If you ever find yourself searching for validation of your own worst fears about the future, there's really no better guy to read than James Howard Kunstler over at his blog Clusterfuck Nation. Whether he's a Cassandra-type figure or a pessimistic loon remains to be seen. If I let myself think about all our problems as a nation and planet, I find myself agreeing with his outlook more often than not. For my own sanity, though, I sometimes have to go to my "happy place" and believe that everything will work itself out in the end.
At any rate, his latest post is a good one, and dovetails with what I was saying about America basically being neutered when it comes to the world stage these days. He then continues:
"We could have spent the past ten years getting our own house in order -- waking up to the obsolescence of our suburban life-style, scaling back on the Happy Motoring, reconnecting our cities with world-class passenger rail, creating wealth by producing things of value (instead of resorting to financial racketeering), protecting our borders, and taking the necessary measures to defend and update our own industries. Instead, we pissed our time and resources away. Nations do make tragic errors of the collective will. The cluelessness of George Bush is nothing less than a perfect metaphor for the failure of a whole generation. The Boomers will be identified as the generation that wrecked America."
While I think blaming an entire generation is painting with overly broad strokes, I get what he's saying. We've had 16 years now of Boomer administrations. Both have borne witness to and actively encouraged the apotheosis of consumption as a virtue. I remember the aftermath of 9/11, when all of us were kinda shocked, but at the same time united in our desire to help out, rebuild, etc. Shoot, my father told me that he was pissed because he wanted to sign up to be an air marshall right then and there, but couldn't due to age restrictions or something. And what did our leaders ask of us at our moment of crisis? Go out and shop! Go buy more useless plastic shit from China! Our leaders don't really want us to be active citizens, just active consumers. It's really, really sad.
It bothers me that my generation might never have a chance at power. Obama sorta kinda bridges the Boomer/X gap, and if he wins I'll be happy for that. But for the most part my generational cohort are just coming of age in the political world, right at the end of the American empire, from the looks of it. I was half-joking with some friends at a party a few weeks ago, and made a prediction: the next American president would be the last American president because the costs associated with ruling over such a huge chunk of land would prove too onerous, and we'd break up into smaller regional entities competing with one another for scarcer resources. I'll likely be proven wrong, but the fact that such a thing can be contemplated is sad in and of itself. Or maybe I'm just the sad one and have been reading too much J.H. Kunstler. Only time will tell!
What's the quote? History doesn't really repeat itself, but it occasionally rhymes? Is that what we are seeing in the Georgia-Russia war? The parallels to the late-80s are interesting to note.
In 1989 the Soviet Union, exhausted by 9 years of war in Afghanistan, withdrew their army from the field. Whether this was a cause or effect of the breakdown of the Soviet empire is still debated, but the fact remains that the failed invasion of Afghanistan was the last time the Soviet Union or her successor states projected power beyond their borders. They basically abandoned the world stage, leaving a power vacuum the USA was only too eager to fill. In nearly two decades since the Soviets withdrew, NATO has added 10 countries to its membership, including former Soviet client states such as Romania, Bulgaria, and the Baltic States.
Fast forward to last Friday. Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili, a strong ally of the US, ordered the occupation of South Ossetia, a breakaway region bordering Russia. He either overestimated the US's commitment to his country or his armed forces' abilities, because the Russians, by all accounts, have quickly overrun Georgian positions and are now demanding the Georgians disarm and evacuate another region, Abhazia. The USA, with its forces already mired in two other wars, its economy back home crumbling, and its populace weary of war, has issued a few sternly worded denunciations, but that's about it. Barring some unforeseen development, the US has in effect ceded that part of the world to the Russians. With the Iraqi government demanding we set a time table for withdrawing our forces from their country, we may be witnessing the end of the unipolar world with the US as the sole superpower.
Whoever wins in November is going to have the unenviable task of explaining to the American people that our place in the world has diminished dramatically.
"Here I'm allowed everything all the time..."
--Radiohead, "Idioteque"
I mentioned in a previous post that I've been thinking a lot lately about resource/energy scarcity, and how a capitalist democracy is perhaps the most poorly equipped system of governance for navigating an energy-poor world. I'll tackle the economic side here, and maybe later I'll try to collect my thoughts on the political side. This will probably come off sounding like a preening freshman econ major with a poor grasp of the subject matter. You've been warned.
Capitalism exists because humans have a innate desire to improve their situation in the world beyond the point of sufficiency. The complex chemical reactions that happen in our brain that lead to what we call "happiness" seem to operate better when we have ever larger surpluses of "stuff," be it food, property, clothing, etc. With the invention of currency, we no longer need to accumulate an abundance of the actual stuff: a healthy surplus of money triggers the same feelings of contentment and happiness. Capitalism, with its underpinnings in the profit motive, gives humans free reign to pursue this state of material abundance, unfettered by The State. It's no accident that in the course of human history, capitalism has been the single greatest system for the accumulation of wealth. It aligns with our own base nature perfectly.
The problem with capitalism is that it requires constant growth of the economy. Absent growth, the only way for me to improve my lot in life is to take from those around me. The pie analogy is sort of canonical here: if I want a bigger slice of a pie of constant size, it requires someone else to get a smaller slice. Since humans are by nature not altruistic, we resent getting a smaller piece, and in fact are angling to get a bigger piece for ourselves. Add in the fact that, with a positive rate of population growth, there are more people every day who want to accumulate more and more "stuff" from a constant supply, and you see how this leads to a lot of friction in society. Capitalism under a zero-growth economy is a highly resistive path.
Growth, however, alleviates this resistance. If there is an untapped supply of raw materials or energy to be tapped, then each individual can improve their lot in life without beggaring their neighbor. To abuse the analogy further, if you "grow the pie higher" then everybody gets a bigger slice, and everybody is momentarily happy. This is a very low resistance path, but it requires a natural abundance of resources, provided by Nature and able to be extracted by humans and turned into useful things.
In order for growth to occur, we need space to grow into. Technology provides this space. Advances in technology continually expand the amount of the planet's resources we are able to make use of. Technology finds uses for resources previously unusable (such as oil), and allows for more efficient use of those resources. Higher agricultural yields, due to technological advancements, allow for larger and larger populations. As long as technology and human ingenuity keep pace with the demands for growth from capitalism and a growing population, everything hums along smoothly.
The problem, of course, is that technology doesn't provide us this space at a constant rate. Innovation is unpredictable. When the needs of humans in a capitalist society grown faster than technology can provide for, we bump up into the limits of growth. Under such conditions, capitalism is forced to switch to the "beggar thy neighbor," highly resistive mode of operation. From such conditions spring monopolies, recessions, and growing inequality. If not alleviated in short order, resource wars and starvation result. Most worrying of all these days is that technology has given us the means to exterminate ourselves in such wars.
We find ourselves in such a situation now, transitioning from a period of abundance into one of resource and energy scarcity. Our capitalist societies are built on top of, and require, a supply of cheap energy, namely oil, in order to satisfy the requirements of growth. That supply now appears to be in decline even while demand for it increases. Technology may one day provide us with another resource to use in place of oil, grant us more space for growing into. But until that day comes, we are left with more and more humans (6.6B at last count, thanks in large part to modern agriculture built around petroleum and petrochemicals) grasping for smaller and smaller supplies of resources. We can either accept our fate, a massive global die-off, or adapt to a way of allocating resources that doesn't require growth. Namely a planned economy.
...always getting your heart broken. Obama is talking about a $1000 emergency rebate to help defray increased gas prices, to be financed by a windfall profits tax on oil companies. I understand that he needs to offer something to counter the Republican's idiotic but catchy "drill drill drill" mantra. But this just sounds like pandering.
I can get behind the windfall tax, but why not use the money to build something of lasting value? Such as updating our decrepit, third world electricity grid. Or as seed money for companies researching renewable energy. Or providing bigger tax incentives for individuals and companies to reduce their energy consumption. Hell, putting the money into a big pile and setting it on fire would probably be a better use; feeding the money back into the maw of American consumer society means it'll just end up back in the hands of the oil companies and OPEC nations, as well as the makers of cheap plastic shit from China. And the only thing we get out of the transaction is dirtier air and bigger landfills.
I think Obama probably knows this, but he's really in a bind. If he wants his policies to become law, he's got to win. And to do that, he needs to blunt McCain's only effective line of attack thus far, which is opening up offshore drilling. McCain is selling immediate relief, which forces Obama into having to also offer immediate relief. In light of that, the rebate is probably his least bad option. And it at least has the bonus of actually providing immediate help to gas addicts, unlike the drilling proposal. I just happen to think the relief is unwarranted.
If I were King, I'd nationalize the bastards and use all revenues to build a modern electric rail system powered by nuclear power plants feeding into a modernized national electricity grid. And a taste of me broadsword for any pleb that complained!
Holy crap! The Watchmen movie is looking pretty badass so far. I can't count how many times I've read that graphic novel. Ever since I heard they were making it into a movie, I've been both excited and worried. I just hope they stay true to the plot of the graphic novel.
Whitney is walking in the AIDS walk again this year. Consider donating, won't you please?
Click Here to Donate
(This is in response to a post on my dad's blog.)
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The summer seems oddly hotter than previous summers, with more freak weather and more powerful storms. The ant is sure it has nothing to do with all the smokestacks and cars. Rush Limbaugh told him that global warming was a hoax perpetrated by the liberal grasshoppers in order to keep hard working ants like him down. The ant trusts Rush. Rush wouldn't lie to him. A few of the grasshoppers think the ant is a fool and laugh, dance and play the summer away. Come to think of it, so do a lot of ants. A great deal more of the grasshoppers do pretty much exactly as the ant does: work hard, try to save some food for the tough times ahead, etc.
Winter comes and the grasshoppers and ants who squandered their summers suffer terribly. They wonder where the people who used to speak for their concerns have gone. Ever since Bill Clinton eviscerated the welfare programs back in the 90s, hardly anybody goes to bat for the poor and hungry anymore. "The end of welfare as we know it" pretty much just ended up being the end of welfare, period. The talking heads on Fox News say this is a good thing, but fail to mention that more and more ants and grasshoppers are becoming homeless and poverty-stricken every year.
So, the grasshoppers and ants that didn't work as hard as Rush would like them to were turned out from their homes and had to live on the mean streets, where they succumbed to drugs, crime and lunacy. Rather than pay money out of taxes to take care of them in a humane way, people seemed happier with paying for them indirectly through increased muggings, robberies, murders, etc. Some people thought this was a pretty raw deal for everyone involved, but they were shouted down by Rush and his ilk.
What was most disturbing that winter, though, was how many of the hard-working ants and grasshoppers were in dire straits. Through no fault of their own, their home values were eroding every day, their gas was getting insanely expensive, and their paychecks just didn't seem to buy as much food each month. Those who were lucky enough to keep their jobs saw their purchasing power diminish rapidly as inflation outpaced wage increases. Ants that had been comfortable before seemed to be falling off the cliff financially in ever greater numbers. Grasshoppers that had been just skating by in earlier times were absolutely destroyed by the new stagflation, and found themselves on the streets with their ne'er-do-well brethren. But not to fear, Fox News said. This was just a business cycle. Creative destruction. If you were poor, it was somehow, some way, your fault.
The ant managed better than most, keeping his head just barely above water. And then it happened. He got cancer. The doctor said it was likely due to all the pollutants in the air he breathed, the water he drank and the food he ate. President Bush had completely gutted the EPA, ignored its findings when he didn't like them, and let Big Industry do what they pleased in pursuit of profit margins. The ant's employer used to pay for health insurance, but stopped a few years ago when the premiums got too expensive. There was no way for the ant to buy his own insurance: the monthly payments were just too onerous. So he went without. He paid for as much chemotherapy as he could, and then resigned himself to die a slow and painful death. And if he ever let himself think for a minute that maybe there ought to be a single-payer national health care system, Rush and his friends at Fox were there to tell him how awful it was in Canada, how you had to wait, like, FOREVER! just to see a doctor.
In the end, though, it wasn't the cancer that got the ant. Heating oil prices got so bad that winter that he turned off his furnace and tried to keep warm by burning stacks of worthless dollar bills. He and his family died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Just went to sleep one night and never woke up. They had a CO detector in their house, but like everything else in America it was cheap plastic shit from China and didn't work. Maybe there should have been some sort of regulation of the CO detector import industry, but, well, you know how Rush and Fox feel about government regulations.
So you see, in George W. Bush's America, it doesn't matter how hard you work, how smart you may be, or the color of your exoskeleton. Unless you're born into wealth, you're poor. And getting poorer by the day. Ants and grasshoppers continue to get the shaft. Fox News continues to prattle on about welfare queens and anchor babies, gays and guns, and tell you who the scapegoat du jour is. And somewhere Rush Limbaugh kicks back in his fabulously expensive house, boggles at all the zeroes in his latest paycheck, lights a fine stogie and laughs.
I have been eagerly awaiting Maxis' upcoming game Spore since I first heard about it back in, like, 2004 or so. The premise of the game is you begin as a one-celled creature in a primordial soup of sorts, and then evolve your creature into a multi-celled organism, then a tribe, then a civilization, until finally you develop interstellar travel and can roam the universe in your UFO. The scope of the game is pretty amazing. Anyway, Maxis released the Creature Editor, which is the tool you will use in the game to create and evolve your creatures. It's pretty slick, and a ton of fun! I've played around with it for a week or so now, and you can see my creations here.
Thus far I've been trying to create scary, apex predator types of creatures, but I'll eventually get around to making herbivores for them to eat. I try to keep a coherent story in mind while working on each, with an eye towards the evolutionary pressures that might lead to each creature developing as I've designed them. At least with my more recent creatures. I wish more of the designers would do the same. Looking through a lot of the other creatures in the Sporepedia, people tend to go way overboard in their designs. Evolution is probably never going to produce a vertebrate with 8 long legs, 4 mouths and giant bat wings: it's just not an efficient design, and evolution selects against inefficient designs. Similarly, pretty much every third creature in the pool has a scorpion tail with a weapon at the end. I can't really talk, I did the same thing with the Addertail. But I tried to mitigate the cliche-ness by making the tail into the throat instead, and putting the creature's mouth at the end instead of some stinger or spikey thing.
September 7th (the release date) can't get here soon enough!
Connor O'Neil's gives me a headache.
Other photos from our trip to Michigan to see Jaely, visit family, and attend Kevin & Liz's wedding can be seen over here.
...or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Oil Bomb.
Obama has taken some flak in recent weeks for saying he supports "gradually higher gas prices." The usual suspects jumped all over him, calling him out of touch with regular Americans, uninterested in the pain high gas prices are causing, etc. I think Obama is right on the money, and I respect him for not dumbing his position down into a 5 second soundbite. Ignoring the fact that inflation alone will always account for a "gradual increase" in pump prices over time, there are several reasons to cheer higher gas prices.
Back in the days of $30/barrel of oil and $2 gasoline, I remember reading the occasional article warning of dire consequences if oil ever rose and stayed above $50/barrel for any sustained amount of time. The reasoning was that since consumer spending made up two-thirds of our economy, any increase at the pump would end up coming out of discretionary spending in household budgets, and hence people would buy fewer salad shooters and other assorted trash. $50/barrel was the magic number tossed around at first. Then we hit that, and the number became $60. Then $75. Then $100. And each time we blew through one of those price points, a funny thing happened: nothing. People kept right on filling up their SUVs, driving their 90 minute commutes twice each day, taking roadtrips on the weekends, all in the face of mounting prices at the pump. And all while continuing to consume cheap plastic trash from China at the usual clip.
What happened? Did we misjudge the resilience of the American consumer? I don't think we did. I think what happened was the housing bubble began to inflate at the same time as gas prices started to go up. With the value of their house going up 10%, 15%, 20% each year, the so-called "wealth effect" had everyone thinking about how to spend their new HELOCs and what kind of boat to get (on credit, natch). They weren't worried about gas prices, even as they blew past $2.25/gallon, then $2.50, then $3.00. Sure, the poor were struggling, unable to tap into this new source of phantom wealth. But hell, the poor are always struggling, and it's probably their own fault, right? Bad life decisions, right? So life in America just rolled on along on the steel wheels of an automobile-centric culture. And then the bottom fell out.
I remember when it started to unravel. Whitney and I were on our honeymoon, halfway across the world cruising on the Mediterranean. I was watching the news on BBC, and they kept talking about the unfolding credit crisis back in America. I gathered from what they were saying that a lot of loans that banks had written up were "non-performing" as the lingo goes. The jig was up. Too many people had bought too much house, and now couldn't pay their mortgage bills. The financial sector that had presided over the greatest expansion of phantom wealth now had indigestion as it came to grips with the folly it had wrought. It happened (and continues to happen) not all at once, but gradually. And gradually, Americans woke up to find themselves not nearly as rich as they thought they were. Even if they were able to stay in their homes and keep their jobs, times were tough, and getting tougher. And what do you know? Gas hit $4 per gallon.
$4 per gallon seems to be the "hinge price" for changing consumer behavior, although I think it's debatable. Had we not been living in Housing La-La Land when prices started to rise, who's to say that something in the $3 range wouldn't have started to change behaviors? At any rate, it looks like $4 is definitely having an effect. Americans drove something like 1.4 billion fewer miles this past April than they had the previous April. The run on hybrids has begun, straining the industry's abilities to keep up with production, especially of the batteries needed to run them. Anecdotes abound of people stuck with SUVs that they cannot sell. On top of that, there have been ominous sounds coming from the retail sector, as the American consumer finally appears to be tapped out. And in perhaps the clearest signal yet that the era of a cheap energy lifestyle is over, in an election where an unpopular war is being fought halfway around the world, pocketbook issues seem poised to dominate. Interesting times.
And this is where Obama's comments seem to bang up against the conventional wisdom. Why would anyone support "gradually increasing gas prices" in such an environment? Because pain brings change. In fact, it's the only thing that can really bring change. The switch to more fuel-efficient cars is a good thing. The reduced consumer spending on crap that is destined to end up floating in a big plastic island in the Pacific is a good thing. Americans moving out of their cloistered, gated "communities" in the exurbs and back into cities to live with one another is a good thing. All of these changes in consumer behavior are necessary if we are to avoid the worst effects of an inevitable Peak Oil scenario. So bring on the gradual increases, I say!
But what amounts to "tough love" when it comes to the American consumer is likely deadly to large swathes of American industry. Diesel is even more expensive than regular gasoline, at least here in California, which is bankrupting a lot of the smaller trucking and transport companies and independent operators. The airline industry is in free-fall, as no business plan for an airline can survive in the face of $100 or more per barrel of oil. All these luggage charges and courtesy fees being instituted are just telegraphing that fact, and hastening the demand destruction for air services. James Howard Kunstler is predicting 18 more months of commercial airplanes in the air, after which we'll have to get used to the quiet we all noticed after the 9/11 attacks when all flights were grounded. The ripple effect of no more highway or air transport for goods threatens to undermine pretty much every other sector of the economy. Yikes!
What if there were some way to keep gas prices high enough for consumers that they continue changing their behaviors in positive ways, but somehow keep the transportation industry from cratering? I think there is, and here is my immodest proposal.
First, implement a price floor of $4/gallon, indexed for inflation, for gasoline sold at gas stations. Yep, prices will never drop below that. You can drill all you want, build as many refineries as you want, the price of a gallon of gas will never fall below $4 per gallon again. If the market price would normally drop below that mark, make up for it in a spot tax that would push the price back up to $4. This would, perhaps counter-intuitively, spur the building of more refineries, since the profit from selling the outputs would never drop below a certain amount. This would help ease our refinery bottleneck and smooth out any supply disruptions in the gasoline chain. Moreover, once consumers know that the old days of cheap motoring are well and truly over, they can let go of their old ways of life and get around to the business of reorienting their lives to a less energy-intensive way of living.
Secondly, subsidize the purchase of diesel and jet fuel to transportation and airline companies using revenues from the new price floor gas tax. Try to keep diesel prices at earlier levels, around $2/gallon. Ditto for jet fuel, though I'm not sure what a suitable price point would be, having never purchased the stuff. If more money is needed for this subsidy than is generated by the gasoline tax, make it up with a windfall tax on the oil companies.
Thirdly, get rid of the subsidies to oil companies and put the money towards what Obama is calling an "Apollo Project" to find new, cheap, renewable energy sources. We are tantalizing close on many fronts. Solar cells are becoming cheaper, more powerful and flexible. A break-even fusion reaction remains the Holy Grail, and progress is being made in that direction. New and intriguing ways of producing biodiesel, using everything from switchgrass to algae, are being cooked up in labs across the country. But this research costs money, and the risks of getting into the game are such that many companies fold for lack of capital. With the government putting money behind some of these ideas, making it OK in a sense to try an idea and fail, much more progress could be made I think.
So that's it, my 3-point plan for solving all of our problems! Ta-da! Seriously though, the central thrust of it is to accept the new realities of an energy-poor world, and harness government to the task of dealing with the fallout of this new reality and planning for the next new reality to come. One primary flaw in the plan is that even if Congress voted in the necessary taxes and subsidies, they'd be voted out at the next election by hordes of pissed-off motorists. Which brings me to my next discussion about how capitalist democracies are perhaps the least fit system of resource management and governance in an energy-scarce world. But that can wait awhile.