Food Security and Peak Oil

SUBHEAD: Our modern industrial food system is fragile, perilously complex, and ultimately doomed. Image above: Demonstration with sign "Nature Doesn't Do Bail-Outs". By Jason Bradford on 4 March 2010 in The Oil Drum - (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6246#more)

The Economy and Mother Nature

I want you all to imagine Mother Nature, in the personified sense. Now, and I realize this may be a stretch, think of her also as a banker, perhaps a matronly Ben Bernanke. Got that image in your head? Okay…

Several generations ago our forefathers walk into “Bank of Nature” and get a loan. Mother Nature approves our loan and offers us plenty of credit. Our ancestors are now endowed with the riches of ancient forests, prolific fisheries, fertile topsoil, clean water, concentrated mineral ores, vast reserves of fossil fuels, and a splendidly stable climate. These assets, Mother Nature’s credit slip, are the source of our wealth and comfort. Every widget, gizmo, thing-a-majig, do-dad, wach-a-macall-it and Winnebago produced in our factories, sold in our stores, stuffed in our closets, piled in our landfills and spilled in our waters originated as a loan from Bank of Nature.

Why are we having economic troubles? Because loans, as we are now discovering, are not just slips of credit, they also come with debt. While we gleefully liquidated the Natural Capital loan Mother Nature approved for us, we failed to develop a business plan that could pay back the debt. This ecological debt is the underlying drag on our financial system.

What this means, practically, is that as soon as the economy tries to heat up again, which we like to call increasing DEMAND, it will be capped on the knees by the henchmen Mother Nature hired. She will not extend us any more credit since we have done a poor job with the first loan. If you are unclear about what I mean here, I’ll explain this a bit more when I talk specifically about oil.

I have seen pictures of some great protest signs over the past couple of years that state this very succinctly: "Nature doesn’t do bailouts". This is why the current policy of all central banks and governments to deal with the financial crisis, which is to essentially create and inject more money into the system, has no chance of success. More money doesn’t solve an ecological debt crisis, because money is a claim on resources and not worth anything by itself.

Oil is Special

Okay, now I want to highlight the special role of oil in our economy.

Over the recent decades, we have built what is called a “globalized economy” where materials, labor and services are readily exchanged across the globe. This feat has only been possible due to cheap oil. The “cheapness” is key. Transportation costs are assumed to be only a small part of doing business.

Some economists have calculated what is called the Goldilocks Zone for oil prices. Below $70 per barrel and it makes no sense for oil companies to explore and develop new supplies, while prices above $80 per barrel lead to a curtailing of demand, basically cutting off prospects for U.S. economic growth. And as mature oil fields deplete, the price to explore and develop new oil wells goes higher than $70 per barrel, essentially locking the U.S. into economic stagnation.

Step back for a moment and think about how potent and special oil is. Oil is highly energy dense and easily portable. A gallon of oil contains enough energy to do the work of hundreds of people simultaneously or a single person for hundreds of hours. You can drive a 4000 lb car at great velocity for tens of miles on a gallon of gasoline. Try pushing a car that distance (but before doing so, ask your doctor if that’s okay).

So when you hear the term peak oil, what does that mean? Peak oil is simply the point in time when the global supply of oil stops growing. Peak oil is not a theory, but an historic fact for 2/3 of oil producing countries, including the United States, which peaked in 1970.

What we experience is less supply leading to a spike in prices. High oil prices then choke off economic growth because our globalized economy is structurally reliant on cheap oil. And without economic growth loans are not paid back sufficiently and a financial crisis ensues.

This is essentially what happened between 2005 and 2008. We had a credit bubble because of lax lending policies PLUS a flattening of oil production at the same time.

Connecting to Food Security

Okay, so what does this have to do with food security?

1. Globalization and cheap energy led to the development of centralized processing and distribution channels, with what is termed “just in time delivery systems.” The typical grocery store, for example, only has a 3 day supply of food on the shelves, and relies on daily trucking from distance warehouses to restock basic supplies. An oil supply shock would disrupt getting food to stores.
2. Because of cheap and reliable transportation, it has been possible for entire agricultural regions to become highly specialized in production for export. So the Willamette Valley evolved into a grass seed capital, which replaced a diversified farm economy that contributed significantly to local consumption. Since we no longer have the local farms feeding us, we depend on global trade for basic sustenance.
3. Farming methods themselves rely on cheap energy, such as tractor fuel and imported fertilizers. Beyond the farm energy is used extensively in processing, distribution, storage and cooking. All told, about 7 calories of fossil fuel go into each calorie of food we eat.
4. Modern farming is highly connected to the financial system. A depressed economy makes credit scare. Many farms that are in debt and require bank credit to operate will likely go out of business. And some financing is going to be needed to help farms restructure for the transition towards new crops, new methods, and new markets.

What to Do

This brings me to the question of “What to do?”

I’ll first address this towards individual persons and families. As energy flows to society decline, our social systems will become less complex structurally, but our daily lives more complex. What I mean by this is that we will become less of “specialized cogs in a big machine” and instead have to take on more diverse, practical, and flexible roles.

The kinds of work we do will shift too. Consider whether you specialize in a “nice to have job” or a “need to have job”. Jobs are going to be more and more about securing basic needs, such as food, water, shelter, health, and security. Fewer paid jobs will be available. This will require people to rely more on the informal economy, which means getting paid through reciprocal exchange relationships. Start by getting to know your neighbors, joining social networks, and developing a few basic skills, such as gardening, bike repair, and inexpensive health care.

As our formal economy declines more work will be done in the informal economy, as is true now in so-called developing countries. Graph from Post Peak Living based on World Bank data.

This all may sound extreme, but it is already the reality for a growing subpopulation of tens of millions of Americans, and most of the 6.7 billion humans on the planet.

Now I’ll talk about what I’d like to see society do. Instead of thinking about policies and programs, I will talk about values and paradigms.

Primarily we need to recognize that the environment is our primary form of wealth. Bank of Nature, not Goldman Sachs or the Federal Reserve, is our master. It is far more important for us to pay back our ecological debts since these are non-negotiable, whereas financial ones are among people and can be forgiven. If you manage public funds, always ask whether allocating money is going to rebuild natural capital or further its liquidation.

I’d like to see community leaders ask people to consider themselves as contributors rather than consumers. The whole consumer identity should become passé. We will thrive by creating an ecological identity, which is a deep appreciation for our relatedness and absolute interdependence with other people, other forms of life on this planet, and the fundamental forces of sunshine and geology.

What I have said may provoke anxiety, and is certainly an immense undertaking, but ultimately we have no choice so let’s not whine and delay. Let’s take it on as a great adventure, a thrilling challenge. Our success or failure is going to hinge on our attitude. We need to take control of the circumstances and become active participants in transition. I can assure you that doing so is tremendously energizing, healthy, and rewarding in so many ways.

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The Century of Famine

SUBHEAD: Without ample, free-flowing petroleum, it will not be possible to support a population of several billion for long. Image above: Photo op of Mau leading the 1958 agrarian initiative "The Great Leap Forward". From (http://dianepernet.typepad.com/diane/2008/10/a-major-mao-mom.html) By Peter Goodchild on 2 March 2010 in Culture Change - (http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=610&Itemid=1) Humanity has struggled to survive through the millennia in terms of balancing population size with food supply. The same is true now, but population numbers have been soaring for over a century. The limiting factor has been hidden, but this factor -- oil and natural gas(or petroleum) -- is close to or beyond its peak extraction. Without ample, free-flowing petroleum, it will not be possible to support a population of several billion for long.

Famine caused by petroleum supply failure alone will result in about 2.5 billion above-normal deaths before the year 2050; lost and averted births will amount to roughly an equal number.

In terms of its effects on daily human life, the most significant aspect of fossil-fuel depletion will be the lack of food. “Peak oil” is basically “peak food.” Modern agriculture is highly dependent on fossil fuels for fertilizers (the Haber‑Bosch process combines natural gas with atmospheric nitrogen to produce nitrogen fertilizer), pesticides, and the operation of machines for irrigation, harvesting, processing, and transportation.

Without fossil fuels, modern methods of food production will disappear, and crop yields will be far less than at present. Crop yields are far lower in societies that do not have fossil fuels or modern machinery. We should therefore have no illusions that several billion humans can be fed by “organic gardening” or anything else of that nature.

The Green Revolution involved, among other things, the development of higher-yielding crops. These new varieties, however, could be grown only with large inputs of fertilizer and pesticides, all of which required fossil fuels. In essence, the Green Revolution was little more than the invention of a way to turn petroleum into food.

Over the next few decades, therefore, there will be famine on a scale many times larger than ever before in human history. It is possible, of course, that warfare and plague will take their toll to a large extent before famine claims its victims. The distinctions, in any case, can never be absolute: often “war + drought = famine” [3], especially in sub-Saharan Africa, but there are several other combinations of factors.

Although, when discussing theories of famine, economists generally use the term “neo-malthusian” in a derogatory manner, the coming famine will be very much a case of an imbalance between population and resources. The overwhelming cause of the imbalance and famine will be fossil-fuel depletion, not government policy (as in the days of Stalin or Mao), warfare, ethnic discrimination, bad weather, poor methods of distribution, inadequate transportation, livestock diseases, or any of the other variables that have often turned mere hunger into genuine starvation.

The increase in the world’s population has followed a simple curve: from about 1.7 billion in 1900 to about 6.1 billion in 2000. A quick glance at a chart of world population growth, on a broader time scale, shows a line that runs almost horizontally for thousands of years, and then makes an almost vertical ascent as it approaches the present. That is not just an amusing curiosity. It is a shocking fact that should have awakened humanity to the realization that something is dreadfully wrong.

Mankind is always prey to its own “exuberance,” to use Catton’s term [2]. That has certainly been true of population growth. In many cultures, “Do you have any children?” or, “How many children do you have?” is a form of greeting or civility almost equivalent to “How do you do?” or, “Nice to meet you.” World population growth, nevertheless, has always been ecologically hazardous. The destruction of the environment reaches back into the invisible past, and the ruination of land, sea, and sky has been well described if not well heeded. But what is even less frequently noted is that with every increase in human numbers we are only barely able to keep up with the demand: providing all those people with food and water has not been easy. We are always pushing ourselves to the limits of Earth’s ability to hold us.

Even that is an understatement. No matter how much we depleted our resources, there was always the sense that we could somehow “get by.” But in the late twentieth century we stopped getting by. It is important to differentiate between production in an “absolute” sense and production “per capita.” Although oil production, in “absolute” numbers, kept climbing — only to decline in the early twenty-first century — what was ignored was that although that “absolute” production was climbing, the production “per capita” reached its peak in 1979 [1].

The unequal distribution of resources plays a part, of course. The average inhabitant of the United States consumes far more than the average inhabitant of India or China. Nevertheless, if all the world’s resources were evenly distributed, the result would only be universal poverty. It is the totals and the averages of resources that we must deal with in order to determine the totals and averages of results. For example, if all of the world’s arable land were distributed evenly, in the absence of mechanized agriculture each person on the planet would have an inadequate amount of farmland for survival: distribution would have accomplished very little.

We were always scraping the edges of the earth, but we are now entering a far more dangerous era. The main point to keep in mind, however, is that throughout the twentieth century, oil production and human population were so closely integrated that every barrel of oil had an effect on human numbers. While population has been going up, so has oil production.

Future excess mortality can therefore be determined ― at least in a rough-and-ready manner ― by the fact that in modern industrial society it is oil supply that determines how many people can be fed. An increase in oil production leads to an increase in population, and a decrease in oil production leads to a decrease in population. [Jan Lundberg’s note: this is why hopes for a technofix of renewable energy – almost always only for electricity -- is far off base regarding the huge present population’s need to eat.]

In round numbers, global oil production in the year 2008 was 30 billion barrels, and the population was 7 billion. The consensus is that in the year 2050 oil production will be about 2 billion barrels. The same amount of oil production occurred in the year 1930, when the population was 2 billion. The population in 2050 will therefore be about the same as in 1930: 2 billion. The difference between 7 billion people and 2 billion is 5 billion, which will therefore be the total number of famine deaths and lost or averted births for that period.

We can also determine the annual number of famine deaths and lost or averted births. From 2008 to 2050 is 42 years. The average annual difference in population is therefore 5 billion divided by 42, which is about 120 million.

It is quite possible, however, that the decline in population will not exactly parallel the decline in oil. In other words, the peak of the population curve may well be a few years later than the peak of the oil curve. People might simply live with less oil per capita for a few decades, i.e. they will just sink further into poverty, with greater problems of malnutrition. In fact, as long ago as 1972, the first edition of The Limits to Growth in its Figure 35, “World Model Standard Run,” showed a 40-year gap between the peak production of food per capita and the peak of population [7].

Many of those annual 120 million will not actually be deaths; famine will cause a lowering of the birth rate. This will sometimes happen voluntarily, as people realize they lack the resources to raise children, or it will happen involuntarily when famine and general ill health result in infertility [4]. In most famines the number of deaths from starvation or from starvation-induced disease is very roughly the same as the number of lost or averted births [3, 4]. In Ireland’s nineteenth-century famine, for example, the number of famine deaths was 1.3 million, whereas the number of lost births was 0.4 million. The number of famine deaths during China’s Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) was perhaps 30 million, and the number of lost births was perhaps 33 million.

The “normal,” non-famine-related, birth and death rates are not incorporated into the above future population figures, since for most of pre-industrial human history the sum of the two — i.e. the growth rate — has been nearly zero. If not for the problem of resource-depletion, in other words, the future birth rate and death rate would be nearly identical, as they were in pre-industrial times. And there is no question that the future will mean a return to the “pre-industrial.”

Nevertheless, it will often be hard to separate “famine deaths” from a rather broad category of “other excess deaths.” War, disease, global warming, topsoil deterioration, and other factors will have unforeseeable effects of their own. Considering the unusual duration of the coming famine, and with Leningrad [5] as one of many precursors, cannibalism may be significant; to what extent should this be included in a calculation of “famine deaths”? It is probably safe to say, however, that an unusually large decline in the population of a country will be the most significant indicator that this predicted famine has in fact arrived.

These figures obliterate all previous estimates of future population growth. Instead of a steady rise over the course of this century, as generally predicted, there will be a clash of the two giant forces of overpopulation and oil depletion, followed by a precipitous ride into the unknown future.

If the above figures are fairly accurate, we are ill-prepared for the next few years. The problem of oil depletion turns out to be something other than a bit of macabre speculation for people of the distant future to deal with, but rather a sudden catastrophe that will only be studied dispassionately long after the event itself has occurred. Doomsday will be upon us before we have time to look at it carefully.

The world has certainly known some terrible famines in the past, of course. In recent centuries, one of the worst was that of North China in 1876-79, when between 9 and 13 million died, but India had a famine at the same time, with perhaps 5 million deaths. The Soviet Union had famine deaths of about 5 million in 1932-34, purely because of political policies. The worst famine in history was that of China’s Great Leap Forward, 1958-61, when perhaps 30 million died, as mentioned above.

A close analogy to “petroleum famine” may be Ireland’s potato famine of the 1840s, since — like petroleum — it was a single commodity that caused such devastation [6]. The response of the British government at the time can be summarized as a jumble of incompetence, frustration, and indecision, if not outright genocide. “There is such a tendency to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting on them is always desirable,” wrote Sir Robert Peel in 1845. By 1847 the description had changed: “Bodies half-eaten by rats were an ordinary sight; ‘two dogs were shot while tearing a body to pieces.’”

The news of the coming famine might not be announced with sufficient clarity. Famines tend to be back-page news nowadays, perhaps for the very reason that they are too common to be worth mentioning. Although Ó Gráda speaks of “making famine history” [6], the reality is that between 70 and 80 million people died of famine in the twentieth century, far more than in any previous century [4].

The above predictions can be nothing more than approximate, of course, but even the most elaborate mathematics will not entirely help us to deal with the great number of interacting factors. We need to swing toward a more pessimistic figure for humanity’s future if we include the effects of war, disease, and so on. The most serious negative factor will be largely sociological: To what extent can the oil industry maintain the advanced technology required for drilling ever-deeper wells in ever-more-remote places, when that industry will be struggling to survive in a milieu of social chaos? Intricate division of labor, large-scale government, and high-level education will no longer exist.

On the other hand, there are elements of optimism that may need to be plugged in. For one thing, there is what might be called the “inertia factor”: the planet Earth is so big that even the most catastrophic events take time for their ripples to finish spreading. An asteroid fragment 10 kilometers wide hit eastern Mexico 65 million years ago, but enough of our distant ancestors survived that we ourselves are alive today to tell the story.

Somewhat related, among optimistic factors, is the sheer tenacity of the human species: we are intelligent social creatures living at the top of the food chain, in the manner of wolves, yet we outnumber wolves worldwide by about a million to one; we are as populous as rats or mice. We can outrace a horse over long distances. Even with Stone-Age technology, we can inhabit almost every environment on Earth, even if most of the required survival skills have been forgotten.

Specifically, we must consider the fact that neither geography nor population is homogeneous. All over the world, there are forgotten pockets of habitable land, much of it abandoned in the modern transition to urbanization, for the ironic reason that city dwellers regarded rural life as too difficult, as they traded their peasant smocks for factory overalls. There are still areas of the planet’s surface that are sparsely occupied although they are habitable or could be made so, to the extent that many rural areas have had a decline in population that is absolute, i.e. not merely relative to another place or time. By careful calculation, therefore, there will be survivors. Over the next few years, human ingenuity must be devoted to an understanding of these geographic and demographic matters, so that at least a few can escape the tribulation. Neither the present nor future generations should have to say, “We were never warned.”

REFERENCES:

1. BP Global Statistical Review of World Energy. Annual. http://www.bp.com/statisticalreview

2. Catton, William R., Jr. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

3. Devereux, Stephen. “Famine in the Twentieth Century.” IDS Working Paper 105. www.dse.unifi.it/sviluppo/doc/WP105.pdf

4. Ó Gráda, Cormac. “Making Famine History.” Journal of Economic Literature, March 2007. http://www.ucd.ie/economics/research/papers/2006/WP06.10.pdf

5. Salisbury, Harrison E. The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 2003.

6. Woodham-Smith, Cecil. The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1962.

7. Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows and William W. Behrens III. The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books, 1972.

World oil and population graph courtesy Paul Chefurka, paulchefurka.ca May 2007

* * * * *

Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is odonatus [at] live.com.

Resistance Resisters

SUBHEAD: Keeping the planet alive. It's time to lead, follow, or get out of the way. Image above: Man faces Chinese tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989. From (http://media.photobucket.com/image/tiananmen+square+tank/countzander/TankMan.jpg) By Derrick Jensen on 2 March 2010 in Orion Magazine - (http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/5340) Another 120 species went extinct today; they were my kin. I am not going to sit back and wait for every last piece of this living world to be dismembered. I’m going to fight like hell for those kin who remain—and I want everyone who cares to join me. Many are. But many are not. Some of those who are not are those who, for whatever reason, really don’t care. I worry about them. But I worry more about those who do care but have chosen not to fight.

A fairly large subset of those who care but have chosen not to fight assert that lifestyle choice is the only possible response to the murder of the planet. They all carry the same essential message—and often use precisely the same words: Resistance isn’t possible. Resistance never works.

Meanwhile, another 120 species went extinct today. They were my kin.

There are understandable personal reasons for wanting to believe in the invincibility of an oppressive system. If you can convince yourself the system is invincible, there’s no reason to undertake the often arduous, sometimes dangerous, always necessary work of organizing, preparing to dismantle, and then actually dismantling this (or any) oppressive system.

If you can convince yourself the system is invincible, you can, with fully salved conscience, make yourself and your own as comfortable as you can within the confines of the oppressive system while allowing this oppressive system to continue.

There are certainly reasons that those in power want us to see them as invincible. Abusive systems, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, from the familial to the social and political and religious, work best when victims and bystanders police themselves. And one of the best ways to get victims and bystanders to police themselves is for them to internalize the notion that the abusers are invincible and then, even better, to get them to attempt to police anyone who threatens to break up the stable abuser/victim/bystander triad.

And meanwhile, another 120 species went extinct today.

But those who believe in the invincibility of perpetrators and their systems are wrong. Systems of power are created by humans and can be stopped by humans. Those in power are never supernatural or immortal, and they can be brought down. People with a lot fewer resources collectively than any single reader of Orion have fought back against systems of domination, and won. There’s no reason the rest of us can’t do the same. But resistance starts by believing in it, not by talking yourself out if it. And certainly not by trying to talk others out of it.

History provides many examples of successful resistance, as do current events. The Irish nationalists, the abolitionists, the suffragettes—I could fill the rest of this column with examples.

Recently, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has, through attacks on oil pipelines and the kidnapping of oil workers, disabled as much as 40 percent of the oil industry’s output from Nigeria, and some oil companies have even considered pulling out of the region. If those of us who are the primary beneficiaries of this global system of exploitation had 1 percent of their courage and commitment to the land and community, we could be equally effective if not more so. We have vastly more resources at our disposal and the best we can come up with is, what, compost piles? The world is being killed and many environmentalists still think that riding bikes is some sort of answer?

Some people maintain that resistance cannot accomplish anything unless we first change the underlying culture; changing culture, then, is where the real work must lie. Setting aside the fact that sometimes people, organizations, and institutions are just wrong and need to be stopped—the Nazis come to mind, as does the KKK at its peak of power, the robber barons, and so on—the more important point is that resistance and working for cultural change are in no way mutually exclusive, but rather are deeply complementary, which makes the complaints of the lifestylists all the more nonsensical. I’m not trying to stop them from saving seeds or handmaking scythes; I’m merely saying that those activities are insufficient to stop this culture from killing the planet.

Yes, there absolutely needs to be the creation of a new culture with new values (or, really, tens of thousands of cultures, each emerging from its own landbase, including the re-emergence of extant indigenous cultures). But the people involved in that cultural creation must see themselves as part of a resistance movement that supports and encourages action against the forces that are dismembering our planet, or, at least, that doesn’t actively discourage organized resistance whenever the subject is raised.

Otherwise that nice, new culture is simply a fantasy, unhooked from anything in the real, physical world, incapable of ever being effective, and, ultimately, a position of privilege. Maud Gonne, for instance, was intimately involved with the Gaelic Revival, promoting literature and language preservation. She also did prisoner support, worked with the Land League, and got arrested herself. She almost died on a hunger strike and won some basic rights for Irish prisoners in the process (and her son Seán MacBride eventually became chief of staff of the IRA, helped found Amnesty International, and in 1974 won the Nobel Peace Prize).

It is insulting to her memory and to the memory of so many other brave people to state categorically that resistance doesn’t work. Of course it works. But people have to actually do it, and keep doing it for the long haul.

Why are even those who call themselves environmentalists not talking about what really needs to happen to save this planet? Burning fossil fuel, for example, has to stop. This isn’t negotiable. You cannot negotiate with physical reality. It doesn’t matter how or why this burning stops. It needs to stop. We need to stop it—need to stop doing it ourselves, and need to stop others, especially giant corporate others, from doing it too.

We need organized political resistance. Power needs to be named and then dismantled systematically. This requires joint action of whatever sort is deemed necessary. While the frontline actionists are taking apart systems of power and fighting to defend wild nature, the culture of resistance is providing loyalty and cooperation and material support, as well as building up alternate institutions—from means of bringing justice to economic systems to food supply chains to schools to new literary forms—that can take over as the system comes down.

The template is not hard to understand. It will take its own culturally appropriate forms. The same actions have been undertaken by resistance movements everywhere—the Spanish anarchists, the American patriots. It’s not conceptually difficult.

But instead of supporting the necessity for action (and we’re not yet even talking about what forms that action should or could take), or at the very least not attempting to discourage action at every turn, so much of the environmental movement keeps insisting that only personal lifestyle change is possible. No other oppressed group in history has ever taken such a stand.

Right now, a small group of half-starved, poverty-stricken people in Nigeria have brought the oil industry in that country to its knees. They remember what it is to love their land and their communities—perhaps because they are not drowning in privilege, but in the toxic sludge of oil extraction. Is that what it will take to get environmentalists in the U.S. to fight back?

MEND has said to the oil industry:

“It must be clear that the Nigerian government cannot protect your workers or assets. Leave our land while you can or die in it.”

There is more courage, integrity, intelligence, and pragmatism in that statement from MEND than in any statement I have ever read by any American environmentalist, including myself. We need to accept the fact that making this type of statement (and being prepared to act on it) might be necessary to preserve a living planet.

Some people may be willing to give up on life on this planet without resisting. I’m not one of them.

.

Together We Will! - talk turkey with Mayor Bernard Carvalho

SUBHEAD: Speak with Kauai Mayor Carvalho during call-in show on KKCR on May 18th at 4:00pm. Image above: Kauai Mayor Bernard P Carvalho Jr. LIVE on-air at KKCR. Photo by jonathan jay. By Jonathan Jay on 6 March 2010 - WHO: You and Yours-most-dear are invited to listen and call-in WHAT: "Out of the Box", KKCR's Community Call-in Public Affairs show WHERE: On your FM dial from: 90.9 91.9 or 92.7; cable: 95.0; www.kkcr.org WHY: To listen and engage with Kaua`i Mayor Bernard P. Carvalho Jr. WHEN: Thursday afternoon 'drive-time', March 18th, from 4-6 pm HOW: Unplug, Tune-in & Call up: live in studio # (808) 826.7771 Note: this show will be airing 2 days after the unveiling of the mayor's budget proposal for the upcoming year, so Mayor Bernard will likely has some things to say about this, but afterward, the sky is the limit for what you want to talk about. advance email your questions for the Mayor to: ootb (at) kkcr.org Whether the most important issue on the island to you is energy, solid waste, civil liberties, transportation, environmental, fiscal or related to the host Hawaiian culture, tune into the show and 'see' what Mayor Bernard has to say. If you don't hear the question or topic you desire, call directly into the show. 2nd Note: Be sure to pull over if you are driving without a hands-free device, because you'll get busted for that according to the new law he just signed. "Out of the Box" - public affairs programming you can really sink your teeth into - on KKCR Kauai's Community Radio. .

America, the Fragile Empire

SUBHEAD: Here today, gone tomorrow -- could the United States fall that fast? That's what empires do. Image above: Still from movie "Apocalypto" portraying collapse of Incan Empire. From (http://video.movies.go.com/apocalypto) By Niall Ferguson on 28 February 2010 in the Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ferguson28-2010feb28,0,7706980.story) For centuries, historians, political theorists, anthropologists and the public have tended to think about the political process in seasonal, cyclical terms. From Polybius to Paul Kennedy, from ancient Rome to imperial Britain, we discern a rhythm to history. Great powers, like great men, are born, rise, reign and then gradually wane. No matter whether civilizations decline culturally, economically or ecologically, their downfalls are protracted. In the same way, the challenges that face the United States are often represented as slow-burning. It is the steady march of demographics -- which is driving up the ratio of retirees to workers -- not bad policy that condemns the public finances of the United States to sink deeper into the red. It is the inexorable growth of China's economy, not American stagnation, that will make the gross domestic product of the People's Republic larger than that of the United States by 2027. As for climate change, the day of reckoning could be as much as a century away. These threats seem very remote compared with the time frame for the deployment of U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan, in which the unit of account is months, not years, much less decades. But what if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic -- at times almost stationary but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night? Great powers are complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized, which means their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time; they seem to be in equilibrium but are, in fact, constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when complex systems "go critical." A very small trigger can set off a "phase transition" from a benign equilibrium to a crisis -- a single grain of sand causes a whole pile to collapse. Not long after such crises happen, historians arrive on the scene. They are the scholars who specialize in the study of "fat tail" events -- the low-frequency, high-impact historical moments, the ones that are by definition outside the norm and that therefore inhabit the "tails" of probability distributions -- such as wars, revolutions, financial crashes and imperial collapses. But historians often misunderstand complexity in decoding these events. They are trained to explain calamity in terms of long-term causes, often dating back decades. This is what Nassim Taleb rightly condemned in "The Black Swan" as "the narrative fallacy." In reality, most of the fat-tail phenomena that historians study are not the climaxes of prolonged and deterministic story lines; instead, they represent perturbations, and sometimes the complete breakdowns, of complex systems. To understand complexity, it is helpful to examine how natural scientists use the concept. Think of the spontaneous organization of termites, which allows them to construct complex hills and nests, or the fractal geometry of water molecules as they form intricate snowflakes. Human intelligence itself is a complex system, a product of the interaction of billions of neurons in the central nervous system. All these complex systems share certain characteristics. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes -- what scientists call "the amplifier effect." Causal relationships are often nonlinear, which means that traditional methods of generalizing through observation are of little use. Thus, when things go wrong in a complex system, the scale of disruption is nearly impossible to anticipate. There is no such thing as a typical or average forest fire, for example. To use the jargon of modern physics, a forest before a fire is in a state of "self-organized criticality": It is teetering on the verge of a breakdown, but the size of the breakdown is unknown. Will there be a small fire or a huge one? It is nearly impossible to predict. The key point is that in such systems, a relatively minor shock can cause a disproportionate disruption. Any large-scale political unit is a complex system. Most great empires have a nominal central authority -- either a hereditary emperor or an elected president -- but in practice the power of any individual ruler is a function of the network of economic, social and political relations over which he or she presides. As such, empires exhibit many of the characteristics of other complex adaptive systems -- including the tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly. The most recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the benefit of hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of rot within the Soviet system back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. Perhaps, as the historian and political scientist Stephen Kotkin has argued, it was only the high oil prices of the 1970s that "averted Armageddon." But this did not seem to be the case at the time. The Soviet nuclear arsenal was larger than the U.S. stockpile. And governments in what was then called the Third World, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, had been tilting in the Soviets' favor for most of the previous 20 years. Yet, less than five years after Mikhail Gorbachev took power, the Soviet imperium in central and Eastern Europe had fallen apart, followed by the Soviet Union itself in 1991. If ever an empire fell off a cliff, rather than gently declining, it was the one founded by Lenin. If empires are complex systems that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, what are the implications for the United States today? First, debating the stages of decline may be a waste of time -- it is a precipitous and unexpected fall that should most concern policymakers and citizens. Second, most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises. Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly indeed as the United States contemplates a deficit for 2010 of more than $1.5 trillion -- about 11% of GDP, the biggest since World War II. These numbers are bad, but in the realm of political entities, the role of perception is just as crucial. In imperial crises, it is not the material underpinnings of power that really matter but expectations about future power. The fiscal numbers cited above cannot erode U.S. strength on their own, but they can work to weaken a long-assumed faith in the United States' ability to weather any crisis. One day, a seemingly random piece of bad news -- perhaps a negative report by a rating agency -- will make the headlines during an otherwise quiet news cycle. Suddenly, it will be not just a few policy wonks who worry about the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy but the public at large, not to mention investors abroad. It is this shift that is crucial: A complex adaptive system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability. Over the last three years, the complex system of the global economy flipped from boom to bust -- all because a bunch of Americans started to default on their subprime mortgages, thereby blowing huge holes in the business models of thousands of highly leveraged financial institutions. The next phase of the current crisis may begin when the public begins to reassess the credibility of the radical monetary and fiscal steps that were taken in response. Neither interest rates at zero nor fiscal stimulus can achieve a sustainable recovery if people in the United States and abroad collectively decide, overnight, that such measures will ultimately lead to much higher inflation rates or outright default. Bond yields can shoot up if expectations change about future government solvency, intensifying an already bad fiscal crisis by driving up the cost of interest payments on new debt. Just ask Greece. Ask Russia too. Fighting a losing battle in the mountains of the Hindu Kush has long been a harbinger of imperial fall. What happened 20 years ago is a reminder that empires do not in fact appear, rise, reign, decline and fall according to some recurrent and predictable life cycle. It is historians who retrospectively portray the process of imperial dissolution as slow-acting. Rather, empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse. Washington, you have been warned. .

Arctic seabed methane unstable

SUBHEAD: A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas.

By Marmian Grimes on 3 March 2010 in UAF News - 
(http://www.uaf.edu/news/news/20100303192545.html)

 
Image above: Acrtic permafrost and ocean are melting, and will release methane into the atmosphere. From (http://earthfirst.com/arctic-sea-%E2%80%98foaming-with-methane%E2%80%99-as-permafrost-melts/)  




A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov.

The research results, published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.

"The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans," said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF's International Arctic Research Center. "Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap."

Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It is released from previously frozen soils in two ways. When the organic material--which contains carbon--stored in permafrost thaws, it begins to decompose and, under oxygen-free conditions, gradually release methane. Methane can also be stored in the seabed as methane gas or methane hydrates and then released as subsea permafrost thaws. These releases can be larger and more abrupt than those that result from decomposition.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area that encompasses more than 2 million square kilometers of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean. It is more than three times as large as the nearby Siberian wetlands, which have been considered the primary Northern Hemisphere source of atmospheric methane. Shakhova’s research results show that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already a significant methane source: 7 teragrams yearly, which is equal to the amount of methane emitted from the rest of the ocean. A teragram is equal to about 1.1 million tons.

 
Video above: Natalia Shakhova speaks on methane destabilization in arctic permafrost. From (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD8hU-lbqpE)

"Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already," she said. "If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger."

Shakhova notes that Earth's geological record indicates that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about .3 to .4 parts per million during cold periods to .6 to .7 parts per million during warm periods. Current average methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years, she said. Concentrations above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are even higher.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a relative frontier in methane studies. The shelf is shallow, 50 meters or less in depth, which means it has been alternately submerged or terrestrial, depending on sea levels throughout Earth’s history. During Earth's coldest periods, it is a frozen arctic coastal plain, and does not release methane. As the planet warms and sea levels rise, it is inundated with seawater, which is 12-15 degrees warmer than the average air temperature.

"It was thought that seawater kept the East Siberian Arctic Shelf permafrost frozen," Shakhova said. "Nobody considered this huge area."

Earlier studies in Siberia focused on methane escaping from thawing terrestrial permafrost. Semiletov's work during the 1990s showed, among other things, that the amount of methane being emitted from terrestrial sources decreased at higher latitudes. But those studies stopped at the coast. Starting in the fall of 2003, Shakhova, Semiletov and the rest of their team took the studies offshore. From 2003 through 2008, they took annual research cruises throughout the shelf and sampled seawater at various depths and the air 10 meters above the ocean. In September 2006, they flew a helicopter over the same area, taking air samples at up to 2,000 meters in the atmosphere. In April 2007, they conducted a winter expedition on the sea ice.

They found that more than 80 percent of the deep water and greater than half of surface water had methane levels more than eight times that of normal seawater. In some areas, the saturation levels reached at least 250 times that of background levels in the summer and 1,400 times higher in the winter. They found corresponding results in the air directly above the ocean surface. Methane levels were elevated overall and the seascape was dotted with more than 100 hotspots. This, combined with winter expedition results that found methane gas trapped under and in the sea ice, showed the team that the methane was not only being dissolved in the water, it was bubbling out into the atmosphere.

 
Image above: Diagram from article illustrating on storage of methane in permafrost.
 


These findings were further confirmed when Shakhova and her colleagues sampled methane levels at higher elevations. Methane levels throughout the Arctic are usually 8 to 10 percent higher than the global baseline. When they flew over the shelf, they found methane at levels another 5 to 10 percent higher than the already elevated arctic levels.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf, in addition to holding large stores of frozen methane, is more of a concern because it is so shallow. In deep water, methane gas oxidizes into carbon dioxide before it reaches the surface. In the shallows of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, methane simply doesn't have enough time to oxidize, which means more of it escapes into the atmosphere. That, combined with the sheer amount of methane in the region, could add a previously uncalculated variable to climate models.

"The release to the atmosphere of only one percent of the methane assumed to be stored in shallow hydrate deposits might alter the current atmospheric burden of methane up to 3 to 4 times," Shakhova said. "The climatic consequences of this are hard to predict."

Shakhova, Semiletov and collaborators from 12 institutions in five countries plan to continue their studies in the region, tracking the source of the methane emissions and drilling into the seafloor in an effort to estimate how much methane is stored there.

Shakhova and Semiletov hold joint appointments with the Pacific Oceanological Institute, part of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Their collaborators on this paper include Anatoly Salyuk, Vladimir Joussupov and Denis Kosmach, all of the Pacific Oceanological Institute, and Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University.

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Earth has its own set of rules

SUBHEAD: Our view of nature is based on our human desire for more, and that economic model is broken. Image above: Enclosed seal lion facing elimination from a Scottish zoo being observed by humans in "nature". From (http://deadlinescotland.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/sea-lions-could-face-axe-from-edinburgh-zoo) By B.E. Mahall and F.H. Bormann on 2 March 2010 in Los Angeles Times - (http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/02/opinion/la-oe-mahall2-2010mar02)

Early in our history it didn't make any difference how we viewed our environment. We could change it, and if we didn't like what we did to it, we could move and natural processes would soon obliterate whatever we had done. Over the years, models of our relationship to the environment have been based on religious views, with the world provided for us to dominate and subdue as described in Genesis, and philosophical views, seeing wisdom and virtue in nature as described by Thoreau.

But by far our most prevalent view of nature derives from a rudimentary human desire for more. This is the basis of the economic model that currently directs our relationships with one another and with our environment. It has produced stupendous human population growth and dramatic, deleterious effects on nature. Recognizing these effects, efforts have been marshaled to change the self-serving economic model with notions of Earth "stewardship," eloquently advanced decades ago by then-Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, and, most recently, to infiltrate the economic model with "ecosystem services" by assigning monetary values to functions performed by the Earth that are beneficial to people.

All of these views are fundamentally and dangerously flawed, because all are anthropocentric. They begin and end with humans. This isn't the way the Earth works.

The Earth has its own set of rules, solidly grounded in laws of physics and chemistry and emergent principles of geology and biology. Unlike our economic model, these are not artificial constructs. They are real, and they govern. Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, tornadoes, 100-year floods, massive wildfires and disease epidemics are dramatic examples of parts of nature, neither all service nor all harm, creating and destroying, and governed by rules that are indifferent to humans. Our anthropocentric economic model for interacting with the world ignores and is proving to be incompatible with Earth's rules, and is therefore on a direct collision course with them.

To achieve a more accurate model of our relation to nature, we need to see ourselves as part of nature, governed by nature (not economics), beholden to nature for ecosystem services and subject to nature's disturbances.

We need to view our existence in nature as dependent on numerous functions we are unable to perform ourselves, and without which we couldn't survive. And we need to recognize that we now have the power and the reckless inclination, driven by shortsighted anthropocentrism, to disrupt these functions to the degree that Earth will become uninhabitable for us.

In the end, the physical, chemical and biological rules of Earth will certainly win, and we will either be on the winning side or we will be vanquished. These are the only choices.

Our anthropocentric economic model needs to be reconceived, incorporating Earth's rules, to become an Earth-centered, "terracentric" model. Stewardship needs to progress from a condescending view of humans tending their "garden" to an effort to become part of Earth without disrupting its vital functions.

Ecosystem services need to advance from recognition of services to humans to recognition of services to our planet. We need to find ways to avoid changing Earth in irreversible directions. We need to soberly evaluate anthropocentric economics' sacred cow, growth, in light of sustainability. And we need to think beyond our own brief lifetimes. Most important, in the new terracentric model, we need to acknowledge that there is nothing more important than preserving the viability of planet Earth. Nothing.

Using human ecologist Garrett Hardin's metaphor, Earth is our only "lifeboat" in a sea of empty, cold blackness. Our lives, and those of other organisms, are allowed in this boat only because of a quasi-steady environmental state created by a unique balance of physical, chemical and biological conditions and processes governed by Earth's rules. The central task of ecology is to understand these conditions, processes and rules and thereby understand the qualities and dimensions of this steady state.

Unfortunately, before ecology has reached this understanding, humans are testing this steady state's robustness with anthropogenic changes in atmospheric chemistry that cause changes in radiation through the atmosphere, fundamental changes in ocean chemistry and changes in the whole planet's energy budget -- its balance of energy in and energy out. We are testing it with pervasive, potentially irreversible, long-term pollution of Earth's fresh and salt water, using a vast assortment of man-made chemicals that often possess biologically hazardous and ecologically unpredictable properties.

We are testing it with relentless, massive, wholesale conversions of ecosystems, channeling their products exclusively into our own limitless consumption. And we are testing it with the global spread of biological species, causing a complex, hugely damaging homogenization of Earth's biota.

Recent measurements of unprecedented, directional changes in the vital signs of Earth suggest that we may have already staved in our lifeboat's hull, causing changes beyond the ability of Earth's biogeochemical forces to maintain balance. The quasi-steady state that makes our lives possible may be disappearing before our eyes. We are in direct conflict with Earth's rules.

The anthropocentric economic model is fundamentally incapable of providing more than temporary fixes for our massive environmental problems. Reliance on this invalid, incompetent model underlies the recent struggles of world leaders in Copenhagen and Washington to make significant progress in solving global environmental problems. Replacement of this failed model with an economic model that recognizes Earth's rules and embraces terracentricity as its essential focus is the primary step necessary to bring reality into our collective thinking and behavior, and provide an accurate conceptual basis for the hard decisions ahead that will determine the fate of life on our planet.

Bruce E. Mahall is a professor of ecology at UC Santa Barbara. F. Herbert Bormann, a professor emeritus at Yale University, is one of the founders of the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study.

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Greek crisis coming to the USA?

SUBHEAD: Germans to debt-ridden Greeks "Sell the Acropolis. And a few islands." Image above: The Acropolis in Athens, the seat of the origin of Western Civilization. Painting by Pantelis Zografos. From (http://zografosart.com/gallerygreece.htm) By Niall Ferguson 10 February 2010 in Financial Times - (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f90bca10-1679-11df-bf44-00144feab49a.html)

It began in Athens. It is spreading to Lisbon and Madrid. But it would be a grave mistake to assume that the sovereign debt crisis that is unfolding will remain confined to the weaker eurozone economies. For this is more than just a Mediterranean problem with a farmyard acronym. It is a fiscal crisis of the western world. Its ramifications are far more profound than most investors currently appreciate.

There is of course a distinctive feature to the eurozone crisis. Because of the way the European Monetary Union was designed, there is in fact no mechanism for a bail-out of the Greek government by the European Union, other member states or the European Central Bank (articles 123 and 125 of the Lisbon treaty). True, Article 122 may be invoked by the European Council to assist a member state that is “seriously threatened with severe difficulties caused by natural disasters or exceptional occurrences beyond its control”, but at this point nobody wants to pretend that Greece’s yawning deficit was an act of God. Nor is there a way for Greece to devalue its currency, as it would have done in the pre-EMU days of the drachma. There is not even a mechanism for Greece to leave the eurozone.

That leaves just three possibilities: one of the most excruciating fiscal squeezes in modern European history –

• Reducing the deficit from 13 per cent to 3 per cent of gross domestic product within just three years.

• Outright default on all or part of the Greek government’s debt.

• Most likely, as signaled by German officials on Wednesday some kind of bail-out led by Berlin.

Because none of these options is very appealing, and because any decision about Greece will have implications for Portugal, Spain and possibly others, it may take much horse-trading before one can be reached.

Yet the idiosyncrasies of the eurozone should not distract us from the general nature of the fiscal crisis that is now afflicting most western economies. Call it the fractal geometry of debt: the problem is essentially the same from Iceland to Ireland to Britain to the US. It just comes in widely differing sizes.

What we in the western world are about to learn is that there is no such thing as a Keynesian free lunch. Deficits did not “save” us half so much as monetary policy – zero interest rates plus quantitative easing – did. First, the impact of government spending (the hallowed “multiplier”) has been much less than the proponents of stimulus hoped. Second, there is a good deal of “leakage” from open economies in a globalized world. Last, crucially, explosions of public debt incur bills that fall due much sooner than we expect.

For the world’s biggest economy, the US, the day of reckoning still seems reassuringly remote. The worse things get in the eurozone, the more the US dollar rallies as nervous investors park their cash in the “safe haven” of American government debt. This effect may persist for some months, just as the dollar and Treasuries rallied in the depths of the banking panic in late 2008.

Yet even a casual look at the fiscal position of the federal government (not to mention the states) makes a nonsense of the phrase “safe haven”. US government debt is a safe haven the way Pearl Harbor was a safe haven in 1941.

Even according to the White House’s new budget projections, the gross federal debt will exceed 100 per cent of GDP in just two years’ time. This year, like last year, the federal deficit will be around 10 per cent of GDP. The long-run projections of the Congressional Budget Office suggest that the US will never again run a balanced budget. That’s right, never.

The International Monetary Fund recently published estimates of the fiscal adjustments developed economies would need to make to restore fiscal stability over the decade ahead. Worst were Japan and the UK (a fiscal tightening of 13 per cent of GDP). Then came Ireland, Spain and Greece (9 per cent). And in sixth place? Step forward America, which would need to tighten fiscal policy by 8.8 per cent of GDP to satisfy the IMF.

Explosions of public debt hurt economies in the following way, as numerous empirical studies have shown. By raising fears of default and/or currency depreciation ahead of actual inflation, they push up real interest rates. Higher real rates, in turn, act as drag on growth, especially when the private sector is also heavily indebted – as is the case in most western economies, not least the US.

Although the US household savings rate has risen since the Great Recession began, it has not risen enough to absorb a trillion dollars of net Treasury issuance a year. Only two things have thus far stood between the US and higher bond yields: purchases of Treasuries (and mortgage-backed securities, which many sellers essentially swapped for Treasuries) by the Federal Reserve and reserve accumulation by the Chinese monetary authorities.

But now the Fed is phasing out such purchases and is expected to wind up quantitative easing. Meanwhile, the Chinese have sharply reduced their purchases of Treasuries from around 47 per cent of new issuance in 2006 to 20 per cent in 2008 to an estimated 5 per cent last year. Small wonder Morgan Stanley assumes that 10-year yields will rise from around 3.5 per cent to 5.5 per cent this year. On a gross federal debt fast approaching $15,000bn, that implies up to $300bn of extra interest payments – and you get up there pretty quickly with the average maturity of the debt now below 50 months.

The Obama administration’s new budget blithely assumes real GDP growth of 3.6 per cent over the next five years, with inflation averaging 1.4 per cent. But with rising real rates, growth might well be lower. Under those circumstances, interest payments could soar as a share of federal revenue – from a tenth to a fifth to a quarter.

Last week Moody’s Investors Service warned that the triple A credit rating of the US should not be taken for granted. That warning recalls Larry Summers’ killer question (posed before he returned to government): “How long can the world’s biggest borrower remain the world’s biggest power?”

On reflection, it is appropriate that the fiscal crisis of the west has begun in Greece, the birthplace of western civilization. Soon it will cross the channel to Britain. But the key question is when that crisis will reach the last bastion of western power, on the other side of the Atlantic.

• The writer is a contributing editor of the FT and author of ‘The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World‘

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Sell the Acropolis

By Nicole Itano on 4 March 2010 in Christian Science Monitor - (http://www.csmonitor.com/Money/2010/0304/Germans-to-debt-ridden-Greeks-Sell-the-Acropolis.-And-a-few-islands)

Athens' Acropolis was closed to visitors Feb. 24 because of a general 24-hour strike in Athens. Workers were protesting a wage freeze and tax hikes imposed as part of a government austerity plan. Now, some German MPs suggest Greece should sell the Acropolis and a few islands to reduce their burgeoning debt.

Greece’s tourism slogan is “a masterpiece you can afford.” But when they coined the phrase, they were probably not thinking of selling Greek islands at cut-rate prices.

As Prime Minister George Papandreou heads to Germany tomorrow to ask German Chancellor Angela Merkel for help in the Greek debt crisis, two members of her coalition have some advice: sell off your islands to pay off your debt.

The comments, by two members of the German parliament, were published in the German newspaper Bild under the provocative headline: “Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks! And sell the Acropolis too!” One parliamentarian, Frank Schaeffler, told the newspaper, "the Greek government has to take radical steps to sell its property – for example its uninhabited islands.”

IN PICTURES: Top 10 things Greece could sell.

With Communist-party affiliated unionists occupying the Ministry of Finance and gray-haired pensioners scuffling with police outside his office, Mr. Papandreou may feel he’s been radical enough. Speaking to Greeks yesterday after a raft of new austerity measures were announced, he said that with the tough measures, Greece had done its part and that now it was time for Europe to come to the country’s aid.

But the comments by the German MPs are likely to further inflame growing anti-Germany sentiment here.

On the right and left, Greeks have been angered by the way they’ve been portrayed in some German media as cheating spendthrifts who lied their way into the European Union. Greek politicians and newspapers responded by dredging up the specter of World War II, and Germany’s brutal occupation of Greece.

On its website, the leftist Greek newspaper Eleftherotypia ran a photo of the Acropolis with a "for sale" sign superimposed

Not funny

Dimitra, a 25-year-old student and part-time nanny who was occupying the Finance Ministry Wednesday afternoon and declined to give her full name, thought the German MPs comments were a joke – but in very bad taste.

“Are they crazy?” she said, with a shake of her head.

But like many on the left, she doesn’t necessarily think Germany should bail out Greece. Instead, she says the money should come from big companies and international banks. “The working classes, in Greece or Germany, should not be forced to pay. Those with money should pay."

About 2.5 million Germans come to Greece each year to sun themselves on the country’s beaches or tromp through its ancient sites. Tourism is one of Greece’s largest industries and Germans among the country’s best clients

But this year, if Germany’s government doesn’t lend a helping hand to Greece, German visitors may get a frostier welcome. Greeks say they’ve forgiven the war, but they haven’t forgotten.

The Five Year Plan

SUBHEAD: A modest plan for attaining some self-sufficiency in a reasonable time could be an act of personal revolution. Image above: A all-pink, all-electric 1960's kitchen by Hotpoint. Is that Florence Henderson feeding Rod Serling a Ritz cracker topped with Cheese Whiz? From (www.RetroRenovation.com) By Juan Wilson on 4 March 2010 - It becomes clearer as we awaken from the American Dream. Our federal government, the state of Hawaii and Kauai County will be ineffective in countering the massive economic, cultural and environmental changes that we are passing through. All levels of government affecting our lives are now (or soon will be) bankrupt. The agencies that in the past gathered taxes, created legislation, provided security, dispensed justice, educated youth and dispersed services will soon be incapable of doing much worthwhile. The crippling debt of the federal government is only supported by its privilege of printing money. That will not be a fix when hyperinflation kicks in and US dollars are worthless. American good intentions will be reduced to posturing with what military muscle remains. But like our efforts to "fix" things in Iraq, Afghanistan, New Orleans and Haiti, that will be like fixing the broken china by yelling at it and swinging a hammer. At the state level things are even grimmer. Hawaii is past broke and cannot print money. The state is over extended by a billion dollars, and will soon have to choose between closing schools or prisons. Already Hawaii social services have been cannibalized and education cut 20%. Our fearless legislators talk about bringing back the Superferry and trolling for rich Chinese tourists that might like high stake gambling in Waikiki. By comparison, Kauai County has been lucky. We have had a tax surplus in recent years due largely to continued high property values and the ensuing property taxes. Those surpluses will soon be history. THE FUTURE There won’t be as many high-end buyers here as in the past, unless they're Goldman Sachs alumni escaping Lower Manhattan with a bonus in hand. And California the style suburban sprawl (like in Puhi, and Kalaheo) won't be spreading out across the island in a replay of the go-go golden years. The post 9-11 crash will continue to rollout - and soon be seen as the new normal. Get used to it and act accordingly. You will need to think about providing for things you need from within your immediate neighborhood, including; water, food, energy, shelter, health care, education, entertainment and a career. If you have to rely on government or multinational corporations for any of these things - find alternatives. If you depend on a car to get to these things daily - find alternatives. In order to take action I see a few useful strategies that vary widely depending on how long into the future you are planning for, and how long you think you have to secure that future. Some would say we have only months to get things right... others argue that the “System” has used every tool at its disposal to keep things “Normal” and will continue to do so for years to come. THE AWAKENING I agree, the “System” will try... things will stumble along kinda-sorta like it used to be, but there will that moment when people realize the emperor is leading the parade butt naked, and the result will be a phase shift or change in our perception of the world. The longer we delay awakening from the dream of “Normal” the more sudden and shocking that moment will be. “Oh my god! We overslept! No time for breakfast! We’ll lose our job... the house!” We should count on constraints of time and resources to prepare for this change. My advice is to find a strategy that targets a medium-range future time frame, and limits you to your current resource stream to accomplish your goals over that period. It does mean your life will change. THE TIMING A medium range of time would be in the order of five years. What would you like to accomplish if you had that much time, but not much longer, to establish the life you would like to maintain long into the future? You may have less time... or a lifetime, but shooting for five years means you should be able to get something significant done even if things go bad fast. It also a period most of us can plan for with some level of realistic expectations. THE RESOURCES Limiting yourself to your current resource stream will mean not taking on debt you cannot cover in the near future. This will put a realistic cap on what you will try to get done over a medium range of time. In other words, if you like what you're doing... keep on floating down that river, but plan on switching canoes soon. If you are making $40,000 a year, you shouldn’t take out a 2nd mortgage to install a $40,000, 5 kilawatt solar PV system this year to run your current array of home appliances. You might spend $1,000 to provide task lighting so you can read at night or do the dishes when KIUC is down. With another small investment you could have a small stereo or laptop computer up and running when the neighborhood is dark. Prioritize. Think about your location and what it offers. Can you dig a well, or will you need to collect water off the roof? Think about your neighbors. Are any like minded and what would they be willing to invest in and share... and protect. THE ALTERNATIVES One path is to do nothing special. Assume things will go on. The industrial growth economy will recover and thrive: “Let KIUC, Costco and Water Department figure out how to supply us with what we need. Isn’t that their job?” Another route is to panic and assume you have to get everything you need for the future in the next six months. You’ll probably over-estimate what you need to survive (based on your current consumption patterns) and under-estimate what it will cost and the effort needed. Of course, there is a possibility that your timing will be perfect. You borrow a bundle just before the onset of hyperinflation; everything you want to keep the good life in bad times. Then you’ll laugh when you can pay it all off in six months with a cost-of-living increase of 10,000%. I’m not betting on perfect timing. I'm buying tools. See also: Ea O Ka Aina: Industry's Parting Gifts 3/3/10 Ea O Ka Aina: Those Gifts Better be Edible 3/3/10 .

Global Weirding - Exergy Crisis

SUBHEAD: Why haven’t solar hot water heaters blossomed like daisies atop homes across the country? Image above: Installing a solar-hotwater panel under a looming sky. Web photo collage by Juan Wilson. By John Michael Greer on 3 March 2010 in The Archdruid Report - (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/03/exergy-crisis.html) In last week’s Archdruid Report (Energy Follows Its Bliss), I discussed the difference between energy and exergy, or in slightly less jargon-laden terms, between the quantity of energy and the concentration of energy. It’s hard to think of a more critical difference to keep in mind if you’re trying to make sense of the predicament of modern industrial civilization, but it’s even harder to think of a point more often missed in the rising spiral of debates about that predicament. The basic principle is simple enough, and bears repeating here: the amount of work you get out of a given energy source depends, not on the quantity of energy in the source, but on the difference in energy concentration between the energy source and the environment. That’s basic thermodynamics, of the sort that every high school student used to learn in physics class back in those far-off days when American high school students took physics classes worth the name. Put that principle to work, though, and the results are often highly counterintuitive; this probably has more than a little to do with the way that even professional scientists miss them, and fumble predictions as a result. The current brouhaha over anthropogenic climate change offers a good example. There’s been a great deal of high-grade fertilizer heaped over the issues by propaganda factories on all sides of that debate, but beneath it all is the tolerably well documented fact that we’re in the middle of a significant shift in global climate, focused on the north polar region. The causes of that shift are by no means entirely settled, but it seems a little silly to insist, as some people do, that the mass dumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by humanity can’t have anything to do with it – or, for that matter, that it’s a good idea to keep on dumping those gases into an atmospheric system that may already be dangerously unstable for reasons of its own. Still, for the next decade or more, that bad idea is very likely to remain standard practice around the world, and one reason for that is that climate change activists have shot themselves in the foot. No, I’m not talking about the recent flurry of revelations that some IPCC scientists diddled the facts to make a good but undramatic case more mediagenic. Nor am I talking about the awkward detail that the IPCC scenarios assume, in the teeth of all geological evidence, that the world can keep increasing the amount of fossil fuels it extracts and burns straight through to 2100. The problem goes deeper than that, down to the decision to define the crisis as “global warming.” That seems sensible enough – after all, we’re talking about an increase in the total quantity of heat in the Earth’s atmosphere – but here as elsewhere, the fixation on quantity misses the crucial point at issue. I’m not generally a fan of Thomas Friedman, but he scored a bullseye in his book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded" when he pointed out that what we’re facing isn’t global warming but “global weirding”; not a simple increase in temperature, but an increase in unexpected and disruptive weather events. As the atmosphere heats up, the most important effect of that shift isn’t the raw increase in temperature; rather, it’s the increase in the difference in energy concentration between the atmosphere and the oceans. The thermal properties of water make the seas warm up much more slowly than the air and the Earth’s land surface, and so even a fairly modest change in the quantity of heat causes a much more significant change in exergy. Again, it’s exergy rather than energy that determines how much work a system can do, and the work that the Earth’s atmosphere does is called “weather.” Thus the most visible result of a relatively rapid rise in the heat concentration of the atmosphere isn’t a generalized warming. Rather, it’s an increase in extreme weather conditions on both ends of the temperature scale. This isn’t a new point. It has been made repeatedly by a number of scientists and, interestingly enough, by large insurance companies as well. Munich Re, for example, pointed out a few years back that at the current rate of increase, the annual cost of natural disasters caused by global climate change would equal the gross domestic product of the world well before the end of the 21st century. Had climate advocates taken that as their central theme, this winter’s abnormally harsh storms in the eastern half of the US would have provided plenty of grist for their mills; even hardcore skeptics, as they shoveled snow off their driveways for the fourth or fifth time in a row, might have started to wonder if there was something to the claim that greenhouse-gas dumping was causing the weather to go wild. Instead, seduced by our culture’s fixation on quantity, climate advocates defined the problem purely as a future of too much heat, and those same skeptics, shoveling those same driveways, are rolling their eyes and wishing that a little of that global warming would show up to help them out. It’s probably too late for climate change activists to switch their talking points from global warming to global weirding and be believed by anybody who isn’t already convinced, and so we’ll likely have to wait until the first really major global climate disaster before any significant steps get taken. Given the latest reports from the Greenland ice cap, that may not be too many decades in the future, and any of my readers who live within fifty feet or so of sea level might find it advisable to relocate to higher ground. Still, the same confusion between energy and exergy impacts the crisis of our time in other ways, and some of those are central to the themes this blog has been exploring in recent months. One of the common ways to avoid thinking about our predicament, as I mentioned last week, is to cite the quantity of energy that arrives on Earth by way of sunlight every day, and note that it’s vastly greater than the quantity of energy our civilization uses in a year. That’s true enough, but it misses the point, which is that the energy in that sunlight has very modest amounts of exergy by the time it crosses 93 million miles of space to get to us, and it can therefore do only modest amounts of work. Strictly speaking, we don’t face an energy crisis as fossil fuels run short; what we face is an exergy crisis – a serious shortage of energy in highly concentrated forms. That’s a problem, because nearly every detail of daily life in a modern industrial society depends on using highly concentrated energy sources. Longtime readers of this blog will recall that calling something a problem has certain definite implications. A problem, at least potentially, has a solution; that’s what differentiates it from a predicament, which cannot be solved and simply has to be lived with. The depletion and eventual exhaustion of fossil fuels, and the absence of any sign of an abundant high-exergy replacement for them in this small corner of the cosmos, is a predicament. The dependence on these fuels of most of the activities of daily life in the industrial world is a problem, because a great many of those activities don’t actually need anything like the amount of exergy we put into them. Here’s an example. Nearly every home in the industrial world has hot water on tap. That’s by no means a pointless luxury; the contemporary habit of washing dishes, clothes, and bodies with ample amounts of hot water and soap has eliminated whole categories of illnesses that plagued our ancestors not that long ago. A very large fraction of those homes get that hot water by burning fossil fuels, either right there at the hot water heater, or at a power plant that uses the heat to generate the electricity that does the heating. A society that has ample supplies of high-exergy fossil fuels can afford to do that; a society running out of exergy is likely to face increasing troubles doing so. There’s a crucial point not often recognized, though, which is that it doesn’t take that much exergy to heat a tank full of water from ambient temperature to 120° or so. The same thing can be done very effectively by energy sources that aren’t very concentrated, such as sunlight. Enter the solar hot water heater. This is arguably the most mature and successful solar technology we’ve got right now. The process is simple: one of several different kinds of collectors gather heat from the sun and transmit it either to water, in places that don’t get freezing temperatures, or to an antifreeze solution in places that do. In a water system, the hot water goes from the collector to an insulated tank, and eventually to the hot water faucet; in an antifreeze system, the antifreeze circulates through a heat exchanger that passes the heat to water, which then goes into an insulated tank to wait for its moment of glory. In most parts of the United States, a well-designed solar hot water system will cut a home’s energy use to heat water by 70%; in the Sun Belt, it’s not at all uncommon for a system of this sort to render any other hot water heater unnecessary. Now it will doubtless already have occurred to my readers that installing a solar hot water system in their homes will not save the world. What it will do, on the other hand, is take part of the work now done by highly concentrated energy sources – most of which are rapidly depleting, and can be expected to become more expensive in real terms over the decades to come – and hand it over to a readily available energy source of lower concentration that, among other things, happens to be free. That’s an obvious practical gain for the residents of the house, and it’s also a collective gain for the community and society, since remaining supplies of high-exergy fossil fuels can be freed up for more necessary uses or, just possibly, left in the ground where they arguably belong. It’s curious, to use no stronger word, that so eminently practical a step as installing solar hot water systems has received so little attention in the peak oil and climate change communities. It’s all the more curious because the US government, which so often seems incapable of encountering a problem without doing its level best to make it worse, has actually done something helpful for a change: there are very substantial federal income tax benefits for installing a residential solar hot water system. Why, then, haven’t solar hot water heaters blossomed like daisies atop homes across the country? Why haven’t activists made a push to define this proven technology as one part of a meaningful response to the crisis of our time? It’s an interesting question to which I don’t have a definite answer. Partly, I think it ties into the weird disconnect between belief and action that pervades the apocalyptic end of contemporary culture. Of the sizable number of people in today’s America who say they believe that the world is coming to an end in 2012, for example, how many have stopped putting money into their retirement accounts? To judge by what little evidence I’ve been able to gather, not very many. In the same way, of the people who say they recognize that today’s extravagant habits of energy use are only possible because of a glut of cheap abundant fossil fuels, and will go away as fossil fuels deplete, those who are taking even basic steps to prepare themselves for a future of scarcity and socioeconomic disruption make up an uncomfortably small fraction. It’s hard to imagine passengers on a sinking ship glancing over the side to see the water rising, and going back to their game of shuffleboard on the deck, but a similar behavior pattern is far from rare these days. Still, I think part of the issue is the same fixation on quantity I’ve discussed already. Solar hot water heaters don’t produce, or save, a great quantity of energy. Water heating uses around 15 per cent of an average home’s energy bill, and so a solar hot water system that replaces 70% of that will account for a bit more than 10% of home energy use. (This is still enough to pay for most professionally installed solar hot water systems in 3 to 7 years, mind you.) If every home in America put a solar hot water heater on its roof, the impact on our total national energy consumption would be noticeable, but in terms of raw quantity, it wouldn’t be huge. Still, this misses at least three important points. First, of course, installing a solar hot water system can very easily be one piece of a broader program of energy conservation with a much larger impact. Knock 10% off household energy use with a solar hot water system, another 10% by insulating, weatherstripping, and the like, another 10% with an assortment of other simple energy-saving technologies (any halfway decent book on energy conservation from the Seventies has plenty of suggestions), and another 20% with lifestyle changes, and your home will be getting by with half the concentrated energy it uses right now. If even a large minority of homes in America took these steps, or others with similar effects, the effect on national exergy use would be very substantial indeed. Second, there’s a very large and under-appreciated difference between essential and nonessential energy uses, and it’s one that many of us will learn to recognize in the challenging years ahead. A great deal of energy use in America today is nonessential – think for a moment of all the energy currently devoted to the tourism industry, which is a very sizable sector of the US economy these days, and could be shut down tomorrow without impacting much of anything but the unemployment rolls – and a very large amount of that will go away as America slides down the curve of energy descent toward its near-future status as a Third World country. Whether or not hot water is strictly essential, its direct practical benefits in terms of health and comfort put it a good deal closer to the core, and that makes finding low-exergy ways to provide it particularly important. Third, as I’ve already suggested, we face an exergy shortage rather than an energy shortage. That doesn’t make our predicament any less severe, mind you. A strong case can be made that available exergy places a hard upper limit on the human population of the planet; as our supplies of exergy diminish, so will the human population, and at this point it’s all too likely that most of that reduction will happen in the traditional manner, via those four unwelcome guys on horseback. It does mean, though, that individuals, families, and communities that take steps to meet as many of their energy needs as possible using relatively low-exergy energy sources can have a disproportionate impact on the way that the future unfolds. I’ve argued elsewhere that Jevons’ Paradox – the rule that gains in the efficiency with which a resource is used tend to increase the use of the resource – only applies when cost is the only restriction to the use of the resource. When use of a resource is declining due to factors external to the economy, such as geological limits, gains in efficiency lessen the economic and social impact of shortages and buy time for a more gradual decline. Solar water heating is one example of a technology that can help our communities and societies make constructive use of that effect, and it’s also a technology that can be put to use by individuals right now. I’ll be discussing other options of the same kind in the next few posts. .