Biochar in Hawaii

SUBHEAD: Small kiln/retort experiment for producing biochar on farm in Ahualoa, Hawaii.
 

By Ben Discoe on 22 April 2010 in TerraPreta - 
(http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/content/small-kilnretort-my-farm-ahualoa-hawaii) 

 
 Image above: The Small kiln/retort built from 55 gallon barrell and cement blocks. From article.

I built a small kiln/retort on my farm in Ahualoa, Hawaii. Description, photos and observations from my first trial run at on my blog here: http://washedashore.com/eggsntea/2010/04/biochar1/
Summary: it's a hybrid of the two-barrel and twin-oaks approaches, aiming for higher volume than the two-barrel and lower cost/complexity than the twin-oaks. My approach needs tuning, but it seems promising.

Results were promising, but need tuning. I learned a lot from this trial run. Some indications:

• 1. The kiln fire needs to be strong and hot and heat up fast. My kiln burned moderately, for a long time, so it didn’t fully cook the retort.
• 2. More air inputs. I was hoping to limit openings to focus the heat inside. I put vents on the left and right and front, but the fire seemed to want more air.
• 3. A round barrel in a square box isn’t great geometry for a fire, which tends to burn separately in the four corner “zones”. I could try stacking the blocks in a more circular arrangement, like a hexagon/octagon. If i stay with this arrangement, i’ll need air vents specifically pointing into each corner.
• 4. Chimney. I figured a simple rectangular hole at the back should suffice, since it worked for Kelpie. But mine didn’t seem to draw well. Charcoal kilns for a thousand years have had proper chimneys. I’ll probably need one too.
• 5. Insulation. I used regular CMUs because they’re cheap and available. No doubt better insulation would result from using firebrick, thereby focusing more heat inside. I could also fill/bury the hollow tile walls, even if they’re dry-stacked.

The half-charred results of this trial aren’t useless; they could still be used for a less-smoky cook fire, or dropped through my shredder to make mulch with a more stable carbon content. However, the goal remains easy, cheap, reliable full pyrolysis. If it doesn’t pan out with this design, i could always switch to a pit, or hybrid brick-lined pit, or other ideas.

Greek credit reduced to junk

SUBHEAD: Standard & Poor's downgrades Greek bonds to junk; Portugal is also cut.

By Staff at AP & Reuters on 27 April 2010 on CNBC -  
(http://www.cnbc.com/id/36802555)


 
Image above: Front of the Mad Greek Diner in Death Valley, California. From (http://foxacrossamerica.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/utah-law-abiding-mormons-or-meth-addicts-you-decide)  

Europe's debt crisis worsened ominously Tuesday when two financially troubled countries— Greece and Portugal—saw their credit ratings downgraded as markets sold off their debt. Greece was downgraded to junk status by Standard & Poor's, which lowered Portugal's rating as well. The move triggered a major selloff in in global stocks.

European shares fell at their fastest rate in more than two months on Tuesday, while the Dow Jones Industrials plunged over 200 points. US crude oil futures sank more than 2 percent and the euro fell back near a one-year low against the U.S. dollar.

"It's contagion from the Greece crisis which has spiralled out of control,'' said William Sullivan at JVB Financial Group in Florida. "It's like coconuts falling from the tree.

There's a flight from sovereign debt issuers that have suspect national finances.'' Sullivan said there was "outright panic'' among investors who feared they would lose some of their principal if Greece restructured or defaulted on its debt...

---

SUBHEAD: Nouriel Roubini says private debt leverage has settled while there is a massive leveraging up of public debt.  

Greece Just Tip of Debt Iceberg By Patrick Allen on 27 April 2010 on CNBC - (http://www.cnbc.com/id/36795861)

The sovereign debt crisis will get worse and bond vigilantes could move on to even bigger economies like the United States and Japan when they are done sweeping through vulnerable European nations, according to economist Nouriel Roubini.

With government debt across the world soaring, the man who predicted the credit crunch is predicting a reckoning. "The recent problems faced by Greece are only the tip of a sovereign-debt iceberg in many advanced economies,”

Roubini told readers of his RGE Monitor Web site. "Bond-market vigilantes already have taken aim at Greece, Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Iceland, pushing government bond yields higher.” “Eventually they may take aim at other countries – even Japan and the United States -- where fiscal policy is on an unsustainable path," he wrote.

Roubini said he fears failure to learn the lessons of the credit crisis will simply mean a bigger, more dangerous crisis is just around the corner.

"There is a lot of talk about better regulation and supervision of the financial system but the financial industry is back to business as usual -- rebuilding leverage, engaging in prop trading and other risky behavior, compensating bankers and traders with indecent bonuses -- and is lobbying against better regulation and supervision,” he said.

“Governments are talking about reforms but almost no one has implemented them."

You Can See Bubbles Inflating Roubini also says he believes that those who claim it is impossible to see an asset bubble coming are misguided. Bubbles are easy to see coming and have had similar characteristics since Tulip Mania hit the Netherlands in the 17th century, he said. "An asset bubble -- often in real estate or in stock markets or in a new industry -- leads to financial euphoria, excessive risk taking, an accumulation of excessive debt and leverage,” Roubini wrote. “So the signposts of this phase -- asset boom and bubble, followed by the eventual bust and crash - are highly predictable if one looks at the economic and financial indicators that show the build-up of such excesses." Roubini warned that we are seeing more and more crises, that their impact on the economy and society is climbing and people continue to miss the signals. "The trouble is that in the bubble phase nearly everyone, the exception being a few critical analysts, is swept in a delusional bubble mania of irrational euphoria: households, financial institutions, investors, governments, spinmeisters all of whom profit from the bubble, including Ponzi-schemers who concoct their houses of cards and financial con games," he wrote. Have We Learned Anything? Huge debts run up in the build up to the credit crisis by households, corporations and the financial sector remain a huge problem and are being added to buy governments across the world, Roubini said. "While there is much talk about deleveraging as the crisis wanes, the reality is that private-sector debt ratios have stabilized at very high levels,” he wrote.

“By contrast, as a consequence of fiscal stimulus and socialization of part of the private sector’s losses, there is now a massive releveraging of the public sector. Deficits in excess of 10 percent of GDP can be found in many advanced economies, including America’s, and debt-to-GDP ratios are expected to rise sharply -- in some cases doubling in the next few years."

What works... Maybe

SUBHEAD: For those courageous, compassionate, and creative souls willing to live in the world rather than in a cubicle, life’s about to get even more interesting.

By Guy McPherson on 26 April 2010 in Nature Bats Last -  
(http://guymcpherson.com/2010/04/what-works-maybe-individual-options)


 
Image above: Painting by George Tucker "The Subway", 1950, at the Whitney Museum of Art. From (http://www.artknowledgenews.com/George_Tooker.html).  

 
Like global Climate Change, Peak Oil represents a predicament, not a problem. There is no politically viable solution to either of these great challenges. Political solutions require economic growth, forever, and therefore no significant sacrifice on the behalf of the electorate. Further, the industrial economy is underlain by the assumption of growth: The industrial economy grows or it dies.

As should be clear by now, we cannot grow the industrial economy while reducing use of energy. As a result, we cannot grow the economy while reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Thus, we’re stuck in a politically untenable situation: To save the living planet, including habitat for our own species, we need to shrink the industrial economy. But the industrial economy requires growth.

Recent research indicates we need to shrink the industrial economy to oblivion to save our species. In other words, what we really need is to kill the industrial economy before it kills us. And by us, I mean all of us: the entire collection of wise apes. As a society, clearly we have made our choice. But as an individual, you can choose to the contrary, with benefits for your psyche and quite possibly your survival.

Crude oil is the master material, the energy source that provides access to all others. Economic growth requires ever-increasing supplies of crude oil. As availability of oil declines the price goes up (with considerable variability, as we have observed during five years since we passed the world oil peak) and the industrial economy starts to sputter. When the price gets high enough, long enough, the economy simply, finally, expires. The world has been on an undulating plateau of oil availability for several years, but that plateau leads to a cliff. According to the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. military’s Joint Forces Command, the cliff comes in 18 months.

I know of no energy-literate person who thinks we’ll be able to avoid the post-industrial Stone Age by 2025. Assuming a conservative 4% annual decline rate of crude oil between now and then indicates we will have access to the same amount of oil in 2025 as we did in 1970, when the planet held half as many people as it now does and the world was considerably less industrialized than it now is. And that’s merely the gross rate of decline, whereas the net rate of decline will be much more rapid because it takes so much energy to extract and deliver energy.

Oil priced at $147.27 per barrel nearly brought down the industrial economy, and we’re hardly out of the woods yet. There is little hope for the industrial era to persist more than a few years, and the next spike in the price of oil could very well be the trigger that brings the industrial era to a sudden close to an unprepared nation.

I suspect we’ll pass through a new Dark Age en route to the post-industrial Stone Age. Indeed, many countries in the world are already there because they lack the world’s reserve currency and the world’s largest military. Bully for us: We have both, thus ensuring a steady supply of fossil-fuel-driven energy into every city and town in the United States. Well, so far.

As an aside, how long do you think we can maintain a military and a functioning industrial economy if we keep spending 58% of our budget on the former? We could stop our involvement in wars, but that would be quite un-American, wouldn’t it?

The costs of maintaining the non-negotiable American way of life are huge, even beyond simple economics. The American suburbs are the antithesis of durable living, as they require us to live far from work, far from play, and far from the places we shop for disposable items in our throw-away culture. They require obedience at home and oppression abroad. American Empire is city living (i.e., civilized), writ large.

The relatively few people paying attention to the undercurrents of the industrial economy know the ship is taking on water faster than the governments can run the printing presses. As the industrial economy continues to lurch and stumble, the vaunted American consumer loses the ability to consume (in part because inflation is rampant on items that actually matter, notably including food).

Because ours is a consumer culture, with personal consumption accounting for 70% of the industrial economy, the ship is listing. The next financial crisis is already unfolding — notwithstanding absurd reports from politicians, media, and the irrational exuberance, again, in the stock markets — and governments have nearly exhausted their supply of tools to deal with economic issues. We hit the iceberg of Peak Oil and, as government administrators busily rearrange the deck chairs, it’s time to launch the lifeboats, even if you believe consumption is a good thing. Personally, I think it’s not, in part based on the definition:

Consume:
1. To do away with completely; destroy
2a. To spend wastefully; squander
2b. Use up
3. To waste or burn away; perish

Consuming gives most people a temporary emotional “high.” We’re addicted to shopping. But I trust it’s clear why rational people want no part of the consumer economy. If we cannot terminate the industrial economy, and soon, we’ll exhaust all habitat for humans on Earth by the end of this century (and, if some models are to be believed, much sooner). Along the way, if we have our way, we’ll destroy every non-industrial culture and every non-human species.
In the face of a contracting industrial economy and the knowledge we’re headed for a situation with extremely limited access to fossil fuels, a quote from Peter Drucker comes to mind:

“You can either take action, or you can hang back and hope for a miracle. Miracles are great, but they are so unpredictable.”

What’s an individual to do, in light of the imminent collapse of western civilization? In addition to hastening the collapse, some tools for which I’ve listed before, I describe four points along a continuum for your own, individual, post-carbon future: (1) transition towns, (2) agricultural anarchy, (3) hunting and gathering, and (4) traveling. I will describe each approach, briefly, as a means of generating thought, action, and perhaps even discussion.

 
Image above: A 6,000-square-foot farm on a rooftop in the industrial Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, New York. From (http://thejakartaglobe.com/food/in-new-york-urban-farmers-take-to-the-skies/331520)

Transition Towns
They allow us the fantasy of keeping the current omnicidal culture going, albeit in slightly different form. This model assumes a long descent that allows time for cities to develop alternative energy sources. Think solar on every rooftop, for starters, and gardens in every suburban lot. For this approach to work, though, the food shed must be sufficiently nearby and sufficiently productive to support all the people in the transition town.

This seems hugely problematic in sprawling western cities, especially those with more than a few thousand people. And for areas with limited supplies of water, or water that is several hundred feet below the surface of the ground, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario that doesn’t include massive suffering along the way to a huge die-off.

The inability to store energy in the absence of fossil fuels beyond a few years in expensive, transient, and toxic batteries is a microscopic problem relative to the absence of ready access to water and food. And there’s an additional problem with the transition-town notion: I seriously doubt we have access to the fossil fuels needed to create the needed infrastructure for the 250 million city-living Americans, much less the 3.5 billion people who occupy the world’s cities. Solar panels and batteries simply won’t make the grade — there’s not enough oil left to pull this one off. When the lights go out in the city, chaos often erupts. Is your city different? If so, will that difference persist when the lights don’t come back on, ever?

I’ve often said and written that I would give my life to terminate the industrial economy, if only to alleviate the burden of oppression on the living world. I’ve no doubt, in fact, that I will make this sacrifice. And that’s okay: My insignificant life pales in contrast to the living planet and the persistence of our species.

On the other hand, although I loved city life, my city was not worth dying for. So I left to prepare, recognizing that fortune favors the prepared. In contrast, Michael Ruppert moved to his home city of Los Angeles with full knowledge L.A. would be among the first cities to go up in flames. Ruppert is willing to die for the privilege of comforting the afflicted there.
 
Image above: Village produce market in Ondo State in Nigeria. From (http://globalvoicesonline.org/2006/04/10/village-market-in-ondo-state-nigeria)

Agricultural Anarchy
This was offered as a model by Thomas Jefferson, and Monticello was the prime example before it became a museum. Contemporary examples are found in nearly every “third-world” country. A large proportion of the towns and cities in Central America and South America never have had ready access to abundant fossil fuels. As a result, communities have communal water sources and people dig shallow wells and harvest rain from rooftops.

On a daily basis, local markets are filled with fresh food brought from nearby gardens and farms. The power goes out frequently, and nobody seems to mind because the towns and cities are actually located in livable areas in the absence of fossil fuels to heat or cool every building (cf. Tucson, Arizona). In short, agriculture has always been, and still is, at the center of everyday life.

 
Image above: Women and girls frequently swim and bath together while caring for the young boys in from this hunter/gatherer Amazon tribe. From (http://www.amazon-tribes.com/Amazon-Indian-Girls.html).

Hunting and Gathering
An activity that doubtless make a comeback for a very few hardy, quick-witted folks. This model resembles the prior Stone Age, and clearly is the most durable approach. It worked for the first 2 million years of the human experience, and we fled from it as recently as a few thousand years ago. But if you can’t find a tribe to go along, you’ll be as lonely as a Saguaro cactus on an ice floe.

 
Image above: Delores, 78-years-old 78-year-old, makes her, on foot, way up a hill outside Castrojeriz, Spain. From (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0809/S00196.htm).

Travelling the World
Finally, individuals can largely avoid the ravages of collapse by traveling from spot to spot. History has been kind to travelers because people rooted in a particular place hunger for knowledge. If you’re to pursue this route, you’ll need to be quick-witted, good-humored, and willing to lend a hand when needed. Also, you’ll need to recognize and avoid danger. Traveling will be terrifying, but no worse than staying in one location. And you’ll get to see the world and live an adventure-filled life, just as promised by U.S. military recruiters.

None of these options offer a life similar to the one you’ve known. But a different life doesn’t mean a worse life, especially if you give a rat’s ass about anybody besides yourself. There will be plenty of opportunities to serve your community, as there has always been, in the months and years ahead. We’ll be living closer to our neighbors and closer to the living planet that sustains us all.

For those courageous, compassionate, and creative souls willing to live in the world rather than in a cubicle, life’s about to get even more interesting. For the vast majority of industrial Americans, though, life is about to become miserable and surprisingly short.
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Help save World with Biochar

SUBHEAD: Biochar is a way of removing CO2 greenhouse gas from the atmosphere for a very long time.

By Ron Dembo on 26 April 2010 in The Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ron-dembo/can-biochar-help-save-the_b_551852.html)
   
Image above: Photo of preparation for field tests of growing corn with the addition of biochar. Material is soaked and crushed before being mixed with soil. From (http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/taxonomy/term/255)

On Earth Day, we looked back on a year in which James Cameron's Avatar, a film about environmental crisis and restoration, swept box offices around the globe. What if there were a real-life answer to help solve the real world problems of climate change, Peak Oil, and global food security?

Would you want the leaders of the G8 and the G20 to know about it and endorse it? This Earth Day, The Huntsville Project launched to inform the global public about biochar, one of the most promising developments in our fight against climate change. At the new website, http://www.newcarboneconomy.info, you can find out about biochar and sign the petition.

The Huntsville Project is asking global leaders to support this important new clean technology. On June 25. the G8 will meet in Huntsville Ontario. Then the G20 will meet in Toronto on June 26 and 27. Sign the Huntsville Petition and help put biochar on the global agenda!

Biochar Explained Biochar is the modern version of an ancient Pre-Columbian technology invented by native Amazonian peoples to enhance soil fertility. A form of charcoal, it is created by pyrolysis - the burning of biomass, such as agricultural waste or wood, in low oxygen. The ancient source of biochar is called terra preta (prepared earth) in Brazil.

The first thing to know about biochar is that it is a way of removing CO2 greenhouse gas from the atmosphere for a very long time. The carbon from biomass, when pyrolyzed, can remain in the soil for hundreds or thousands of years. We know this because some of the terra preta soils of the Amazon are 2000 years old. And these ancient soils are still so fertile after all this time that there is an industry in Brazil to collect these soils and put them in bags to sell as potting soil.

Biochar is one of the few technologies that can take carbon out of the atmosphere. 'Green' technologies like solar and wind power reduce the amount of CO2 that goes in to the atmosphere, but do nothing to remove the carbon build up. Biochar takes carbon that has been captured from the atmosphere during the growing process of plants and trees and converts it into a soil additive, thereby storing the carbon in the earth.

It has a number of advantages over other carbon removal technologies, such as geo-engineering or coal power generation carbon capture and storage, in that it is proven, relatively cheap and can be widely applied. Biochar could potentially play a significant role combating climate change.

In addition, biochar has a number of other potential benefits.

Soil fertility Field tests by the Biochar Fund in Cameroon (http://www.biocharfund.org) have demonstrated up to 220% yield increase in maize crops in degraded soil in one season with addition of biochar to the soil. Although it works in many different soil conditions, and possibly all, biochar works especially well in degraded soils, and in the tropics. Following the promising results in Cameroon, Biochar Fund recently received a $300,000 grant from Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai's Green Belt Movement for biochar projects in Kenya.

Farms and gardens Biochar has an exceptional ability to hold nitrogen and water in the soil. This means that farmers can use less water and less fertilizer. They can make biochar from their own wastes and use it in their fields, avoiding the carbon emissions associated with the manufacture and transport of fertilizer. Different biochar technologies are being developed that are optimized for different agricultural inputs, like rice husks, coconut shells, etc.

Pollution prevention Biochar lessens the run-off of nitrogen into waterways, which can cause serious health problems. These include 'blue baby' deaths from high nitrate contamination of ground water. Biochar could also prevent the growth of 'dead zones' where nitrogen-induced algae blooms in the ocean. Biochar may also be able to remediate other soil contaminants.

Invasive species control - A potential remedy for invasive species is to turn them into the raw material for biochar. Kudzu vine in the southern US, cat tails and striga in Africa, and water hyacinth in Africa and India are among the invasive species that could be treated in this way.

Reforestation - Biochar could be used to improve soils for reforestation programs. It could prove particularly valuable in places such as Haiti where severe deforestation leads to contaminated waters supplies and other problems.

Stoves The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 1.6 million people, mostly women and young children, die every year from smoke inhalation from traditional cooking stoves. Stoves which use the biochar process are emission-free while creating a soil additive to improve the fertility of kitchen gardens. Some biochar stoves can even create electricity for home lighting or cellphone charging.

Biochar-making equipment is available in many different types and sizes, from the small and very cheap ($6-8 dollars), all the way to municipal-scale plants. Equipment can in some cases be made with scrap metals. This is why people in the Biochar Offsets group are so passionate about this emerging technology and why we started the Huntsville Project and Biochar Haiti. Biochar can play a key role in the sanitation, health, and food security needs of people in developing countries, and globally, while at the same time contributing to the mitigation of climate change. We want to help bring a new biochar industry to Haiti to help restore the forests and make the soil fruitful for the people of Haiti, while creating jobs and income. We can take this model and apply it in any developing country.

You can find out more at the website of the International Biochar Initiative: http://www.biochar-international.org 

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Biochar goes Industrial 10/18/09 
Ea O Ka Aina: Sacres Shrines & Skinny Chickens 8/26/09  
Ea O Ka Aina: Searching for Terra Preta 8/7/09 
Ea O Ka Aina: Soylent Black 1/11/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Black is the New Green 2/28/09 
Island Breath: Rethinking BioChar 10/15/07

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Dodd's Wall Street Plan

SUBHEAD: Why won't Chris Dodd take "Yes" for an answer on financial reform? Because he doesn't want to.

 By Simon Johnson on 26 April 2010 in Huffington Post - 
 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/simon-johnson/when-will-chris-dodd-star_b_551311.html)

 
Image above: Democrat Chris Dodd whispers a confidence to Republican Richard Shelby on financial reform. From (http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2009/12/dodd_shelby_voice_optimism_on.html).

 Senator Chris Dodd is a tactical legislative genius - keep this clearly in your mind during the days ahead. In terms of maneuvering for the outcomes he seeks, managing the votes, and controlling the floor, you have rarely seen his equal.

Senator Dodd wants some financial reform - enough to declare victory - but not so much as to seriously undermine the prevalence of megabanks on Wall Street. You can take whatever view you like on his motivation - but Senator Dodd himself is quite open about his thinking and intentions. Given the mounting pressure from many sides - including Federal Reserve Bank presidents - to implement significantly more reform (see also David Warsh's Sunday evening assessment), for example using some version of the Brown-Kaufman SAFE banking act, how exactly will Senator Dodd prevail?

1) He knows that the Republican leadership will mount a disinformation campaign, trying to muddy the waters by claiming that the Dodd bill "institutionalizes bailouts". This top-down Republican line is complete and deliberate misrepresentation - designed purely to prevent real reform. Every time it is repeated, Senator Dodd's position becomes stronger because people who really want reform need to rally to his defend his approach.

2) The Republican attacks also justify the Democratic leadership and various pro-reform groups telling people: Don't confuse the message. Everyone in the center and on the left is lobbied to emphasize that Senator Dodd's bill will completely "end too big to fail" - if you deviate from this line, you will be accused of falling in with Mitch McConnell's dangerous views. Expect this pressure to intensify in coming days - requests for responsible and transparent debate on policy options will be drowned out and pushed aside by the pressure for conformity (underpinned by the desire not to undermine Wall Street campaign contributions too much).

3) As the White House pushes back against the Republicans, this will further strengthen Senator Dodd - he is the congressional standard bearer, after all. And everyone knows that he needs 60 senators on his side in order to prevail, so some weakening of the bill is presumed inevitable and must be accepted in the reasonable name of making some progress. But this is where the pure genius of Senator Dodd enters the equation - with an audacity that makes you whistle with appreciation for the art (although not the substance). The presumption is that Senator Dodd is negotiating with one or more Republicans who are the easiest to bring on board. This would make sense if Senator Dodd wanted the strongest bill possible. Senator Chuck Grassley voted for strong derivatives reform in the Agriculture Committee; Senator Olympia Snowe also seems on board with that agenda. 

Senators John Thune and Bob Corker are saying in public that Republicans want to vote for reform (although it's a good question what this means exactly). Senator Jim Bunning voted with Senator Bernie Sanders in the Budget committee - on what is being seen as a test vote on breaking up banks (Sanders's press release; Huffington Post coverage).

Senator Scott Brown is wavering in broad daylight. Senator George Voinovich is retiring and rumored to be flexible on financial reform issues. But Senator Dodd is closeted in negotiations with Senator Richard Shelby - who stands for the most pro-Wall Street bill possible.

The goal is apparently not to give up as little as possible and still get a bill. The goal is to bring as many supporters of Wall Street as possible on board with the legislation, at the same time as framing the issues so the pro-reform camp looks bad when it presses for more. As we head into what is likely to be the decisive week, Senator Dodd controls the clock, can determine what is debated on the Senate floor, and - whenever he feels hard pressed - remind everyone to toe his line or fear the extreme Republicans.

At this point, only the White House can bring sufficient pressure for the Brown-Kaufman bill to get an up-or-down vote; the odds are against this being what the White House really wants to do. But keep calling the White House and the Senate Democratic leadership.

 .

A Still Moment

SUBHEAD: It's hard to believe that the authorities in government and banking can keep the illusion of normality going a whole lot longer.

By James Kunstler on 26 April 2010 in Kunstler.com -  
(http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/04/a-still-moment.html)


 
Image above: Still from 4/24/10 Saturday Night Live opening sketch by Fred Armisen on Obama and Financial Reform failure. From (http://www.hulu.com/watch/144715/saturday-night-live-obama-reform-cold-open#s-p1-sr-i1)  

 George W. Bush was onto something in the fall of 2008 when he remarked apropos of the Lehman collapse: "...this sucker could go down." It's my serene conviction, by the way, that this sucker actually is going down, right now, even as I clatter away at the keys -- perhaps in slow motion, so that not many other bystanders have noticed yet, and the few who have noticed are mostly too crosseyed with nausea to speak. It's perhaps useful to define even what we mean when we say "this sucker."

Everybody knows what a sucker is, of course -- say, a Midwestern public employees' union pension fund snookered into buying a fat slice of equity tranche in a Goldman Sachs-engineered CDO. But "this sucker" is something else: a rather large cargo of commercial relations, entailed obligations, hopes, expectations, habits of daily life -- indeed millions of whole lives -- loaded onto the rather creaky vessel we call modern civilization.

"This sucker" was such an apt term coming from someone whose understanding of civilization was like unto that of a boy who found a PlayStation under the Christmas tree. It's also perhaps useful to define what we mean by "going down." To my mind it means an awful lot of money disappears and nobody can pay for anything and an awful of things that have kept going on promises to pay and to get paid will stop keeping going. I don't think that the idea of money disappears -- that is, paper certificates representing claims on future work -- but there will be a lot less of it to go around.

 Eventually the idea of money could go, too, at least in its current form as Federal Reserve notes. But mostly for some years it will just be a lot of people, companies, and governments who are broke. "Going down" will mean a society with no money and an infrastructure for daily life that requires gobs of money to run, and a populace too dazed, confused, and inflamed to do anything useful in the way of organizing new infrastructures for daily life for their new circumstances.

In retrospect, the Great Depression of the 1930s will look like "The Philadelphia Story" compared to what we wake up to ten years from now. President Obama's speech at Cooper Union last week was a remarkable performance. It managed to appear forceful and serious without containing any really serious or forceful proposals to discipline a banking system that is running a hostage-and-ransom racket on civilization.

If this is finally what the Obama Experience is all about than his detractors have been right all along: he is a tool. Finance reform aside, there are still plenty of laws left on the statute books that could be applied to the frauds and rackets that ran absolutely amok on Wall Street the past few years. I would still like to know why buying CDS "insurance" against your own issue of bonds deliberately engineered to default is NOT a form of insider trading, to put it as simply as possible.

The SEC action against Goldman Sachs is likely to open a Pandora's box of troubles for that company, and perhaps all of the Too Big To Fail banks. But even so, I believe this sucker is going down before 99.9 percent of it is sorted out. Anyway, there was a lot about the SEC action that seemed curious, to put it mildly, from the timing of it, to the brevity of the document, to the strange fact that it emerged at all from an agency whose principal activity the past few years has been the viewing of internet porn, and which has otherwise behaved so indifferently in the face of numberless offenses to common decency, not to mention the public interest, that it might as well have been staffed by a thousand head of Holstein cows rather than licensed attorneys and graduates of accredited colleges.

 This sucker is going down because the train of bankruptcies underway has a remorseless self-reinforcing power to provoke more and more bankruptcies at every stop along the line as every promise to pay is welshed on.

The mortgages will not be paid and securities will not pay their investors and the banks will choke on the bad paper promises in their vaults and the pension funds will not pay their beneficiaries and the states and counties and municipalities will go broke and not pay their employees and creditors, and the federal government will not be able to "print" new money in sufficient quantities fast enough to compensate for all the money not being paid up-and-down the line... and one morning we will wake up and discover that all those promises to pay were sham promises based on no productive activity whatsoever... and that will be a sad day. Perhaps the Dow Jones Industrial Average will hit 35,000 on that day.

Nothing can stop this chain of bankruptcy. It's already baked in the cake. There is probably some wish on the part of those in charge, like Mr. Obama, to try everything possible to postpone it. And there is likewise surely a huge effort underway in the banking sector right now to cream off as much cash as possible so that when this sucker does go down they will bethink themselves better positioned to survive the consequences. Personally, I believe that the damage was mostly done during the tenure of poor dim George W. Bush, and his predecessor Bill Clinton.

I suspect that Mr. Obama learned at the height of 2008 election campaign -- during those days of the Lehman collapse and the TARP -- just how completely the government -- and the people of the USA -- were in fact hostage to the banking system, and that it has been his unfortunate role to pretend that there is some other fate to bargain for besides this sucker going down. It is probably why he continues to smoke so much. He must be lighting one Marlboro off the tip of another, one after another, in whatever inner sanctum he repairs to when the midnight chimes toll around the White House.

 It's sad to think of this graceful, still rather young man going down in history as the chump-of-the-century, a reincarnation of Herbert Hoover on steroids, with sugar on top. Animosities brewing as they are among the white trash elements of the country, I just hope this sucker doesn't resolve into an ugly bout of attempted ethnic cleansing. Certainly Obama's racial make-up has inspired a revival of the Ku Klux spirit around the Nascar ovals.

I'm sincerely worried that the misdeeds of people name Blankfein, Rubin, and Madoff could provoke a red-white-and-blue pogrom. The big mystery for the moment is how come a few good men of stature in important places have not stepped forward to say the right thing or do the right deed. How come no US congressperson challenged the knavish behavior of Republicans who condone malicious idiocy that they know to be false like the so-called "birther" activity.

How come no putative "progressive" has called the Democrats on their disingenuous failure to call illegal immigrants what they are. How come no state attorney general has filed charges against TBTF bank misconduct even if the US attorney general lies in state over at the US DOJ. How come no political figure of any stripe has called for the resignation of Summers, Rubin, Gensler and other Goldman Sachs "sleepers" infesting high levels of government.

How come Dylan Ratigan is the only visible figure in any major newsroom willing to identify the precise nature of the meta-swindle. When this sucker goes down, our primary task will be reorganizing American life on a much more local and de-complexified basis. It's a very big assignment and especially daunting against a possible background of political disorder. The losses will be epic and the changes severe, but it doesn't have to mean the end of recognizably American culture.

There will be very little money around, and it may end up being a certificate backed by gold issued by a bank other than the Federal Reserve. Or maybe we'll just be swapping stuff for the makings of dinner. So many forces are roiling around 'out there' now that it's hard to believe that the authorities in government and banking can keep the illusion of normality going a whole lot longer.

The possible litigation against Goldman Sachs-style frauds by a thousand aggrieved victims is enough to paralyze the system. Meanwhile, trillions in credit default swaps are ticking away like dirty bombs.

Greece is going down, with Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and the UK standing by to go next. Nobody can pay their bills. Before long, the old folks won't get their checks. Then the poor folks. Lately, I wonder if there will even be an election six months from now.

 
Video Above has advertisement: Saturday Night Live opening "Obama Reform Cold" on 4/24/10. From (http://www.hulu.com/watch/144715/saturday-night-live-obama-reform-cold-open#s-p1-sr-i1)
 .

Not Even on South Park

SUBHEAD: Our cowardice suggests that there’s enough rot in our institutions that a stronger foe might be able to bring them crashing down.

By Ross Douthat on 26 April 2010 in New York Times -  
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/opinion/26douthat.html)

 
Image above: Still from the 200th episode of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's "South Park," which included a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad disguised in a Chicago Bears mascot suit. From (http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2010/04/20/website-warns-south-park-creators-face-retribution-depicting-muhammad).  

Two months before 9/11, Comedy Central aired an episode of “South Park” entitled “Super Best Friends,” in which the cartoon show’s foul-mouthed urchins sought assistance from an unusual team of superheroes. These particular superfriends were all religious figures: Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Mormonism’s Joseph Smith, Taoism’s Lao-tse — and the Prophet Muhammad, depicted with a turban and a 5 o’clock shadow, and introduced as “the Muslim prophet with the powers of flame.”

That was a more permissive time. You can’t portray Muhammad on American television anymore, as South Park’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, discovered in 2006, when they tried to parody the Danish cartoon controversy — in which unflattering caricatures of the prophet prompted worldwide riots — by scripting another animated appearance for Muhammad. The episode aired, but the cameo itself was blacked out, replaced by an announcement that Comedy Central had refused to show an image of the prophet.

For Parker and Stone, the obvious next step was to make fun of the fact that you can’t broadcast an image of Muhammad. Two weeks ago, “South Park” brought back the “super best friends,” but this time Muhammad never showed his face. He “appeared” from inside a U-Haul trailer, and then from inside a mascot’s costume.

These gimmicks then prompted a writer for the New York-based website revolutionmuslim.blogspot.com to predict that Parker and Stone would end up like Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker murdered in 2004 for his scathing critiques of Islam. The writer, an American convert to Islam named Abu Talhah Al-Amrikee, didn’t technically threaten to kill them himself. His post, and the accompanying photo of van Gogh’s corpse, was just “a warning ... of what will likely happen to them.”

This passive-aggressive death threat provoked a swift response from Comedy Central. In last week’s follow-up episode, the prophet’s non-appearance appearances were censored, and every single reference to Muhammad was bleeped out. The historical record was quickly scrubbed as well: The original “Super Best Friends” episode is no longer available on the Internet.

In a way, the muzzling of “South Park” is no more disquieting than any other example of Western institutions’ cowering before the threat of Islamist violence. It’s no worse than the German opera house that temporarily suspended performances of Mozart’s opera “Idomeneo” because it included a scene featuring Muhammad’s severed head. Or Random House’s decision to cancel the publication of a novel about the prophet’s third wife.

Or Yale University Press’s refusal to publish the controversial Danish cartoons ... in a book about the Danish cartoon crisis. Or the fact that various Western journalists, intellectuals and politicians — the list includes Oriana Fallaci in Italy, Michel Houellebecq in France, Mark Steyn in Canada and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands — have been hauled before courts and “human rights” tribunals, in supposedly liberal societies, for daring to give offense to Islam.

But there’s still a sense in which the “South Park” case is particularly illuminating. Not because it tells us anything new about the lines that writers and entertainers suddenly aren’t allowed to cross. But because it’s a reminder that Islam is just about the only place where we draw any lines at all.

Across 14 on-air years, there’s no icon “South Park” hasn’t trampled, no vein of shock-comedy (sexual, scatalogical, blasphemous) it hasn’t mined. In a less jaded era, its creators would have been the rightful heirs of Oscar Wilde or Lenny Bruce — taking frequent risks to fillet the culture’s sacred cows.

In ours, though, even Parker’s and Stone’s wildest outrages often just blur into the scenery. In a country where the latest hit movie, “Kick-Ass,” features an 11-year-old girl spitting obscenities and gutting bad guys while dressed in pedophile-bait outfits, there isn’t much room for real transgression. Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place.

Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing.

This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that “bravely” trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.

Happily, today’s would-be totalitarians are probably too marginal to take full advantage. This isn’t Weimar Germany, and Islam’s radical fringe is still a fringe, rather than an existential enemy.

For that, we should be grateful. Because if a violent fringe is capable of inspiring so much cowardice and self-censorship, it suggests that there’s enough rot in our institutions that a stronger foe might be able to bring them crashing down.
.

How Bjorn Lomborg Deceives

SUBHEAD: An elaborate and convenient excuse for continuing on our current trajectory.

By Kurt Cobb on 25 April 2010 in Resource Insights -
(http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2010/04/how-bjrn-lomborg-deceives-public.html)
 

 
Image above: Photo of Bjorn Lomborg from Wkipedia profile.

 [IB Publisher's note: [Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish environmentalist, campaigns to oppose the Kyoto Protocol and other measures to cut carbon emissions in the short-term, and argues that we should instead adapt to short-term temperature rises as they are inevitable, and spend money on research and development for longer-term environmental solutions, and on other important world problems such as AIDS, malaria and malnutrition - Wikipedia]

 Bjørn Lomborg is articulate, attractive, youthful-looking and the supposed voice of reason in the debate over environmental policy. So, it is no surprise that he is making the rounds in the media this Earth Day season. In a piece in USA Today he recycles claims from previous work that "many key environmental measures" are getting better. As you sift through the piece, you will see that his "key environmental measures" relate almost exclusively to the health and well-being of humans. And, this is what he uses to build a three-fold strategy to deceive the public.

First, he equates human well-being with the well-being of the planet as a whole largely ignoring declines in the functioning of the very ecosystems that support human life.

 Second, he knows that humans are particularly eager to hear good news about themselves, especially when it is wrapped in rhetoric that makes it appear that we are not undermining our environmental support systems. Third, he accuses those who call for blanket curtailment of practices such as the burning of fossil fuels of having no concern for the poor. Let's take each strategy in turn.

 Human well-being is the same as planetary well-being.
It is easy for people to think that general conditions on Earth are getting better if those people are well-fed and have access to adequate housing, education, economic opportunity, and recreation. If a person has been alive long enough, he or she will probably notice that many waterways are cleaner than they were a generation ago and that the air in many cities is now clearer than it used to be. Lomborg is playing on the tendency of humans to judge conditions on the planet based on their own personal experience and to assume that this experience is the best indicator of those conditions.

Of course, major planetary systems such as the oceans, the forests, the soil and the climate are moving in dramatic and measurable ways that are hostile not only to human survival, but also to the survival of virtually every other living thing. But these changes are not readily apparent to the average urban dweller who neither experiences them directly nor has the apparatus or training to measure changes in such systems.

What humans have actually been doing is overtaxing the Earth's ecosystems and that makes them feel, well, great--at least for a while. Humans have had such spectacular success at increasing their numbers, longevity, health and overall material wealth that it is hard for them to surmise that something is wrong.

But our trajectory as a species is the very picture of overshoot. And, we have become ever more confident in our path even as the carrying capacity deficit builds. Ecologically speaking, what characterizes population trajectories such as ours is a steep and seemingly unstoppable rise followed by a rapid crash as the carrying capacity deficit exceeds critical levels. In other words, everything is all right until it isn't! That's why measures of human well-being are not very useful in judging the health of ecosystems.  

Humans are particularly eager to hear good news about themselves.
Think back to when you were a child and received praise from your parents or from teachers about your grades; your performance in a school concert or play; your prowess on the football, basketball, soccer, or other field of play; or just about anything that you did well and in accordance with the wishes of your parents and teachers. Who doesn't want to be praised? Well, Lomborg is full of praise for what we've supposedly already done to "improve" the environment. He doesn't claim there is no work yet to be done. But in a week filled with dire warnings about environmental catastrophe, Lomborg's message is designed to stand out. It's an excellent public relations ploy.  

Those insisting on drastic policy shifts have no concern for the poor.
This is an especially pernicious claim by Lomborg. It makes people who advocate swift and thoroughgoing changes in environmental policy out to be monsters. What Lomborg doesn't want readers to think about is how the existing system is responsible for creating the huge disparities in income and therefore the degraded and perilous conditions of the world's poor. He acts as if the very system that enslaved the world's poor will be the one that somehow alleviates their condition. It is all too easy for privileged Westerners to convince themselves that they have done a great service for the world's formerly pre-industrial cultures by colonizing them and then forcing them into the industrial model. That said, Lomborg is correct on one point.

It is hypocritical for those living in wealthy countries to insist that the world's poor forego the benefits of a Western lifestyle in order to "save the planet" if these same wealthy countries are unwilling to make drastic changes themselves. But that doesn't mean that drastic and rapid changes aren't necessary across the board to prevent the collapse alluded to above. Essentially, Lomborg's argument is that the world's poor need to be lifted out of poverty by continuing business-as-usual, only more equitably practiced. This argument allows those of us in wealthy countries an excuse for continuing on our current trajectory even if we are supposed to do it using green technology.

Whether Lomborg is cynical or merely blind to his own subterfuges, I cannot know.

But his clever rhetoric has kept him in the spotlight year after year. Maybe that's all it was intended to do.

 .

Wham-O Moves to America

SUBHEAD: Wham-O moving its production of Frisbees, hula hoops and pool noodles from China to the U.S. is reverse colonialism.

By Jon Stewart on 23 April 2010 on the Daily Show -
(http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-april-22-2010/wham-o-moves-to-america)

 
Image above: A Wham-O Professionsl 108 gram Frisbee made from recycled plastic. From (http://www.inthehopper.org/sustainability/frisbees-recycled-content)  

So what does it mean? Wham-o is moving production back the USA because shipping costs, and other such overhead, makes it cheaper to manufacture in the US. The guy from China said that China does not want that sort of industry so much anymore.

China wants higher paying jobs such as engineering, and software development. Such high-tech work is also less environmentally destructive, and there is no shipping cost involved. In other words: now that China has progressed, let the US have the crappy jobs.

 Not that long ago, I remember reading a similar article with a guy from India saying that Indians are becoming much less interested in call center jobs. Today Indians want to be developers, architects, analysts, and project managers. Who could blame them? I seem to remember a few article about call center jobs coming back to the US. So now the trend seems to be that the US gets the low-end jobs, while China and India enjoy the high-end careers.
 .

Genesis in Reverse

SUBHEAD: We've cooked the planet, says activist Bill McKibben, but thinking locally, not globally, could help.

By Andrew Nikiforuk on 23 April 2010 in The Globe and Mail -  
(http://www.theglobeandmail.com/books/review-eaarth-by-bill-mckibben/article1544611)


 

Image above: Detail of Penguin Books paperback cover for "Eaarth" by Bill McKibben. from (http://www.penguin.com.au/lookinside/spotlight.cfm?SBN=9781863954723)  
 
Bill McKibben has always struck me as a puritanical figure who needs to lighten up a bit. But he's a damn good New England writer and a “real deal” environmental activist. He wrote about climate change long before the Arctic ice shelf collapsed and the oceans started to acidify (The End of Nature). He questioned the wisdom of letting mere mortals engineer different forms of life as casually as Mexican drug gangs cleansing a working-class neighbourhood (Enough). And he's examined the meaning of Job, God and climate change (The Comforting Whirlwind). You'd think he'd be ready to surf the waves on Hawaii's North Shore.

But not McKibben. He's the founder of the carbon-battling 350.org and a man with a gung-ho mission. To appreciate his old-fashioned radicalism, you have to understand his origins: He hails from Lexington, Massachusetts. That's where the American Revolution started. The idea that small communities must revolt against big tyrannies just swims in his blood.

As such, McKibben, a Methodist, remains very much part of the New England congregational tradition, which still informs smart states such as Vermont. The congregational tradition, a small-government creed, holds that the route to a better life (as opposed to better buying) lies in the improvement of individuals, their families, communities and the local economy. Aboriginals call such thinking traditional knowledge. The Greeks call it wisdom and the psychopaths at Goldman Sachs would call it treason. McKibben is convinced it's the way forward.

His oddly titled new book Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet reflects our increasingly precarious global existence. (The wonky spelling just suggests that we've cooked the planet and it's no longer the same hospitable place, McKibben says.) Business as usual is over, but our elites can't admit it. The fouling of the atmosphere has ended ten thousands years of relatively benign climate and replaced it with shock-and-awe weather. In other words, the Titanic has left the dock: The ship's owners still worship at the Evangelical Church of Petroleum, and the passengers will have to look out for icebergs on their own.

The hard-core science, though effectively mocked by the moneyed hawkers of heavy crude, grows more alarming every year. The tropics have expanded more than two degrees of latitude north and south since 1980. A study on the freshwater discharge from 950 of the world's largest rivers shows half are declining. The amount of water entering the Pacific has dropped by six per cent. Thanks to fossil-fuel emissions, the oceans are 30 per cent more acidic than they should be.

That's calamitous news for coral reefs, crabs and fish eaters. The Arctic ice cap has lost an ice mass equal to 12 nations the size of Great Britain. Misguided adventures with biofuels have increased the ranks of food-poor by 40 million. McKibben says;

“We're running Genesis backwards, de-creating,”

But getting off oil, and the casino-like revenues that beget unethical governments, won't be easy. McKibben, unlike many greens, recognizes that it took 40 to 50 years to get hooked on our oil-energy slavery, and it will take decades to achieve hydrocarbon emancipation. But bigness won't provide the solutions.

“The project we are now undertaking – maintenance, graceful decline, hunkering down, holding on against the storm – requires a different scale. Instead of continents and vast nations, we need to think about states, about towns, about neighborhoods, about blocks.”

We need to know our place again and abandon old party lines, McKibben argues.

“It's not clear whether a farmer's market or a local neighbourhood crime watch or a community-owned windmill is a liberal or conservative project. It's some of both.”

Reform, he says, must begin with fundamentals: food and energy, the only two beats in journalism that have ever mattered. And the good news is that ordinary people have started the revolution. The number of small farms in New England grew from 28,000 to 33,000 between 2002 and 2007, increasing for the first time in 150 years.

The Institute for Local Self Reliance reports that half of the United States could meet its own energy needs within its own borders. The Slow Money movement promotes the investment of local capital in small local businesses with the goal of making a living as opposed to making a killing. (Calgary's Podium Funds, for example, could well kick-start a national renaissance in local investment.)

McKibben even proposes a new vocabulary for living on this tougher, meaner planet: “durable, sturdy, stable, hardy and robust.” That's Great Depression lingo. It's also the language cherished by modest folks for a long time. I might add to McKibben's sober-minded list a few key additions: truth, perspective and proportion.

All in all, it's an elegant and disquieting read and well worth the time. But two things struck me about McKibben's assessment of our overheated predicament. The first concerns its conservative tone. Our greed had sent us down uncertain paths, and the best we can now do is roll up our sleeves and find atonement in a garden, McKibben says. Greens just may become the renewed face of conservatism while alleged conservatives such as Sarah Palin continue their metamorphosis into petroleum savants.

The second remains McKibben's historic remedy: Small, diversified communities can withstand adversity. Jane Jacobs, Leo Tolstoy and E. F. Schumacher all said that small was sustainable, resilient and beautiful. G. K. Chesterton, by the way, brilliantly offered the same “outline of sanity” nearly 100 years ago.

Although McKibben's analysis of the big problem (and climate change and peak oil are just that) rings mostly true, his earnestness and clean writing diminish the real conflicts that lie ahead. Like many U.S. military analysts, I suspect there will be blood. You can't end an addiction in a house rocked by repeated climate shocks without tribal and chaotic trauma. It might be more Egad than Eaarth.

• Andrew Nikiforuk is the author of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, which won the Rachel Carson Book Award in 2009.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: "Eaarth" by Bill McKibben 4/6/10

 .

Defenders of the Land

SUBHEAD: Dakota native points to indigenous survival and liberation in times of collapse.  
Image above: Detail of book cover for "What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland" by Waziyatawin, Ph.D. From (http://www.livingjusticepress.org/index.asp?Type=PRODLIST&SEC={9643748B-1735-4115-A479-FA6F18327BAD}&DE={E811C28A-77CD-49CD-8E09-3D77F547E1BC})  

Radio by Waziyatawin on 25 March 2010 in Rabble - 
  (http://rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/healing-earth/2010/03/defenders-land-indigenous-survival-and-liberation-times-collaps)

Click on link above for access to 49 minute talk with Waziytawin on this subject from Healing Earth Radio.  

Show Notes:
Waziytawin is a Dakota writer, scholar, and activist, who urges Indigenous people as well as non-Indigenous people to think seriously about the threats of collapse and the need for land defense. She is from The Place Where They Dig for Yellow Medicine, also known as the Upper Sioux Reservation in southwestern Minnesota. She also holds the Indigenous Peoples' Research Chair in the Indigenous Governance program at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. She is the author of numerous books on the Dakota nation and decolonization, and has been a strong community activist working on truth-telling initiatives in the Minnesota/St. Paul area. You can learn more about her at www.waziyatawin.net.

Recently Waziyatawin has been intertwining her interest in decolonization and Indigenous liberation with research around climate collapse and peak oil, and believes that we can't simply wait for an end to the extreme destruction caused by industrial civilization - we need to take action and help bring it to and end, so that our chances for future survival are the greatest. Waziyatawin offers something very important with this interview, by connecting a recognition of the great changes upon us with an anti-colonial perspective as an

Indigenous woman. Industrial civilization now threatens not just our individual landbases, but the entire earth, and more than ever we are in need of people who are willing to be defenders of the land. Waziyatawin talks about some of the cultural myths that colonialism has infected all of us with to varying degrees, myths about the legitimacy and permanence of the US and Canadian governments, myths of technological prowess, myths of passivity to authority, and myths of the moral purity of non-violence.

In a time of such dire need, she urges us to re-consider all of these and seriously consider how we can best serve our landbase, and best prepare our community for an end to an industrial way of life. As an action plan to base a community's preparation on, she has put forth several steps:

• having a spiritual and cultural foundation,
• building a culture of resistance,
• arming yourself and your community,
• building lifeboats of skills, tools, and knowledge to be self-sufficient,
• taking back land,
• halting the industrial infrastructure that is destroying the land, and
• defending the land at all costs. 

She asks questions that need to be asked and answered. I hope you enjoy this interview and are able to give it some serious thought.

 .

Imminent Crash of Oil Supply

SUBHEAD: What is going to happen and how it came to pass that we weren’t forewarned.  

By Nicholas C. Arguimbau on 23 April 2010 in the Intelligence Daily -  (http://www.inteldaily.com/2010/04/oil-crash)

[IB Publisher's note: How can it be said we were not forewarned? It has been clear since Paul Erlich published the "Population Bomb" , in 1968, warning of future starvation and resource depletion; and The Club of Rome wrote The Limits to Growth, in 1972, projecting then current trends leading to disaster; and President Jimmy Carter delivered his "Crisis of Confidence" speech, in 1979, that we had to prepare for less oil in our future! We cannot kid ourselves. We have been adequately forewarned for over 40 years, but chose to ignore the evidence!]

  
Image above: EIA data projecting available fuel through 2030. From (http://www.eia.doe.gov/conference/2009/session3/Sweetnam.pdf) Page 8.  

Look at this graph and be afraid. It does not come from Earth First. It does not come from the Sierra Club. It was not drawn by Socialists or Nazis or Osama Bin Laden or anyone from Goldman-Sachs. If you are a Republican Tea-Partier, rest assured it does not come from a progressive Democrat. And vice versa. It was drawn by the United States Department of Energy, and the United States military’s Joint Forces Command concurs with the overall picture. What does it imply? The supply of the world’s most essential energy source is going off a cliff. Not in the distant future, but in a year and a half. Production of all liquid fuels, including oil, will drop within 20 years to half what it is today. And the difference needs to be made up with “unidentified projects,” which one of the world’s leading petroleum geologists says is just a “euphemism for rank shortage,” and the world’s foremost oil industry banker says is “faith based.” The above graph was prepared for a DOE meeting on May 9, 2009. Take a good look at what it says, assuming it to be correct:

1. Conventional oil will be almost all gone in 20 years, and there is nothing known to replace it.

2. Production of petroleum from existing conventional sources has been dropping at a rate slightly over 4% per year for at least a year and will continue to do so for the indefinite future.

3. The graph implies that we are past the peak of production and that there are750 billion barrels of conventional oil left (the areas under the “conventionals” portion of the graph, extrapolated to the right as an exponential). Assuming that the remaining reserves were 900 billion or more at the halfway point, then we are at least 150 billion barrels, or 5 years, past the midpoint.

4. Total petroleum production from all presently known sources, conventional and unconventional, will remain “flat” at approximately 83 mbpd for the next two years and then will proceed to drop for the foreseeable future, at first slowly but by 4% per year after 2015.

5. Demand will begin to outstrip supply in 2012, and will already be 10 million barrels per day above supply in only five years. The United States Joint Forces Command concurs with these specific findings (http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf) Page 31. Ten million bpd is equivalent to half the United States’ entire consumption. To make up the difference, the world would have to find another Saudi Arabia and get it into full production in five years, an impossibility. See The Oil Drum (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5154).

6. The production from presently existing conventional sources will plummet from its present 81 mbpd to 30 mbpd by 2030, a 63% drop in a 20-year period.

7. Meeting demand requires discovering, developing, and bringing to full production 60mbpd (105-45) of “unidentified projects” in the 18-year period of 2012-2030 and approximately 25 mbpd of such projects by 2020, on the basis of a very conservative estimate of only 1% annual growth in demand. The independent Oxford Institute of Energy Studies has estimated a possible development of 6.5mbpd of such projects, including the Canadian tar sands, implying a deficit of 18-19 mbpd as compared to demand, and an approximate 14 mbpd drop in total liquid fuels production relative to 2012, a 16% drop in 8 years.

8. The curve is virtually identical to one produced by geologists Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere and published in “The End of Cheap Oil,” in Scientific American, March, 1998, twelve years ago. They projected that production of petroleum from conventional sources would drop from 74 mbpd in 2003 (as compared to 84 mbpd in 2008 in the DOE graph) and drop to 39 mbpd by 2030 (as compared to 39 mbpd by 2030 in the DOE graph! See (http://www.jala.com/energy1.php). Campbell and Laherrere predicted a 2003 “peak,” and the above graph implies a ‘peak” (not necessarily the actual peak, but the midpoint of production of 2005 or before.

Is that graph correct?

So here we are - if the graph is right - on the edge of a precipice, with no prior warning from either the industry, which knows what it possesses, or the collective governments, which ostensibly protect the public interest. As Colin Campbell, a research geologist who has worked for many large oil companies and studied oil depletion extensively says (http://www.peakoil.net/about-aspo/dr-colin-campbell),  

“The warning signals have been flying for a long time. They have been plain to see, but the world turned a blind eye, and failed to read the message.” 
 
The world was completely transformed by oil for the duration of the twentieth century (http://www.greatchange.org/ov-campbell,outlook.html), but if the graph is right, within 20 years it will be virtually gone but our dependence upon it will not. Instead, we have:

• Zero time to plan how to replace cars in our lives;
• Zero time to plan how to manufacture and install millions of furnaces to replace home oil furnaces, and zero time to produce the infrastructure necessary to carry out that task.
• Zero time to retool suburbia so it can function without gasoline;
• Zero time to plan for replacement of the largest military establishment in history, almost completely dependent upon oil;
• Zero time to plan to support nine billion people without the “green revolution,” a creation of the age of oil;
• Zero time to plan to replace oil as an essential fuel in electricity production;
• Zero time to plan for preserving millions of miles of roads without asphalt;
• Zero time to plan for the replacement of oil in its essential role in every industry;
• Zero time to plan for replacement of oil in its exclusive role of transporting people, agricultural produce, manufactured goods. In a world without oil that appears only twenty years away, there will be no oil-burning ships transporting US grain to other countries, there will be no oil-burning airlines linking the world’s major cities, there will be no oil-burning ships transporting Chinese manufactured goods to the billions now dependent on them;
• Zero time to plan for the survival of the billions of new people expected by 2050 in the aftermath of peak everything;
• Zero capital, because of failing banks and public and private debt, to address these issues.

Why is there just zero time available?

Because, if we at any time use more oil than allowed by the graph, we will have even less later. We also are already committed to supporting 2.5 billion more people on what we have. And lastly, because every day we continue upward in our oil consumption, even though we continue to have more people who need it and billions who deserve to rise from abject poverty, we are making the future supply shortage worse.

By looking at the graph, it is clear that demand will outstrip supply starting at the end of 2011, and severely outstrip supply in five years. What are we going to do, and how are we going to do it? We have no time to decide.

It is very unlikely that things can be better than the graph indicates. Why? The great majority of authorities believe there is little more than 1 trillion barrels of conventional oil left. You can make a simple calculation from that: At the present rate of 30 billion barrels per year(82 million barrels per day) it will all be gone in 33 years, and consumption has been rapidly increasing, not decreasing, so if anything it will all be gone sooner…

A closer look at the graph reveals that it was drawn on the assumption that the world’s existing conventional fields contain only 750,000 barrels at this time, enough to keep us going only 25 years.

The graph assumes a decline rate of 4% per year. As long as the estimates of remaining reserves are right, that can’t be far off. In fact, 4% is a relatively low decline rate compared to what has been observed in oil fields generally. Hold on, it’s going to be a fast ride down!

Making the Case
The major oil companies, which presumably know better than we do how much oil is in their possession, “conspicuously fail to invest in new refining capacity, which would surely be needed if production were set to rise.”, says Campbell, (http://www.greatchange.org/ov-campbell,outlook.html).

The excess of refining capacity over demand remained close to 10 million bpd during the nineties, but dropped to almost nothing in the last decade as a result of failure to build new capacity (http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2006/01/chp1pdf/fig1_21.pdf).

The United States Joint Forces Command has also reported the failure of the oil industry to invest in the refining capacity necessary to permit expanded production, and that “Even were a concerted effort begun today to repair that shortage, it would be ten years before production could catch up with expected demand.”, according to the Joint Operating Environment 2010, (http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf).


The most frequently discussed significant source of unexploited petroleum is the tar sands of Alberta, Canada. Because a high percentage of the energy value of the tar sands has to be expended in their extraction, the reported quantity of reserves is misleading, and two independent researchers have estimated respectively that production from the tar sands by 2020 may be expected of 3.3 million bpd and 4 million bpd. Consequently, the likelihood of the tar sands making a significant contribution to the world’s petroleum demand in the foreseeable future is low. Concludes Phil Hart and Chris Skrebowski, “Peak oil: A Detailed and Transparent Analysis” (http://www.energybulletin.net/node/30537).

The shortfall, labeled “unidentified projects,” that needs to be filled in 20 years is an unprecedented 60 million barrels per day, equivalent to 3/4 of today’s total production. We have never in history done anything comparable to that. Although there are large deposits of “unconventional” oil such as the Canadian tar sands, most are making only slow progress at development and consume as much or more energy in their production as they can generate. The independent Oxford Institute of Energy Studies has estimated a possible development of 6.5mbpd of such projects, when we’ll need more than that every two years just to keep our place.

So the likelihood of anything at all making a significant dent in the shortfall is small. Indeed, the “unidentified projects” can be perceived as just a “euphemism for rank shortage”says Campbell, (http://www.greatchange.org/ov-campbell,outlook.html).

The United States Joint Forces Command has come to the similar conclusion that of all potential future energy sources, “None of these provide much reason for optimism.”, (http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf).

Petroleum industry investment banker Matt Simmons, the investment banker who has spent his post-Harvard-Business School career advising oil companies and serving as Peak Oil advisor to the last Presidential administration and specifically to President Bush, calls them “faith-based” (http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/Northern%20Trust%20Bank.pdf) Page 4.

The “Hubbert Peak” theory of oil field depreciation, which predicted the peak and subsequent demise of the US oil industry 15 years in advance and within 2 years of its occurance http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/1956/1956.pdf, says that with normal production methods, a country reaches peak production in its oil fields when they are 50% depleted, with the production curve being bell-shaped. The peak can be postponed with innovative extraction techniques, but this only causes subsequent more rapid decline of the deposits and total extraction if anything decreasing. The world reached the midpoint of its reserves in the last decade, so the 2005 “peak” implied by the above graph is very close to what would be expected.

Astonishingly, Dr. Hubbert in the same 1956 paper predicted, based upon records of only 90 billion barrels of oil having been recovered worldwide, that the peak of world petroleum production would be approximately the year 2000; this apparently quite accurate prediction by Hubbert has largely been forgotten(http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/1956/1956.pdf).

One is tempted to ask why, if one man could predict the timing of the peak 44 years before it occurred, the United States Department of Energy is incapable of recognizing it after it occurred.

There’s a common feeling that just because we don’t know where the oil is, doesn’t mean the Mother Lode isn’t right around the corner. But if you’ve looked everywhere, the chances are a lot slimmer. The lag time between discovery and bringing to full production of a field is 30-40 years, which means that even the virtually impossible discovery of another Saudi Arabia would barely change the graph above, of production between now and 2030. But no such discoveries are left to be made.

The rate of discovery of new conventional oil has been steadily dropping now for FORTY years despite ever-more searching with ever-more-sophisticated technology. There have been two pivotal events: the peak of discovery around 1968, and the day in 1981` when discovery of new oil deposits no longer kept up with production. There is nothing complicated about this. As Campbell says, the warning sign there for anyone to see by simply recognized two undeniable facts:

• You have to find oil before you can produce it
• Production has to mirror discovery after a time lag

Discovery reached a peak in the 1960s – despite all the technology we hear so much about, and a worldwide search for the best prospects. It should surprise no one that the corresponding peak of production is now upon us. Indeed, Campbell’s second point means that the inevitable peaking of oil production in the early 21st century, should have been clear for all to see since the peaking of discovery in the late sixties.

Campbell does not stand alone. As the US Joint Forces Command observes, “The discovery rate for new oil and gas fields over the last two decades (with the possible exception of Brazil) provides little reason for optimism that future efforts will find major new fields. Saudi Arabia’s largest field, the Ghawar, is now in decline and it appears that the country has nothing to offset that decline.

 That has led many to conclude that “Peak Oil is a Done Deal.” by Dave Cohen in ASPO/USA Energy Bulletin, July 16, 2008 (http://www.energybulletin.net/node/45940). “We can wish it, we can dream it, but it will never be, oil is not renewable, and therefore in time it must be realized that there will be no oil.” ENO Petroleum Corporation, “Peak Oil – The Global Oil Crisis,” (http://www.enopetroleum.com/opecoilreservers.html).

It is hard to conceive of an act or omission causing more pain to more people and creatures than the failure of those in charge to announce with reasonable forewarning that the oil supply was going to crash. But it is upon us with no forewarning to the general public at all. The government planning agencies charged with helping the public survive the end of oil could not have performed worse than by recognizing peak oil only after it has happened. Like anthropogenic global warming (“AGW”), “peak oil” has been the subject of decades of denial.

 Notwithstanding Hubbert’s famous coup in pinpointing the peak of US oil production through the simple observation that production naturally peaks when the supply is half gone, few would listen that because the worldwide supply of conventional oil would reach the halfway point in the first decade of this century, trouble was right around the corner.

The fact is, coming to that point meant we were in trouble regardless, because the early stages of development of an oil field (like the early stages of growth of virtually anything else) follow an exponential growth curve, and the world’s growth addicts love exponential curves, but once you get beyond the halfway point, it is a mathematical certainty that the longer you attempt to conform the field to a pattern of exponential growth, the more the end is going to be precipitous.

 If you don’t decelerate rapidly, that is precisely what has to happen – the decline after the halfway point can only be more rapid than the rise beforehand.

What Hubbert observed with respect to the US oil reserves has an intuitive sense to it – as the amount of oil in the field drops, its pressure drops, so the flow begins to slow down – the gusher goes down to a trickle. But if the owner of the field doesn’t make full disclosure of what’s there, outsiders can only make educated guesses from general geological principles and what the owner is selling, as to what the future holds.

And as we all know, full disclosure is not the name of the game in the oil business. If the field is just allowed to release its liquid gold at its natural rate, that’s not too bad, because observations like the Hubbert Peak can be applied. But as technology improves and well pressure can be jacked up to compensate for declining reserves, (for instance by pumping water into the wells) the outside observer loses certainty.

There remains information about the company’s reserves, but the accuracy of that information is seriously open to question. Within OPEC, which allows its members to market in accordance with the amount of their reserves. According to Hart, in “Introduction to Peak Oil,” 
(www.philhart.com/content/introduction-peak-oil), there are great temptations to fudge.

Outside observers can follow a country’s reports on its reserves, but those reports are highly suspect. They will remain constant for years while the country is pumping great amounts of oil without reporting any new discoveries, and indeed they can take sudden leaps upward also without reports of new discoveries. Such records lead to the inevitable conclusion that many OPEC reserves reports are fictional. If you would like to see charts of OPEC oil reserves mysteriously contorting themselves, you are invited to take a look at Hart’s essay. So if you thought the experts had it all in hand and would reliably warn us when trouble was a brewin’, think again.

Not only do OPEC members have internal business reasons to exaggerate their reserves, but companies on the public stock market want to satisfy their stockholders of their long-term viability, and all oil producers want to make their customers confident that they can rely on oil for the long haul.

 By concealing their future from homeowners, oil companies have made trillions for the real estate business and the banks at the expense of those who chose urban sprawl over dense “near-in” housing, and the companies themselves will make trillions in the near future selling to consumers trapped into oil addiction, who might have sought alternatives more vigorously had they known how close the crash was.

Matt Simmons ought to know. And what he says is that Western oil companies, like Exxon Mobil, would be strongly opposed to the idea of transparent data because it would reveal “how crappy and old their fields really are.”
 
In, “Meeting the Challenge Matt Simmons: Force All Oil Producers to Give Transparent Data” (http://energytechstocks.com/wp/?p=245) Simmons has warned that:

“The failure of Saudi Arabia and other major oil producers to provide transparent production data has left the world in a lurch, unable to know whether it can maintain an adequate supply of oil in the face of burgeoning demand Such uncertainty has led to indecision about whether the world should invest the huge sums of money necessary to develop alternative transportation fuel sources.”

Just how bad the published reserve figures for the major oil-producing nations are, has long been understood. We like to say that what goes up, must come down, but not OPEC member-nation oil reserves. Their allowed production quotas depend upon their reserves, so there is a built-in temptation to overstate reserves and never reflect in reduced reserve figures, what they have pumped out.

In 1988, the OPEC oil reserves “magically and miraculously increased twofold,” without any corresponding discovery of new fields. The officially reported reserves follow graphs that would be comical were it not for the fact that 6.8 billion people, and counting, depend upon the real numbers. See (http://www.enopetroleum.com/opecoilreservers.html).

Now we are facing the consequences of the major oil producers leaving the world in a lurch, almost complete inability to cope with the severe difficulties we face in transporting, feeding, housing, and keeping warm the burgeoning billions of our numbers. It is hard to conceive of how any private entity could impose so much pain on so many. It didn’t need to be that way. The US Government and its cohorts around the world could have imposed transparency on the oil companies as to their true reserves, and we would have had fair warning and the possibility of coping.

Yes, and the moon could be made of green cheese. Of course, as noted, it is possible to produce a graph roughly like the one above with nothing more than production data and reserves data. The former are public, and the latter are known to a limited extent. It has been the consensus of decision makers for many years that the world had a total (both produced and still in the ground) of approximately 2 trillion barrels of conventional oil, and as pointed out by Campbell, four decades of dwindling discoveries have left us with an absolute inability to increase available reserves in a timely manner to mitigate the looming shortfall.

The two trillion barrel figure was absolutely critical for doing what planning could be done, but at the beginning of the last decade, the US broke ranks with the consensus of the rest of the world, declared through the historically-reliable US Geological Survey (USGS) that world reserves of conventional oil (both consumed and yet-to-be-consumed) were in fact in the neighborhood of three trillion barrels rather than two, a claim which if true immediately provided the world by sleight of hand with an extra thirty years’ supply at present consumption rates.

To be sure, USGS former employees disputed its estimates as relying heavily on guesses to calculate new oil discoveries, and on doubling the usual 30 percent recovery rate from reserves “with no technology in mind capable of doing that.” says Gordon, in “Worries Swelling Over Oil Shortage,” in Energy Bulletin March 20-, 2005.

The concerns about overestimation of discoveries proved correct, they continued on their downward track. This alone created a discrepancy between the USGS projections and reality of approximately 900 billion barrels. At the same time, the production data appeared to peak in 2005, prominent Princeton University petroleum geologist Kenneth Deffeyes predicted that 2005 was the year, and Simmons suggested similar concerns. See (http://www.energybulletin.net/node/4835) and (http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/Northern%20Trust%20Bank.pdf) Page 31.

Nonetheless, based upon the USGS wishful thinking, during the Bush Administration, the Department of Energy was forecasting (http://www.energybulletin.net/node/4835): “production peak somewhere between 2021 and the start of the next century, with 2037 the most likely date.”

Not to worry. In 2006, with the peak imminent in reality, the industry came up with a theory published in a non-peer-reviewed report, that Peak Oil was, in its totality, a false concept, and that the true behavior of an oil field (or conglomeration thereof) was a peak, followed by an undulating plateau, and then a gentle decline by around 2% per year, years, perhaps decades later.

According to Cambridge Energy Research Associates,CERA, (www.cera.com/aspx/cda/public1/about/about.aspx):

“It is likely that the situation will unfold in slow motion and that there are a number of decades to prepare for the start of the undulating plateau. This means that there is time to consider the best way to develop viable energy alternatives that would eventually provide the bulk of our transport energy needs.”

Not to worry. CERA faulted the Peak Oil proponents with failure to take into account the facts that reserve estimates evolve with time and that so does the technology used in extracting oil. The criticism is disingenuous given that the industry refuses to disclose either the technology it is using at any one time or its true reserves, and the reserve estimates evolve with time more for political reasons than geological one.

The facts the proponents of Peak Oil fail to take into account are facts that the industry will not disclose. As Simmons has pointed out, with solid global field-by-field production data, Peak Oil timing could be proved. And, or course, if the undulating plateau theory is correct, all the industry has to do is to disclose their true facts to prove it, but they won’t.

Regardless, average decline rates of an oil supply are dictated by only two numbers: how fast we are now using the oil, and how much is left. Lower decline rates now mean higher decline rates later. Those are immutable facts even if the “undulating plateau” is correct.

So to avoid a rapid decline in available oil, we must discover and bring to production staggeringly large new supplies, right now today. Nonetheless, the CERA “theory” has sufficiently intimidated the bureaucrats that DOE’s official position at the moment, as expressed to Le Monde, notwithstanding the graph, is that we are entering a plateau. See "Washington considers a decline of world oil production as of 2011" (http://petrole.blog.lemonde.fr/2010/03/25/washington-considers-a-decline-of-world-oil-production-as-of-2011)

Coincidence?
At the same time all of this was happening, the UN, the US Congress, the Obama Administration and the oil industry were negotiating over goals for global warming legislation. Miraculously, although arguably coincidentally, the percentage-reduction goals agreed to fit quite precisely the percentage reductions in oil consumption that will be physically forced upon us all if you believe the above graph: an 18% drop from 2005 by 2020, and an 85% drop from 2005 by 2050. It is possible to extrapolate the graph, which assumes exponentially dropping levels of existing reserves at a 4% per year rate.

This compares to reductions of CO2 emissions 17% from 2005 in 2020 and 80% from 2005 in 2050 in the bill. So it would appear that the legislative goals have been set, for whatever reason, so that the oil industry will have to do little if anything it won’t have to do in any event because of dwindling reserves, (http://ecoglobe.ch/energy/e/peak9423.htm).

It is hard to see how the negotiators could have come up with such correspondence if they had not all been aware of the impending crash of production and the expected decline rate. Coincidence? Maybe, but somehow it seems unlikely. Whether or not by intent, the goals fit the needs of the oil companies rather than the needs calculated by the scientists. In short, with all the evidence available, it is hard to see how the industry and the Department of Energy could have failed to see this coming. Their failure to warn the public, given the consequences, verges on the criminal. And if somehow they can claim innocence, then we still have to ask why they did not heed the warning of Matt Simmons, advisor on Peak Oil to the Bush administration, as to the importance of transparency. But they did not, and here we are.

Conclusions
We are on our own. We are rapidly going to have to deal with less and less oil, since there has been no forewarning and no planning. It is a time for communities to prepare for community energy independence, because only that way will be safe.

This means relying on the sun and wind and water that have always been with us. It means cooperation with each other to get through seriously difficult times. It means finding alternatives to oil throughout our lives as quickly as possible – the oil that runs our cars, the oil that heats our houses, the oil that runs generators for our electricity, the oil from which chemical fertilizers and insecticides and plastics and polyester are made, the oil that brings countless manufactured goods to us from overseas, the oil on which farmers depend for irrigation pumps, for transporting produce to market, for working the soil to bring us food.

If you believe the graph, it will almost all be gone in 20 years. And the Progressives and Tea-Partiers must remember that the people who brought this calamity to us are not our friends but are people we trusted, so we must work together to cope with the mess that is upon us, and to throw the rascals out.  
• The author, Nicholas C. Arguimbau, is an appellate and environmental lawyer licensed in California and residing in Western Massachusetts.