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Recrimination vs Innovation

Posted in Environment, Peak Oil by nickblack on December 25, 2009

Since Copenhagen I’ve been reading some of the recriminations. Naomi Klein, George Monbiot, Mark Lynas, Fred Pearce et al, have all had a go. It was Obama, it was the Chinese, it was Gordon Brown, it was batman, it was that ugly cow outside the café smoking a cigarette, it was that smug bastard banker, it was those corporate swine, it was… them. God damn it, it had to be someone! People, we don’t have time. Hoping that the powers of the status quo are going to be the ones leading the revolution is naïve, and we don’t have time for that kind of naivety either.

There was no government program to invent anything that revolutionized the 20th century. Not for internal combustion, electricity generation, radio, jet engines, penicillin, TV, computers, internet, you name it. It was people with creative imaginations, and it’s people with imagination that are igniting the next revolution. But we have a fantastic advantage over the people at the turn of the last century: nearly instant global communication. Ideas can propagate faster than at any other time. Which means that we can see technological and social change on a scale and at a speed we’ve never seen before, which considering the way things look is just as well. We need to think fast, act fast and communicate.

I was lucky enough to see an advance copy of The Road, today. You want the answer to continuing business as usual? Go see it, that’s the answer. And if that looks like a good way to live, stay on that sofa and don’t do a thing. If on the other hand it makes you weep, as it did me, then time to get cooking.

First of all read Lester Brown’s Plan B. It’s a good place to start, and that’s the point, starting. It’s free online for crying out loud, how much better deal do you need? And quit whinging about how it’s all over and how on the downside of peak oil we may as well just kill ourselves because it’s a rollercoaster ride back to the stone age and there’ll only be 10 of us left at the bottom. And the world will turn into a burning desert by the time they bring dessert. Because it isn’t going to happen. Because we’re going to change the way it all works. Starting now, because business as usual is over.

Why would we want business as usual? We’ve produced one of the ugliest civilizations ever, the kids are so bored they’re knifing each other in the streets, we’ve killed nearly all the trees on the planet, the only alternative to war is shopping, everyone’s closet is so full of cheap Chinese crap there’s barely room to move, we’re pregnant at 12, divorced at 13, and permanently unemployed by corporations that thought what the world needed was a parking lot the size of Russia full of cars no one wants to buy. What? It’s the perfect operation of a free market and we’re just ironing out the kinks? So that a miniscule percentage of the world’s population can sit on superyachts in Monaco with illiterate topshop models dressed up like Moldavian prostitutes? The worst part is that even the people on the superyachts are miserable. All this affluenza advertorial mumbo jumbo has got everyone suicidal. Dear turbo capitalist, buzz off, you’re fired.

But we’re not going to get anywhere with this Green Puritanism business either. We can do without the endless cries of mea culpa from the guilt ridden of the rich world, and the fire and brimstone rhetoric from the climate preachers. First of all, half the population has been bamboozled by the oil companies’ disinformation campaign into thinking climate change is some dopey evil scientist’s conspiracy. So they’re not taking it seriously no matter what you say. Second, to get anywhere you have to have something more interesting than the drumbeat of doom. It’s no good droning on about running out of oil and expecting people to get all perky. You want to know about oil, ask a Saudi.

In this case Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi oil minister in the 1970′s. His famous saying, ‘the stone age didn’t end because they ran out of stones’, is dead right. We’re not going to quit using oil because we’ve used it all, or all that we can get out of the ground economically. We’re going to quit using it because it’s a primitive way to get energy. Once upon a time it was the best we could do, fair enough. It had some unforeseen side effects, like bling bankers in lambos thinking they were cool and other lapses of taste. That and the carbon and the ugliness and the unliveable cities and the cancer and permanent war in the middle east. It’s okay, we’re over it, like big hair and shoulder pads. Oil is so last century. We are going to get our energy from Sun and Wind, and we’re going to use it intelligently. We’re going to do it in ten years and have a blast doing it.

First wind. I live more or less between London and Berkeley and I don’t spend a lot of time in Kansas, but I know three things about Kansas: it’s huge and it’s windy and not many people live there. Ditto other parts of the Midwest and Texas. We’re going to put up wind farms the size of Kansas and ship those electrons to the places people actually live on High Voltage Direct Current lines. HVDC is the business, or as they say in England, the dog’s bollocks. To be frank, why the English use the testicular architecture of the canine species as a metaphor for quality is a mystery to me. But that won’t stop Kansas being the Saudi Arabia of Wind Energy in 10 years. Or Texas. Or South Dakota. Or half a dozen other states.

And up north in Europe we can stop moaning about wind farms buggering up the scenery and get on with it. Put em out at sea. I know it’s already happening, but we need to get a move on here. There are still really inane problems with HVDC circuit breakers and network issues as well as some political problems with building a Europe wide intelligent grid so we can use electricity like grown ups. Well I’m prepared to bet that if we gave some people like say, the Claverton Group, one percent of the money Alistair Darling just gave the banks as a reward for bankrupting earth, we’d have the technical problems solved in a jiffy. As for the political arguments, let me put it this way: All you poli-sci econ majors shuffling round Brussels being important, if civilization collapses no one will care about the Norwegian national electricity pricing policy, will they?

Oh, and a word about buggering up the scenery. A lovely friend of mine bought me Edward Burtynsky’s new book Oil. Buy it and spend a warm evening by the fire in your second home in the Cotswolds, with the girlfriend Tamsin, looking at the ‘scenery’ in that book. Then email me and let me know all your problems with wind farms.

The Sun: Is it worth mentioning the fact that large areas of the US southwest are desert which is sunny a lot of the time? And that some of it isn’t really overdeveloped, not counting Las Vegas and Phoenix? So if you wanted to put up acres and acres of concentrating solar arrays it wouldn’t invade anyone’s personal space. Does this technology work you ask. On February 14th 1980, when my lovely wife Pepper Black (no, seriously) called me to let me know the contractions had started and she thought she might like to go to the hospital, I was on a roof installing a concentrating solar array in the San Fernando Valley. The sun worked in 1980, I assume it still does. To the tune of about 1300 watts a square meter. So instead of using all that metal to build cars and coal fired power plants and private planes and the rest of the left over 20th century rubbish we can build amazing solar arrays in the desert.

When we’re done in the US we’re going on holiday to the Mediterranean. Because it’s sunny there, just like California. So we’re going to build solar arrays there too. And, you got it, ship the electrons across Europe on HVDC. By the time we’ve done Spain, Italy, Greece, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and what’s left of the Levant if they can leave off killing each other for 5 minutes, we’ll have all we need for a while.

How will we afford all the resources we need now that the western world is broke? Lucky break, we have tons and tons of steel cunningly hidden as cars in those Russia sized parking lots. Time to recycle. And the workforce? What about we use some of those so-called ‘unemployed’ people who aren’t busy wasting their time in mindless office jobs and making those cars nobody wanted. And some of those kids who just laid out £20,000 for a degree with a street value of a cup of coffee. Right now they are all sitting at home on benefits looking at daytime TV which a)leads to brain damage and b) is a waste of valuable resources, namely talent and enthusiasm.

Dear Government People: pay them to do it. Hell, you’re already paying them to watch TV. Pay them a living wage and get them out there all over the US and Europe building and installing wind farms and solar arrays. Knock off £5000 of student loans for every year for the kids. Find out what they’re good at, what they want to learn, and set em to it. You’ll be amazed. Ship them all over the place, have them build new energy infrastructure, and they’ll have a great time.

Everyone seems mystified why the kids on the estates are killing one another. It’s because they’re bored, isolated, alienated, there’s nothing to do and nowhere to go and they’ve never met an adult who wasn’t a crack addict or a cop. Half of them have never seen the sea. How about we send them off to Spain, or the North Sea, or Kansas and have them work on real stuff, get some life skills that don’t involve murder, and maybe meet some adults who aren’t totally dysfunctional. Just an idea.

I said earlier that it wasn’t government programs that lead to inventions in the 20th century, and it’s true. It really is the imagination of creative people. But there is a place for government in here and it’s the ability to take on those new ideas and when circumstances require it mobilize millions of people and vast resources. And through the tax code give things a nudge in the right direction. Quit subsidizing carbon industries and start subsidizing wind and solar. I know all the free market people are howling. Excuse me, where do you think all those highways came from, private industry? No, it was a gigantic government subsidy for the car manufacturers in the 1950s. We did it for General Motors, we can do it for our kids.

Okay, now I’ve got a zillion tons of steel and a workforce of 7 million. No problem. We need about 2 million 2MW turbines and a billion square meters of solar arrays, (those are real numbers, except for the zillion) so get cracking. We need to do this over the next decade, which I know sounds like a rush, but hey we manage to make 65 million cars a year. You’ve heard of swords into ploughshares, well this is cars into windmills.

Pretty much the same set of ideas apply to pretty much the rest of the world. How hard is this? There are some technical issues, but nothing beyond the wit of man. We need some organization to get it all done properly. There are some political issues, and that’s the point – we need to stop thinking of narrow national interests here, because if our civilization goes tits up, there won’t be any national interests. There’ll be Viggo Mortensen and his shopping cart and you don’t want that.

Happy Christmas.

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Copenhagen

Posted in Environment, Peak Oil by nickblack on December 21, 2009

I’ve been trying not to say anything about Copenhagen. It’s cruel to make fun of so much hope betrayed. For three decades we’ve watched as one city after another has hosted these jamborees for politicians and assorted hangers-on. Geneva, Rio, Kyoto and half the other cities in the world capable of housing for a few days the tremendous circus of luggage and limos and fussy interns and security guards and banquets and chain link barricades and self congratulatory paeans to the impossible have had their hospitality insulted. And in the vanguard come the bespoke suited leaders, buffed and polished to within an inch of their lives. Leaders of nations, united nations, banks, oil cabals, international organizations of this and that ad infinitum.

And for nothing.

Thank goodness. Can you imagine the damage that might have been done to innovation had they passed some nonsense? We got away with that by the skin of our teeth.

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The Lie

Posted in Environment, Peak Oil by nickblack on December 16, 2009

Where was I? Oh yes, the lie. It’s not so much that the truth hurts, it’s that it’s so boring and pompous. Yes, the Cadillacs may go creeping now through the night and the poison gas, but that’s no way to encourage the young people. Endlessly telling them that the most ecologically sensible thing to do is commit suicide is no help. So we’re going to lie and see if we can turn it into the truth.

There are two competing trajectories, critical paths if you will, amongst the futurati. The most popular at the moment is 6 degrees of Apocalypse, you oil drunk fools, you will die horribly. The other, much less well known, is the Singularity: Humanity stands on the verge of the most thrilling period in its history. Now I ask you, which sounds like more fun?

In case you’ve been on a Buddhist retreat for the last 150 years in a Bhutanese cave I’ll run through the anthropogenic climate catastrophe for you. We were running out of whale oil and it looked grim, until Colonel Drake discovered real oil, which was a great relief to us, and the whales were thrilled to bits. We made Cadillacs and giant roads to drive ourselves to death on. We built towns in the middle of nowhere for no other reason than that we could. We found that Oil was the greatest aphrodisiac ever, so we all had way too many babies. We invented plastic which is shiny, cheap, lives forever and now we have a giant island of floating plastic rubbish in the Pacific the size of America. In the process we pumped billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and poisoned the ocean, which turns out to have been a mistake. Now it looks like the average temperature on earth will make Reykjavik look like St Tropez  and civilization will drown in warm plastic soup. Which sounds terrible of course.

Okay, now for the lie, the Singularity. It’s really about the convergence of computing, space travel, biology and nanotechnology. Or utilitarian transhumanism if you want to get philosophical about it. Here’s what happened – just the highlights.

Computing: In the second world war a gay English cryptographer called Alan invented computing. Which was pretty incredible considering he was busy beating the Nazis at the same time. After the war the English, rather than develop a gigantic new industry and make billions, hid the computer, called Colossus, in a colossal warehouse like the one where they put the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Indiana Jones and refused to talk about it. When they realized Alan was gay they took away his security clearance in case he became a communist and he was so miserable he committed suicide. Which tells you a lot about the English.

But luckily computing continued to develop in America and we got ENIAC, IBM and mainframes. The spooky part is that in the mid 50s some boys were born within about a year of one another: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Bill Joy, Scott McNealy and of course Steve Wozniak. Between them they gave us pretty much all the rest of computing, including the internet. Makes you wonder about cluster reincarnation. Nah, probably just a coincidence.

Anyhow by 1965 Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, realized that semiconductor capability was doubling about every two years. He called it Moore’s Law (no surprise there) and the amazing thing was that it seemed to work not just for semiconductor capability, but the whole course of technological development for the last 40 years. In a few years it’s very possible we’ll make a machine smarter than us. Not science fiction, but really.

Biology: Then shortly after the war four scientists at Cambridge discovered DNA. Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Franklin. There’s an argument that Rosalind Franklin was really behind it all, but we’ll never know. We all know how guys are about girl scientists. Suddenly we could understand everything Darwin had been trying to say: we had a language of biology – molecular biology – and it went ATCG. Everything changed in the lab. By 2000 we’d mapped the human genome, three years earlier than anyone thought possible. Thank you Mr. Venter, who is now finding genomes all over the world’s oceans on his giant yacht Sorcerer II.

Nano: In 1959 Richard Feynman gave a talk called There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom in which he said he saw no reason we couldn’t manipulate matter at the atomic and molecular level. Not only was he one of the funniest men in science, he was also one of the smartest. He’d discovered Quantum Electrodynamics so when he started talking about molecular size engineering no one just laughed him off. But it wasn’t until the invention of the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope that we could see what we were doing. By the 80s Eric Drexler had published Engines of Creation and really got down to some detail about how we could proceed. 20 years later and we can build things at the molecular scale. It’s called Nanotech because it deals with structures less than 100 nanometres in size. That’s 0.0000001m. We are on the verge of mastering matter. In 10 years we’ll be there.

And then there was space. Space got off to a good start and when I was a kid lots of us thought we were on our way. It wasn’t to be. Arthur Clarke was maybe the only one who foresaw that there would be a hiatus after the moon landing. Me? I was packed and ready. We were going to live in space stations at the Langrange points and go out into the Galaxy. It was disappointing, but in the meantime things were going on. We got very good at satellite technology and NASA sent probes out into the solar system. What most people don’t know is that in the background big things have been happening: space drive. One of the overwhelming problems with space travel is the time it takes. 2 years to Mars. But a Venezuelan Chinese astronaut, Frank Chang Diaz, has developed plasma drive – VASIMR – and it works. Okay, it’s not Warp Drive, but it’ll get us out there.

You see what’s going on here? While a lot of us were having sex in the back of the Cadillac, some of us were getting some work done. In the last 50 years we’ve discovered more than in centuries before. I talked the other day about how the human cognitive system doesn’t like a downer, well it has a worse problem. It doesn’t have a good intuitive grasp of exponential change. It’s an evolutionary thing. We’re built for a linear change environment, so exponential change sort of creeps up on us and then we get surprised.

For the last half century technology has been accelerating – but it’s been the slow acceleration. Exponential curves have this inflection point where it’s going along slowly getting bigger and then boom, it heads for the sky. That’s where we are, the inflection point. These technologies are at the point of converging and the rate of change becomes almost instantaneous. Science fiction stops being in the future.

So what was the lie? It wasn’t. I was kidding you.

But doesn’t that sound like more fun than hunkering down in the disused nuclear bunker with the last three cans of organic carrots?

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The Lords of the Aether

Posted in Environment, Peak Oil by nickblack on December 16, 2009

I am flattered and terrified that the Lords of the Aether appear to be reading my blog. How else to explain the immediate synchronicity, but to assume the intervention of those of the psychic realm? I’d no sooner posted a little piece on Simon Cowell’s phone-in democracy than here he was being interviewed by Newsnight’s favorite dominatrix Kirsty Wark. He actually intends to make a show in which “big issues” are discussed and voted on by the X Factor demographic. Can you imagine? In the last UK election 24 million people voted. In the last X Factor 20 million people voted. Which means he now has the ability to clone the entire parliamentary process and produce virtually instant referenda. The gothic edifice of representative democracy is technologically obsolete. In the days of the horse and carriage we had to have representatives because there was no other way to approximate the so called voice of the people. Now Simon can just ask the people and they can phone in the vote. Immigration, the War for Oil, the European Magisterium, The Underclass, The Overclass…sorted in no time. Go Simon.

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Apocalypse Now: The Musical

Posted in Environment, Peak Oil by nickblack on December 14, 2009

I know. The oil. The gas. The arctic, the albedo effect. The thermohaline. 386 ppm. 8 billion starving refugees by next week. I know. I spent years trying, unsuccessfully, to get a major documentary on peak oil made for PBS (American Public TV). I’ve met and interviewed most of the serious peak oil ecologists and geologists. Last night I sat watching Fora.tv (“the world is thinking”, oh really?). An hour long presentation on a tiny web screen by Dan Miller called A Really Inconvenient Truth. Yes, it is worse than Al Gore dared tell you. Yes, I already knew everything Dan had to tell me, as would most of the eco-oilers I know. We are like some goth punk death cult, avid for the new terror numbers of ice melt, storm surge or oil field decline.

Then, because of an unavoidable social context, I watched the penultimate final of X Factor. I watched for a while in sneering disbelief at the demented Karaoke of these guileless kids and Simon, their gurning svengali, all lit up like the Nuremberg Rally. I saw the crowds, crowds of 20 million – crowds for which any politician would sell their soul – cheering and screaming for their Stacey or Olly or little Joe. Every single ambulatory person in these kid’s hometown was on the street. This was the democracy they’d always wanted, the chance to vote on something they really cared about. The aspirational Viagra of instant celebrity, not just of the kids, but them, the hometown crew who have never ever known anyone on the telly before and now their hometown exists, and they exist, because of X.

And then the terrible truth dawned on me. We, the Collapse Literati, are doomed to write our pitiful blogs and make our tiny webscreen docs of impending Apocalypse to no avail whatever, unless we are simply entertaining ourselves. Al Gore had to train a legion of “Town Hall” speakers to spread the Inconvenient Truth. You see Simon Cowell wrestling with how to get his message out? No you don’t. Because one of the fundamental things about the human cognitive system is that it doesn’t like a downer. It likes up and preferably cute. It prefers bright lights shining on a perfect cleavage to earnest old men talking geology. I’ve watched for years as some of the most informed scientists and commentators on earth have put on their best suit and teeth to bore the living beejesus out of believers decked out in white people rasta hair and greenpeace fleeces, sitting on hard chairs in dank halls. For all the difference it made they could have been shooting heroin in the lavs.

The Association for the Study of Peak Oil, or ASPO, (pronounced Asspo, not a moment of marketing genius), began in 2000. Colin Campbell should be given the Nobel Save the Goddamn World Prize. I love these guys. They have done their best to make the world sit up and look at the oil horror movie coming to a planet near you. And Mike Ruppert, lovely guy, with his Collapse documentary. I hope it makes it to theatres. But do you for a moment think it’s going to have the impact, or the box office, of Roland Emmerich’s 2012? No, it won’t because neither Colin or Mike look as good as Amanda Peet in underwear.

My species likes stories where 5 good looking people save the world, or sing us to an anodyne consumer coma, or best of all, show us the perfect kitchen. They don’t like to be told no, you can’t have that, no it’s bad for you, no it will destroy the atmosphere and your children and grandchildren, forevermore, will live in a boiling desert next to a dead ocean. They don’t like to be told that now we’ve burned all the easy oil and had a damn good time whizzing up and down those freeways, it’s over and we may have to share the expensive stuff that’s left with everyone who didn’t get their go in a Cadillac yet, like the poor people from those countries we go to on holiday. How the hell is Cheryl Cole the hair extension replicant going to make that sound bouncy? Not even Cheryl could pull it off. (Yeah Cheryl, pull em off, nice one innit. Sorry. No disrespect intended.)

So we’ll have to lie.

We are never going to sell the great ruminant herd out there on the shopping Serengeti the idea that we’d better grow up and get responsible and treat the earth like the fragile little Christmas tree ornament it is. People don’t want to hear about efficiency, or cutting down, or organic carrot soufflé, or wearing a woolly over their lingerie because of green morality. Never going to sell.

So we’ll have to lie. Here we go.

We are moving into an unimaginable future of free energy, space exploration, bio and nano engineering, and artificial intelligence embedded throughout our lives. War, want, pestilence and decay will be things of the past. Old age and decrepitude will be remembered like images from a Breugel painting. Social networking will enable us to solve humanity’s problems in completely new ways. With 350,000,000 people working on a problem, be it poverty or middle east conflict, facebook will vote on the most democratic solution – X factor style. You can be part of the greatest experiment in history: to re-engineer the whole planet in 3 decades.

Details to follow. Stay tuned.

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Fractal Collapse

Posted in Environment, Peak Oil by nickblack on December 9, 2009

In Michael Caine’s new film Harry Brown, he plays an elderly ex-marine forced by the violence on his London housing estate to become a vigilante, killing the drug dealers and thugs that have made life impossible. It’s a grim depiction of modern Britain, and will resonate in the rest of Europe and the US. If the Elephant and Castle area of London, where the film is set, were a small state, would it qualify for the Failed State Index published every year by Foreign Policy? When we talk about collapse are we using data at too low a resolution? Suppose we started thinking about collapse at much higher resolution. Instead of measuring nation states, what about failed cities, failing counties and states (in the US sense of states). Would you rather live in one of the shining new developments in Bangalore or in the Toxteth area of Liverpool, recently cited as the most deprived area of Britain? Is Bangalore part of the developed world, and is Liverpool a failing city in the post development world? By only thinking in terms of collapsing nations we are getting a very skewed idea of the real condition of our global civilization. Not that it’s very encouraging even at nation state resolution. The interactive map in the Failed States Index 2009 is chilling.

The Failed States Index measures 12 indicators: Demographic Pressures, Refugees/IDPs, Group Grievance, Human Flight, Uneven Development, Economic Decline, Delegitimization of the State, Public Services, Human Rights, Security Apparatus, Factionalized Elites, and External Intervention. The British Department for Communities and Local Government used generally similar metrics: Crime, Education, Housing, Health, Income etc., and the ones that don’t directly apply, like Delegitimization of the State, would be applicable to the Elephant and Castle if we thought to ask. The US uses much the same metrics in its urban analysis. Does anyone really believe that those gangstas in Harry Brown consider for a moment the existence of legitimate governance in their lives? Maybe we’re measuring much the same things and what we’re seeing is that failure is occurring in a much more nuanced way than we imagine. I don’t have anything like the resources to collect and collate the kind of data sets to make an interactive map at the resolution of cities and counties, but I’m willing to bet it would show us a very different picture of the state of play. My point is that while we look at the Failed States Index it’s tempting to ignore the real condition of the so called rich countries.

If we can imagine a higher resolution world map of socio-economic and ecological conditions what detail might we see? On the one hand we’d see places in the developed world that are slipping out of development. They are becoming feral: once part of the domesticated planet, now slipping back to the wild. Basic infrastructure gone, population declining, local resources used or scattered, education and health of the remaining population retreating, mafia organizations replacing legitimate governance, post industrial pollution leaving some areas too toxic to live in or reclaim.

Although below the public radar, there are plans to manage this decline in many countries now. There is an acceptance that it is impossible to reverse this and it’s better to manage it. Look at the work of Karina Pallagst at UC Berkeley and SCiRN. It’s all about shrinking cities. But what does it say about the era of ‘progress’ we’ve believed for the best part of a century. Unlike previous eras in which cities shrunk and populations declined, the populations of the US and Europe aren’t declining. Rome’s population collapsed from around a million at the peak of its power, to 20,000 in the 14th Century. But a lot of that was centuries of famine topped off by the Black Death. There is (as yet) no Black Death in the US, so where are the new centres of population? What happened to the people from Flint, Michigan, from Detroit, from Baltimore?

They’ve moved to the US southwest – an ecological desert without the water and other resources to support anything like the present population after peak oil. Las Vegas is the fastest growing city in America. The same demographic shift is true in Europe. What were once thriving industrial cities in the north of France and England, for example, are now drifting towards wasteland. Property values have collapsed, people have left, then buildings are abandoned and set on fire. The result is that more and more people gravitate towards the larger cities: London, Paris, Hamburg, Munich etc. All of this internal migration starts to look startlingly like the FSI’s Internally Displaced Persons category. Any number of international agencies are sounding alarm bells about mass international migration, and internal migration in the developing world as a result of conflict and climate. I haven’t seen much in the way of alarm at the collapse in the formerly industrial developed world.

My point is that the pattern of collapse we are seeing in the developing world is increasingly mirrored in the developed world. We are thinking about collapse in a “them over there in those other countries” kind of way. It is partially a function of the way we gather data and partially because the political elite of the developed world has to maintain a media storm of positive spin, which is getting more difficult every day in the face of the facts. What we are actually seeing is an increasingly fragmented world map of wealth and resource distribution, with little reference to national boundaries. What is problematic is that I don’t see any sign in the developed world of alarm at this fragmentation.

Perhaps what we will see as the financial crisis continues is a truly new world order in which the old divisions of developed vs developing world give way to a fragmented map of rich pockets surrounded by vast areas of poverty and decline – like the medieval republics of post Roman Europe as famine and war take their toll and populations decline. Only this would be on an unimaginable global scale. Maybe we’d better start imagining it.

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