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Archive of Blog Posts to Aug 14, 2007I am back in my hammock under a palm thatch roof on an island triangulated between three potential hurricanes' current positions. The closest of these storms is less than 90 miles away, and we are getting some rain here, but at this moment, none of them seem on a collision track with my location. I am setting aside the mariner's Rule of Threes. This palm-wood house perches only a meter above the sea, its foundations entirely sand. It is a Tibetian Sand Mandala.
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Image: Tacoria in Puerto Morelos, photoshop effect by author.
"The U.S. average retail price for regular gasoline dropped 3.8 cents last week to dip to 283.8 cents per gallon as of August 6, 2007, 20.0 cents lower than last year. Prices fell for the third week in a row, reaching the lowest national average price since April 9, 2007."
2. In a small bowl toss the onion with the 4 tablespoons vinegar. Set aside for about 20 minutes while preparing the other ingredients.
What Hundertwasser may not have known is that Hokusai changed residences 93 times (although the names on his prints changed only 25 times). This gave me an idea. Somehow I can't imagine either Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama rolling back Homeland Security. Its already a third rail. Third rail? Hey Vern! Gimme a copper penny and lets see if we can get some colored sparks!
n many ways, the Post-Petroleum Survival Guide was made possible by the experience of that travel, and I am grateful. But now the invitations to speak keep coming at an even faster pace, and I feel trapped in an ethical dilemma. I am throwing chem-trails into the stratosphere like there is no tomorrow. My friend Richard Heinberg says I may as well take the experience while I can, because soon enough there will be no more commercial air travel and all this jet-setting will grind to a hard landing. My friend Rob Hopkins says he has taken his last flight already, and proud of it. I am sort of drifting a bit more towards Richard's advice than Rob's and taking a final lap or two around the planet. I sit by the cabin window and shoot photos of clouds, forest, cities, ice. Here is a photo of the Amazon in Brazil taken just about one month ago. It is just past 7 am and the river is giving off clouds of mist that appear like a popcorn string on a Christmas Tree.
Here is a shot of the glaciers retreating in Greenland, taken from about 35,000 feet at midday, two days ago. The shrinking ice cover has opened up lakes, rivers, and islands that were once buried. As the coastal shelves retreat they release a meltwater flow directly into the ocean, seen at the lower right of the photo. I was on a flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis that carried me right over this spectacular scenery. I live in miraculous times.
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Million Barrels per Day
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2000
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2001
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2002
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2003
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2004
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2005
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2006
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2007
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World demand
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76.7
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77.4
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77.7
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79.3
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82.3
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83.5
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84.3
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85.8
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Non OPEC supply*
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45.4
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46.1
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47.2
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48.2
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49.2
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49.0
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49.4
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50.4
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OPEC NGLs
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3.1
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3.4
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3.7
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3.7
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4.2
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4.5
|
4.7
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4.9
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Non-OPEC supply plus OPEC NGLs
|
48.5
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49.5
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50.9
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51.9
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53.4
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53.5
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54.1
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55.3
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Call on OPEC
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28.2
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27.9
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26.8
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27.4
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28.9
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30.0
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30.2
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30.5
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Iraq Production
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2.6
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2.4
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2.0
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1.3
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2.0
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1.8
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1.9
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1.9
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Angola Production
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0.7
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0.7
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0.9
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0.9
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1.0
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1.2
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1.4
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1.5
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Call on OPEC ex Angola & Iraq
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24.9
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24.8
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23.9
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25.2
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25.9
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27.0
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26.9
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27.1
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World demand growth
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0.7
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0.7
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0.3
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1.6
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3.0
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1.2
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0.8
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1.5
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Non OPEC supply growth
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1.2
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1.0
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1.4
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1.0
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1.5
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0.1
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0.6
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1.2
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Call on OPEC change*
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-0.5
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-0.3
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-0.9
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0.6
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1.5
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1.1
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0.2
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0.3
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Source: IEA Oil Market Report
*Angola switched from non-OPEC to OPEC
OPEC
OPEC's response has been to grow supply in fact by rather more than this as shown below. Indeed from mid-2004 to mid-2006 it fluctuated around 1m b/d over the simple call on OPEC. Some 300 million of these 700-800 million barrels can be accounted for from global stock building and OECD strategic reserve building. The balance reflects either poor data or non OECD strategic reserve building and/or the impact of $10bn-$20bn of investment flows into energy holdings of passive commodity funds (166 million-333 million barrels at $60 per barrel).
As we continue to stress, OPEC is now in centre stage. The effect of the cuts at the end of last year can be seen in the graph below. The 1.2 million barrel a day cuts from November and the 500,000 barrel a day cuts from February have tightened the market, and appear to be supporting the oil price between $55 and $60. The cartel decided to maintain production at current levels at the March meeting in Vienna. The graph shows OPEC production to be below the call on OPEC for the first time since 2003 which might suggest that the market is undersupplied. However, it is important to realise that this data is at best unreliable and always subject to change. It will be interesting to see whether this gap widens in the coming months. OPEC meets next in September.
OPEC apparent production (ex Angola & Iraq) vs Call on OPEC 2000 - 2007
Source: Guinness Atkinson Energy Fund
There would appear to be another fortuitous concurrence of opinion. Despite precipitous declines being watched in Ghawar, Cantarell, the North Sea and elsewhere, and "disappointment" with Russia, we may remain afloat in the SUV-world at least until September's OPEC meeting, which is to say, 2008 (since new quotas take time to implement).
Lucky You. This is like a game of Texas Hold-em. OPEC is all in. Matt Simmons says they are bluffing. Daniel Yergin thinks they have the cards. If OPEC has something in the hole to make an inside straight, the game goes on. And here comes the river....
Extra Credit: Was flood-the-zone employed in the anthrax story back in 2001?
16 April 07:
A 30-minute radio interview during the morning drive time in Orange County, California is now available at http://www.kuci.org/podcastfiles/611/albert-bates.mp3. Once again, unexpected interest in the hippies. The April-May issue of Plenty is out with a photo story on the Farm in the same vein as Vanity Fair.
Culture Change also ran an extended interview that is seeing some syndication in the blogosphere.
Over the weekend I did a little talk at Centennial Park in Nashville for Step-It-Up. I pointed out that Nashville is hundreds of feet above sea level and so has nothing to fear when Greenland melts, at least from the ocean. But then I told the story of Paris in the summer of 2003. That is a story Nashville needs to take to heart. At 103 degrees F, the body reacts by pumping blood to the skin, sweating profusely, and panting heat out through the mouth. You can survive it, but you will need some down time to recover. In Paris in 2003 that is the one thing they didn't get. Rest. It was hot at night and they mostly didn't have air conditioning at home. Tens of thousands died.
The North American Southeast was not a great place for large settlements, being hot and humid, and those that pre-existed European conquest were mostly on rivers or coastlines. It wasn't until air conditioning arrived in the years after World War II that the settlement pattern changed and we saw the same kind of suburban sprawl that exists everywhere else Europeans have spread. Air conditioning takes energy. It is hard to get a large space chilled by pedal power. I have yet to see a good solar-powered air conditioning system, although in theory it should be possible. We design for passive cooling here at the Farm and the Ecovillage Training Center has never had air conditioners. We use fans, though, powered by PV and wind.
Much of the built environment of the Southeast is a Paris 2003 waiting to happen.
7 Apr 07:
What is it about humans that as a species we are so fascinated by, flirtatious with, and drawn to extinction? Like 9-year-old boys we push small insects and plants into it, watching with rapt attention as they squirm and squeal, unable to avoid their fate.
Is it a deep zeitgeist, a phantom image of things to come? Do we, as Ivan Illich said, sense the shadows our future throws?
And yet, when thrown to our conscious mind, in its aware state, we utterly reject the possibility -- don't want to hear about it, don't want to discuss it, don't want to think about it. You have to get us stoned to have that discussion.
Our science is now whispering the E word in our ear. Should I say whisper? Our mathematicians are holding forth on the exponential function. Biologists and population demographers are at the lectern, speaking into microphones. The climatologists are shouting it from the rooftops.
And yet, once it passes through our social and political earmuffs, it is reduced to a dull purr against the background of Brad and Angelina; Tom and Katie; Anna Nicole Smith.
I just came off a radio show where I had a chance to talk about the IPCC WG2 report released yesterday in Brussels (WG1 was released in Paris 2 Feb 07, WG3 is due 4 May 07 in Bangkok). Watered down by the US and China political delegations, it said 30% of all species can be expected to go extinct this century due to climate change. Millions of individual humans are likely to do the same for the same reason.
There is a time when that thought might have been quite alarming, such as when the human race in total was less than the forthcoming projected die-off number. Today we apparently have excess lives to burn. We add two hundred thousand more, net, each day.
But can we ignore the bees and the trees?
Today's papers buried the lead. Curitiba's Gazeta de Povo led with “Involvement of Youth with Drugs up 133%.” The Guardian of London led with The Ultimate Chocolate Guide. The West Australian led with bold print about Uranium Exports. It ran on page 54 in the Caracas Universal, 23 in the Glasgow Herald, and behind the page 4 story of disappearing bees in Diario de Yucatan.
Hats off to the Salt Lake Tribune, Diario do Povo (Brazil), Dubai Gulf News and others (notably the LA Times syndicate) who ran the story, with grim photos and local connections, front and center.
Bart Gordon has invited the scientists to testify before his Congressional Committee next week, free from the Bush editorial board. Here are some of the filtered report's key findings:
There is high confidence that hydrological systems are being affected around the world:
- increased run-off and earlier spring peak discharge in many glacier- and snow-fed rivers;
- warming of lakes and rivers in many regions, with effects on thermal structure and water quality
There is very high confidence, based on evidence from a wide range of species, that recent warming is strongly affecting terrestrial biological systems, including such changes as:
- earlier timing of spring events, such as leaf-unfolding, bird migration and egg-laying;
- poleward and upward shifts in ranges in plant and animal species.
There is high confidence that observed changes in marine and freshwater biological systems are associated with rising water temperatures, as well as related changes in ice cover, salinity, oxygen levels and circulation. These include:
- shifts in ranges and changes in algal, plankton and fish abundance in high-latitude oceans;
- increases in algal and zooplankton abundance in high-latitude and high-altitude lakes;
- range changes and earlier migrations of fish in rivers.
Based on these observations, and many others, WG2 is able to predict with considerable confidence:
By mid-century, annual average river runoff and water availability are projected to increase by 10-40% at high latitudes and in some wet tropical areas, and decrease by 10-30% over some dry regions at mid-latitudes.
In the dry tropics, some of which are presently water stressed areas, drought-affected areas will likely increase in extent. Heavy precipitation events, which are very likely to increase in frequency, will augment flood risk.
In the course of the century, water supplies stored in glaciers and snow cover are projected to decline, reducing water availability in regions supplied by meltwater from major mountain ranges, where more than one-sixth of the world population currently lives.
Over the course of this century net carbon uptake by terrestrial ecosystems is likely to peak before mid-century and then weaken or even reverse, thus amplifying climate change.
Approximately 20-30% of plant and animal species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average temperature exceed 1.5 - 2.5C.
At lower latitudes, especially seasonally dry and tropical regions, crop productivity is projected to decrease for even small local temperature increases (1-2C), which would increase risk of hunger.
Globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase with increases in local average temperature over a range of 1-3C, but above this it is projected to decrease.
Increases in the frequency of droughts and floods are projected to affect local production negatively, especially in subsistence sectors at low latitudes.
Many millions more people are projected to be flooded every year due to sea-level rise by the 2080s. Those densely-populated and low-lying areas where adaptive capacity is relatively low, and which already face other challenges such as tropical storms or local coastal subsidence, are especially at risk. The numbers affected will be largest in the mega-deltas of Asia and Africa while small islands are especially vulnerable.
Where extreme weather events become more intense and/or more frequent, the economic and social costs of those events will increase.
In Africa, by 2020, between 75 and 250 million people are projected to be exposed to an increase of water stress due to climate change.
Freshwater availability in Central, South, East and Southeast Asia particularly in large river basins is projected to decrease, which, along with population growth and increasing demand arising from higher standards of living, could adversely affect more than a billion people by the 2050s.
Production from agriculture and forestry by 2030 is projected to decline over much of southern and eastern Australia, and over parts of eastern New Zealand, due to increased drought and fire.
In Southern Europe, climate change is projected to worsen conditions (high temperatures and drought) in a region already vulnerable to climate variability, and to reduce water availability, hydropower potential, summer tourism, and in general, crop productivity. It is also projected to increase health risks due to heat waves and the frequency of wildfires.
By mid-century, increases in temperature and associated decreases in soil water are projected to lead to gradual replacement of tropical forest by savanna in eastern Amazonia.
In North America, disturbances from pests, diseases, and fire are projected to have increasing impacts on forests. Dust bowl conditions are not unlikely for the plains.
Cities that currently experience heat waves are expected to be further challenged by an increased number, intensity and duration of heat waves.
Very large sea-level rises that would result from widespread deglaciation of Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets imply major changes in coastlines and ecosystems, and inundation of low-lying areas, with greatest effects in river deltas.
Based on climate model results, it is very unlikely that the Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) in the North Atlantic will undergo a large abrupt transition during the 21st century. Slowing of the MOC this century is very likely, but temperatures over the Atlantic and Europe are projected to increase nevertheless, due to global warming. Impacts of large-scale and persistent changes in the MOC are likely to include changes to marine ecosystem productivity, fisheries, ocean carbon dioxide uptake, oceanic oxygen concentrations and terrestrial vegetation.
Adaptation alone is not expected to cope with all the projected effects of climate change, and especially not over the long run.
Natural systems have limited adaptive capacity. So do humans.
6 Apr 07:
We showed Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil at the Tennessee Technology Center in Hohenwald last night to a crowd of about two dozen local citizens. Some snickering during the film but the Q&A afterwards was less strange than I had expected, people wondering about windmill co-operatives and how long solar cells last before they wear out. This is a lot about sugar-coating a doom and gloom message. Just a teaspoon of honey makes the medicine go down. Today we begin our usual spring natural building workshop, this one putting a green-space addition on the straw cabin. Yesterday we dropped in a rubble trench footer and built up the start of a rammed tire and creekrock kneewall in preparation for the earthbags and cob. Hard freeze overnight but outdoor working temperatures today.
Alicia Bay Laurel helpfully posted links to vegetarian passover recipes on her blog. I am especially keen on the walnut mushroom chopped ped, very timely after the last rain. Need to use up those fall nuts from the attic storage bins and the wild mushrooms coming from the April showers are just the ticket.
Chopped ped
This savory Passover spread is the perfect topping for matzo.
3 Tbsp. oil
1/2 lb. mushrooms, chopped
1 small onion, chopped
1 cup chopped walnuts
Pepper and salt, to taste
1 Tbsp. water
Saute the mushrooms and onion for 8 minutes.
Pour into blender or food processor, adding walnuts, seasonings, and water. Blend until smooth.
Serve on matzo as a spread.
Makes 1 cup
Lots more from fans and foes over the rebound off Conserve. The Oil Drum ran it April 2 this way:
Stay in the City and Don't Buy Guns or Gold
Albert Bates doesn't think that either peak oil or global warming will usher in the apocalypse. Nor does he advise citizens to start stockpiling firearms and Krugerrands. "There's a contingent of peak oilers who are survivalists at heart," Bates told me. But he isn't one of them. "We don't need to think of defending ourselves from packs of feral animals, we need to think of getting together quilting bees and sowing bees to make things."
Just so some people can b
ack off and take a breath, I don't know that either peak oil or global warming won't usher in the apocalypse. It is also not a bad idea to learn how to use an arc welder if you don't quilt.
Vanity Fair decided they would rather put Leo on the cover instead of me. So they killed the print story from the May issue and ran it online instead under the title Sex, Drugs and Soybeans: Politics & Power. I am guessing I was Power. Vanity Fair quoted the closing two lines from this blog of 2 Feb 07.
Continuing my reading of Six Degrees. Lynas makes this observation:
The planet might even be better off without Homo sapiens, some might suggest. Notwithstanding the moral questions that this sort of attitude raises (it is a bit like saying the Nazi Holocaust didn't matter because the high post-war birth rate soon replaced the 6 million dead), it is far from clear that life will always go on. The Sun is getting hotter as it burns up its finite supply of nuclear fuel, and for millions of years into the future our planet's great challenge will be to keep itself cool as the output of solar radiation inevitably increases.
This is a dangerous time to be fiddling with the Earth's thermostat. Scientists have calculated that only a billion years remain before the biosphere will go extinct for ever from overheating - the planet is already 4.6 billion years old, and for much of this time it was lifeless. The tens of millions of years it will take for new forms of life to re-establish, and for biodiversity to re-evolve into new complex ecosystems after any human-caused mass extinction, is a sizeable portion of this remaining habitable time. As James Lovelock writes, 'Mother Earth' is now an old lady in her sixties, no longer as resilient as she once was. With our conscious actions, we are now measurably shortening her lifespan.
So far as we yet know, this is the only planet in the entire universe which has summoned forth life in all its brilliance and variety. To knowingly cut this flowering short is undoubtedly a crime, one more unspeakable even than the cruelest genocide or most destructive war. If each person is uniquely valuable, each species is surely more so. I can see no excuses for collaborating in such a crime. As the post-war Nuremberg trials established, ignorance is no defence; nor is merely following orders. To me the moral path lies not in passively accepting our destructive role, but in actively resisting such a horrendous fate.
Amen.
3 Apr 07:
Back in from the coast, breathing a great sigh. Good to be back with the blooming dogwoods and spring peas. In Laguna Beach where they are paying $3.99 a gallon and sprawl is going up slopes so vertical as to be illegal to build upon in many countries, I asked my audience in a house with a million-dollar view (and caissons 40 feet deep gripping the slope, which was sliding in places) how they planned get to work or the grocery store when gas became scarce. "Horses are going to get really tired on this hill," I said. California has too many people, too few horses. Alicia Bay Laurel accompanied us on the trip and took pictures.
On April 1st the book was reviewed in Conserve magazine and picked up by Energy Bulletin (I was in the St. Stupid Day parade in San Francisco at the time) which prompted some angry mail from those in the die-off camp. One good friend wrote:
You're in la-la land if you think this, the situation in New Orleans where people go to sleep to the sound of gunshots but no police sirens, etc is not going to be what most cities look like after 5 years of gas either being $7 or not available at all and the subsequent economic collapse that will flow from that.
Yet you tell people to:
1. stay in the cities and
2. stay unarmed.
Really, you've either:
A. smoked a bit too much weed in your day and it's now catching up to you in your senior years OR
B. you know you're advice is irresponsible but continue to dish it out so you can stay on the peak oil speaking circuit.
I'll be blunt: I'm getting sick and tired - disgusted really - with this sort of disconnected irresponsibility from the over 60 hippie crowd that seems to dominate the Peak Oil debate.
I objected to the charge of being too pollyannaish, pointing out my record in calling attention to rapid warming and the nuclear dragon, among other threats, but I pled guilty to the rap about city-centrism and pacifism. I have a hard time picturing how we can spread humans horizontally like butter on a slice of bread and still have land enough to grow food, make fuels to cultivate, harvest and transport that food, and also mitigate warming with more forests and water. I pointed out that putting more guns into the hands of angry citizens who had been reduced to zombie-like mobs by fast food, TV, corporate schools and pharmaceuticals is suicidal, throwing kerosene on a roaring blaze, and actually I think we should be collecting guns about now, especially in California. He promptly came back with more of the same, so it was probably the wrong thing to say.
The bum rap about hippies runs contrary to the popular sentiment that I began sensing as I took questions in my talks. It seemed to me that people are beginning to recognize that hippies were right about civil rights, freedom rides, gender rights, Native Americans, nuclear power, Vietnam, peace, genetic engineering, globalization, private property, corporations... name your poison, long before most of the rest of the population. On the plane home I picked up a copy of the April 9 issue of Time Magazine and its special feature on 51 things you can do to reduce global warming. It is amazing how many of those 51 are central tenets of the hippie credo.
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Especially noteworthy was the item (number 22) on vegetarianism, which Time observed has profound impacts (far more than a plug-in Prius), immediate time horizon, and a high feel-good factor. Well, yes.
Time also was keeping alive the NeoCon ruse over Al Gore's MacMansion in Belle Meade, which we now know was stymied from putting solar PV on the roof by a Republican zoning board. Bill Bradley has a new book that describes the way right-wingers took control by showing two pyramids, one Democratic, one Republican. According to Bradley (as synthesized by The New York Times/Truthout):
Big individual donors and large foundations - the Scaife family and Olin foundations, for instance - form the base of the pyramid. They finance conservative research centers like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, entities that make up the second level of the pyramid.
The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove or Ralph Reed or Ken Mehlman take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest electorate. That language is sometimes in the form of an assault on Democrats and at other times in the form of advocacy for a new policy position. The development process can take years. And then there's the fourth level of the pyramid: the partisan news media. Conservative commentators and networks spread these finely honed ideas.
At the very top of the pyramid you'll find the president. Because the pyramid is stable, all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works fine.
It is not quite the "right wing conspiracy" that Hillary Clinton described, but it is an impressive organization built consciously, carefully and single-mindedly. The Ann Coulters and Grover Norquists don't want to be candidates for anything or cabinet officers for anyone. They know their roles and execute them because they're paid well and believe, I think, in what they're saying. True, there's lots of money involved, but the money makes a difference because it goes toward reinforcing a structure that is already stable.
To understand how the Democratic Party works, invert the pyramid. Imagine a pyramid balancing precariously on its point, which is the presidential candidate.
Democrats who run for president have to build their own pyramids all by themselves. When Gore tried to put solar cells on his roof, he ran into Bush's pyramid. The local electric board gives the data on Gore's power use, which is significant given that he runs a major office with lots of employees out of his home, to Matt Drudge, who scrambles the message with NeoConSpeak, casting a Spell of Obfustication, and hands off to Fox, CNN, MSNBC and the rest, so that the general public's view of Gore is tarnished.
So now when I speak, this is the kind of question I am getting; "What about that big electric bill Al Gore has?" In the future I will have to pull out the inverted pyramid to try to explain what is really going on. I just have to limit myself to the basics, and not get into the century-long development of this theme that includes, besides Scaipe and Olin at the base of the pyramid, the Israel Lobby started by Prescott Bush's dad and his influence on Hitler, the poppy cartel with vertical integration from Afghanistan to the streets of East LA, the House of Saud, Halliburton and the Prince family's varied contractors, HUD and numerous other players who have given us history as we don't know it from the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway to the October Surprise, from Reagan in Reykavik to the Anthrax Letters. Who needs the Illuminati or the DaVinci Code when you have Skull and Bones?
26 Mar 07:
On Left Coast tour. First stop the Permaculture course at Los Angeles Eco-Village and two speaking gigs here. The second gig was recorded for radio and videotaped for future webcasting. Earlier today I did an hour with sustainableradio.org and they should be podcasting that within the next week or so. From here we are off to visit some permaculture sites in California and a couple more speaking gigs in Berkeley and Bolinas.
The creative commons slide show for this tour is now available from this site as a 12Mb download pdf file.
A fun side trip while in Los Angeles was the Bicycle Kitchen, a splendid example of community supported manufacturing. It is a fully appointed bike shop, replete with mechanics in Victorian attire, operated on a volunteer basis for anyone with a desire to assemble, repair or tune up a bike. There are salvaged parts available adequate to assemble an entire city bicycle from scratch, either free or reasonably priced, using the available tools and expertise. Their goal: put the city on 2 wheels.
Appropos of which I began my talks in LA with a bicycle metaphor. This comes from my morning ride the day I left Tennessee. Out in the hills at sunrise, staying in some deep caked mud tracks left by 4-wheelers, I was fine if I stayed in the ruts but if I got out or tried to cross them it was tough going. Imagine homo sapiens as the bike tires. Our narrow vision, which is linear, allows us to see the way forward as a smooth track, no problems. As the rider, I am more like Gaia, non-linear, holographically connected. I can see the trouble that lies just outside the tracks. The thing is, the bike tire can never become the rider. It will never have that wider vision, and it will never control where it will be going. Any fantasy to the contrary is mere hubris.
20 Mar 07:
The cascade of no-holds-barred reports have made me much more pessimistic about the future. I was worried that Jim Hanson was lulling people to sleep with "just 10 more years," etc. But now see the Pentagon Report Feb 22, the Holdren Report Feb 27, the London Times review of Six Degrees Mar 12. The European Commission needs to get some moxie and start putting coal facilities of n'er-do-wells on a selected target matrix. Shut down or we'll shut you down. Not sure why people are marching on the Pentagon. Activists need to choke off the rail lines exiting Powder River Basin in the fashion of Leonidas and his 300 Spartans.
Last week Sizwe Herring and I did an Urban Permaculture workshop in the Historic Belmont neighborhood and Carver Park in Nashville. I am taking that template on the road now, to Los Angeles, Berkeley and Bolinas, California over next 2 weeks. Click on Belmont and Carver Park to get my walk-n-talk, especially the parts about Shawnee DNA, Big Mike Fink and Adelicia Acklen's deal with Baron Rothschild.
Also my pretty basic (and uphill, given the questions) explanation of peak oil was published in my interview for New Southerner magazine.
We are podcasting!
YOWUSA (45 min quasi-mystical podcast)
Earthworms (St. Louis show for gardens and eco-politics)
Third Planet Review (Youtube video, sort of a hippie home brew version of Meet the Press)
Third Planet Report broadcast from The Farm's low-power WUTZ-FM
2 Feb 07:
I'm back into the North now and the snow is falling. Two interviews yesterday that will eventually be posted or streamed to the web and I'll put up those links.
IPCC-4 summary report for policymakers released today at the Climate Change conference in Paris, pointing the finger at humans. It is likely too conservative, as are all consensus documents, but it is becoming harder to understate the problem. I'll read it before I say much more.
We are knee deep in the big muddy and the big fool says to push on.
The parallels between our part in returning Gaia to the Eocene epoch and the US misadventure in the Middle East are striking. We are over-extended, first in pushing the gain knob up on our amplified technology to pamper ourselves and assert domination over our nature slaves, and second in on our military cruelty in pursuit in unobtainable goals to dominate the world (in order to pamper ourselves, etc.)
We are out of touch with Gaia, who is holistically wise. We forgot Mother Nature bats last. We think we can shut her out in the first half of the ninth inning and still win. She is not the slave, she is the master.
We are all New Orleaneans and it is April 2005. We know the levees are too weak and too low. We know a big hurricane is overdue. We know global warming increases the odds of bad weather. Our techology has put us in a pleasure swamp of home entertainment centers and so we just don't care that much.
Speaking of swamp metaphors, the first nation to defeat the United States of America militarily was the Seminole Nation. At the time of the first Seminole War, it was actually several tribes and bands that were not all that friendly towards each other. Attack by the US Army, with the goal of removal west to Oklahoma, unified them. Until the Iraq conflict, this was the most expensive war in US history, and is still the longest-lasting. There were actually three wars, 1817-1818, 1835-1842, and 1855-1858. The Second Seminole War cost the USA 40 million 1835 dollars, which is 377,448 million 2005 dollars. As of this morning the USA has spent 363,565 million 2006 dollars on the Iraq war, not counting externalities like veterans benefits or loss of productivity.
As a civilization have been pushing forward with an un-winable war against Nature from at least the Age of Enlightenment. We imagine that we are in control, and we are just getting used to the display panel. But we don't know why those red lights are blinking, and we don't have an operator's manual. There seem to be more of them going off each hour, and now there are these annoying annunciators blaring.
We are all George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney is whispering in our ear that it will be okay, we just need to keep going.
21 Jan 07:
I have been reading or re-reading some seminal books concerning the prospect of die-off, or at least the end of Western Civilization. At the same time I have been playing around with shockwave flash as an artform, so I worked those themes into a swf file for the home page, but it is a bit too difficult to read, so I will republish it here, in full. My sources are Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, Jared Diamond's Collapse, Joseph Romm's Hell and High Water, Mike Tidwell's The Ravaging Tide, Daniel Quinn's My Ishmael, Thomas Homer-Dixon's Upside of Down, and recent posts on Dieoff.org, Culture Change and The Oil Drum. I steal, warp and expand on their ideas shamelessly. Here 'tis.
We are at the cusp of unprecidented changes. Our prevailing complacency is based on trust in science to give us the knowledge, markets to give us the incentives, leaders to give us the consensus and our past to give us the tools necessary. But we are trying to solve cascadingly complex problems with the cerebral cortices of only marginally-evolved great apes.
We have stolen fire from the Gods. They want it back.
Our brains, with linear thought processes, do not stop choosing complex solutions once they hit diminishing marginal returns. We simply cannot fathom why the problems continue becoming more complex. Earth's problems are non-linear, vastly interlinked and dynamic, and are not solvable by human brains.
We need to get over the idea that we are somehow in charge. By throwing new technology at our cascading ecological problems, they become ever more complex, and expensive to solve, until merely maintaining the status quo, never mind returning to a status quo ante, consumes a greater and greater percentage of one-time, irreplaceable resources.
Consider firewood. Our grandparents went back to it when the kerosene ran out. What will happen in China, India and other countries soon, and what will that mean for climate change? First they will burn more coal, and then the people will burn the forests.
Our simian brains are unable to comprehend concatenating layers of ecosystem complexity self-reinforcing in unanticipated, unprecidented, and unseen patterns. So we split atoms to warm ourselves. We splice genes to grow our corn.
The long-term costs of our technological solutions charade can be very high. Nuclear power, oxidized hydrocarbons and genetic engineering have a price tag which is unacceptably high when all the sums are done. And as more wealth is devoted to old problems, little is left to address new ones, which can lead to generalized dissatisfaction and a loss of legitimacy for modern societies. Our security bankrupted, we drift into fascism out of desparation. Our leaders come to maintain authority through the power of nightmares. Surrender your toothpaste or Al Zwahari (The Fox) will get you, but don't worry we'll get him first. Vote for our war or get an anthrax letter in the mail, but don't worry we will find a cure.
We keep doing things that make our lives progressively less resilient - we pile on more debt, extend our car-dependent tract housing over our finest crop lands, transfer our addictions to non-existent future sources of energy, and continue to become so specialized that we can't take care of ourselves when our machines fail.
What is needed is the re-education of our children for local and very basic self-sufficiency - only this will provide any semblance of resilience in the face of the collapse of complex systems and catastrophic climate change. And as the world warms, we will need far fewer people, far more trees.
Even that may not be enough, and life — all life — on our tiny blue oasis in space now hangs in the balance.
11 Nov 06:
I am back on the island, in my grass hut, starting next Monday.
While I enjoyed the review of Heat from Salon.com I still think Monbiot's recommendations about reversing climate change are way too little for where we find ourselves now. We need more trees, less people. Period.
I enjoyed (if that is the right word) So Long, and Thanks for All the Fishsticks and recommend it. Iceland has officially resumed whaling, but the whales checked out ahead of the announcement.
20 Oct 06:
Here are my predictions for bioregionalism penned for The Pulse (Shasta Bioregion) to be published in December. This piece reflects my first trip at the helm of the GoogleMars rover.
7 Oct 06:
Here is my review of Lovelock's Revenge of Gaia from The Permaculture Activist in June, 2006.
If you haven't got the woolsey.mp3 at http://www.nps.edu/cebrowski/woolsey.html, get that.
I also have been showing Robt Newman here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7374585792978336967 or just an audio excerpt http://www.robnewman.com/peakoil.mp3 for the Nano while biking to work or if you lack broadband.
note too the emergent Kortin/Macy meme. e.g.: http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1473, http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1463
check it out,
Albert
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