to do some pillaging, and, with the help of a certain blue pill, even some raping. Even if that proves to be too much for him, he can still stuff ships into bottles for the tourist souvenir shops."

Traditionally, mutinous dogs who espouse such notions would be lashed to the mainmast and given fifty strokes with the cat o' nine tails. However, in the prevailing sadomasochistic political climate, neither the physical pain nor the public humiliation of corporal punishment can be guaranteed to have the expected salutary effect on morale. In fact, the scurvy perverts might find the experience enriching, blogging about it, posting tantalizingly fuzzy cell phone videos of their flogging on YouTube, and auctioning their bloodied shirts on Ebay. No, they would have to be made to walk the plank, or, if the sea is calm, swing from the yard-arm, thus saving a bullet.

The pirate's claim for disability compensation rests on a clinical diagnosis of chronic pain. The idea of honest work can be observed to make his phantom limbs twitch. Also, he suffers from a possibly false but nevertheless emotionally distressing memory of being sexually assaulted by his parrot. The Social Security check would be helpful, of course, but, beyond that, he craves recognition. He would like to regularly see a neurologist, a psychiatrist and an acupuncturist. He feels that there must be a popular syndrome that accounts his unique condition perfectly. He has correctly surmised that pain and suffering are this society's most important form of social capital, more important than wealth or achievement.

When Bill Clinton, in 1992, spoke the words "People are hurting all over this country. You can see the pain in their faces, the hurt in their voices," which he later synthesized into the memorable and mantra-like "I feel your pain," he tapped into something rather powerful that had been gestating in the popular subconscious for some time. In effect, he put into circulation a new coin of the realm. It is wonderful to have a leader who feels your pain! Of course, you had to have pain for him to feel, so you went out and got yourself some. How you got it didn't much matter. Hard work and heroic self-sacrifice were the best, but in the end it didn't matter whether it was through overwork, overexercise, substance abuse, overeating, self-abuse - almost any sort of abuse gained you admission to a nationwide orgy of shameless public blubbering about one's pain.

Beyond a superficial sense of physical well-being, how we feel about ourselves and the world is mediated and conditioned by our culture. In the richer cultures, the feelings are highly refined, and their expressions are couched in complex, culturally specific terms. This creates a problem for an inclusive, multicultural society, because refined feelings, between two mutually unintelligible cultures, seem idiosyncratic and subjective, and serve to alienate rather than to create common ground. So why not leave the complex feelings of love, sympathy, pride, respect, honor and shame and so forth behind, as so much cultural baggage, and standardize on the simpler feeling of pain? Unlike these other feelings, pain can be made objective, because it is subject to pharmacological effects.

At the National Cathedral of Pain, you confess to pain, you are absolved, and you receive communion in pill form. And so we have a nation that gobbles painkillers. The hardest workers have the biggest bottles of Ibuprofen or Acetaminophen displayed proudly on their desks, and may be abusing oxycodone in private. People as disparate as Rush Limbaugh and Michael Jackson share a predilection for painkillers. The rich have access to prescription medications, while the poor self-medicate with illegal drugs and alcohol.

The interesting thing about pain is that it is not objective it all. There is a fine line between pain and pleasure, and it seems to have a lot to do with whether we sense that physical harm is being caused. That is, pain is really not so bad provided you know that there is nothing wrong with you. On the other hand, if you think that you have caused yourself irreparable harm, then your brain will furnish you with undeniable symptoms of it. For instance, a herniated disk is often benign physically (like a bit of toothpaste pushing against a garden hose), but if you disagree with that, then your brain will cut the blood flow to the surrounding tissues, giving you chronic pain (but still no physiological damage). It is often sufficient to convince yourself that there is nothing physically wrong with you for the pain to subside. This psychological mechanism could very well be behind the strangely increased incidence of chronic back pain in a society that does less back-breaking work than ever before.

A good question to ask, then, is whether people who suffer pain because of their need to be recognized for their suffering, and to feel included, should be compensated for it financially. Perhaps they should be. Doing so might cause us all some additional financial pain. But then Dr. Geithner at the US Treasury Clinic seems perfectly happy to oblige with a script for financial morphine whenever anyone asks for one, and Pharm. D. Bernanke at the Federal Reserve Pharmacy always fills Mr. Geithner's scripts no questions asked. Nobody knows how much financial morphine Dr. Bernanke has left in stock, but let's not ask him any questions about that either. For an economy in hospice care, that is far too painful a question to even think about.

And now for the really hard question: Are you ready and willing to do the backbreaking work that's needed to bring this country around? To make it easier, let's make it multiple-choice: A. Yes; B. No; C. Ouch!

Caution, White People

2009-09-17T18:36:00.008-04:00

UPDATE: This article has attracted the usual trickle of informative and thoughtful reader comments, which are always welcome, plus a torrent of venomous stupidity, which, unfortunately, I have had to look at in order to reject. It is quite clear that the US is headed in the direction of very stupid, hurtful and dangerous politics. What is also clear is that I have neither the time nor the interest nor the stomach for it. I regret having to do this, but I am disabling comment submission.

I happened to be in Washington, DC last weekend, and on the way to and from the National Gallery I had the opportunity to observe the March on Washington, which was in full swing. Once upon a time I had joined demonstrations, not out of some misplaced idealism, but to pick up women (I was still single at the time). The demonstrations were always full of pretty, high-spirited young women, and the context of marching and chanting slogans together rendered them approachable. And so my first question concerning the crowd marching around the Mall last weekend was, "Where are all the pretty young women?" There weren't any! Surprised, I observed some more. What I saw only deepened my consternation. Not only were there no pretty women to be seen, but the crowd included exactly zero blacks, Latinos or Asians. I don't believe I have ever before seen so many middle-aged, obese, shabbily dressed, melanin-challenged individuals gathered in one place!

What political interests bind over-the-hill flabby white people to the exclusion of all other ethnic groups? What is the shabby white agenda? Perhaps the signs the marchers carried might offer a clue? Most of them carried white corrugated cardboard signs stapled to a sharpened pine stake, of the sort designed for displaying on suburban front lawns. The slogans they scribbled on them were of their own devising, but the form factor of the signs was identical throughout. The slogans related to disparate interests: health care, monetary policy, constitutional law. I eventually stumbled on a pile of the stock they used to make their signs. These were printed signs: the printed side said either "Office Space for Lease!" or "Condos for Sale!". The demonstrators would pry the cardboard off one sign, staple it to another sign face down, and scribble on the blank side of the one in the front. These people are refugees from foreclosure-land that somebody organized and shipped in, together with their props!

Although the topic of war did not seem foremost on their minds, some of the men, and even a few of the ruddy, rugged-looking women, were clad in warrior garb of one of two varieties: quite a few aging road warriors sported motorcycle gang leathers decorated with Harley-Davidson insignia, while others wore frumpy US Military camouflage pyjamas. One very large would-be warrior paraded with a sign that read "I will defend the Constitution by any means necessary." He could certainly snuff one or two enemies of the republic by belly-flopping onto them with his gigantic gut! But this wasn't a rabidly militant crowd, unlike some of the pro-war demonstrations I've witnessed. For this bunch, militarism is clearly just part of the clutter in their mental attic.

The one theme that seemed to tie it all together could be summed up by the statement "Obama is bad". This message was often couched in laughable, preposterous bits of hyperbole: "Obama is a socialist/Marxist/fascist". (To my knowledge, Obama holds no Marxist credentials whatsoever.) Interestingly, some of the signs were decorated with the hammer and sickle, but I did not see a single Swastika. I would venture a guess that this was to avoid mistaken identification; it is probably easier for these people to be mistaken for fascists than for communists. Not that they are either of these: clearly, they are just some regular old shlubby people, self-organized along strict ethnic lines, self-selected by their hatred of Obama.

Since Obama happens to be a politician, a superficial assumption is that these people joined forces in opposition to Obama's politics. It is, however, difficult to see much daylight between Obama's politics and those of his predecessor. There is a dearth of ideas on how to reverse the country's economic slide and point it in a new, more promising direction. Instead, there is a great deal of continuity: in financial bail-out strategies that benefit large financial institutions and wealthy investors (who are part of Obama's base of support just as they were of Bush's), in the policy of open-ended military engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Obama's refusal to investigate and prosecute the previous administration for war crimes, and in most other areas of policy as well, Obama has tuned out to be a Bush in sheep's clothing.

The latest, desperate effort to avoid national bankruptcy at the hands of the medical-industrial complex is not a new initiative. Medical reform has been attempted before, and the outcome can be foretold with some accuracy: efforts at reform will fail because any meaningful reform would be financially damaging to powerful vested interests, and so national bankruptcy will have to be an essential part of the work-out. Feelings of the electorate on the matter are irrelevant. But opposition to medical reform is a convenient ruse to hide the real motivations of these self-selected white demonstrators. Now, could these perhaps have to do with... racism?

Jimmy Carter has recently blundered into the fray, making the following statement on CNN: “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man,” Carter told NBC News." This has caused a bit of an uproar. Captain Obvious was immediately paged but declined comment. The Obama administration immediately started to distance itself from Jimmy. Jimmy does say the darnest things, such as calling Israeli policies toward Palestinians "Apartheid". (Speaking truth to liars is a dangerous sport, because if you do, their lying turns vicious. Everyone knows that anything short of a glowing endorsement of Israeli policies brings an automatic charge of antisemitism. When is Jimmy going to learn?)

Obama's ethnic and racial identity is ambiguous. He is a self-described mutt. If he is black, then he is black in the way a puppy born of a black Labrador and a golden retriever might be black, not the way a lot of the US prison population is black. He is a cross between a Kenyan and an anthropologist, and a privileged, pampered member of America's ruling class. His people did not come from Africa in slave ships to be auctioned at Charleston and work on plantations.

He may not be particularly black, but he is definitely not of the same tribe as the Washington demonstrators, who were predominantly of Scots-Irish or English or German descent. This is who America's proud owners and proprietors have been through most of American history, the ethnic groups that have built the American empire, driving slaves, running factories, fighting the natives and driving them into reservations, driving the Mexicans out of the Southwest, and manning the police departments, the military bases and the prisons. They are the ones who worked to impose Pax Americana on the Americas, and, for a short while, almost succeeded in having their way with the rest of the world.

And now they have grown old, fat and sick and are mired in debt. Their time is over, and they are every bit as upset about it as they ought to be. I can't fault them for it. Up until last year, they could comfort themselves by thinking: "We may be poor, but at least we ain't black!" But now they have a black President. What a shock that must be!

What is lost on many simple minds is that the concept of racism is actually a lot of ridiculous nonsense. The term should be retired. It initially presupposed the existence of some sort of natural hierarchy, with a master race (English aristocracy) at the top and semi-evolved animal-like barbarians (Africans, Asians and such) near the bottom. This theory was responsible for a great deal of misery and injustice, but now it has been thoroughly discredited by genetics. The human genome is not differentiated according to race or skin color: we are all one race.

What remains of the concept of race is irrational racial hatred, but racial hatred is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce ethnic strife. Privileged ethnic groups do not have to hate ethnic groups they oppress any more than I have to hate chickens in order to steal and eat their eggs. Ethnicity-based feelings of entitlement and a clan mentality work just as well to divide a multi-ethnic society into warring factions. You might think that intermarriage and a long history together might mitigate against this risk, but there was plenty of intermarriage and a very long history together between Serbs and Croats in Yugoslavia, and between Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda, and look at where that got them. Multi-ethnic societies are fragile entities, and have a tendency to explode. When they do everyone loses.

Whenever two or more ethnic groups live side by side, the danger of ethnic strife, civil war, ethnic cleansing and genocide is always present. What usually triggers it is the presence of politicians who are willing to exploit ethnic differences in order to grab or hold on to power. Do we have any of those here? Do they even know that they are playing with fire? The poor people I saw parading around Washington last weekend didn't seem so threatening, but where there is smoke there is fire.

It is possible to excuse those who are upset with the way things are in the country. It is, after all, a sad state of affairs. It is also possible to forgive people for being upset that their leader doesn't look or act like them. Bush did his best to appease them by playing a redneck on TV, cutting up logs with a chainsaw, driving a pickup truck around his ranch during his lengthy and numerous vacations, and cultivating a fake Texas twang to mask his New England upper-class roots.

But what of those in positions of influence who are willing to exploit public frustration and stir up ethnic hatred, all in order to defeat health care reform? Isn't that exactly what we should expect of those who want to continue to extort money from sick people in order to make profits even while the country teeters toward bankruptcy? Are they too stupid to realize how dangerous a game that is? Or do they think that it might not be too bad for them, and that a bloodletting might be good for their business, making it even more profitable?

In the US, politics is a stupid, pointless, but mostly harmless game. Let's all do our best to make sure that it stays that way.

Time's Up!

2009-09-14T20:07:00.015-04:00

Time's Up! An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis
by Keith Farnish
Green Books, September 2009

Keith's book is a reader challenge: the reader is tasked with developing a survivable future for her progeny. Very carefully and delicately, with many references to academic research and a rich bibliography, Keith lays out the case that extinction is the default choice – unless you, dear reader of such books, along with a few other people, people like Keith, who would like to help you, come up with a better plan.

Keith points to two of the narratives that are becoming prevalent in thinking about our lack of future. The first of these is the vision of technological apocalypse: the complex, highly interconnected technology-based life support system crashes, stranding us in a dead landscape that is not survivable. The second is the vision of environmental catastrophe: methane bubbles out of the tundra, the ice caps melt, the oceans rise, the forests burn up, fields turn to desert, harvests fail, and, along with most other species, humans go extinct. Keith asks us to create a third narrative – one in which our children stand a chance, as members of an uncivilized, and perhaps an endangered species, but not an extinct one. Keith asks us to start taking steps toward making this vision a reality.

A worthy goal, although one rife with difficulties and internal contradictions. The first of these is that such a consummately civilized book is an odd vehicle for promoting the destruction of the civilization that is leading us all to perdition. Another is that his presentation, true to fact though it is, due to its dark subject matter, is enough to drive most people to melancholy. Questions of survival and extinction are hard for us, for we civilized humans are a sentimental lot: we bake cupcakes and play with kittens and babies, and prefer to think that the big world out there is just an extension of our little safe haven with its security and its comforts, where we can go and play if we want to. We worry about all the little baby animals out there, the cute, sad-eyed, furry ones especially, but we leave the dirty, planet-destroying work of providing our security and our comforts to specialists – soldiers, the police, politicians, businessmen, engineers and industrial workers. These, being professionals, generally feel that they need not concern themselves with matters outside their purview, such as their forthcoming extinction.

As for those whose purview does include the minor matter of our continued viability as a species, the list now includes anyone who seriously studies ecology, climatology, natural resource physics, crisis economics, or any of the other disciplines that tell us of crisis, danger, or catastrophe. For them, deep and abiding melancholy has become something of an occupational hazard. Scientists are professional problem-solvers, and tend to choke on the idea that their problem-solving happens to be responsible for having caused much of the problem. If all you can do is study something to death, then die, then why on earth bother? But Keith does come up with a very simple, powerful idea that cuts through all of this sentimental fog like a laser beam.

This is perhaps the most powerful idea of his entire book. We – all of us – should just follow our genetic programming a little better. As bits of biological hardware executing a genetic program, it is our primary function to pass our genes on to the next generation. This part is not controversial, and there are several billion of us on hand to attest to the program's success. But unlike, say, yeast, some of us are also capable of understanding an important principle: that just blindly creating progeny doomed to extinction is not as clever as we like to imagine ourselves to be. If we leave no viable habitat for our children, then we could give birth to countless numbers of them and still fail to reproduce successfully. (Yeast are actually somewhat clever, and when their environment becomes too polluted with their main waste product, alcohol, for them to function, they fall dormant and wait for an improvement, whereas we just kick the bucket.) The key question is not whether to breed, it is where to breed, and just as many animals range far and wide to find a place to breed and rear their young, we need to look beyond the cupcake-and-kitten universe with its plastic baby car seats and baby formula, and reconcile our effort with the big picture, or we are only doing half the job of parenting.

As always and with everything, there is a problem with this approach as well. It is quite possible to take the position that while the cupcake-and-kitten universe is undeniably real, first-hand experience, and is all that makes your life interesting and fun, the big scary world of ecological and economic catastrophe is an ever-changing carnival show of horrific visions that our apocalypse-addled culture serves up as popular entertainment. It seems that there is always something out there to moan about in public. It used to be nuclear winter, but now it's global warming summer, with some killer asteroids lurking about to spice things up. Sure, lots of children might go extinct, but who's to say they will be my children? Mine might turn out to be particularly clever – much more clever than you or me – so why not let them sort this out for themselves? Indeed, when it comes to planning our own birth, what advice would any of us want to have given to our own parents, beyond "Oh, please, don't think about it, just get on with it!" And while, simultaneously, some of us may wrinkle our noses at all the stupid people who pop out babies with no means or plans to bring them up properly, that, you see, is part of their genetic programming as well: in a heterozygotic species such as ours, breeding is a matter of chance, nobody knows which two crabapples might produce a Golden Delicious, and if none of the numerous idiots among us were allowed to breed, there would be even fewer geniuses among us.

While "Please, just get on with it!" sums it up nicely, some sort of plan might still be called for. We want our children to be grateful, not just weak with relief for being born at all. And while the introduction declares bombastically that "Part Four contains the keys to human survival" [p. 8] by the time Part Four rolls around, Keith is quick to offer a disclaimer: "These are just thoughts, ideas, imperfect sketches for something that could work if it's done properly. I can't predict how things are going to turn out, even if what I am going to propose does succeed; nobody can predict something that hasn't started yet." [p. 182-3] Keith's practical thoughts and considerations are not unhelpful, including all the usual steps toward self-sufficiency, such as constructing your own shelter and growing and gathering your own food, but they really are (as perhaps they should be) just baby steps.

Keith also talks about the task of destroying industrial civilization in order to allow life on earth to return to equilibrium. A worthy goal, perhaps, although none of what Keith proposes is particularly radical or effective, or it would be illegal and his book would be banned. Is it a goal worth pursuing? If we try and succeed, would we feel proud of ourselves, and wear "I collapsed industrial civilization" T-shirts? (Unlikely, since by then we would be clad in skins, furs or homespun cloth, or, if global warming comes through in time, perhaps a simple loincloth would suffice.) Won't industrial civilization collapse in any case, and so shouldn't we devote our scarce energies and short lives to more constructive pursuits? The forces that maintain industrial civilization do so at the cost of ever-increasing complexity, an approach that, once it reaches the point of diminishing returns, only hastens its own destruction. A more worthy goal might be to insulate yourself and your children from this wave of destruction that is about to befall industrial society, by freeing yourself from its enslavements. Indeed, I believe that inside Keith's somewhat ambiguous and tentative message of conscious destruction lurks a far more potent and coherent message of emancipation from mental slavery.

The chapter on "connecting" elaborates one part of this message. "Connecting" is a process of liberation that allows a person to pierce the veil of objectivity, to cease being a part of objective reality, subject to objective judgment and evaluation, and to enter a realm of direct, subjective meaning and experience. It can start with something as superficial as a trip to the seashore and exposure to the timelessness of surf and wind and sand. It can be as significant as dissolving in the life of a forest, drawing all inspiration and sustenance from it, to the point of being ready to defend it with your own life, which no longer has a significance that is separate from the forest itself.

The next chapter contains a fairly complete description of the elements that prevent connection. Keith calls these mind control methods of modern society the "tools of disconnection." The machinery is subtle and advanced, and the work of emancipation difficult. We are all brainwashed: the rhetoric of freedom is so ingrained in us that breaking through it requires a great deal of effort. Serfdom is obsolete, and old-fashioned slavery is a crime against humanity. To become modern, the slave must be upgraded to new and improved wage-slavery, complete with consumer rights. Freedom requires slavery for it to have meaning. Those who are truly free have no use for the word, and do not know its meaning. Keith's clear exposition of the mind control techniques involved in making this neat little hat trick work helps to break the spell.

But my favorite part of the book is Part One: The Scale of The Problem, in which Keith gives a meticulously researched exposition of life at all scales at which life on Earth has been observed and studied, from the microscopic to the gigantic. In each case, he shows how human industrial activity has impacted and destabilized the web of life, usually with inevitable and dire consequences for our own chances of survival. Each one of us is tied up in this unfolding drama of wrenching change, as both the perpetrator and the victim, in a web of such stunning complexity that such simplistic labels become meaningless, including many others, such as "environmentalist" or "industrialist".

To rediscover meaning in this context, what is needed is direct contact, outside of the limits set by society and officially sanctioned roles. Keith's book is a progress report from one man's search for this meaning. I encourage you to join efforts with him, and to work on discovering a future in which you and your children might find a place.

Hunger Insurance

2009-08-21T14:42:00.005-04:00

I would like to sell you some hunger insurance. Are you insured against hunger? Perhaps you should be! Without this coverage, you may find it impossible to continue to afford feeding yourself and your family. With this coverage, not only will you be assured of continuing to get at least some food, but so will I. In fact, thanks to this plan, I will get to eat very, very well indeed.

Here's how it works. You buy a hunger insurance plan from my hunger insurance company, or from one of my illustrious competitors in the hunger insurance industry. The hunger insurance market is very competitive, offering you plenty of consumer choice. You can even decide to go with a hunger maintenance organization (HMO); that would make a lot of sense if you are on a diet.

Whichever company you choose buys up food in bulk on your behalf. Then, should you come down with a case of hunger, you can file a claim, pay the copayment, and get some of the food. Certain feeding procedures, such as breakfast, are considered elective, and are not covered.

The company is in a position to demand lower prices for food from the food providers, and can even pass some of these savings on to you. (But the fine folks in the hunger insurance company do have to eat too, you know.) Of course, the food providers try to make up the difference by charging those without hunger insurance much higher prices, but how can anyone blame them? That's just market economics. There may also be some food-related benefits, such as lower rental rates on bowls, spoons, napkins and feeding tubes (check the details of your plan).

There is just one more twist: you should try to arrange your hunger insurance plan through your employer. You see, it is much more expensive for companies to do business with consumers directly. It is much cheaper and easier for them to deal with other companies, and this allows them to, again, pass along some of the savings. In fact, many hunger insurers may decide not to sell individual hunger plans because group hunger is much more profitable. This is just Business 101: nothing personal. Plus, how can you afford to pay your hunger premium every month if you are unemployed? It goes without saying that if you want to keep your hunger insurance, you better try to keep your job, whether they pay you or not! And if you are currently unemployed, then, well... why am I still talking to you?

I am sure you will agree that this is a damn good system: it offers you consumer choice, a healthy diet, and, most importantly, peace of mind. But, as you may have heard, some people have been clamoring for a so-called "single-feeder system" run by the government. Now, that sort of thing may be very well for those miserable communists, but let me ask you a couple of questions.

First: Do you want to get fed the same as everyone else, even if you can afford to pay a little extra? What if you, say, win the lottery; wouldn't you want to upgrade to the premium plan, and dine on filet mignon, foie gras and truffles like I do instead of the corporate-government-provided Happi-Meals?

But even more importantly, who do you want your children to be when they grow up: lowly, overworked, underpaid government bureaucrats, or fat-cat capitalists like me? Isn't this compelling vision of hope worth tightening your belt for? To be perfectly honest, those jobs are reserved for my children, but yours might still be able to find work as their personal bathroom assistants, if they are docile and pretty... let's pretend you didn't hear that.

But ultimately it is still all up to you, because it is you who, every few years, walks into a voting booth and pulls a lever. And then I have to work with whoever you elect, and bring them around to seeing things my way. We are in this together, you see: you get to pull the lever, but I get to write the checks, with your money. Politicians have to eat too, you know, I am there to help them, and they know it.

Is that your stomach growling, or are you just happy to see me?

Interview on KPFA.org

2009-08-04T21:12:00.002-04:00

Guns and Butter
Wednesday, August 5, 2009, 1:00pm

"The Collapse Gap" with Dmitry Orlov, author of "Reinventing Collapse - The Soviet Example and American Prospects". Orlov's repeated travels to Russia throughout the early nineties allowed him to observe the aftermath of the Soviet collapse first-hand. Being both a Russian and an American, Dmitry was able to appreciate both the differences and the similarities between the two superpowers. Eventually he came to the conclusion that the United States is going the way of the Soviet Union. His emphasis is on all the things that can still be made to work, and he advocates simply ignoring all that will fall by the wayside.

"Guns & Butter" investigates the relationships among capitalism, militarism and politics. Maintaining a radical perspective in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, "Guns & Butter: The Economics of Politics" reports on who wins and who loses when the economic resources of civil society are diverted toward global corporatization, war, and the furtherance of a national security state.

Live on KPFA at 01:00 PM Pacific Time: Wednesdays
You can listen to it here.

You don't have to go to school

2009-07-21T10:52:00.007-04:00

A small but already by no means negligible number of Americans is starting to realize what their future looks like: no retirement, no job, no savings, plus they are getting old. Their only possible means of support in old age is their children.

And so, in the meantime, let's continue to mindlessly send our children off to "learning" institutions, where they will be properly supervised at all times, bored half to death, medicated into submission should they rebel, even by simply refusing to pay attention, not taught anything worth knowing by demoralized, underpaid public servants, and then spat out into the world with their spirits crushed.

On second, thought, let's stop doing that. When thinking about making big changes, sometimes it's healthy to hear of places halfway across the world, which may have their own issues to deal with, but they are not the same ones we have here, allowing us to see past them. But the problem of institutionalization of children and emphasis on mindless discipline and rote learning is the same in all "developed" nations, being part of the worldwide legacy of industrialization and militarism, which we all have to deal with somehow. And a good first step is to starve this mindless suicide machine of fresh cannon fodder - by denying it access to our children.

Here is the story of a Russian woman's experience with pulling her three children out of school that I thought would provide some valuable perspective to people in the States who are confronting the same decision, so I translated it.

В школу можно не ходить
(You don't have to go to school)

Ksenia Podrova, St. Petersburg, Russia
http://ruk.1september.ru/article.php?ID=200701613 (Set encoding to Windows-1251)

Translated by me.

I have known this for sure for twelve years now.

During this time, two of my children have received high school diplomas while sitting at home (since it had been decided that these could turn out to be useful to them during their lives). My third child passed exams for the primary grades without attending classes, and is not about to stop there. Honestly, I am unconcerned. And I don’t get in the way of them choosing whatever substitute for school they manage to think of.

When my eldest was in secondary school, I started noticing that all too often he would recall situations of the following type: “I started reading a really interesting book during math class today;” or “I started composing a new symphony during history class;” or “It turns that Peter plays chess quite well – we played a few games during geography today.”

And I started thinking: why is he going to school? Is it to study? But then he does completely unrelated things during classes. Is it to socialize? But then it’s possible to do that outside of school.

Shift of consciousness

And then a sudden shift occurred in my consciousness. And I thought: “Maybe he shouldn’t go to school at all?” For a few days we discussed this idea. Then I went to see the school principal and told her that my son will no longer be attending school. (Afterwards many of my friends told me: “You were lucky to have such a principal! What if she didn’t agree?”) But it had nothing to do with the principal. If she didn’t agree, this would not have changed our plans at all. It's just that in that case our further steps would have been slightly different.

The principal (whom I remember with sympathy and respect to this day) was sincerely interested in our motivations, and I was quite open with her concerning my opinion of school. She herself proposed how we should proceed: we should write a statement requesting that my child be transferred to home schooling, and she will make arrangements with the Department of Education, so that my child (supposedly because of his superior talents) will, as part of an experiment, study independently, and take tests as an external student at this same school.

And so we forgot about school almost until the end of the school year. My son was absorbed in all the things for which he had never had enough time. He spent entire days composing music and performing it on “live” instruments. He spent nights in front of the computer, building his own BBS (those of you who were fans of Fidonet know what that means). He also managed to find time to read anything he wanted, to study Chinese (just because he found it interesting at the time) and to help me with my work in translating and typing documents in various languages, installing email (still a difficult task at the time that involved consulting an expert), entertaining the younger children… In all, he was incredibly happy with his new freedom from school, and did not feel that he was missing anything.

The Price of Freedom

In April, we suddenly remembered: “Oh, we must prepare to take exams!” My son pulled out the dusty textbooks and concertedly read them for two or three weeks. Then we went to see the principal and told her that he is ready to take the exams. At this, my involvement in his school affairs ended. On his own, he caught up with the various teachers and arranged with them when and where they would met.

He managed to pass in all the subjects in one or two visits. The teachers themselves decided on the form of the exam. Sometimes it was just a conversation, sometimes a written test. Curiously, almost none of them wanted to give him an ‘A’, although my child certainly knew no less than the others. Our favorite grade became ‘B’, but this was not the least bit upsetting: this was the price of freedom.

Some time ago it had been considered that a child must attend school every day. If it turned out that someone doesn’t do this, one could get a visit from some special government agency (with something like “guardians of childhood” in the title, but I am no expert in these matters, so I could be wrong). In order for a child to gain the right to not go to school, it was necessary to receive a medical certificate that he is unable to attend school due to bad health. This is why I often heard confused questions such as: “What are your children sick with?” “Then why aren’t they in school?!” “They don’t want to be.”

An awkward silence ensued. By the way, later I found out that some parents simply bought such certificates from doctors they knew.

But in the summer of 1992 President Yeltsin issued a historic decree which announced that henceforth any child (independent of medical condition) has the right to study at home! Furthermore, the local schools must pay to the parents of such children, because they are spending the government’s education funds not on teachers and not on school buildings, but independently and at home!

And then there were two

When my daughter became old enough, I told her that she didn’t have to go to school at all. But she was a socialized child, having read many children’s books which stressed the idea that going to school was highly prestigious. Since I was in favor of a free upbringing, I wasn’t about to forbid it. And so off she went to first grade.

She lasted almost two years! Only around the end of the second year did she get sick of this empty waste of time, and she announced that she is going to study at home, like her older brother.

I delivered yet another statement to the principal. And now I had two children who did not go to school.

Yet another statement

Once in September I went to see the principal and give her yet another statement that this year my children are studying at home. She gave me the text of the presidential decree to read. (I didn’t think to write down its title, number and date, and now don’t even remember. If you are interested – search the Internet, and let me know.)

And then the principal said: “Nevertheless, we aren’t going to pay you for not sending your child to school. It’s too complicated for us to get these funds. But, on the other hand, we won’t charge you for their exams.”

I was quite satisfied with this. It would have never occurred to me to take money from her. And so we parted satisfied with each other and with the changes to our laws.

Spelled out in black and white

Last year I went to arrange home schooling for my third child.

Imagine this situation: i come to see the head teacher and tell her that I want to register my child to attend school, first grade. The head teacher writes down the name of the child and asks for the date of birth. It then turns out that then child is ten years old. And now – the really pleasant part: the head teacher reacts calmly, and even shows me an official document that stated that any person has the right to come to any school and request to take exams for any grade, and is not required to show any documents regarding completion of previous grades. The school administration is required by law to create a commission to administer all necessary exams.

That is, you can go to any school when you reach 17 years of age (by the way, along with my daughter, there were two bearded fellows who had suddenly decided that they wanted their diplomas) and directly take the exams for 11th grade. And you will receive that same diploma, which so many people consider to be so necessary.

As they explained to us

Once, after we moved, and more out of curiosity than need, I went to the school nearest to our new house, and asked to see the principal.

I told her that my children have long since and irreversibly stopped going to school, and that I am currently looking for a place where they can take exams for 7th grade, quickly and inexpensively. The principal (a pleasant young woman with progressive views) was very glad to meet me, and I was glad to tell her about my children. But at the end of our conversation she suggested that I look for some other school.

They were, by law, indeed required to accept my children, and indeed required to allow them to study at home. That would not be a problem. But, she explained, ordinary teachers, which are the majority at this school, will not agree to my conditions of home schooling: letting the child pass the entire annual course at one go. The child cannot pass the entire program in one visit! The child has to work a certain number of hours. That is, they have absolutely no interest in what the child actually knows, they are only interested in the time spent studying. They want the child to attend all quarterly exams. And, of course, the child is required to participate in the life of the school: wash windows on Saturdays, collect trash on school grounds, and so on.

Obviously, I refused.

We just do not understand

But in spite of this the principal gave me what I needed, simply because she enjoyed our conversation. Specifically: I needed to borrow all the textbooks for the 7th grade from the library, to avoid having to buy them. And so she immediately called the librarian and ordered her to issue me all the textbooks free of charge until the end of the school year.

And so my daughter read all these textbooks and, with no fuss or “class participation,” passed her exams somewhere else. Then we brought the textbooks back. After that, if only she wanted to, she could have gone to any school and studied alongside her peers.

But somehow she doesn’t want to. Quite the opposite: she, just as her brothers, just as I do, considers such a suggestion to be pure nonsense. And we just cannot understand why a normal person would want to go to school.

Video of Public Lecture

2009-07-10T11:38:00.005-04:00

This is a video of the public lecture I gave last month in Dublin, Ireland, the night before the opening of the Feasta Conference. Click here to watch.

The Slope of Dysfunction

2009-06-25T15:13:00.010-04:00

(Update: click here for a special version for the Nihonjin care of Masayuki.)

(Update, November 2009: Michael Lardelli spells out the same point in much more detail in The oil-economy connection)

Perhaps you have heard of the Peak Oil theory? Most people have by now, even the people whose job used to involve denying the possibility that global crude oil production would peak any time soon. Now that everybody seems a bit more comfortable with the idea, perhaps it is time to reexamine it. Is the scenario Peak Oil theoreticians paint indeed realistic, or is it firmly grounded in wishful thinking?
Here is a typical, slightly outdated Peak Oil chart. I chose it because it looks pretty and conveys the typical Peak Oil message, which is that global crude oil (and natural gas condensate) production will rise to a lofty peak sometime soon, and then drift down gently, over several decades, until, by the year 2050 or some other distant date, less than half as much oil will be produced globally. Since this would still be a very impressive number, and since we have decades to adjust to living with half as much oil, this would not necessarily pose a major problem. Some combination of new energy from wind, solar, biomass and nuclear sources, coupled with efficiency improvements such as light rail and electric cars, better-insulated buildings and so on, would allow us to plug up the gap.

Peak Oil theorists base their calculations on data from the many oil-producing provinces that have already peaked, such as the United States, which peaked in 1970. The majority of oil-producing provinces and countries are past peak now, providing the theorists with a wealth of precise data. But they seem to have overlooked one little detail, which, I believe, is rather important. What do countries do when they reach their peak and can no longer supply themselves with sufficient quantities of oil from their depleting domestic sources? They turn to imports, of course. They can do so if their local peak comes before the global peak; they cannot do so if it comes after. This makes local peaks poor analogies for the global peak.

And what happens if a country cannot import oil to make up for the production deficit? It just so happens that we have a convenient example of just such a scenario unfolding: post-Soviet oil production after the collapse of the USSR. There, production declined 43% between 1987 and 1996. The decline was arrested and reversed by the introduction of foreign investment and technology (Source: Marek Kolodziej and Doug Reynolds, ASPO Workshop, Lisbon, Portugal, May 19. 2005).

Note how just around the time of the collapse oil production goes into free-fall, which is only arrested in mid-1990s. Had the Former Soviet Union remained economically isolated, the free-fall would have continued. Kolodziej and Reynolds drew some interesting conclusions based on these data. Firstly, the crash in oil production preceded collapse in USSR's Gross Domestic Product. The lag time between the two, and the severity of the collapse are clear enough to ascribe causality: to say that the oil crash caused the economic collapse. On the other hand, coal and natural gas production, which also crashed, did so after the GDP collapsed, again, with a significant enough lag time to say with confidence that it was economic collapse that caused coal and gas production to crash.

What actually happens to an economy and a society under such circumstances? With oil in short supply, industrial production plummets, the economy stalls, there is a financial crisis because of debts going bad, followed by a commercial crisis because of falling demand and lack of credit, followed by political collapse caused by dwindling government revenues, followed by social collapse as unemployment rises and crime becomes rampant. After a while of this, the idea of you and your friends going out to the oil field and pumping some more oil starts to seem rather odd, and so oil production heads to zero.

The global oil peak is different from all the little localized peaks in that the planet as a whole cannot import its way out of an oil shortage, resulting in a global economic collapse. The economic collapse will, in turn, cause global oil production to crash even faster, extinguishing the industrial economy.

It seems possible that certain countries which are currently oil exporters might be able to keep the oil flowing, provided they have nationalized their oil production and are sufficiently authoritarian and militarized to quell any unrest. But modern oil production is a technically complicated business (the easy-to-get-at oil is all gone) while the field service equipment and parts delivery system is fully globalized and exceedingly complex. Shocks to any part of the global economy are very likely to disrupt the whole before too long. Nevertheless, it seems likely that some countries will be able to keep their military supplied with fuel, until enough of their equipment wears out.

What, then, of our canonical Peak Oil scenario, which is that global crude oil (and natural gas condensate) production will rise to a lofty peak sometime soon, and then gently waft down, over several decades, until, by the year 2050 or some other distant date, less than half as much oil will be produced globally? Ever eager to present a hopeful vision, I will say here and now that I believe this scenario to be entirely plausible... but it requires alien intervention. As Russian oil production was saved by foreigners, so Earthling oil production must be be saved by aliens from outer space. Here's an updated Peak Oil slide:
Although we have absolutely zero data on which to base this assumption, we must assume that oil production throughout the rest of the universe has not peaked yet. Further, we must assume that interstellar vessels will deliver this oil to Earth in a timely manner, making up for any planetary production shortfall before Earth's economy collapses. Further, since Earth has few resources to trade for this oil, let us assume that the aliens will be happy to give us their oil in exchange for a truly excellent recipe for brioche à tête which (for reasons we should find intuitively obvious) no-one in the rest of the universe has been able to perfect.

Errata

2009-06-20T15:55:00.003-04:00

In my previous post, I quoted some numbers from François Cellier. In doing so, I inadvertently used the word "oil" where I should have used the word "energy". As a result, I incorrectly calculated the approximate oil price as percentage of GDP at which the global economy stalls out to be 25% instead of 6%. The specific numbers are irrelevant to the rest of my argument; however, a lot of people (who are apparently comfortable with arithmetic but not much else) have decided that this is a reason to start calling me names. I have a name for them too: I like to call them "the arithmeticians". The rest of you can safely ignore these details and concentrate on what's important: economic recovery -> oil price spike -> economic crash. Repeat as often as it takes to learn the lesson: no more growth is possible.

Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation

2009-06-16T10:20:00.022-04:00

This talk was presented at The New Emergency Conference in Dublin, on June 11, 2009.

1. Good morning. The title of this talk is a bit of a mouthful, but what I want to say can be summed up in simpler words: we all have to prepare for life without much money, where imported goods are scarce, and where people have to provide for their own needs, and those of their immediate neighbours. I will take as my point of departure the unfolding collapse of the global economy, and discuss what might come next. It started with the collapse of the financial markets last year, and is now resulting in unprecedented decreases in the volumes of international trade. These developments are also starting to affect the political stability of various countries around the world. A few governments have already collapsed, others may be on their way, and before too long we may find our maps redrawn in dramatic ways.

2. "Sustainability" -- what's in a word?

In a word, unsustainable. So what does that mean, exactly? Chris Clugston has recently published a summary of his analysis of what he calls "societal over-extension" on The Oil Drum web site. Here is a summary of his summary, in round numbers. I don't want to trifle with his arithmetic, because it's the cultural assumptions behind it that I find interesting. The idea is that if we shrink our ecological footprint by an order of magnitude or so, that should make the whole arrangement sustainable once again. This is expressed in financial terms: here we are lowering the GDP of the USA from, say $100 thousand per capita per annum, to, say $10 thousand. Clugston draws a distinction between making this reduction voluntarily or involuntarily: we should make it easy on ourselves and come along quietly, so that nobody gets hurt. I find the idea that Americans will voluntarily lower their GDP by a factor of 10 rather outlandish. We keep the same system, just shut down 9/10 of it? Wouldn't that make it a completely different system? This sort of sustainability seems rather unsustainable to me.

3. My plan

I would like to offer a more realistic alternative. Everybody should have one US Dollar, for purely didactic purposes. This way, all Americans will be able to show their one dollar to their grandchildren, and say: "Can you imagine, this ugly piece of paper was once called The Almighty Dollar!" And their grandchildren will no doubt think that they are a little bit crazy, but they would probably think that anyway. But it certainly would not be helpful for them to have multiple shoe-boxes full of dollars, because then thir grandchildren would think that they are in fact senile, because no sane person would be hoarding such rubbish.

4. An unpalatable alternative

Clugston offers an alternative to the big GDP decrease: a proportionate decrease in population. In this scenario, nine out of 10 people die so that the remaining 10% can go on living comfortably on $100 thousand a year. I was happy to note that Chris did not carry the voluntary/involuntary distinction over to this part of the analysis, because I feel that this would have been in rather questionable taste. I can think of just three things to say about this particular scenario.

First, humans are not a special case when it comes to experiencing population explosions and die-offs, and the idea that human populations should increase monotonically ad infinitum is just as preposterous as the idea of infinite economic growth on a finite planet. The exponential growth of the human population has tracked the increased use of fossil fuels, and I am yet to see a compelling argument for why the population would not crash along with them.

Second, shocking though this seems, it can be observed that most societies are able to absorb sudden increases in mortality without much fuss at all. There was a huge spike in mortality in Russia following the Soviet collapse, but it was not directly observable by anyone outside of the morgues and the crematoria. After a few years people would look at an old school photograph and realise that half the people are gone! When it comes to death, most people do in fact make it easy on themselves and come along quietly. The most painful part of it is realising that something like that is happening all around you.

Third, this whole budgeting exercise for how many people we can afford to keep alive is a good way of demonstrating what monsters we have become, with our addiction to statistics and numerical abstractions. The disconnect between words and actions on the population issue is by now is almost complete. Population is very far beyond anyone's control, and this way of thinking about it takes us in the wrong direction. If we could not control it on the way up, what makes us think that we might be able to control it on the way down? If our projections look sufficiently shocking, then we might hypnotise ourselves into thinking that maintaining our artificial human life support systems at any cost is more important than considering its effect on the natural world. The question "How many will survive?" is simply not ours to answer.

5. What's actually happening

Back to what is actually happening right now. There seems to be a wide range of opinion on how to characterise it, from recession to depression to collapse. The press has recently been filled with stories about "green shoots" and the economists are discussing the exact timing of economic recovery. Mainstream opinion ranges from "later this year" to "sometime next year." None of them dares to say that global economic growth might be finished for good, or that it will be over in "the not-too-distant future" -- a vague term they seem to like a whole lot.

There does seem to be a consensus forming that last year's financial crash was precipitated by the spike in oil prices last summer, when oil briefly touched $147/bbl. Why this should have happened seems rather obvious. Since most things in a fully developed, industrialised economy run on oil, it is not an optional purchase: for a given level of economic activity, a certain level of oil consumption is required, and so one simply pays the price for as long as access to credit is maintained, and after that suddenly it's game over. François Cellier has recently published an analysis in which he shows that at roughly $600/bbl the entire world's GDP would be required to pay for ~~oil~~ energy, leaving no money for putting it to any sort of interesting use. At that price level, we can't even afford to take delivery of it. In fact, at that price level, we can't even afford to pump it out of the ground, because the tool pushers, roughnecks and roustabouts that make oil rigs work don't drink the oil, and there would no longer be room in the budget for beer.

And so, the actual limiting price, beyond which no economic activity is possible, is certainly a lot lower, and last summer we seem to have experimentally established that to be around $150/bbl. which is something like 256% of global GDP. We may never run out of oil, but we have already run out of money with which to buy it, at least once, and will most likely do so again and again, until we learn the lesson. We will run out of money to pump it out of the ground as well. There might still be a few gushers left in the world, and so there will be a little bit of oil left over for us to fashion into exotic plastic jewelry for rich people. But it won't be enough to sustain an industrial base, and so the industrial age will effectively be over, except for some residual solar panels and wind generators and hydroelectric installations.

I think that the lesson from all this is that we have to prepare for a non-industrial future while we still have some resources with which to do it. If we marshal the resources, stockpile the materials that will be of most use, and harness the heirloom technologies that can be sustained without an industrial base, then we can stretch out the transition far into the future, giving us time to adapt.

6. Key points

I know that I am running the risk of overstating these points and oversimplifying the situation, but sometimes it is helpful to ignore various complexities to move the discussion forward. I do believe that these points are all true, roughly speaking.

Global GDP is a function of oil consumption; as oil production goes down, so will global GDP. At some point, the inability to invest in oil production will drive it down far below what might be possible if depletion were the sole limiting factor. Efficiency, conservation, renewable sources of energy all might have some effect, but will not materially alter this relationship. Less oil means smaller global economy. No oil means a vanishingly small global economy not worthy of the name.
We have had a chance to observe that economies crash whenever oil expenditure approaches ~~1/4~~~6% of global GDP. Attempts at economic recovery will cause oil price spikes that break through this ceiling. These spikes will be followed by further financial crashes and further drops in economic activity. After each crash, the maximum level of economic activity required to trigger the next crash will be lower.
Financial assets are only valuable if they can be used to secure a sufficient quantity of oil to keep the economy running. They represent the ability to get work done, and since in an industrialised society the work is done by industrial machinery that runs on oil, less oil means less work. Financial assets that that are backed with industrial capacity require that industrial capacity to be maintained in working order. Once the maintenance requirements of the industrial infrastructure can no longer be met, it quickly decays and becomes worthless. To a large extent, the end of oil means the end of money.

Now that the reality of Peak Oil has started to sink in, one commonly hears that "The age of cheap oil is over". But does that mean that the age of expensive oil is upon us? Not necessarily. We now know (or should have learnt by now) that once oil rises to over 256% of global GDP, the world's industrial economy stalls out, and as soon as that happens, oil ceases to be particularly valuable, so much so that investment in maintaining oil production is curtailed. The next time industry tries to stage a comeback (if it ever does) it hits the wall much sooner and stalls again. I doubt that it would take more than just a couple of cycles of this market whiplash for all the participants to have two realisations: that they cannot get enough oil no matter how much they pay for it, and that nobody wants to take their money even for the oil they do have. Those who still have it will see it as too valuable to part with for mere money. On the other hand, if the energy resources needed to run an industrial economy are no longer available, then oil becomes just so much toxic waste. In any case, it is no longer about money, but direct access to resources.

7. A reasonable set of objectives

Now, I expect that a lot of people will find this view too gloomy and feel discouraged. But I feel that it is entirely compatible with a positive vision of the future, so let me try to articulate it.

First of all, we do have some control. Although we shouldn't hold out too much hope for industrial civilisation as a whole, there are certainly some bits of it that are worth salvaging. Our financial assets may not be long for this world, but in the meantime we can redeploy them to good long-term advantage.

Secondly, we can take steps to give ourselves time to make the adjustment. By knowing what to expect, we can prepare to ride it out. We can imagine which options will be foreclosed first, and create alternatives, so that we do not run out of options.

Lastly, we can concentrate on what is important: preserving a vibrant ecosphere that supports a diversity of life, our own progeny included. I can imagine few short-term prerogatives that should override this - our highest priority.

8. Managing financial risk

It will take some time for these realisations to sink in. In the meantime, we will no doubt keep hearing that we have a financial crisis on our hands. We must do something to shore up the banks, to deal with the toxic assets, to shore up our credit ratings and so forth. There are people who will tell you that this was all caused by a mistake in financial modelling, and that if we re-regulate the financial sector, this won't happen again. So, for the sake of the argument, let's take a look at all that.

Financial management is certainly not my speciality, but as far as I understand it, it is mostly about assessing risk. And to do that, financial managers make certain assumptions about the phenomena they are trying to model. One standard assumption is that the future will resemble the past. Another is that various negative events are randomly distributed. For instance, if you are selling life insurance, you can be certain that people will die based on the fact that they have been born, and you can be reasonably certain that they will not all die at once. When someone dies is unpredictable, when people in general die is random, most of the time. And so here is the problem: the world is unpredictable, but classes of small events can be treated as random, until a bigger event comes along. It may seem like an obscure point, so let me explain the difference in a graphical way.

9. This is (pseudo)random

Here is a random collection of multicoloured dots. Actually, it is pseudo-random, because it was generated by a computer, and computers are deterministic beasts incapable of true randomness. A source of true randomness is hard to come by. Even very good random noise generators can have higher-order effects. Small events are frequent, and therefore we can treat them as random, larger events are less frequent and rather unpredictable, and some of the really large events put an end to the careers of the statisticians trying to model them, and so we never find out whether they are random or not. To a layman, this is random enough, but eventually you run out of randomness and hit something very non-random.

10. This is not random but predictable

Like this. Now this is not random, even to a layman. This is like oil expenditure going to ~~1/4~~~6% of global GDP. That certainly wasn't random. But was it unpredictable? We had a few years of monotonically increasing oil prices, and the high prices failed to produce much of a supply response in spite of record-high drilling rates, investment in ethanol, tar sands, and so on. We also have some good geology-based models that accurately predicted oil depletion profile for separate provinces, and had a high probability of succeeding in the aggregate as well. So this is definitely not random, and it is not even unpredictable. So, at a higher level, what sort of mathematics do we need to accurately model the inability of our financial and political and other leaders and commentators to see it, or to understand it, even now? And do we really need to do that, or should we just let this nice brick wall do the work for us. Because, you know, brick walls have a lot to teach people who refuse to acknowledge their existence, and they are very patient with students who need to repeat the lesson. I am sure that the lesson will sink in eventually, but I wonder how many more full-gallop runs at the wall it will take before everyone is convinced.

11. His models mostly work

One person I would like to have a close encounter with the brick wall is this fellow, Myron Scholes, the Nobel Prise-winning co-author of the Black-Scholes method of pricing derivatives, the man behind the crash of Long Term Capital Management. He is the inspiration behind much of the current financial debacle. Recently, he has been quoted as saying the following: "Most of the time, your risk management works. With a systemic event such as the recent shocks following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, obviously the risk-management system of any one bank appears, after the fact, to be incomplete." Now, imagine a structural engineer saying something along those lines: "Most of the time our structural analysis works, but if there is a strong gust of wind, then, for any given structure, it is incomplete." Or a nuclear engineer: "Our calculations of the strength of nuclear reactor containment vessels work quite well much of the time. Of course, if there is an earthquake, then any given containment vessel might fail." In these other disciplines, if you just don't know the answer, then you just don't bother showing up for work, because what would be the point?

12. We love their lies

The point certainly wouldn't be to reassure people, to promote public confidence in bridges, buildings, and nuclear reactors. But economics and finance are different. Economics is not directly lethal, and economists never get sent to jail for criminal negligence or gross incompetence even when their theories do fail. Finance is about the promises we make to each other, and to ourselves. And if the promises turn out to be unrealistic, then economics and finance turn out to be about the lies we tell each other. We want to continue believing these lies, because there is a certain loss of face if we don't, and the economists are there to help us. We continue to listen to economists because we love their lies. Yes, of course, the economy will recover later this year, maybe the next. Yes, as soon as the economy recovers, all these toxic assets will be valuable again. Yes, this is just a financial problem; we just need to shore up the financial system by injecting taxpayer funds. These are all lies, but they make us feel all right. They are lying, and we are buying every word of it.

13. Fastest way to lose all your money

Let's face it, these are difficult times for those of us who have a lot of money. What can we do? We can entrust it to a financial institution. That tends to turn out badly. Many people in the United States have entrusted their retirement savings to financial institutions. And now they are being told that they cannot withdraw their money. All they can do is open a letter once a month, to watch their savings dwindle.

We can also invest it in some part of the global economy. I know some automotive factories you could buy. They are quite affordable right now. A lot of retired auto workers have put all of their retirement savings into General Motors stock. Maybe they know something that we don't? (Actually, that's part of a fraudulent scheme perpetrated by the Obama administration, to pay off their banker friends ahead of GM's other creditors.)

Well then, how about a nice gold brick or two? A bag of diamonds? Some classic cars? Then you could start your own personal museum of transportation. How about a beautifully restored classic luxury yacht? Then you could use the gold bricks to weigh you down if you ever decide to end it all by jumping overboard.

Here's another brilliant idea: buy green products. Whatever green thing the marketers and advertisers throw at you, buy it, toss it, and buy another one straight away. Repeat until they are out of product, you are out of money, and the landfills are full of green rubbish. That should stimulate the economy. Market research shows that there is a great reservoir of pent-up eco-guilt out there for marketers and advertisers to exploit. Industrial products that help the environment are a bit of an oxymoron. It's a bit like trying to bail out the Titanic using plastic teaspoons.

Another great marketing opportunity for our time is in survival goods. There are some web sites that push all sorts of supplies to put in your private bunker. It's a clever bit of manipulation, actually. Users log in, see that the stock market is down, oil is up, shotgun shells are on sale, so are hunting knives, and if you add a paperback on "surviving financial armageddon" to your shopping cart you qualify for free shipping. Oh and don't forget to add a large tin of dehydrated beans. Fear is a great motivator, and getting people to buy survival goods is almost a matter of operant conditioning: a marketer's dream.

If you want to help save the environment and prepare yourself for a life without access to consumer goods, then doing so by buying consumer goods doesn't seem like such a great plan. A much better thing to do is to BUY NOTHING. But that is not something you can do with money. But there are useful things to do with money, for the time being, if we hurry.

14. How to lose all your money (but have something to show for it)

Most of the wealth is in very few private hands right now. Governments and the vast majority of the people only have debt. It is important to convince people who control all this wealth that they really have two choices. They can trust their investment advisers, maintain their current portfolios, and eventually lose everything. Or they can use their wealth to reengage with people and the land in new ways, in which case they stand a chance of saving something for themselves and their children. They can build and launch lifeboats, recruit crew, and set them sailing.

Those who own a lot of industrial assets can divest before these assets lose value and invest in land resources, with the goal of preserving them, improving them over time, and using them in a sustainable manner. Since it will become difficult to get what you want by simply paying for it, it is a good idea to establish alternatives ahead of time, by making resources, such as farmland, available to those who can put them to good use, for their own benefit as well as for yours. It also makes sense to establish stockpiles of non-perishable materials that will preserve their usefulness far into the future. My favourite example is bronze nails. They last a over a hundred years in salt water, and so they are perfect for building boats. The manufacturing of bronze nails is actually a good use of the remaining fossil fuels - better than most. They are compact and easy to store.

Lastly, it makes sense to work towards orchestrating a controlled demolition of the global economy. This calls for a new financial skill set: that of a disinvestment adviser. The first step is a sort of triage; certain parts of the economy can be marked "do not resuscitate" and resources reallocated to a better task. A good example of an industry not worth resuscitating is the auto industry; we simply will not need any more cars. The ones that we already have will do nicely for as long as we'll need them. A good example of a sector definitely worth resuscitating is public health, especially prevention and infectious disease control. In all these measures, it is important to pull money out of geographically distant locations and invest it locally. This may be inefficient from a financial standpoint, but it is quite efficient from the point of view of personal and social self-preservation.

15. Beyond finance: controlling other kinds of risk

Coming back for a moment to the poor bankers and economists, it seems rather disingenuous for us to treat economics and finance as a special case of people who generate a lot of unmitigated risk. Do we have any examples of risks we understood properly and acted on in time? Are there any really serious systemic problems that we have been able to solve?... The best we seem to be able to do is buy time. In fact, that seems to be what we are good at - postponing the inevitable through diligence and hard work. None of us wants to act precipitously based on what we understand will happen eventually, because it may not happen for a while yet. And why would we want to rock the boat in the meantime? The one risk that we do seem to know how to mitigate against is the risk of not fitting in to our economic, social and cultural milieu. And what happens to us if our entire milieu finally goes over the edge? Well, the way we plan for that is by not thinking about that.

16. The biggest risk of all

The biggest risk of all, as I see it, is that the industrial economy will blunder in for a few more years, perhaps even a decade or more, leaving environmental and social devastation in its wake. Once it finally gives up the ghost, hardly anything will be left with which to start over. To mitigate against this risk, we have to create alternatives, on a small scale, that do not perpetuate this system and that can function without it.

The idea of perpetuating the status quo through alternative means is all-pervasive, because so many people in positions of power and authority wish to preserve their positions. And so just about every proposal we see involves avoiding collapse instead of focusing on what comes after it. A prime example is the push to develop alternative energy. Many of these alternatives turn out to be fossil fuel amplifiers rather than self-sufficient resources: they require fossil fuel energy as an essential input. Also, many of them require an intact industrial base, which runs on fossil fuels. There is a pervasive idea that these alternatives haven't been developed before for nefarious reasons: malfeasance on the part of the greedy oil companies and so on. The truth of the matter is that these alternatives are not as potent, physically or economically, as fossil fuels. And here is the real point worth pondering: If we can no longer afford the oil or the natural gas, what makes us think that we can afford the less potent and more expensive alternatives? And here is a follow-up question: If we can't afford to make the necessary investments to get at the remaining oil and natural gas, what makes us think that we will find the money to develop the less cost-effective alternatives?

17. How long do we have?

It would be excellent if more people had these realisations, and started making progress toward making their lives a bit more sustainable. But social inertia is quite great, and the process of adaptation takes time. And the question is, is there enough time for significant numbers of people to have these realisations and to adapt, or will they have to endure quite a lot of discomfort?

I believe that people who start the process now stand a fairly good chance of making the transition in time. But I don't think that it is too wise to wait and try to grab a few more years of comfortable living. Not only would that be a waste of time on a personal level, but we'd be squandering the resources we need to make the transition.

I concede that the choice is a difficult one: either we wait for circumstances to force our hand, at which point it is too late for us to do anything to prepare, or we bring it upon ourselves ahead of time. If we ask the question, How many people are likely to do that? - then we are asking the wrong question. A more relevant question is, Would we be doing this all alone? And I think the answer is, probably not, because there are quite a few other people who are thinking along these same lines.

18. It's always personal

I think it is very important to understand social inertia for the awesome force that it is. I have found that many people are almost genetically predisposed to not want to understand what I have been saying, and many others understand it on some level but refuse to act on it. When they are touched by collapse, they take it personally or see it as a matter of luck. They see those who prepare for collapse as eccentrics; some may even consider them to be dangerous subversives. This is especially likely to be the case for people in positions of power and authority, because they are not exactly cheered by the prospect of a future that has no place for them.

There is a certain range of personalities that are most likely to survive collapse unscathed, physically or psychologically, and adapt to the new circumstances. I have been able to spot certain common traits while researching reports of survivors of shipwrecks and other similar calamities. A certain amount of indifference or detachment is definitely helpful, including indifference to suffering. Possibly the most important characteristic of a survivor, more important than skills or preparation or even luck, is the will to survive. Next is self-reliance: the ability to persevere in spite of loneliness lack of support from anyone else. Last on the list is unreasonableness: the sheer stubborn inability to surrender in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, opposing opinions from one's comrades, or even force.

Those who feel the need to be inclusive, accommodating, to compromise and to seek consensus, need to understand the awesome force of social inertia. It is an immovable, crushing weight. "We must take into account the interests of society as a whole." Translated, that means "We must allow ourselves to remain thwarted by people's unwillingness or inability to make drastic but necessary changes; to change who they are." Must we, really?

There are two components to human nature, the social and the solitary. The solitary is definitely the more highly evolved, and humanity has surged forward through the efforts of brilliant loners and eccentrics. Their names live on forever precisely because society was unable to extinguish their brilliance or to thwart their initiative. Our social instincts are atavistic and result far too reliably in mediocrity and conformism. We are evolved to live in small groups of a few families, and our recent experiments that have gone beyond that seem to have relied on herd instincts that may not even be specifically human. When confronted with the unfamiliar, we have a tendency to panic and stampede, and on such occasions people regularly get trampled and crushed underfoot: a pinnacle of evolution indeed! And so, in fashioning a survivable future, where do we put our emphasis: on individuals and small groups, or on larger entities - regions, nations, humanity as a whole? I believe the answer to that is obvious.

19. "Collapse" or "Transition"

It's rather difficult for most people to take any significant steps, even individually. It is even more difficult to do so as a couple. I know a lot of cases whether one person understands the picture and is prepared to make major changes in the living arrangement, but the partner or spouse is non-receptive. If they have children, then the constraints multiply, because things that may be necessary adaptations post-collapse look like substandard living conditions to a pre-collapse mindset. For instance, in many places in the United States, bringing up a child in a place that lacks electricity, central heating, or indoor plumbing may be equated with child abuse, and authorities rush in and confiscate the children. If there are grandparents involved, then misunderstandings multiply. There may be some promise to intentional communities: groups that decide to make a go of it in rural setting.

When it comes to larger groups: towns, for instance any meaningful discussion of collapse is off the table. The topics under discussion centre around finding ways to perpetuate the current system through alternative means: renewable energy, organic agriculture, starting or supporting local businesses, bicycling instead of driving, and so on. These certainly aren't bad things to talk about it, or to do, but what of the radical social simplification that will be required? And is there a reason to think that it is possible to achieve this radical simplification in a series of controlled steps? Isn't that a bit like asking a demolition crew to demolish a building brick by brick instead of what it normally does. Which is, mine it, blow it up, and bulldoze and haul away the debris?

20. Better living through bureaucracy

There are still many believers in the goodness of the system and the magic powers of policy. They believe that a really good plan can be made acceptable to all - the entire unsustainably complex international organisational pyramid, that is. They believe that they can take all these international bureaucrats by the hand, lead them to the edge of the abyss that marks the end of their bureaucratic careers, and politely ask them to jump. Now, don't get me wrong, I am not trying to stop them. Let them proceed with their brilliant schemes, by all means.

21. Simpler approaches: investment

There are far simpler approaches that are likely to be more effective. Since most wealth is in private hands, it is actually up to individuals to make very important decisions. Unlike various bureaucratic and civic bodies, which are both short of funds and mired in social inertia, they can act decisively and unilaterally. The problem is, what to do with financial assets before they lose value. The answer is to invest in things that will retain value even after all financial assets are worthless: land, ecosystems, and personal relationships. The land need not be in pristine or natural condition. After a couple of decades, any patch of land reverts to a wilderness, and unlike an urban or an industrial desert, a wilderness can sustain life, human and otherwise. It can support a population of plants an animals, wild and domesticated, and even a few humans.

The human relationships that are the most conducive to preserving ecosystems are ones that are in turn tied to a direct, permanent relationship with the land. They can be enshrined in permanent, heritable leases payable in sustainably harvested natural products. They can also be enshrined as deeded easements that provide the community with traditional hunting, gathering and fishing rights, provided human rights are not allowed to supersede those of other species. I think the lifeboat metaphor is apt here, because the moral guidance it offers is so clear. What has to happen in an overloaded lifeboat at sea when a storm blows up and it becomes necessary to lighten the load? Everyone draws lots. Such practises have been upheld by the courts, provided no-one is exempt - not the captain, not the crew, not the owner of the shipping company. If anyone is exempt, the charge becomes murder. Sustainability, which is necessary for group survival, may have to have its price in human life, but humanity has survived many such incidents before without descending into barbarism.

22. Gift-giving as an organising principle

Many people have been so brainwashed by commercial propaganda that they have trouble imagining that anything can be made to work without recourse to money, markets, the profit motive, and other capitalist props. And so it may be helpful to present some examples of very important victories that have been achieved without any of these.

In particular, Open Source software, which used to be somewhat derisively referred to as "free software" or "shareware", is a huge victory of the gift economy over the commercial economy. "Free software" is not an accurate label; nor is "free prime numbers" or "free vocabulary words". Nobody pays for these things, but some people are silly enough to pay for software. It's their loss; the "free" stuff is generally better, and if you don't like it, you can fix it. For free.

General science works on similar principles. Nobody directly profits from formulating a theory or testing a hypothesis or publishing the results. It all works in terms mutuality and prestige - same as with software.

On the other hand, wherever the pecuniary motivation rises to the top, the result is mediocre at best. And so we have expensive software that fails constantly. (I understand that the British Navy is planning to use a Microsoft operating system on their nuclear submarines; that is a frightening piece of news.) We also have oceans full of plastic trash - developing all those "products" floating in the ocean would surely have been impossible without the profit motive. And so on.

In all, the profit motive fails to motive altruistic behaviour, because it is not reciprocal. And it is altruistic behaviour that increases the social capital of society. Within a gift-giving system, we can all be in everyone's debt, but going into debt makes us all richer, not poorer.

23. Barter as an organizing principle

Gifts are wonderful, of course, but sometimes we would like something rather specific, and are willing to work with others to get it, without recourse to money, of course. This is where arrangements made on the basis of barter. In general, you barter something over which you have less choice (one of the many things you can offer) for something over which you have more choice (something you actually want).

Economists will tell you that barter is inefficient, because it requires "coincidence of wants": if A wants to barter X for Y, then he or she must find B who wants to barter Y for X. Actually, most everyone I've ever run across doesn't want to barter either X for Y, or Y for X. Rather, they want to barter whatever the can offer for any of a number of the things they want.

In the current economic scheme, we are forced to barter our freedom, in the form of the compulsory work-week, for something we don't particularly want, which is money. We have limited options for what to do with that money: pay taxes, bills, buy shoddy consumer goods, and, perhaps, a few weeks of "freedom" as tourists. But other options do exist.

One option is to organise as communities to produce certain goods that the entire community wants: food, clothing, shelter, security and entertainment. Everyone makes their contribution, in exchange for the end product, which everyone gets to share. It is also possible to organise to produce goods that can be used in trade with other communities: trade goods. Trade goods are a much better way to store wealth than money, which is, let's face it, an essentially useless substance.

24. Local/alternative currencies

There is a lot of discussion of ways to change the way money works, so that it can serve local needs instead of being one of the main tools for extracting wealth from local economies. But there is no discussion of why it is that money is generally necessary. That is simply assumed. There are communities that have little or no money, where there may be a pot of coin buried in the yard somewhere, for special occasions, but no money in daily use.

Lack of money makes certain things very difficult. Examples include gambling, loan sharking, extortion, bribery and fraud. It also makes it more difficult to hoard wealth, or to extract it out of a community and ship it somewhere else in a conveniently compact form. When we use money, we cede power to those who create money (by creating debt) and who destroy money (by cancelling debt). We also empower the ranks of people whose area of expertise is in the manipulation of arbitrary rules and arithmetic abstractions rather than in engaging directly with the physical world. This veil of metaphor allows them to mask appalling levels of violence, representing it symbolically as a mere paper-shuffling exercise. People, animals, entire ecosystems become mere numbers on a piece of paper. On the other hand, this ability to represent dissimilar objects using identical symbols causes a great deal of confusion. For instance, I have heard rather intelligent people declare that government funds, which have been allocated to making failed financial institutions look solvent, could be so much better spent feeding widows and orphans. There is no understanding that astronomical quantities of digits willed into existence and transferred between two computers (one at a central bank, another at a private bank) cannot be used to directly nourish anyone, because food cannot be willed into existence by a central banker or anyone else.

25. Belief in science and technology

One accusation I often hear is that I fail to grasp the power of technological innovation and the free market system. If I did, apparently I would have more faith in a technologically advanced future where all of our current dilemmas are swept away by a new wave of eco-friendly sustainability. My problem is that I am not an economist or a businessman: I am an engineer with a background in science. The fact that I've worked for several technology start-up companies doesn't help either.

I know roughly how long it takes to innovate: come up with the idea, convince people that it is worth trying, try it, fail a few times, eventually succeed, and then phase it in to real use. It takes decades. We do not have decades. We have already failed to innovate our way out of this.

Not only that, but in many ways technological innovation has done us a tremendous disservice. A good example is innovation in agriculture. The so-called "green revolution" has boosted crop yields using fossil fuel inputs, creating generations of agro-addicts dependent on just one or two crops. In North America, human hair samples have been used to determine that fully 69% of all the carbon came from just one plant: maize. So, what piece of technological innovation do we imagine will enable this maize-dependent population to diversify their food sources and learn to feed themselves without the use of fossil fuel inputs?

I think that what makes us likely to think that technology will save us is that we are addled by it. Efforts at creating intelligent machines have failed, because computers are far too difficult to program, but humans turn out to be easy for computers to program. Everywhere I go I see people poking away at their little mental support units. Many of them can no longer function without them: they wouldn't know where to go, who to talk to, or even where to get lunch without a little electronic box telling what to do.

These are all big successes for maize plants and for iPhones, but are they successes for humanity? Somehow I doubt it. Do we really want to eat nothing but maize and look at nothing but pixels, or should there be more to life? There are people who believe in the emergent intelligence of the networked realm - a sort of artificial intelligence utopia, where networked machines become hyperintelligent and solve all of our problems. And so our best hope is that in our hour of need machines will be nice to us and show us kindness? If that's the case, what reason would they find to respect us? Why wouldn't they just kill us instead? Or enslave us. Oh, wait, maybe they already have!

26. The need to evolve

Now, supposing all goes well, and we have a swift and decisive collapse, what should follow is an equally swift rebirth of viable localised communities and ecosystems. One concern is that the effort will be short of qualified staff.

It is an unfortunate fact that the recent centuries of settled life, and especially the last century or so of easy living based on the industrial model, has made many people too soft to endure the hardships and privations that self-sufficient living often involves. It seems quite likely that those groups that are currently marginalised, would do better, especially the ones that are found in economically underdeveloped areas and have never lost contact with nature.

And so I would not be surprised to see these marginalised groups stage a come-back. Almost every rural place has its population of people who know how to use the local resources. They are the human component of the local ecosystems, and, as such, they deserve much more respect than they have received. A lot of them can't be bothered about fine manners or about speaking English. Those who are used to thinking of them as primitive, ignorant and uneducated will be shocked to discover how much they must learn from them.

27. Beyond planning

So what are we to do in the meantime, while we wait for collapse, followed by good things? It's no use wasting your energy, running yourself ragged and ageing prematurely, so get plenty of rest, and try to live a slow and measured life. One of the ways industrial society dominates us is through the use of the factory whistle: few of us work in factories, but we are still expected to work a shift. If you can avoid doing that, you will be ahead. Maintain your freedom to decide what to do at each moment, so that you can do each thing at the most opportune time. Specifically try to give yourself as many options as you can, so that if any one thing doesn't seem to be working out, you can switch to another. The future is unpredictable, so try to plan so as to be able to change your plans at any time. Learn to ignore all the people who earn their money by telling you lies. Thanks to them, the world is full of very bad ideas that are accepted as conventional wisdom, so watch out for them and come to your own conclusions. Lastly, people who lack a sense of humour are going to be in for a very hard time, and can drag down those around them. Plus, they are just not that funny. So avoid people who aren't funny, and look for those who can laugh at the world no matter what happens.

An Evening with Dmitry Orlov

2009-05-28T15:04:00.008-04:00

CANCELLED
Apologies to the 18 people who bought tickets; they will be refunded.
I'll recycle the questions people have raised into blog posts instead.

Where? Studio 353 353 West 48 St. New York City, NY 10036
When? July 11, 2009 6:30-8:30 PM
How much? $20 (Buy tickets here.)

Here are some topics for you to choose from or add to (ahead of time) by submitting comments. The venue happens to be in New York, and I can talk fast, so let it rip. (This list came from Phil who organized the event. I'll pick items of interest based on the feedback I get.)

How our society has moved from one of generalists to specialists making us especially vulnerable and resistant to reengaging with nature and our ability to have numerous skills.
The continuing attraction of obtaining advanced degrees despite evidence that only debt and unemployment are the end results of such efforts.
People returning to school recently for degrees in Urban Planning, Ecology, etc., with the belief that the degree will result in some great future: are they going to make a paradigm shift, or are they just smoking crack?
The talk by many older “star” authors and speakers that there is a mass movement by our youth to recapture the spirit of the 1960’s and to correct the state of the world as it exists.
The belief that the Internet and Digital Media are here to stay.
Permaculture: There seems to be a real disconnect between theory and putting it into practice.
Fixation with Permaculture as The Solution; how is that similar to/different from fixating on technology in general?
Why is there a dire shortage of hippies in the country and what should the government do to address it?
The ethics of reducing population and resource share: is there a distinction between planned population reduction and fascism?
Can Permaculture avoid the trap of other movements that wind up in power when those in charge come to believe theirs is the only solution.
Will Permaculture teachers continue jetting around until there is no jet fuel left?
What can we do about the desire and pressure to continue having children while acknowledging the limited carrying capacity of the planet?
Vegetarians and Vegans – How can not eating certain things solve the problem?
Can a green economy help us continue on the road of exponential growth.
What of all the talk of products and patents locked up by the evil oil companies that can deliver us from the problems we’ve created?
Is a utopian society possible? What, at this point, qualifies as a utopian society? How would it be different from a dystopia?
Are people ready or willing to make drastic changes and take the huge personal risks that circumstances demand?
With so many forms of media at our disposal, are we less able to communicate than ever before.
Are we on information overload. Can we still differentiation between what is true and false. How does one navigate this? Is it even possible?
Why is there an enduring allure of technology as the great fix?
Russia vs the US - where is Russia today? Where is the US today?
How can we shield ourselves from the disintegration of social services, the money system, and other bits of communal life support?
What things happened in Russia during descent that will/will not occur in the U.S.
How do I feel knowing about this? How do I go on?
What do I think of the Transition Town movement? Is it workable for all cities no matter their size?
The Left: is it so fractured that the pieces can accomplish nothing of substance?
Why is each segment seem oblivious to the interconnection that exists between the environment, energy and economy?
Why is there still a belief that Obama can correct the situation despite evidence that it is business as usual (banking, healthcare, new automobile standards, automotive industry bailout, build more roads, etc.)?
Why is the food movement focusing on bringing food to you instead of bringing you to food?
Why is there all this talk of making changes, but little understanding that what is being suggested is akin to bailing out the Titanic using teaspoons?
Why is there no understand that we don’t have 30 more years to course-correct?
Why are those who speak the hard truth labeled as being ‘Doomers”?
What would it mean to bear responsibility for the role each and every one of us plays in what is unfolding?
How do we tap the creative spirit in ourselves?

Reinventing Collapse wins Independent Publisher Award

2009-05-20T13:59:00.005-04:00

The 2009 IPPY Awards have awarded my Reinventing Collapse silver in the Current Events category. The IPPYS are for independent publishers, with over 4000 entries each year in 65 categories. They don’t necessarily garner much media attention; they tend to look more at the big literary prizes. I am tied with Pat Murpy's Plan C. These are both New Society titles.

Feasta Conference, Dublin

2009-05-13T09:51:00.005-04:00

I will be giving a couple of talks at a conference in Dublin, Ireland, June 9th through 12th. The conference is sponsored by Feasta (The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability www.feasta.org.) This is its 10th anniversary conference, entitled:

Creative Solutions for the New Emergency
Managing Risk and Building Resilience in a Resource Constrained World

I will be giving a public lecture at the Davenport Hotel in Dublin on the evening of the 9th, starting at 19:30, as well as a keynote on the morning of the 11th:

Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation