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Jason Bradford: A Message to the Nearly Converted
Jason Bradford, The Oil Drum: Campfire
I was recently asked to give a talk at “The Generation Green Tent” during the Summer Arts and Music Festival at the Benbow Lake State Recreation Area. Here’s the text and supporting images for that talk.
Thanks for coming to my presentation. I am going to say some challenging things today. I don’t know if you are going to be validated or view me as a heretic. In any case, if you are taking notes I am going to have eight main points to cover. Here it goes!
My wife is a physician and has a Masters in Public Health, and so I am going to start with an analogy inspired by her profession that I believe all of us can follow. A very telling study was done on the health of Native Americans on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. The Mexican population was quite fit, while the U.S. population had high rates of obesity and associated diseases, such as diabetes. I am going to make some judgments about the society that produced this discrepancy, and perhaps we can primarily assign the blame for the illnesses of these people on their sick environment. However, I don’t want to absolve individuals of all responsibility for their predicament because that is a disempowering thing to do.
… What I am going to argue is that you are all capable, powerful individuals and that you are responsible for making great changes.
Point 1. This is the first point of my talk. I want everybody to view the grim environmental statistics as multiple “organ failures” approaching for human civilization.
I’ll just run through a few of them: Species are being lost at a rate that is about 1000 times higher than normal. Nearly all populations of commercial fish are in severe decline or utter collapse. Forests, wetlands, prime agricultural lands, and other highly productive habitats are routinely paved over or degraded. Key non-renewable mineral and energy resource stocks, especially oil, have been consumed at exponentially increasing rates for decades and are now past or near their extraction peak. Fresh water is frequently polluted and overdrawn from aquifers. And just to finish off this incomplete rundown, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are destabilizing the climate system with frightening consequences.
[Graphs from New Scientist.]
Most environmentalists will give a talk about one of these systems and then propose some things you or the government or business can do to make it not so bad. I am not going to give that kind of talk. Let’s not waste any more time dealing with the organs, let’s take a look at why they are all failing at once.
Point 2. The second point I want everybody to get is this: The cause of environmental decay is a kind of obesity crisis of humanity. We humans are taking more than we should from the planet, getting fat in the process, and leaving our trash behind.
Why do I put it this way? Well, let’s examine some other statistics. Growth in human population has been sharply rising for several decades. So has industrial output. The number of cars, trucks and planes in the world has increased steadily. Consumption of paper products, and stuff of all kinds, really, has risen exponentially. This is people taking stuff from the planet, building things, and creating lots of waste.
(10 June 2009)
Profiting from Scarcity
Philip Henshaw, The Oil Drum
This is a guest post by Philip Henshaw, known on The Oil Drum as pfhenshaw. Phil has a BS in physics and an MFA in architecture. He has been studying the physics of how natural systems change form for 40 years, first interested in the subject by college physics experiments in how all experiments misbehave. Phil’s website is www.synapse9.com.
– TOD editor Gail Tverberg
Economic theory is based on the observed regularities of the past. Some are considered as general principles, or “natural laws” that are expected to never change. From a systems view, though, such laws are emergent properties of the complex system they are regularities of, and prone to change as the system changes form.
Growth systems, for example, invariably change form when they climax, but the present laws of economics describe a complex system that has perpetual growth that never changes form. The question is partly how to tell when such changes might be appearing. Complex systems may vary a great deal without indicating a change in the form of the whole system. What would raise the question are events of kinds that are never supposed to occur at all.
An example of one such economic law is that scarcities are temporary. In theory, self-interest drives people to either find substitutes, added supplies, or to reduce demand as prices rise, and in those ways scarcity is expected to resolve smoothly.
When none of those three things occurs, though, the economy experiences a continuing price spiral with no substitutes or added supplies being found for an extended period. It’s a primary indication that the physical system is at a point of inelasticity, and changing design in some way. Then the old “laws” become misinformation about regularities that no longer exist. This is a brief research note on one example, to raise questions.
… It seems to me that the time has come for us to reexamine the rules which we assume underlie our economic system. Physical resources seem to have reached limits, driving up their physical cost for a system built for readily available and inexpensive resources. If we don’t start noticing now, when will we?
(11 June 2009)
A Review of Neil Jackson’s Photo Essay “Conflict”
Clifford J. Wirth, Ph.D., Surviving Peak Oil: Planning, Preparation, and Relocation
In “Conflict” photojournalist Neil Jackson examines the causes and consequences of ethnic, national, and international violence. He employs 134 of his photographs along with quotations that explain and document his work. The photographs place us where we have better sense of conflict.
This is an important work that will interest anyone who wants to learn about modern history. Knowledgeable historians and astute political observers will be challenged to think deeper about the causes of conflict. Students of history at all levels will be challenged to think about who we are and why governments often act with malice.
Jackson examines a variety of issues and conflicts, including: education; the Second World War; Bosnia; Northern Ireland; Scotland; control of oil resources; British banking and government deception and manipulation in the economic collapse of 2008 and 2009; and the Peak Oil energy catastrophe. We gain a better understanding of modern conflict, the twilight days of the age of oil, and the end of modern civilization.
Education doctrines that date from a century ago to the present explain much about how the western world evolved into patterns of authoritarianism, popular submission, civil war, genocide, international conflict, and atrocities.
We learn how industry, government, media, and the public and relate to values, democracy, authoritarianism, manipulation, power, domination, violence, and war.
Neil Jackson’s work supports a quote in his introduction: “Almost all conflict is about the allocation of resources. People fight in war or in civil society to get a better deal.” His work can also demonstrate that conflict stems from hatred, xenophobia, vengeance, arrogance, authoritarianism, racism, ignorance, and stupidity, as well as from the hopes and dreams of the poor and the young who seek a better life. Neil Jackson can expand his study in many directions.
How is it that the U.S. fell into the trap set by Osama Bin Laden? Despite the recent lessons of the USSR in Afghanistan and the U.S in Vietnam, the U.S. is now trapped in a guerilla war in economically destitute Muslim Afghanistan. The story of David and Goliath is shared by Christianity and Islam. Yet the U.S. does not see that the Muslim world views Bin Laden as David and the U.S. as Goliath.
Revolution is a form of conflict and the Middle East is the world’s tinderbox of revolution. Here, the greatest oil wealth is squandered on the world’s largest indoor snow park and Rolls-Royces while the masses suffer in poverty. What were the motives of the young men who gave their lives in the terrorist attack of 9/11. Were they religious fanatics or do their motives have to do with the poverty of the masses who are excluded from the benefits of national wealth? Did political alienation drive religious fanaticism? Who supplies the elites with weapons needed to suppress revolution in the Muslim world? Did the U.S. imprison and torture Bin Laden’s followers in order to silence discussion of their motives?
War is often folly and many aggressors fail miserably. Adolph Hitler promised Germany a Third Reich that would last 1,000 years, but it lasted barely 12 years. Hitler committed suicide in a pathetic fashion to avoid the humiliation of a trial before the world, including the Jewish people he hated.
Oil is central to Jackson’s study of conflict, and much of the Second World War, Cold War, and the two Bush/Cheney wars are about oil. The very survival of the globe’s population depends on oil. How is it that virtually all of us squandered this vital liquid on automobiles, pleasure boats, suburban living, get-away vacations, luxuries, and vanities? What does this tell us about us?
Neil Jackson’s work evolves as he learns. I will check back from time to time to learn from what he is learning.
(7 June 2009)
