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Thomas Friedman and his book, Hot, Flat And Crowded (video)
Energy Efficiency Forum via Energy Policy TV
Thomas Friedman, New York Times Columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, reads from, and discusses, his forthcoming book, Hot, Flat And Crowded, which describes potentially catatrophic effects of global trends of climate change, worldwide economic growth and population increases, and energy consumption. Friedman says U.S. leadership is needed to deal with them.
(11 June 2008)
The substantial remarks begin at about 3:00 minutes into the video.
Kunstler on Wishful Thinking (audio)
KunstlerCast
Religious activists are praying at Washington DC gas stations for cheaper fuel. James Howard Kunstler says that type of neurotic behavior isn’t much different than the behavior of cargo cults in the South Pacific. The concept of getting something for nothing is widely accepted by American culture, and religion, too. But Jim feels spirituality in America might one day evolve into something worthy of more respect than the Jiminy Cricket, consumerist culture of today’s suburban mega churches.
(19 June 2008)
Welcome to the Next Epoch – Humanity’s Meltdown
Mike Davis, TomDispatch
1. Farewell to the Holocene
Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.
This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column.
… contemporary stratigraphers have set extraordinarily rigorous standards for the beatification of any new geological divisions. Although the idea of the “Anthropocene” — an Earth epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force — has been long debated, stratigraphers have refused to acknowledge compelling evidence for its advent.
At least for the London Society, that position has now been revised.
To the question “Are we now living in the Anthropocene?” the 21 members of the Commission unanimously answer “yes.” They adduce robust evidence that the Holocene epoch — the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization — has ended and that the Earth has entered “a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years.” In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which “now exceeds [annual] natural sediment production by an order of magnitude,” the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota.
This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that “the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks.” Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.
2. Spontaneous Decarbonization?
The Commission’s coronation of the Anthropocene coincides with growing scientific controversy over the 4th Assessment Report issued last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is mandated to establish scientific baselines for international efforts to mitigate global warming, but some of the most prominent researchers in the field are now challenging its reference scenarios as overly optimistic, even pie-in-the-sky thinking.
… The Panel, in effect, has bet the ranch, or rather the planet, on unplanned, market-driven progress toward a post-carbon world economy, a transition that implicitly requires wealth generated from higher energy prices ultimately finding its way to new technologies and renewable energy.
… Critics argue, however, that this represents a heroic leap of faith that radically understates the economic costs, technological hurdles, and social changes required to tame the growth of greenhouse gases.
… Coal production, especially, is undergoing a dramatic renaissance, as the nineteenth century has returned to haunt the twenty-first century.
… Even while higher energy prices are pushing SUVs towards extinction and attracting more venture capital to renewable energy, they are also opening the Pandora’s box of the crudest of crude oil production from Canadian tar sands and Venezuelan heavy oil. As one British scientist has warned, the very last thing we should wish for (under the false slogan of “energy independence”) is new frontiers in hydrocarbon production that advance “humankind’s ability to accelerate global warming” and slow the urgent transition to “non-carbon or closed-carbon energy cycles.”
… As the current ethanol-from-corn boom, which has diverted 100 million tons of grain from human diets mainly to American car engines, so appallingly demonstrates, “biofuel” may be a euphemism for subsidies to the rich and starvation for the poor. Likewise “clean coal,” despite a vigorous endorsement from Senator Barack Obama (who also champions ethanol), is, at present, simply a huge deception: a $40 million advertising and lobbying campaign for a hypothetical technology that BusinessWeek has characterized as “being decades away from commercial viability.”
… On the other hand, the spoils from high energy prices continue to gush into real estate, skyscrapers, and financial assets. Whether or not we are actually at the summit of Hubbert’s Peak — that peak oil moment — whether or not the oil-price bubble finally bursts, what we are probably witnessing is the largest transfer of wealth in modern history. [to oil-exporting countries]
… Climate change … will initially produce dramatically unequal impacts across regions and social classes. It will reinforce, not diminish, geopolitical inequality and conflict.
As the United Nations Development Program emphasized in its report last year, global warming is above all a threat to the poor and the unborn, the “two constituencies with little or no political voice.”
… And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drive elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity? Global mitigation, in this unexplored but not improbable scenario, would be tacitly abandoned (as, to some extent, it already has been) in favor of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for Earth’s first-class passengers. We’re talking here of the prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet.
… In light of such studies, the current ruthless competition between energy and food markets, amplified by international speculation in commodities and agricultural land, is only a modest portent of the chaos that could soon grow exponentially from the convergence of resource depletion, intractable inequality, and climate change. The real danger is that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards.
Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change.
(26 June 2008)
Sixty Days, Next Year
C. Haynes, New Colonist
You’ll have to excuse me, but I don’t usually keep a diary. These events began before I understood what was happening, and where it was all headed. It was only later, after it was all going on, that I thought that maybe I should be keeping some sort of record–as if no one else was. We live in The Information Age, or did. Now it’s just The Dim Ages. Welcome to my world.
June 14
It all started (for me) with just a small item on an Internet news page, “Trouble in the Kingdom”. I thought they were talking about Disney World (the Magic Kingdom) so I clicked on it. Turns out they were talking about “the repercussions of curtailed social services in Saudi Arabia”. (Insert a big yawning noise here.) So their kids don’t get free day care? Big whoop. I scanned the article for any mention of M. Mouse and then went on with my life. My mistake. No biggie. Really.
June 15
Yesterday’s headlines are still today’s news? I guess those folks in the sand are really upset about something–it was in all the papers today. Sounds like the Saudi government is in for a tough time trying to rein in a runaway budget–and the locals don’t like it one bit. Now their capital (Riyadh?) is a mess with people getting ugly in the streets. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no more subsidized housing. Deal with it, people. Get a job.
June 16
I saw the news today, oh boy. Three Saudi cities are up in flames, people with big guns are going nuts, and everyone that can find a plane is leaving that country in one big hurry. It’s like Saigon in a sand box. (Not that I actually remember Saigon.) Local news guys are talking about what it means to us–and our oil. Maybe I’d better go fill up the car before everyone else does. I hate being stuck in long lines.
June 17
Almost forgot to top off my tank. Would have forgot completely if I hadn’t heard the guy talking about it on the radio on the drive home from work. The gas station was busy, but not bad. Of course they’d already raised their prices. The creeps. Some people will try to make a buck off of anything. The radio guy said something about us sending in the Marines. Sure. Why not? How many countries can we invade at once?
June 18
No work today, so it’s grocery shopping and errands. Good thing I topped off the car’s tank yesterday. The gas station was mobbed this morning when I drove by–and I think the price was even higher today. Geez. Even the grocery store seemed crowded. What’s with these people? Is there a storm coming or something? I bought what I needed and headed for home. The errands can wait. Who needs this? ….
(February 2004)
A vision of the future. Recommended by contributor Jeffrey Brown.
UPDATE (June 27) Author Chip Haynes wrote to give some background:
“60 Days Next Year” was written in early February of 2004. The New Colonist posted it on their web site in March of that year, and Maine Public Radio ran it as a 30 minute radio program in June of 2004. Also that year, Maine author Charles McArthur funded the burning [production] of 1000 CDs of the radio show, and made sure several hundred of them were delivered to the annual ASPO International Workshop on Peak oil that has held in Berlin , Germany that summer. Whew.
“Ghawar is Dying”, by the way, was written in the summer of 2001.
And yes, I wish the dates had been more widely known. At the time, the people at The New Colonist had no idea how it was all going to play out, and how it might look good if we looked as though we knew what we were doing – way back when.
