Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Daniel Yergin is at it again — telling policymakers not to worry their pretty little heads about peak oil because technology will give us plenty more cheap crude. Predictably, the peak oil community responded with a raft of yard-long blog posts filled with charts, graphs and statistics. But this won’t beat Yergin at his own game, reaching the people who matter. For that, we should take a page from Yergin’s own interview with Steven Colbert.
Bill McKibben’s latest book is a well-chosen and arranged collection of climate-related writings by the likes of James Hansen, Al Gore and George Monbiot, which McKibben edits and introduces. Significantly, the book contains writings by Inhofe and his ilk as well, the better to understand “the lines of attack climate deniers have used over and over,” in McKibben’s words,
Living now in relative abundance, when the whole world is a shopping mall and our appetites are no longer constrained by limited resources, our craving for reward–be that for money, the fat and sugar of fast food, or for the novel gadgetry of modern technology–has become a liability and a hunger that has no bounds. Our nature has no built-in braking system. More is never enough.
In 2002, talking like a modernist poet, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked Americans to pay heed to “known unknowns” to prevent terrorist disaster. Two years later, a real poet, Wendell Berry, advised us to take the “Way of Ignorance” to prevent ecological catastrophe. If Rumsfeld is a man who tormented people and words alike, Berry is a man who would set them both free. And that could be more dangerous to the status quo than any weapons imagined by Rummy.
The EIA published International Energy Outlook 2011 (IEO 2011) on September 19, showing energy projections to 2035. One summary stated, “Global Energy Use to Jump 53%, largely driven by strong demand from places like India and China.” It seems to me that this estimate is misleadingly high. The EIA is placing too much emphasis on what demand would be, if the price were low enough. In fact, oil, natural gas, and coal are all getting more difficult (and expensive) to extract.
Save the planet?! What a stupid and arrogant thing to say! How about this: “Please, please, God, let the planet save us, and we promise to get out of her way.” Of course, as a species, we are organically incapable of saying this simple prayer and following up on it.
More than two decades after the Brundtland Report, it’s past time to abandon this linguistic sleight of hand and rally around a new, shocking but this time realistic slogan: sustainable shrinkage! Within this new perspective, we can get on with saving species, restoring wastelands, improving efficiency, putting our life-support systems on sustainable bases—in short, finding solutions. But we’ll do so with a new urgency and clarity, conscious that if we are to survive on our little planet in some reasonably civilized way, human activity (and its impacts) must shrink. If we don’t shrink it, Gaia will shrink it for us, catastrophically.
(Ernest Callenbach is author of the prescient novel Ecotopia.)
This week we are taking a break from the usual format to publish a new piece by ODAC trustee Chris Skrebowski. In the article Chris argues that the long running debate over peak oil between geologists and economists is a distraction. There is a price at which oil becomes unaffordble to consume and therefore to produce. The affects of this are already beginning to play out in the global economy.
In the “empty world” of the past, hard work was a public good with few negative externalities on society. In today’s “full world,” work has become a common-pool resource, vulnerable to over-exploitation. In the absence of social or cultural norms to take care of this common-pool resource, governmental intervention is the best option for preventing market failure and encouraging an optimal amount of work. Unfortunately, our work ethic is worsening the situation.
A weekly update of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-OPEC and the IEA’s Oil Market Report
One factor that is increasingly being cited as an important economic indicator is happiness. After all, what good is increased production and consumption if the result isn’t increased human satisfaction? Until fairly recently, the subject of happiness was mostly avoided by economists for lack of good ways to measure it; however, in recent years, “happiness economists” have found ways to combine subjective surveys with objective data (on lifespan, income, and education) to yield data with consistent patterns, making a national happiness index a practical reality. From Richard’s new book The End of Growth.
What China is teaching us is that the western economic model—the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy—will not work for the world. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2035 is projected to have an even larger population than China. Nor will it work for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are also dreaming the “American dream.” And in an increasingly integrated global economy, where we all depend on the same grain, oil, and steel, the western economic model will no longer work for the industrial countries either.
