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James Howard Kunstler: “America, Think Downscale!”
William Hughes, Media Monitors Network
Baltimore, MD – James Howard Kunstler, controversial author and civic gadfly, was the keynote Humanities Symposium speaker on Feb. 20, 2007, at Loyola College. For years, he has been raising unholy cain about the decline of our major cities, and the strip-mallization of our once-unspoiled countrysides. He has also played the role of Cassandra, in warning about the potential harmful effects to the economy from the national addiction to fast-fading cheap oil. Kunstler intertwined the two subjects throughout his talk. His provocative lecture took place in the McManus theatre before a large, mostly student, audience.
Kunstler’s one hour-plus presentation varied from being funny, cynical, and downright depressing to being outright sarcastic. He used the words “piece of crap” a lot in describing the dismal architectural situation he found, on an aesthetic level, in so many U.S. cities, towns and in suburbia.
(22 Feb 2007)
Familiar Kunstleriana, but the author spends more time on Kunstler’s criticism of architecture and urban planning than on peak oil. -BA
Climate change, peak oil and nuclear war
Bill Henderson, Counter Currents
Damocles had one life threatening sword hanging by a thread over his head. We have three:
The awakening public now know that climate change is real and human caused but still grossly underestimate the seriousness of the danger, the increasing probability of extinction, and how close and insidious this danger is – runaway climate change, the threshold of which, with carbon cycle time lags, we are close to if not upon.
A steep spike in the price of oil, precipitated perhaps by an attack on Iran or Middle East instability spreading the insurgency to Saudi Arabia, could lead to an economic dislocation paralyzing the global economy. Such a shock coming at the end of cheap oil but before major development of alternative energy economies could mean the end of civilization as we know it.
And there is a building new cold war with still potent nuclear power Russia and China reacting to a belligerent, unilateralist America on record that it will use military power to secure vital resources and to not allow any other country to threaten it’s world dominance. The world is closer to a final, nuclear, world war than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 with a beginning arms race and tactical confrontation over weapons in space and even serious talk of pre-emptive nuclear attack.
These three immediate threats to humanity, to each of us now but also to future generations, are inter-related, interact upon each other, and complicate any possible approach to individual solution.
(24 Feb 2007)
Study sees harmful hunt for extra oil
Carola Hoyos, Financial Times
All the world’s extra oil supply is likely to come from expensive and environmentally damaging unconventional sources within 15 years, according to a detailed study.
This will mean increasing reliance on hard-to-develop sources of energy such as the Canadian oil sands and Venezuela’s Orinoco tar belt. A report from Wood Mackenzie, the Edinburgh-based consultancy, calculates that the world holds 3,600bn barrels of unconventional oil and gas that need a lot of energy to extract.
So far only 8 per cent of that has begun to be developed, because the world has relied on easier sources of oil and gas. Only 15 per cent of the 3,600bn is heavy and extra-heavy oil, with the rest being even more challenging.
The study makes clear the shift could come sooner than many people in the industry had expected, even though some major conventional oil fields will still be increasing their production in 2020. Those increases will not be enough to offset the decline at other fields. ..
(18 Feb 2007)
Matthew Simmons gets a few words in near the end, no surprise since the report raises issues he and many others have been talking about for years.-LJ
Climate Change, Sabre Tooth Tigers and Devaluing the Future
Nate Hagens, The Oil Drum
The debate on the realities of both climate change and Peak Oil has moved from ‘are they real?’ to questions concerning timing, magnitude and impact. At the same time, expanding research in ‘temporal discounting’ in economics (called ‘impulsivity’ in psychology), is shedding light on how steeply we value the present over the future, a trait that has ancient origins. Knowing this tendency, how can we expect factual updates on peak oil and climate change to behaviorally compete with Starbucks, sex, slot machines, and ski trips?
Science is rapidly increasing our knowledge about the planet. To affect change however, we must become equally knowledgeable about ourselves. The time has come to integrate ecological science with insight about human behavior derived from new findings in anthropology, hunter gatherer studies, evolutionary psychology and the neurosciences. Below the fold is an overview on human discount rates, their evolutionary origins, and their relevance to the mitigation and adaptation to climate change and peak oil.
Introduction
Much analysis and effort is being made in environmental science, ecological economics, energy analysis, and grassroots blogging (including and especially on theoildrum.com) to improve and refine data on our natural resource problem. But is “education” enough? Can reading Khebab’s and Euan’s posts about the upcoming peaking in world oil production push us to make forward thinking policy choices while we are still buying $2 gasoline? Would a report raising the value of the Amazon basins ecosystem services from $1 trillion to $10 trillion make a difference to those who read it? Why or why not?
The understanding and application of behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology will play an integral role in the battle with the two-headed monster Peak Oil / Climate Change. This first of several ‘demand related’ posts will highlight our innate bias to place more weight on the present than the future via steep discount rates.
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The Bottom Line
1. Education about oil depletion and climate change is not enough. We need to incorporate how people react to information. If companies like Daimler Chrysler are using neuromarketing to sell more cars, an equal effort needs to be made on the environmental and energy front.
2. Two of the planets largest problems, climate change and peak oil, are in the future. As such, our evolutionary derived penchant to focus on the present lacks the discipline to think and act ahead. Either accelerating the expected ‘bad news’ or making the expected bad news ‘worse’ are both ways to increase the weight we place on these events.
3. We can’t easily reduce our discount rates. But having a team of middle aged female monks running the climate change team may not be a bad idea (I’m only half kidding).
4. There are so many scientific disciplines running parallel courses. Somehow we need to integrate them into a logical framework that makes sense and is practical. I don’t expect President Bush will soon appoint a Secretary of Darwinian Ecology but the time is now to combine the sciences.
5. Though it’s difficult, we can learn from our mistakes. Those on Easter Island, Rome and the Mayas and Aztecs were neurally not dissimilar from us. To recognize they valued the present even when they could forsee the future (cutting down the last tree) means we have to acknowledge ahead of time that our intelligence will be trumped by our emotion, and plan accordingly.
5b. In writing this post, it dawned on me that much of the work we do in raising peak oil awareness is received by readers as kind of an interesting horror movie. Yes – tell me more scary facts and I will sit at my computer and read them. But its the rational brain that is receiving this information. And its not budging behavior much.
5c. Understanding that stress increases peoples discount rates suggests to me that the events surrounding peak oil (and perhaps climate change) will reach an inflection point. We need to hit the emotional triggers well ahead of peak oil. Once people are stressed and things become difficult, accessing peoples rational minds will be all the harder. Plus, greater awareness of resource depletion might trigger increased consumption, as people try to get their share.
6. I think steep discount rate is another term for addiction. Humans are addicted to life. Some more than others.
(23 Feb 2007)
