2010: The Next Leg Down
Before I go off on my transatlantic sailing trip next week I thought I’d make some forecasts for 2010: The next leg down.
Oil and Globalization: First thing is our reaction to the arrival of triple digit oil prices. Right now oil is at $80. I’m not expecting a miraculous recovery in demand, but a political crisis could easily drive prices into triple digits. If so, whether or not you actually believed the news tripe about recovery, oil over $100/barrel will begin the next leg of the post peak oil crisis. Right on schedule. The same process will be broadly applicable to most of Western Europe, the US and the rest of the developed world, but my immediate concern is Britain. This is the year when transport begins to trump labour arbitrage and the global part of globalization starts to look shaky.
On the face of it, this is disastrous. The OECD industries have come to rely on almost completely on foreign manufacturing sources, obviously for the most part China. But in fact it’s a tremendous opportunity, because except for bankers and entertainers, globalization has been a disaster for wage earners. The myth of the service economy has run its course. It was largely an artefact of cheap oil. It brought cheap goods, but the side effects have been an ecological horror. According to a recent report in the Guardian, major companies caused $2 trillion worth of environmental damage just in 2008.
Sir Richard, my new best friend: Probably the most important signal for Britain is Sir Richard Branson’s discovery of peak oil. Dollar short and a day late, but he may be the person to make it mainstream in Britain. He’ll be our Al Gore. It’s a pity that Matt Simmons, Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrere, and all the rest of the ASPO folk couldn’t get any traction for the last decade. Never mind, now that Sir Richard has noticed and the Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security has been formed at the Royal Society finally we’ll see some righteous panic.
Re-Industrialization: I’m expecting to see talk of the rapid re-industrialization of Britain. The flag wavers for the service economy will be ushered off the stage. Despite being the economic darlings of the last decade or two, suddenly they’ll be seen as hopelessly out of touch. Start watching for some new clever marketing speak. Right now in glass walled offices with aluminium furniture, there are eager young marketing drones with perfect complexions, dreaming up the sound bites for the new new clean energy renaissance: Social enterprise resourcing , Clean Tech revolution, Cloudsourced inventory control, AgroUrbanOrganic complex …it’ll be some such jabber. Especially watch for UrbanFoodCommunities.com and “Liveability.” And yes, I have trademarked all these buzzwords, so don’t even think about it, nasty little marketing children.
What it means is that if the bloody Chinese are too far away to make all our stuff we’ll have to remember how to do it ourselves.
Does that mean I’ll have to get mud on my Vivien Westwood?
Yes darling, I’m afraid it does.
Nukes: I’m expecting some real surprises around nuclear energy. I remember talking to Kjell Aleklett in 2003 about the nuclear renaissance. This is one of those issues that gets normally polite ecology people at each other’s throats. Whether or not nuclear energy has an EROEI to make it worth building is one thing, but the politics will be interesting. The current British Government is talking about going from 19% to 40% electricity from nukes in 20 years. I stand in awe of the nuclear energy PR machine that has completely turned the government’s opinion round from 2003 to 2006. Now watch for the demonstrations.
Immigration is going to hit the big time: 2010 will be a tipping point in the collapse of Africa and the mass migration into Europe. For the last 4 decades, more or less since the independence of the last colonies, there’s been a tragic failure of Africa to adapt. As William Easterly puts it, “Spending $2.3 trillion (measured in today’s dollars) in aid over the past five decades has left the most aid-intensive regions, like Africa, wallowing in continued stagnation; it’s fair to say this approach has not been a great success.” A mixture of tribal identity, corruption, over population, infrastructure and ecological collapse combined with increasingly severe climate effects have initiated the collapse of sub Saharan Africa. The collapse seems to be propagating rapidly out of the Horn, and accelerating. The Africans are doing what populations always do in the face of collapse. They die or leave. In this case the death toll will make the term “Biblical” obsolete, by an order of magnitude.
It’s the leaving that’s the problem for Europe. The population of sub Saharan Africa and Europe are roughly the same; something over 800 million. Europe is already far past carrying capacity, probably by a factor of two, like Britain. The transport and agricultural infrastructure, health systems, education systems and societies of Europe cannot successfully cope with such an influx and remain viable.
I’m not suggesting for a moment that Africa is the sole source of illegal migration into Europe. If only. But Africa seems to me to be in the worst shape. Add in the populations of failing countries in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and the Indian subcontinent from which migrants will flood into Europe and the total is well over a 1.5 billion.
The cracks are beginning to show. In Italy last month there was a riot in Rosarno in which illegal immigrants from set fire to cars and shops. Italy’s demographic is changing very rapidly. At least 7% of the population, not counting illegal immigrants is now non-Italian. 1 in 6 babies is born to a non-Italian. Italians are about to wake up to the permanent changes in their country. I expect some desperate headlines as we head into summer. Naturally the cry of ‘racism’ will be the sure sign of backlash.
In 1997, the number of foreigners living in Spain was 500,000. In 2008 it was 5.3 million. That is an order of magnitude difference. In Catalonia 15% of the population is foreign born. The Spanish are now beginning to realize the full effects of such high levels of immigration on its school system.
In Greece, which is already close to financial meltdown, has a non-Greek population of 10%. Until recently most of that influx came from Balkan states, but as Africa’s situation deteriorates more of the illegal immigrants will come from Africa. Aside from street riots in Greece over the economy, expect a backlash over immigration.
The cultural, religious and ethnic divides in the new Europe have been ignored by a generation of politicians. There is even a rumour in Britain that the Labour party secretly decided to allow unlimited immigration to Britain during its tenure since they thought immigrants would be more likely to vote Labour in future. For the past decade it’s been almost impossible to talk about immigration without being silenced by cries of racism. I’d expect this debate to get a lot more difficult in 2010. For better or worse, Europe is now a fundamentally different place demographically than it was 10 years ago. How it fares in the 21st century with this starting population is anyone’s guess, but if history is any guide balkanization is a lot more likely than peaceful integration. I wish there was something vaguely humorous about this whole thing, but I can’t see it.
Fighting in the street: Whole areas of Britain, Europe and the US have fallen into decay. Along with it communities have been destroyed, and we are left with a vast underclass living on benefits. Add to that the tensions in the middle classes as the last of the savings dribble away. People can generally last about 3 years if they’ve got some savings, but now it’s down to the dregs. Living on the kid’s education money and worrying about losing the house. The last shops in the high street boarded up. No room at university for the kids anyway – and nowhere for them to go. 50% unemployment in the under 25s. The austerity measures announced from the balcony of some grand old palace by some unelected Brussels apparatchik with a bad comb over. The human mind can only stand so much. It’s impossible to predict the spark, but if it’s an el Nino hot summer, look for trouble in the streets.
Weather: I know that economists are the only profession with a worse record than weather forecasters, nonetheless I’m going to chance my arm. The la Nina conditions of the last couple of years have given way to a new el Nino. If it persists into summer 2010, as looks likely, we may be getting some exciting weather. As I said above, if it results in a very hot summer look out. Angry unemployed people and 40°c are a bad combination.
War: Rule number 1. Do not under any circumstances allow yourself to be drawn into an endless campaign in Asia. You are not that rich. No empire ever was, nor ever will be. You are thinking in years. They are thinking in centuries. From Babylon, with love, Alex@Macedon.
Anyone got a film crew they’re not using, I’ve got the oil film script re-done. Now I’m going to cross an ocean under sail for the first time. Wish me luck.
Requiem for a Dream
It was a very peculiar experience these last few days to live without a computer. The old mac’s transformer popped and she died, sudden as a heart attack. None of the gradual dementia of malware decaying OS, just goodnight. Naturally there followed the reincarnation ritual of data transfer to the gleaming new imac. And the new printer because the perfectly serviceable HP isn’t supported by OSX 10.6. When is the computer industry going to get off its disposable styrofoam cup version of tech? But it doesn’t matter really. Because by the time I got it all sorted Europe was having a nervous breakdown.
Old Europa is crumbling. That EU lobbyist, self-congratulatory ‘end of history’ marketing speak never could quite paper over the cracks of language and ancient wars. They wanted it to be a rerun of American history, but the history of Europe is a different beast. Free trade? Sure, I like olive oil and German cars as much as anyone. But a puzzle palace in Brussels making laws for all, accountable to none? Not really.
There is something splendid about the fact that it’s Greece where the end began. Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to the laws of finance we lie. That’s what we need: 300 sweaty men in leather jock straps to hold the bond market at bay. Will the Germans really be willing, or able, to support 11 million Greeks? So who will take care of the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Italians, the Irish…the British? Because that’s a lot of people and a lot of money. How the euro zone survives this without default is anyone’s guess, but I’d expect people in the streets before too long.
What no one seems willing to bring up is the possibility that growth may not be possible while oil is near $80/barrel. According to the Independent on the 11th of February, soon we’ll be looking back at $80 with nostalgia. All that’s left to do is watch as the people who’ve grown used to cheap money and oil learn to live with expensive money and oil.
Suppose it’s not about the bankers wondering how to get out before the roof caves in. Suppose it’s about the fact that the EU happened to be one of those ideas that came to be popular during the era of cheap oil, and now it’s obsolete because it belongs to a resource environment that no longer exists. I’m sure that some sort of smoke and mirrors deal will be figured out to keep it going for a while. But in the event of a major oil spike it will simply be impossible to find all the money needed to bail out 5, 6 countries. Who will be buying all this new sovereign debt: China? And this is just at the moment when all the headlines were trying to buck everyone up on the idea we were headed out of recovery because all the subprime mortgage lending in the US had been handled. Do you believe that the problems in Greece and Portugal were the direct result of mortgage dealers misbehaving in Cleveland?
Meanwhile I’ve been wondering about the numbers on the “recovery.” It seems as if more than half of the supposed growth over the last quarter is inventory rebuilding, which is normal, but the next part that has to happen is that the new inventory has to be bought. But consumer spending isn’t improving, it’s declining. So the businesses that are buying inventory will adjust to new lower levels of consumption. People are busy paying down debt and looking for work. If people in Europe and the US aren’t buying then China isn’t selling. China’s manufacturing miracle was based on transport being cheap. Now it isn’t, and it’s unlikely that it will ever be again. It looks as if the price of fuel will reverse 3 decades of trade liberalization. In the absence of a new technology boom, and with unemployment staying high and growing, and governments still trying to borrow their way out of a debt crisis it looks like a fake recovery to me.
What’s happening is that the service economy which has been the central mythology of the cheap oil era in Europe and the US is done. But like all our favorite myths, it takes a while to wake up to the truth. There is simply not enough productive capacity left in Europe to support the population at current standards without cheap oil and gas. The income from Tourism and coffee bars just isn’t going to crack it.
In the new local world Europe has to figure out how to get its hands on energy. Because the good folk of Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Russia are using their own oil and gas at unprecedented rates. At a time when the bank vaults of Europe are full of bad paper we need a massive and immediate wartime level energy infrastructure mobilization. An intelligent HVDC Europe wide grid for a start, with inputs from all over, including French nukes. It’s the only way that the Europeans are going to keep things running.
It’s an unfortunate fact of human history that this kind of paradigmatic change seldom, if ever, comes without blood in the streets.
There is a chance we can make a break with history here. We’re at a critical juncture. We cannot afford to allow ourselves the luxury of civil war and social breakdown because our model of global capitalism is obsolete. One of the things we’ve done in our race to build this Utopia is use up or waste a good portion of the world’s rare resources. Sir David King, who knows a thing or two about this business, is trying to get people to understand that we are going to be running short of Helium, Platinum, Copper, Tin, Neodymium, and a host of rare earth metals, before mid century. Contrary to the economist’s idea of substitution, there are some things that we can’t substitute for. It reminds me of that Fred Hoyle quote from 1964:
“It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology.
This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only.”
What a shame it would be if it turned out we had blown our one chance at developing intelligence for this entire solar system because we were too busy swanning around in luxury cars right before the lights went out.
No Country for Old Men
What shall we do about the demographics in Britain – on the one hand Harriet Harman is telling us that people in their 60s and 70s should continue working to help the country recover from recession. On the other, Martin Amis is telling us to kill ourselves in street corner euthanasia booths because the “silver tsunami” will destroy the country. I assume he is planning on recycling all those wonderful red public telephone boxes we no longer use into euthanasia booths. It’ll be like the Matrix; you stagger down to the telephone box on your Zimmer frame, go in and pick up the fashionably retro receiver and you’re sucked out of existence. Of course Harriet’s version is even more sci-fi. Has no one thought to tell her that the unemployment levels for those over 50 are hilarious and that the corporate world hasn’t hired anyone over 35 since records began? So which is it, work until you die and save the country from a fate worse than death or go and kill yourself as rapidly as possible? For obvious reasons you can’t have it both ways.
Let’s go with Harriet’s version because one of the things Martin’s forgotten is that some old people remember how to do all kinds of things and when they go that knowledge goes with them. We don’t know which skills, or what knowledge our kids will need, so it’s probably best to get as much of it passed on as we can manage. You know how it is, the one thing you didn’t think was interesting, and the last woman who remembers how to do it goes to the euthanasia booth and bam, it turns out to be the thing that would have saved the species. How annoying would that be for the last three people alive? Right now I know for a fact there’s a guy called Terry Davis who lives in a little village in Shropshire. Terry is the last man in Britain who knows how to make a horse collar. Terry is 60 and he works alone. Do we really want to bet that we will never need to plough with horses again? Ever? Really?
Yeah I know, horse collars. I’ve got to be kidding. Of course I am, don’t be daft, this is the modern world. I’m kidding like the survey this week that told us that more than a quarter of British kids think oats grow on trees and bacon comes from sheep. Hell, 17% of kids and adults thought eggs were a big part of a bread recipe. Uh oh, hold that euthanasia booth. Grandma, don’t go! We don’t know how to bake a loaf of bread.
Enough of all this nostalgia nonsense. We get enough of that on the BBC with those same half-dozen famous old white guys wandering over hill and dale in their swishy north face anoraks saying ‘isn’t it lovely’ to every abandoned Victorian engineering marvel. No one under 30’s got any idea what they’re on about. What about modern? Like wind turbines, that’s modern; virtually avant-garde. We don’t make any. The skills shortage is so severe after 20 years of a service economy that all the turbines for the new offshore farms will be made in Denmark or Germany. Isambard Kingdom Brunel is spinning in his grave like a bloody turbine.
Vernacular education. That’s what I’ve got in mind. Before some of these folks go to the euthanasia booth, it might be a good idea to see if they’d pass some knowledge on. The way they would have if there were still communities built round common human interests, rather than your facebook friends or the kind of logos you wear. I’d hate to think of a whole range of skills disappearing, like biodiversity loss, it’s a kind of extinction. It may be a rough century and we need to send the kids off with more than an iphone and plastic lunch box.
Or to put it another way:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
— Robert Heinlein
So who’s going to tell em?
According to the news, no one. The universities – you know the places we train the next generation to push into the future –are now having their funding slashed. And you know who’s making the cuts? Boomers. The very people who benefited from grammar schools and FREE university education. Now they’ve got the big house and the cool job at the think tank, it’s time to screw the kids.
Maybe Martin’s right after all.
The Local
First – Everyone has to watch this video. That’s an order!
You know, it’s funny how things work. Last week I asked for a new paradigm, or at least I wanted to start thinking about how it might look, and bingo, there it was. Jeff Rubin, the former chief economist at CIBC, has outlined it – and it’s what a great many of us have been arguing about for a long time: the end of globalization and the re-localizing of the economy. The difference is that Mr. Rubin is a mainstream economist, so it’s harder to dismiss his analysis.
Perhaps the most important point he’s making is the time factor. This is not something that’s a decade out. He’s estimating triple digit oil prices about 15 months away, with luck. It is almost inconceivable that any significant changes can be made in that time, even if his analysis is believed by policy makers and the markets. As Rubin points out, if the gains of labour arbitrage are eclipsed by the costs of transport – “Distance is Money” – then the entire edifice of globalization collapses rapidly.
As I was saying in Obsolete Paradigms, we need to start acting as if the laws of physics are true, by which I meant full cost accounting (The definitions here can be confusing. I mean accounting that includes the true cost of all resources used, ecological footprint if you like) and the end of artificial externalities. Full cost accounting will force our current model of capitalism to adapt. Certainly the model we’ve used for the last quarter century is, quite literally, bankrupt. Western Europe and the US will have to re-localize at an unprecedented rate. I think he’s right, but my concern is whether or not these economies can adapt fast enough or go through a severe depression towards a new structure.
The western version of globalization, the service economy – or what he calls the barista economy – is obsolete. The entire range of skills of the blue collar world, you know, people making stuff, which most economists have written off, will have to come back. Did any of us really think we were going to run a world class economy on coffee shops and back rubs?
The problems we have with rapid re-localization was driven home to me by an article in the Evening Standard, January 21. Britain is building the world’s largest offshore wind farm, called the London Array, 20 km off the Essex coast in the Thames estuary. You would think it would be a great opportunity for British firms and engineers. Not so. The majority of the contracts to build the London Array are going overseas. Britain has neither the skills nor the manufacturing base to produce the turbines. The major contracts have gone to Dong Energy of Denmark, E.ON of Germany, and Masdar of Abu Dabhi. This is no criticism of those companies. I was in Denmark recently and what they’ve done with wind power in just a few years is extraordinary. It is, however, an appalling indictment of the government’s and British industry’s short sightedness. Britain is the windiest country in Europe and the need for alternate energy sources has been obvious for years. Now with oil prices set to rise to above $100 if Rubin is right, we find ourselves with an army of media studies graduates and baristas to build a new grid for the 21st century.
I said in Recrimination vs Innovation on Christmas day, we have a workforce, what we desperately lack is leadership. These young people need new skills, they need new opportunity, and they don’t need to be burdened with £20,000 for a degree in something they’ll never get a job doing. This is not impossible, but it’s not trivial either. Danny Stevens of the Environmental Industries Commission has called for the Government to establish a National Environmental Skills Academy. I couldn’t agree more, but I would argue it’s on too small a scale. We need to mobilize this generation on a scale that hasn’t been contemplated since WWII. Since the war, Britain has allowed its position as a world leader in science and technology to slip away, preferring to rely on wage arbitrage and cheap transport to support a version of globalization which has benefited a tiny minority, while leaving the economy as a whole in ruins. That flapping you hear is the vultures coming home to roost.
So I’d like to ask the government to immediately establish a British Environmental Engineering Corps, (being that this is Britain I wanted to make the acronym come out as BEER, but Regiment seemed a bit severe), which will train people, for free, forgive the student debts they already have, and go about building a new energy infrastructure, reconfiguring our cities so that they are sustainable and liveable, and making the transportation infrastructure as efficient as the Japanese. In 10 years. Get a move on.
Obsolete Paradigms
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller
A couple of friends have kindly pointed out that it might be possible to interpret my last post – Ghost Acreage and British Immigration – as suggesting that stopping immigration would effectively solve the population problem in Britain. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s like that old adage; if you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. The real task will be to get population down this century to manageable levels without chaos. Chaos is the real enemy. The point I was making is that when politicians talk about ecology in a country at twice carrying capacity, without mentioning immigration, it’s inherently hypocritical.
There is another version of ghost acreage that is actually much scarier. It’s sometimes called phantom acreage and means the extra energy provided by fossil fuels and its effect on population. We have relied on fossil fuels to change our environment so that it will support many times the historical world population. But now we are bumping up against hard limits in food supply, water, a host of critical metals and gases, fish stocks, and of course fossil fuels. So we’ve set ourselves up for overshoot. The issue in Britain, and for the rest of Europe, is how to manage population so that overshoot doesn’t cause a chaotic crash. To my knowledge no civilization, in the 69 odd empires so far, has managed it. They just collapsed. I have started to see some alarmed commentary on the ominous figure of 70 million UK population, so perhaps there’s hope that finally it’s sinking in.
Which brings me to my subject: Obsolete Paradigms.
I know that numbers of ecologically minded folk have started to run for the hills, or its equivalent, the transition movement. They argue that it’s already too late to avoid a crash for many parts of the world and it’s wisest to adapt our small towns, like Totnes, to a post fossil fuel community. Well…yes and no. There are two problems with this approach. One is that if things do really collapse, then Totnes isn’t going to be some safe haven. That is unless the good folk of Totnes are considerably better armed than I thought. Two is that it assumes that we are at the end of innovation, and I disagree completely. We are on the cusp of an era of innovation unique in our history. What’s hanging us up is not so much carbon fuels and climate chaos as it is an obsolete paradigm.
The usage of the word Paradigm has changed significantly over the last century, but here I mean it as the axiomatic epistemological framework of a culture. I’m taking it from Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shift in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but not just applied to science. I mean the entire paradigm of the way we operate on earth.
The one we have right now is cobbled together from bits of desert religions and some economic ideologies based on an early and tragically misinformed interpretation of Darwinian evolution. Its main weakness is that it requires infinite resources and space. On the one hand you’ve got ‘go forth and multiply’ and on the other you’ve got ‘don’t worry when it (whatever it is) runs out or gets too expensive we’ll substitute something else for it.’ Both ideas are idiotic in a closed environment. So we need to get rid of it, as Bucky says, not by fighting it, but by making it obsolete.
We need a new framework. Let’s see if we can hack one out on the fly. We’ll need some basic rules. To make it more interesting we can make it a test. We’ll call it the intelligent species test. If you’re too dumb to manage your environment and population you go extinct.
Axioms of a New World Order:
1. All species that reproduce without limit in a closed environment die in their own poisons. I like this one because of its elegant simplicity. Take your pick, either you set a limit on your reproduction or you make earth an open system, which means you’re going to have to figure out space colonization. Or a bit of both?
2. The laws of thermodynamics are true. There’s no work around. That’s called magic, including those desert religions, and much as I love Harry Potter movies, it’s made up. Have you ever noticed that’s what all magic is about? Some sort of exception to the laws of thermodynamics. Only we’re making up rules for a real planet here, so no cheating.
3. Pollution is not intelligent design, it’s a complete failure of design – a failure of the imagination. Pollution is not waste. It is useful chemicals in the wrong place in the wrong concentrations. It’s our job to manage our chemical and metallurgical environment. Disposable? You live in a closed system dope. (Talking of closed systems did you see the news about the urine clogging up the water recycling on the space station?)
4. Adapt or die. Adaptation is time dependent. Whether we’re talking about a species or infrastructure, it all takes time. We can probably adjust to global average temperatures on a century timescale. On a decade timescale we won’t.
5. Complexity theory is true. Complex systems tend toward the fragile, and once their equilibrium is nudged by some enthusiast with a hammer they can get very unpredictable. Respect recursive environments, especially if you live in one.
That’ll do for a start.
I don’t think there’s much to do about the religions, unless there’s some mass spontaneous waking up experience round the corner. I’m stumped. About capitalism I’m more hopeful. Suppose it’s not the be all and end all of human economic organization? Why are we all so attached to it? I understand if you’re one of the 1% of the population that’s really profited from it, but I don’t understand all the enthusiasm from the 99% who didn’t. The Gini Coefficient numbers on most of the developed world outside Scandinavia are hilarious. It’s virtually feudal.
We can start by including Gini Coefficient in all national economic calculations, in the same way we include inflation etc. Scandinavia looks like it does okay with .25! And we go to full cost accounting, no artificial externalities. No, Virginia, carbon isn’t free. None of this cap and trade malarkey. You smoke it, you pay for it. Why are we subsidizing the use of fossil fuels? How is it that international aviation fuel isn’t taxed, but ground transportation fuel is? Let’s tax aviation fuel and subsidize solar and wind power. Subsidize disaster preparedness – think Haiti.
None of this is particularly threatening as far as I can see.
Recrimination vs Innovation
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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