Freke - I think your points on the power-disparity are extremely important and valid ones. I don't think however your statement about markets relying on short-term price signals is true though; one look at the myriad futures markets in commodities and money is enough to put paid to that.
Peak Oil (was "petroleum geologist explains US war policy")
- Thread starter Bernie_Gunther
- Start date
TinyCrendon
New Member
also nice site Freke...its your site? its v cool...congrats innit.
Slaar - but futures markets are also short term no? The legendary run on the Thai baht was created via the futures market...futures markets may act in a longer term than the `day-to-day` markets but its not exactly what one could call even medium term no?
Slaar - but futures markets are also short term no? The legendary run on the Thai baht was created via the futures market...futures markets may act in a longer term than the `day-to-day` markets but its not exactly what one could call even medium term no?
There might be a myriad of futures, options and other derivatives around (in fact far more than ever before), but these are primarily used to offset risk, or as finely judged gambles, not to predict the future.
I can see how it can be argued that derivatives could be used to provide the same kind of long-termist angle in the markets as we should expect of the state, but surely we are again asking an apple (the markets) to be a pear (the state), when we already have a perfectly good pear in front of us?
I can see how it can be argued that derivatives could be used to provide the same kind of long-termist angle in the markets as we should expect of the state, but surely we are again asking an apple (the markets) to be a pear (the state), when we already have a perfectly good pear in front of us?
TinyCrendon
New Member
this is a fundemental no?
the `marketeers` said `look government is shite and moribund`which in many cases was and is true...but their solution was `give it to us` which has been a disaster for everyone not in the top 30-40% of earners in industrialised nations...a huge bonus for the top 1- 5% of earners...
we dont need `markets` to make solutions we need to democratize the state - and all the organs that exist close to the state, like unions the BBC etc - so it makes solutions we want. even if we make the wrong ones, at least we will make them out of error not out of a desire to subjugate populations and destory any type of society, which is behind the vast majority of free marketeers.
the `marketeers` said `look government is shite and moribund`which in many cases was and is true...but their solution was `give it to us` which has been a disaster for everyone not in the top 30-40% of earners in industrialised nations...a huge bonus for the top 1- 5% of earners...
we dont need `markets` to make solutions we need to democratize the state - and all the organs that exist close to the state, like unions the BBC etc - so it makes solutions we want. even if we make the wrong ones, at least we will make them out of error not out of a desire to subjugate populations and destory any type of society, which is behind the vast majority of free marketeers.
adzp - I don't think the problem in Thailand was that futures markets don't go long-term enough, the problem is in the way that capital can swamp developing markets. I guess you can argue that's a symptom of the short-termism prevailing in markets, but only where the institutional background isn't there (another good reason for the state to regulate things).
Freke - isn't judging risk the exact corollary of attempting to predict the future? The pear has looked pretty rotten in the past too, no?
Freke - isn't judging risk the exact corollary of attempting to predict the future? The pear has looked pretty rotten in the past too, no?
thanks adzp, glad you like ak13, and yes I do have a hand in the political stuff on there. pm on way.
agree with you re the state, and I think your answer about the need to improve the state answers slaar's "rotten pears" comment. Yes the state has many flaws, but it is still the most appropriate institution for long-term problem-solving on behalf of its masters - us.
the derivatives markets are never going to increase their coverage of the long-term (ie more than 3 or 6 months), because it is so damn impossible to predict what's going to happen - look at the bets on Italy going into the euro. The results of long-term economic forecasting are, in general, shockingly bad.
Judging risk has an element of crystal ball gazing, but in the way that it works in the City, it is institutionalised, ie the answer to this equation means x amount of risk; the answer to that equation means y amount of risk. Credit rating agencies (the specialists in this area) are not renowned for their accuracy, in fact they are widely derided.
Credit risk derivatives are basically a form of insurance or hedging instruments based upon whatever the prevailing view of economics is at that present moment in time. Though I work in this area, I am well aware of its shortcomings.
agree with you re the state, and I think your answer about the need to improve the state answers slaar's "rotten pears" comment. Yes the state has many flaws, but it is still the most appropriate institution for long-term problem-solving on behalf of its masters - us.
the derivatives markets are never going to increase their coverage of the long-term (ie more than 3 or 6 months), because it is so damn impossible to predict what's going to happen - look at the bets on Italy going into the euro. The results of long-term economic forecasting are, in general, shockingly bad.
Judging risk has an element of crystal ball gazing, but in the way that it works in the City, it is institutionalised, ie the answer to this equation means x amount of risk; the answer to that equation means y amount of risk. Credit rating agencies (the specialists in this area) are not renowned for their accuracy, in fact they are widely derided.
Credit risk derivatives are basically a form of insurance or hedging instruments based upon whatever the prevailing view of economics is at that present moment in time. Though I work in this area, I am well aware of its shortcomings.
Glad you found it interesting nano
First point. I've quoted Pimentel's two cases. 3billion can eat. 1-2billion can eat and use lots of otherwise arable land for solar energy (to grow biomass, to make ethanol or whatever.)The reason I focus first on food, is explained with diagrams here The basic notion being, that sustainability is like seaworthiness in a ship. It's a hierarchy of supporting layers. So if the ship is sinking, it doesn't matter that much if the decor in the crew quarters is a bit ugly.
Second point. This is a bit like what I was saying above regarding organic food not being an end in itself, but rather a consequence of trying to figure out what to do when e.g. fertiliser based on phosphorous mining becomes increasingly uneconomic due to depletion, and unviable given the amounts of food required. I am not basing anything here on my 'personal distaste for profit'. I'm saying that the steering mechanisms of corporations measure and optimise for profit and growth. Thus any beneficial effects they may have on any of these problems will be accidental because they are not tracking any of the relevant variables , and that therefore, free-market solutions are extremely unlikely to be our saviours. I don't deny market mechanisms can have value in some cases, i.e. where economic optimisation is of value. I've also tried to show how the search for profit causes corporations to behave in ways that are clearly not beneficial in ecological or social terms. For example Exxon's massive and well-funded disinformation campaigns against most legitimate climate science. You can see exactly why this happens, e.g. Pimentel's articles about biomass fuels and their limitations affected the potential IPO values of speculative ventures in ethanol fuel technology and corn and soybean biomass fuel projectors. Result, their PR creeps push out the crude disinformation I linked above.
Added:
A paper by various authors on the need to integrate science back into economics. I liked what freke said about the need for the broader view of political economy, but I also think ecological economics important.
A site with links to a couple of Pimentel papers about this stuff. Another site with the article I was quoting from earlier. Linking direct to the papers doesn't seem to work, but you can find them in two clicks by looking under the link for 'Sustainability Authors'.
Risk is very interesting in this context. Are you aware of the paper Cars, Cows & Cholera dealing with social filters and categorisation of risks? Here's a snip from the executive summary of that paper.
"Everyone takes and manages risks, balancing potential rewards against uncertain losses. Experts provide advice about managing risk, but with limited success. Part of their difficulty stems from an incomplete appreciation of the different kinds of risk and part from their inadequate consideration of the different mindsets with which people respond to risks.
Directly perceptible risks are managed instinctively and intuitively. Professional attempts to manage them are thwarted by people who insist on being their own risk managers. Risks perceptible with the help of science include infectious diseases. Quantitative estimates of such risks are frustrated by the reflexivity of risk. Virtual risks include mad cow disease and suspected carcinogens. Scientists do not know or cannot agree about the nature or magnitude of these risks, and nonscientists argue from preestablished beliefs, convictions, and superstitions. Imaginary or not, virtual risks have real consequences for individuals, corporations, and governments."
edited to add a quote from the paper itself. The author has been talking about how a driver balances risk (of crashing etc) against reward (arriving quicker) He then builds on his analysis of this 'directly perceptible risk' by looking at cases with multiple actors who are each doing their own risk-reward balancing act.
" ... the physical damage that a cyclist or pedestrian might inflict on the truck is small. The truck driver in this illustration can represent the controllers of large risks of all sorts. Those who make the decisions that determine the safety of consumer goods, working conditions, or large construction projects are, like the truck driver, usually personally well insulated from the consequences of their decisions. The consumers, workers, or users of their constructions, like the cyclist, are in a position to suffer great harm, but not inflict it."
I'd argue that a lot of this stuff is already in or fast approaching the category of 'risks perceptible to science', rather than 'virtual risks' on which experts can't agree. I'd also want to claim that some of the 'truckers' (to continue his metaphor) are prone to funding disinformation campaigns to keep these risks 'virtual' because they judge that this will be to their (short-term) profit. They see it as advantagous to keep the risks in the domain of judgement based on cultural filters rather than scientific consensus, because they believe that will tend to reduce the risk of government or grassroots attempts to fuck with their profits. If you are an executive making judgements at this level, your perception of your own personal risk of being e.g. a starving, homeless, diseased refugee from a genocidal conflict anytime soon, are fairly minimal, but the risk to your stock options is immediate and likely to take priority.
nanoespresso
New Member
Bernie, your attention to your thread is inspiring. Freke and Adam P, good to see you two here as well.
hmmm, Freke, why always take things to the extreme?
Prove? How do I prove to you what I believe? Governments are an absolutely necessarily tool for any healthy functioning market, it's not one or the other, or it need not be. Markets function on an array of government backed services and laws. You'd be hard pressed to find any 'neo-liberal' who suggests that governments should stop issuing and protecting currency.
But the point being made that market fail to address long-term problems is valid due to the risk involved. So yes governments must intervene to ensure these issues are addressed. But how is intervention conducted? If risk is the problem, would it not make sense to reduce that risk? Government funded research is just that. Since the 'answers' are unknown, spending shit loads of dosh on something that might not work is precisely where governments can, and do, come in. My sugar daddy is DARPA which tackles projects the private sector would not touch due.
And it's not just research, most large infrastructure projects are so capital intensive, only governments are suited to take on that risk, such as roads. Even so called 'private' projects in power generation, water distribution, etc often have government backed loans to reduce the risk premium asked of the companies who must finance the project.
Asking governments to 'solve' these problems is a bit of a stretch as they really don't know how to so, or at least they don't know how do so in a manner which satisfies the public they are meant to represent. When adam talks about the pain and suffering of +100$/barrel on the developing world he does so without offering any method to alleviate that. The chinese Government could just say oil is 10$/barrel by law, but we all know enough about the repercussions of supply and demand to know that shortages will occur almost instantly. That oil is going to go to who ever will pay the highest price. There is not much the chinese gov't can do about that.
hmmm, Freke, why always take things to the extreme?
Prove? How do I prove to you what I believe? Governments are an absolutely necessarily tool for any healthy functioning market, it's not one or the other, or it need not be. Markets function on an array of government backed services and laws. You'd be hard pressed to find any 'neo-liberal' who suggests that governments should stop issuing and protecting currency.
But the point being made that market fail to address long-term problems is valid due to the risk involved. So yes governments must intervene to ensure these issues are addressed. But how is intervention conducted? If risk is the problem, would it not make sense to reduce that risk? Government funded research is just that. Since the 'answers' are unknown, spending shit loads of dosh on something that might not work is precisely where governments can, and do, come in. My sugar daddy is DARPA which tackles projects the private sector would not touch due.
And it's not just research, most large infrastructure projects are so capital intensive, only governments are suited to take on that risk, such as roads. Even so called 'private' projects in power generation, water distribution, etc often have government backed loans to reduce the risk premium asked of the companies who must finance the project.
Asking governments to 'solve' these problems is a bit of a stretch as they really don't know how to so, or at least they don't know how do so in a manner which satisfies the public they are meant to represent. When adam talks about the pain and suffering of +100$/barrel on the developing world he does so without offering any method to alleviate that. The chinese Government could just say oil is 10$/barrel by law, but we all know enough about the repercussions of supply and demand to know that shortages will occur almost instantly. That oil is going to go to who ever will pay the highest price. There is not much the chinese gov't can do about that.
This is an interesting point in the light of the likely role of a rather decentralised, low capital investment infrastructure in creating a sustainable agriculture. It leads me to a rather speculative point.
In a sustainable world, it does not seem likely that whatever energy supplies are available, will be spent as casually as they are at present. For example, I've argued that a fairly radical programme of decentralisation is required in both agriculture and in habitation, in order to reduce the energy inputs to agriculture.
I personally, would find it a trial to do without computer chips. I'm actually old enough to remember life before microcomputers, and I'd prefer not to go back to it. The relative energy cost to make computers is probably small compared to say, spending 10 units of oil energy to put each unit of food energy on all our tables each day. Both processes need expensive infrastructure though, and that cost should be budgetted along with everything else when deciding how much that CPU really cost. I'm not a big expert on chip fabrication, which I'm sort of using as a token here for all desirable 'high' technology, but I'm pretty sure a lot of energy is used if you also look at the infrastructure costs, the waste products etc. If anyone is able to make that comparison, knowledgably, I'd be quite interested. The quantity of energy used, translates quite directly, if sustainable, to an area being used to generate the energy, by PV or biomass or whatever. An area that it might argued, would be better used for growing food.
Which leads me to the rather uncomfortable question:
'How many people will have to starve to death, in order for me to have a computer?' (in say 2050)
nanoespresso
New Member
howdy bernie,
allow me to briefly interrupt your thread to answer your question as best as I can. Microchip fabrication is an extraordinarily energy and resource intensive process, however both do not go into the final product, and thus it can seem odd why this would be so. A microchip is really nothing more than silicon, silicon oxide, and a few very thin layers of metal ( Ti, Al, Cu.. ), thus it would seem that fabrication of such a product, given it's material composition and small size, would be rather trivial in terms of resource needs.
However, in order to work properly, every single transistor ( up to 100 million now ) must function perfectly, and this requires pristine facilities. It requires a massive amount of energy to maintain a class-1 environment, so much so, that the newest ( multi-billion dollar ) fab facilities do all manufacturing in a closed ( ie: the microchip is never exposed to the same atmosphere as people ) environment.
California's fabs were ill-prepared for the summer blackouts of 2002:
link
more info
here's an interesting link:
The big issue here is not so much the energy, as the water consumption. Because the microchips need to be rinsed clean of even the smallest of impurities after each processing step ( and there are many ) the water consumption is enormous.
allow me to briefly interrupt your thread to answer your question as best as I can. Microchip fabrication is an extraordinarily energy and resource intensive process, however both do not go into the final product, and thus it can seem odd why this would be so. A microchip is really nothing more than silicon, silicon oxide, and a few very thin layers of metal ( Ti, Al, Cu.. ), thus it would seem that fabrication of such a product, given it's material composition and small size, would be rather trivial in terms of resource needs.
However, in order to work properly, every single transistor ( up to 100 million now ) must function perfectly, and this requires pristine facilities. It requires a massive amount of energy to maintain a class-1 environment, so much so, that the newest ( multi-billion dollar ) fab facilities do all manufacturing in a closed ( ie: the microchip is never exposed to the same atmosphere as people ) environment.
California's fabs were ill-prepared for the summer blackouts of 2002:
link
more info
here's an interesting link:
The big issue here is not so much the energy, as the water consumption. Because the microchips need to be rinsed clean of even the smallest of impurities after each processing step ( and there are many ) the water consumption is enormous.
Very helpful. Thanks nano. So, the more desirable forms of hi-tech come with a resource and energy cost that's probably pretty high?
They also require serious expensive centralised infrastructure. So if you have to e.g. use PV and-or grow biomass to generate the energy, to create and operate that infrastructure, you're going to use a fair bit of land. It also requires lots of water, which is also likely to be a rather scarce basic survival resource in many places.
It looks to me like desirable hi-tech in general might be in the category of things to be balanced against growing more food.
Those figures I was quoting above keep coming to mind here.
They also require serious expensive centralised infrastructure. So if you have to e.g. use PV and-or grow biomass to generate the energy, to create and operate that infrastructure, you're going to use a fair bit of land. It also requires lots of water, which is also likely to be a rather scarce basic survival resource in many places.
It looks to me like desirable hi-tech in general might be in the category of things to be balanced against growing more food.
Those figures I was quoting above keep coming to mind here.
- 1-2 billion. Sustainably and with EU levels of energy use.
3 billion. With sustainable food, but without the energy use.
While we currently have:
6 billion. 2 billion starving or close to it. Using a temporary oil fix to boost carrying capacity and oil price kept low at gunpoint.
Slaar and I were talking about ecological footprints on another thread. Here's some footprint data from Rio (ie it's a few years old)
Let's take the UK as an example, leaving the global stuff above to one side for the moment. According to the Rio figures, the UK is -3.5 overshot. That is, it has three and a half ha per person less land than it needs to actually feed in the abscence of any plentiful supplies of cheap oil for transport, and the chemical manufacture of pesticides and fertiliser. Most importantly, phosphorus needs to be mined in a distant part of the world, industrially processed and applied to depleted soil.
If you look at the figures from Pimentel above, who is assuming in effect some variation of business as usual only with biofuels and all that kind of stuff. I.e. pretty much the estalishment account of how we are likely to deal with these issues in the future. Use those numbers, and the situation looks far worse than a threefold overshoot. Please feel free to check my calculation here.
Area of UK = 94,525 Square Miles
Arable Area = 24,964 Square Miles
Actual UK Pop = 60,000,000 People
Pimentel makes the following assumptions:
Land needed per cap for growing food = 0.5ha
Land needed per cap for energy/biomass = 1.5ha
Land needed per cap for biodiversity/pasture = 1ha
Total = 3ha = 7.41 acres = 0.011578125 Square Miles, therefore:
694,687 arable Square Miles needed to support the present UK pop. We divide by the actual number of arable sq miles to get the overshoot and discover we're about 27 to 28 times overshot.
Not good. We can get some better numbers if we use Folke Gunther's assumptions above. He's actively re-designing how we live, so as to cut as much as possible of the energy requirement.
He comes up with a requirement of about 0.25ha per person, which means an overshoot of 2 to 3 times, but he does this by making very radical assumptions, involving massive changes to reduce the energy burden, in effect by putting everybody within a few miles of where their food is grown and doing away with all public sewage systems to replace them with sustainable ones.
Conclusions suggested? The business as usual with ecofuels option doesn't look terribly viable for the UK at least, unless you also assume that the US is going to share nicely the remaining reserves, should it end up controlling them in a decade or two.
The radical option looks a lot better, but still pretty desperate. The difficulty with that option is trying to imagine any set of circumstances where it could end up be applied on a UK scale.
Let's take the UK as an example, leaving the global stuff above to one side for the moment. According to the Rio figures, the UK is -3.5 overshot. That is, it has three and a half ha per person less land than it needs to actually feed in the abscence of any plentiful supplies of cheap oil for transport, and the chemical manufacture of pesticides and fertiliser. Most importantly, phosphorus needs to be mined in a distant part of the world, industrially processed and applied to depleted soil.
If you look at the figures from Pimentel above, who is assuming in effect some variation of business as usual only with biofuels and all that kind of stuff. I.e. pretty much the estalishment account of how we are likely to deal with these issues in the future. Use those numbers, and the situation looks far worse than a threefold overshoot. Please feel free to check my calculation here.
Area of UK = 94,525 Square Miles
Arable Area = 24,964 Square Miles
Actual UK Pop = 60,000,000 People
Pimentel makes the following assumptions:
Land needed per cap for growing food = 0.5ha
Land needed per cap for energy/biomass = 1.5ha
Land needed per cap for biodiversity/pasture = 1ha
Total = 3ha = 7.41 acres = 0.011578125 Square Miles, therefore:
694,687 arable Square Miles needed to support the present UK pop. We divide by the actual number of arable sq miles to get the overshoot and discover we're about 27 to 28 times overshot.
Not good. We can get some better numbers if we use Folke Gunther's assumptions above. He's actively re-designing how we live, so as to cut as much as possible of the energy requirement.
He comes up with a requirement of about 0.25ha per person, which means an overshoot of 2 to 3 times, but he does this by making very radical assumptions, involving massive changes to reduce the energy burden, in effect by putting everybody within a few miles of where their food is grown and doing away with all public sewage systems to replace them with sustainable ones.
Conclusions suggested? The business as usual with ecofuels option doesn't look terribly viable for the UK at least, unless you also assume that the US is going to share nicely the remaining reserves, should it end up controlling them in a decade or two.
The radical option looks a lot better, but still pretty desperate. The difficulty with that option is trying to imagine any set of circumstances where it could end up be applied on a UK scale.
I do take the point, but isn't this just another reincarnation of Malthus? People have been predicting the end of human development for centuries and it hasn't happened yet, which suggests the most likely scenario is ceteris paribus not holding and humans being resourceful / lucky enough to come up with a solution as and when these problems arise.
Blind optmism; maybe. Extrapolating into the future based on not-entirely-relevant past events; maybe. I tend to veer towards excessive optmism myself, otherwise I'd just get depressed, as the juggernaut is pretty much unstoppable in its current form.
Blind optmism; maybe. Extrapolating into the future based on not-entirely-relevant past events; maybe. I tend to veer towards excessive optmism myself, otherwise I'd just get depressed, as the juggernaut is pretty much unstoppable in its current form.
Well, it's not exactly the same thing as Malthus IMO. Malthus predicted that when the population reached the limit of the available food supply, deadly competition for survival would break out, and society would deteriorate. His argument, as far as I recall, was made before the Industrial Revolution really got itself rolling. Malthus's predictions didn't come true, arguably, precisely because of those fossil inputs I'm on about. With one hectare of viable land, you can sustainably feed about half a dozen people if you can recycle all of their waste products to return phosphorus.
If you just pour phosphorus in as an input, and don't care that most of it goes straight into the water table, you can feed way more people off that hectare, but only while oil and phosphorus-based fertiliser remains cheap.
(edited to add: here's a link that answers most of the obvious questions that arise regarding peak oil http://greatchange.org/ov-thomson,convince_sheet.html )
Here's another, showing how the 'sustainable' population suddenly jumped by orders of magnitude from the start of the industrial revolution. It's not conclusive, but very persuasive IMO. You'll note that Mathus's 'Essay' came out in 1798, but as you can see here, the rapid acceleration of population starts around 1850.
http://www.holon.se/folke/kurs/logexp/logexp_en.shtml
If you just pour phosphorus in as an input, and don't care that most of it goes straight into the water table, you can feed way more people off that hectare, but only while oil and phosphorus-based fertiliser remains cheap.
(edited to add: here's a link that answers most of the obvious questions that arise regarding peak oil http://greatchange.org/ov-thomson,convince_sheet.html )
Here's another, showing how the 'sustainable' population suddenly jumped by orders of magnitude from the start of the industrial revolution. It's not conclusive, but very persuasive IMO. You'll note that Mathus's 'Essay' came out in 1798, but as you can see here, the rapid acceleration of population starts around 1850.
http://www.holon.se/folke/kurs/logexp/logexp_en.shtml
Well, if all that is true then Malthus was right, except just a few hundred years out of date, and the number of people who will die is far greater than would have died had fossil fuels never been discovered. I am spectical however of any site that claims to know everything that professional policy makers do not, especially when accompanied by quotes such as
when it's bloody obvious the latter doesn't follow directly from the former.
Well, perhaps it was unwise to link that site, because it's a bit indiscriminate. Stick with the core numbers though, and I think you'll find there is an interesting challenge
To a certain extent, that's what the contributors to this thread have been trying to figure out. From something like the following assumptions.
Most assume that oil depletion has something to do with current US policy, the US govt has been getting credible warnings of this since Hubbert himself (Shell's chief scientist) in the 50's and 60's.
Some discussion has occured of those economic arguments (e.g Friedman et al) that markets create resources where there were none, also saner discussions of the useful properties of markets.
Some hold that at least some members of elites are planning on the basis of this to steal as much as they can now and 'circle the wagons' to protect their little empires from the starving masses, others seem to just see it as path-dependent institutions making inevitable blunders due to the way they evaluate their own acts.
If all you look at is short-term profitability, long-leadtime problems are invisible. If you look at the necessary measures, it's hard to imagine any of our governments pissing off interest groups by trying to enact them. So we seem to get pessimistic conclusions.
This might mean a series of bad recessions, preciptated by oil shocks and getting progressively worse from say 2012 onward.
The consequences get very unpredictable though, when you consider non-economic responses. Who gets pushed over the catastrophe slope into war rather than business as usual? When?
Edited to add: there's also the question of increasing demand, in a way, the longer we can avoid the crunch, the worse it gets because the more population has grown by the time is arrives.
If you plot oil availability, you get a bell-curve and the only argument is where we are on it within a decade or so. If you plot oil demand, the curve points skywards and is growing faster than population, as countries like China and India industrialise. So the crunch looks to me like it comes about 2012. At that point, strong assertions like the one from that hippy site start to make sense.
Oil demand is inelastic, especially when it's a matter of next years harvest. If it exceeds possible supply, and the remaining supply is basically in Saudi, Iraq, Kuwait and Iran. Things look dangerous.
toxteth o'grady
604....
Conservation would be a good place to start. Build green.
TinyCrendon
New Member
the major probs of oil depletion - well there are many in fact - but one of them is that higher oil costs knock right through every industry, especially if materials need transport, or manafacturing from oil based goods.
The ASPO (Ass Study Peak Oil) guys fall over laughing (i simplify)when u talk about hyydrogen fuel cells for example, coz they are made of metals and plastics. ditto wind power.
the problem isnt that we cant find other energy sources, its that we dont have the political will or ability to swop over and there are no `bridge` fuels to get us to a sustainable energy level.
its not so much a `first world` problem (of course it is in fact but the richest will be the last to be affected), but who will pay fro indias cars and trains and chinas cars and motorbikes, who will pay for the 70% of world goods that are transported by boat? etc...
The ASPO (Ass Study Peak Oil) guys fall over laughing (i simplify)when u talk about hyydrogen fuel cells for example, coz they are made of metals and plastics. ditto wind power.
the problem isnt that we cant find other energy sources, its that we dont have the political will or ability to swop over and there are no `bridge` fuels to get us to a sustainable energy level.
its not so much a `first world` problem (of course it is in fact but the richest will be the last to be affected), but who will pay fro indias cars and trains and chinas cars and motorbikes, who will pay for the 70% of world goods that are transported by boat? etc...
Idris2002
Christmas Eve, you know?
Up to a point Lord Copper . . .
1. Land Reform is not a simple process at the best of times. Zim is probably not a good example of that, however, given that Mugabe's not interested in genuine reform but in a bit of demagogic rabble-rousing and patronage intended to sustain his grip on power (and on the collective throat of the Zim masses). That power having been seriously eroded by the effects of neo-liberal structural adjustment on Zim.
2. A better example of the "messiness" of Land Reform might be the South African experience of "market-led" land reform. Aside from the actual restitution of lands seized under apartheid, other forms of land reform were to be carried out on a "willing buyer, willing seller" basis. This, it was believed would reduce bureaucratic distortions and delays. Lionel Cliffe, writing in the Review of African Political Economy a couple of years ago noted that in practice it had become beset by bureaucrats in the form of "consultants". I'll see if I can dig that paper out again, and get hold of his full argument.
3. As for a return to small-holder agriculture as opposed to agri-business . . . well again the SA experience may have some interesting lessons. Initially, the ministry of land in SA was sympathetic to this idea. But the Mbeki govt. was afraid of anything which might disrupt the food supply to SA's rapidly growing cities, so when the initial experiments in that area were disappointing the brakes were swiftly applied.
I'll post a bit more on this, if I have time.
I'd certainly be interested if you did Idris2002. Lately I've been reading up on eco-communities of the sort described earlier and one thing even simple spreadsheet models make very clear is the importance of such communities obtaining suitable, appropriately sized, chunks of land. What these model say works best for sustainability, is definitely not something that fits easily with either typical planning regs or land ownership patterns in the UK.
This suggests to me that land reform, to say nothing of planning issues, would be crucial if, say the UK, had to fairly quickly move in the direction of sustainability. It's one thing for a few small groups to go live sustainably on smallholdings, but if we suddenly had to create thousands of economically viable eco-villages and towns, each needing at least an acre or perhaps more per resident, each community needs a chunk of land rather larger than most blocks of farmland usually found on the UK market.
That is not an easy thing to set up. Front costs are well into the millions, land is not always available in such quantity even for a one-off project, let alone thosands of them, and often comes with all kinds of awkward planning restrictions. Findhorn is fine just where it is, but if you are doing this sort of thing on a mass scale, you have to build such communities pretty much everywhere, not just in the remoter areas. It's one thing for a bunch of 30-something professionals to form a land co-op and create a sustainable enclave, but it won't do them much good if they're next to 300,000 people who aren't even remotely sustainable.
What are the alternatives to these unlikely visions of a mass-scale sustainable community movement though? If people don't do it for themselves first, what are governments and corporations likely to try do when the whole thing has become a major crisis and they have to react to it?
1) Don't minimise the distance between where food is grown and eaten, in which case, far more land must be given over to energy systems and you can grow food for far less people. In the case of the UK, I think this could mean that the difference is between being overshot by x 2-3 and being overshot by x 20-30 or so (the latter is based on 'business as usual but with bio-fuels' scenarios, in other words, you try to keep the economic and demographic patterns that evolved as an adaptation to unlimited cheap oil viable by growing lots and lots of biofuels to replace that oil.)
2) Try to do this in a big last-minute rush, when you realise you're a year or two away from people actually starving etc, but try to do it while keeping intact all the existing land ownership and planning structures. This sounds potentially pretty awful to me. Council estates being cleared en-masse to create Cuban-style 'Organoponicos' operated by desperate former members of the middle classes, and their surplus population all being shipped off out to 'corporate eco-villages' jerry-built out in the middle of nowhere - imagine a kind of rural gulag run by Bernard Matthews.
I'm being satirical here, but that's the kind of overwhelming crisis situation where civil liberties, historically, do get ignored en-masse.
3) Do nothing, be in a large city totally dependent on a global oil-based food chain when the unlimited cheap oil to which that food system has adapted, ceases forever to be cheap or unlimited.
Monbiot article this morning on just this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,11319,1097672,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,11319,1097672,00.html
Doh.
TinyCrendon
New Member
(mutter mutter...he's quick off the mark)
But this sort of thing is the thing that KILLS people inside:
"People tend to take to the streets because they want to consume more, not less. Given a choice between a new set of matching tableware and the survival of humanity, I suspect that most people would choose the tableware."
Fuck off back to your Cambridge/Oxford wank fest leather patched cordouray self-important fanciful bitch slapping ivory tower and ram it in your bigoted pious ass. `Liberals` (as defined by me, now)...feh...that makes me really angry...this paragraph should be preserved for people to see, to see the fanciful notion of elite thought or `intelectualism`, how it becomes warped with ego and the feeling of ones own piety...maaan, i'm in a good mood as well...
THIS is what sums up the Guardian for me, and a host of other papers too, Le Monde Diplo springs to mind. Self satisfied, elitist and above all absolutely convinced of their own personal righteousness...their abilty to talk down to people is amazing...amazing that they dont consider work like this to be offensive (class based) specualtion...these are GATEKEEPERS, i see them all the time, too often.
what he should have said is "the fucking proles want a decent living when I realise they need less material goods, but then they are proles after all..." He should have it tatooed on his face...
Grrrr.
Ok, sorry, back to oil depletion...
But this sort of thing is the thing that KILLS people inside:
"People tend to take to the streets because they want to consume more, not less. Given a choice between a new set of matching tableware and the survival of humanity, I suspect that most people would choose the tableware."
Fuck off back to your Cambridge/Oxford wank fest leather patched cordouray self-important fanciful bitch slapping ivory tower and ram it in your bigoted pious ass. `Liberals` (as defined by me, now)...feh...that makes me really angry...this paragraph should be preserved for people to see, to see the fanciful notion of elite thought or `intelectualism`, how it becomes warped with ego and the feeling of ones own piety...maaan, i'm in a good mood as well...
THIS is what sums up the Guardian for me, and a host of other papers too, Le Monde Diplo springs to mind. Self satisfied, elitist and above all absolutely convinced of their own personal righteousness...their abilty to talk down to people is amazing...amazing that they dont consider work like this to be offensive (class based) specualtion...these are GATEKEEPERS, i see them all the time, too often.
what he should have said is "the fucking proles want a decent living when I realise they need less material goods, but then they are proles after all..." He should have it tatooed on his face...
Grrrr.
Ok, sorry, back to oil depletion...
One thing in that article struck me as dead-on though.
I would be really interested to see what the mass of the population will make of this as the issue slowly enters the public conciousness. My bet is that insofar as they get real information, they'll be basically onside with the idea of a rational response. A rather larger question is what access to information they'll have.
Certainly, such talk would be viewed as heresy by the swelling numbers of glassy-eyed cultists in the US. It's an article of faith with them that anything an 'enviro-whacko' says is automatically garbage. Exxon and other companies paid good money to some third rate scientists and first rate PR firms to create disinformation about climate change which makes the mass of people pretty confused about what to believe. They're trying to keep climate change in the category of 'risks experts can't agree on' (see http://www.stopesso.com/why.php for some details.) and this emerging sub-culture of reason-hating, hyper-patriotic, zealot yahoos seems increasingly like something that was cultivated on purpose by some part of the far right in the US as a grass-roots counter-balance to the perceived threat to their being presented by the rapidly growing environmental and anti-globalisation grass-roots movements that were in so much in the headlines before the events of September 2001. Of course, the Bushbot claque was also very useful during the 'President's Dick' scandal, so I'm certainly not claiming that their only function in the eyes of their various sponsors is to corrupt the debate on climate change. What I'm asserting is that to some extent, the grass-roots right was shaped and sponsored by people interested in spreading climate change disinformation to counter a real grass-roots movement of well-informed citizens trying to assert their rights.
Plus of course, we have the interdependent nature of global capitalism, which means the media generally aligning all their coverage in a way that won't piss off any of the shareholders.
It's therefore quite reasonable to wonder whether the mass of people who theoretically can do something about it by voting, would be likely to get a clear scientific picture of the problem articulated in the quote above, and the range of possible solutions to it. The economic and social impacts of the necessary changes are enormous, so an enormous weight of disinformation from at least some of the interested parties seems certain to emerge. It's very important therefore to get a clear picture before the fog starts to come down. Many people had a good grasp of the basics of climate change before the disinformation got too thick and in Europe at least, most people still see it in scientific terms.
The subsequent point, about whether the stupid proles would choose tupperwear over death is, I quite agree obnoxious.
I would be really interested to see what the mass of the population will make of this as the issue slowly enters the public conciousness. My bet is that insofar as they get real information, they'll be basically onside with the idea of a rational response. A rather larger question is what access to information they'll have.
Certainly, such talk would be viewed as heresy by the swelling numbers of glassy-eyed cultists in the US. It's an article of faith with them that anything an 'enviro-whacko' says is automatically garbage. Exxon and other companies paid good money to some third rate scientists and first rate PR firms to create disinformation about climate change which makes the mass of people pretty confused about what to believe. They're trying to keep climate change in the category of 'risks experts can't agree on' (see http://www.stopesso.com/why.php for some details.) and this emerging sub-culture of reason-hating, hyper-patriotic, zealot yahoos seems increasingly like something that was cultivated on purpose by some part of the far right in the US as a grass-roots counter-balance to the perceived threat to their being presented by the rapidly growing environmental and anti-globalisation grass-roots movements that were in so much in the headlines before the events of September 2001. Of course, the Bushbot claque was also very useful during the 'President's Dick' scandal, so I'm certainly not claiming that their only function in the eyes of their various sponsors is to corrupt the debate on climate change. What I'm asserting is that to some extent, the grass-roots right was shaped and sponsored by people interested in spreading climate change disinformation to counter a real grass-roots movement of well-informed citizens trying to assert their rights.
Plus of course, we have the interdependent nature of global capitalism, which means the media generally aligning all their coverage in a way that won't piss off any of the shareholders.
It's therefore quite reasonable to wonder whether the mass of people who theoretically can do something about it by voting, would be likely to get a clear scientific picture of the problem articulated in the quote above, and the range of possible solutions to it. The economic and social impacts of the necessary changes are enormous, so an enormous weight of disinformation from at least some of the interested parties seems certain to emerge. It's very important therefore to get a clear picture before the fog starts to come down. Many people had a good grasp of the basics of climate change before the disinformation got too thick and in Europe at least, most people still see it in scientific terms.
I think it's hard from a position where one doesn't watch any mass-media and have reasonably balanced sources of information to know much at all about how much information a lot of people have. The way I see it, if these oil shocks hit and hit hard it'll become pretty obvious pretty quickly. If we hit social meltdown I'm running for the rainforest, but not before airline fuel gets too expensive mind.
Sure, but ideally, one would begin to do something sensible about the problem as it became apparent. Rather than just kind of assuming it can't be true until it is, which appears to be the current policy of our governments and public servants, who have verifiably been getting briefings on this stuff for some years now.
I suspect it's like climate change, nothing much gets done until an issue reaches mass conciousness and grass-roots protests start.
Interestingly, most of the things you'd probably want to do to tackle climate change, would be pretty close to what one might want to do about fossil fuel depletion. So there are at least two risks you'd be mitigating by implementing such radical measures.
There are also a number of things that could arguably be seen as appealing and positive benefits in moving to a sustainable way of life, assuming that you are moving that way democratically. (By which I mean that people get to have an informed public debate and as much choice as possible about how they will adapt to sustainability, rather than having a particular solution imposed upon them.) Food you saw growing often feels and probably is healthier. Wider distribution of population in most areas, would tend to reduce many social pressures which are currently of deep concern to many people (assuming that the overall population wasn't still expanding out of control)
In practice though, the transition is likely to be very painful. I think there are four basic positions, cultural filters if you like.
1) The Government or The Market or God(ess) (tick one) will fix it.
2) That's horrible! I'm not going to think about it until it happens.
3) Let's understand it better, have an open debate on the basis of science, and work together to fix it for everybody, or die trying.
4) I'm gonna grab everything I can before everyone finds out, and build a secure compound in the middle of nowhere for me and my kin.
Imagine those four guys in a lifeboat.
I suspect it's like climate change, nothing much gets done until an issue reaches mass conciousness and grass-roots protests start.
Interestingly, most of the things you'd probably want to do to tackle climate change, would be pretty close to what one might want to do about fossil fuel depletion. So there are at least two risks you'd be mitigating by implementing such radical measures.
There are also a number of things that could arguably be seen as appealing and positive benefits in moving to a sustainable way of life, assuming that you are moving that way democratically. (By which I mean that people get to have an informed public debate and as much choice as possible about how they will adapt to sustainability, rather than having a particular solution imposed upon them.) Food you saw growing often feels and probably is healthier. Wider distribution of population in most areas, would tend to reduce many social pressures which are currently of deep concern to many people (assuming that the overall population wasn't still expanding out of control)
In practice though, the transition is likely to be very painful. I think there are four basic positions, cultural filters if you like.
1) The Government or The Market or God(ess) (tick one) will fix it.
2) That's horrible! I'm not going to think about it until it happens.
3) Let's understand it better, have an open debate on the basis of science, and work together to fix it for everybody, or die trying.
4) I'm gonna grab everything I can before everyone finds out, and build a secure compound in the middle of nowhere for me and my kin.
Imagine those four guys in a lifeboat.
I think one of the other factors that needs to be overcome is the way people think about oil.
I'm not sure that unless pressed most people think about oil as anything other than a fuel. Saying that we need to adjust to a situation where availability of oil is severely restricted gets a reaction of "when that happens we'll just switch to hydrogen, or biofuels etc".
It's not until you start talking in terms of plastics and pesticides and pharmaceuticals that the scale of change necessary starts to dawn on people. At that stage they're more likely to opt for option 2 than anything else.
I'm not sure that unless pressed most people think about oil as anything other than a fuel. Saying that we need to adjust to a situation where availability of oil is severely restricted gets a reaction of "when that happens we'll just switch to hydrogen, or biofuels etc".
It's not until you start talking in terms of plastics and pesticides and pharmaceuticals that the scale of change necessary starts to dawn on people. At that stage they're more likely to opt for option 2 than anything else.
Yep. A couple of pages back I was offering some numbers on area needed to produce biomass as an industrial replacement for fossil fuels. The energy balance does just about work, so in principle biofuels/biomass is a possibility. You're talking about something like 3-6 times the amount of land needed to grow food, depending on other assumptions, in order to do anything like 'business as usual' based on biomass. This would be fine if there was that much land, but we'd need several more planets to support the population we already have without using oil inputs.
So I think the biofuels option only looks like an easy answer if you're Mr 4) and actually don't give a shit if billions stave to death.
The big relevation for me on all this stuff came when I saw just how much petroleum goes into putting food on the table compared to running a car or even a house (which was what I started out trying to understand when I began looking at this)
So I think the biofuels option only looks like an easy answer if you're Mr 4) and actually don't give a shit if billions stave to death.
The big relevation for me on all this stuff came when I saw just how much petroleum goes into putting food on the table compared to running a car or even a house (which was what I started out trying to understand when I began looking at this)
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