Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It’s easy for discussions about future crises to remain stuck in a realm of abstractions that never quite get down to talking about the lived reality of events as they happen. The toolkit of narrative fiction is one of the few useful ways to get past that roadblock of the imagination. This week’s post, therefore, is the first of a five-part series providing, in fictional form, a glimpse at one way the American empire could go the way of Nineveh and Tyre.
In Extraenvironmentalist #50, Robert Neuwirth tells us how supply meets demand in the informal markets employing as many as 2/3 of the world’s population. Does this System D economy provide the blueprint for an economic system that could exist in developed nations as governments breakdown from debt overhangs and peak complexity? John Michael Greer [2h 03m] takes a break from his hiatus on The Archdruid Report to answer your questions.
As the corruption of the market/state duopoly has deepened, our very language for identifying problems and imagining solutions has been compromised. The snares and deceptions embedded in our prevailing political language go very deep. Such dualisms as “public” and “private,” and “state” and “market,” and “nature and culture,” for example, are taken as self-evident.
At the 2012 Degrowth conference in Venice one of the highlights for me was the talk by Arturo Escobar. He is the author of Encountering Development and Territories of Difference, among others. His talk looked at how Transition might look in the context of the Global South, and held many fascinating insights. Here is the interview I did with him, first as an audio file, and below as a transcript.
Democracy, individualism , liberalism and many of the dimensions of modern societies that we most cherish and take for granted, emerged on the back of high energy throughput and growth. The pacified, individuated personality structure which allows the ‘I’ to be partially dissociated from the ‘We’ is itself historically and metabolically specific. It is very difficult for people with such an elaborated sense of self even to imagine the worldview of other people living in the past, or in those very few simpler societies in the present which have not been forcibly integrated into the connected modern world.
It is equally difficult to imagine the values, predispositions or likely attitudes of our children’s children’s children, living in a world which, if James Kunstler and Richard Heinberg are correct, will have become larger, more closed and less connected. But one thing does seem clear: degrowth is not a liberal prospect [excerpts from a to-be-published paper].
Barry Commoner died in New York on September 30, at the age of 95. He never called himself an ecosocialist, but he was one of our most important precursors. He was a founder of the modern environmental movement, an anti-war activist, and a powerful critic of capitalism. His 1971 book The Closing Circle was a pioneering analysis of the economic and social causes of environmental destruction. At a time when most writers were blaming individual behaviour or overpopulation for pollution, Commoner exposed the role of capitalism and profit.
A year ago I would’ve loved the optimistic and can-do tone of Power from the People: How to Organize, Finance, and Launch Local Energy Projects. While all too many solar panel and wind turbine buffs are Polyannas who promise that America can enjoy decades of economic growth in the future if only we’d dump dirty energy for solar and wind, author Greg Pahl offers a more realistic assessment of the limited potential of clean energy. Pahl is a peak oiler who understands the concentrated power of fossil fuels and knows that no amount of renewables can replace the energy we now get from coal, oil and natural gas.
I, along with my editor Sam Avro, recently conducted a broad-ranging interview with John Hofmeister, former President of Shell Oil. The topics touched upon included future oil supplies and prices, climate change, U.S. energy policy, and topics familiar to R-Squared Energy readers such as Peak Lite and the Long Recession. I will present this interview in a series of stories covering some of the various topics. In this first story, I will discuss Mr. Hofmeister’s detailed answer to the question, “What do you feel is the potential for expanding global oil production, and the time frames?”
A weekly review including:
– Oil and the Global Economy
– The Middle East
– Slowing economies
– Quote of the Week
– Briefs
A few years back Stuart Staniford, (who is one of the most brilliant people I know) and I had a lively debate about the future of small scale agriculture over at The Oil Drum. Stuart argued that agriculture would continue to get bigger and more industrialized, because its fossil fuel dependency really wasn’t that great. I argued that in fact energy and environmental pressures would push us back to smaller scale agriculture.
Two mechanisms may be occurring when speakers frame climate change as the most important problem that the world has to face. If one’s view of the world is that energy is unlimited, and that we can grow infinitely, and that the environment has a limitless ability to absorb our pollution, then growth is not an important issue…Secondly, speakers who focus on climate may fail to grasp the severity of the problem of peak oil, because of declining net energy or emergy yields…These problems are inextricably connected, but we prioritize them differently depending on our ability to think like a system.
A few days ago, I showed the close relationship between growth in world oil consumption and growth in world GDP. In this post, I will extend that analysis by building a model that shows how much of an increase in world oil supply is needed for a given increase in world GDP. This model indicates that if we want the world economy to grow by 4% per year, world oil supply will need to grow by close to 3% per year. This is more than world oil supply has grown per year since the 1970s–giving a clue as to why the world is having so much problem with economic growth now.
