You Are Not In Control

SUBHEAD: The Technosphere controls our tastes, making us prefer things that it prefers for its own reasons.

By Dmitry Orlov on 14 February 2017 for Club Orlov -
(http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2017/02/you-are-not-in-control.html)


Image above: Detail of illustration of man controlled by technology by Igor Morski. From (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/543317142516835055/).

My recent book tour was very valuable, among other things, in gauging audience response to the various topics related to the technosphere and its control over us. Specifically, what seems to be generally missing is an understanding that the technosphere doesn’t just control technology; it controls our minds as well.

The technosphere doesn’t just prevent us from choosing technologies that we think may be appropriate and rejecting the ones that aren’t. It controls our tastes, making us prefer things that it prefers for its own reasons. It also controls our values, aligning them with its own. And it controls our bodies, causing us to treat ourselves as if we were mechanisms rather than symbiotic communities of living cells (human and otherwise).

None of this invalidates the approach I proposed for shrinking the technosphere which is based on a harm/benefit analysis and allows us to ratchet down our technology choices by always picking technologies with the least harm and the greatest benefit.

But this approach only works if the analysis is informed by our own tastes, not the tastes imposed on us by the technosphere, by our values, not the technosphere’s values, and by our rejection of a mechanistic conception of our selves.

These choices are implicit in the 32 criteria used in harm/benefit analysis, favoring local over global, group interests over individual interests, artisanal over industrial and so on. But I think it would be helpful to make these choices explicit, by working through an example of each of the three types of control listed above. This week I'll tackle the first of these.

A good example of how the technosphere controls our tastes is the personal automobile. Many people regard it as a symbol of freedom and see their car as an extension of their personalities.

The freedom to be car-free is not generally regarded as important, while the freedoms bestowed by car ownership are rather questionable. It is the freedom to make car payments, pay for repairs, insurance, parking, towing and gasoline. It is the freedom to pay tolls, traffic tickets, title fees and excise taxes.

• It is the freedom to spend countless hours stuck in traffic jams and to suffer injuries in car accidents.
  
• It is the freedom to bring up neurologically damaged children by subjecting them to unsafe carbon monoxide levels (you are encouraged to have a CO detector in your house, but not in your car—because it would be going off all the time).
  
• It is the freedom to suffer indignities when pulled over by police, especially if you’ve been drinking. In terms of a harm/benefit analysis, private car ownership makes no sense at all.
  
• It is often argued that a car is a necessity, although the facts tell a different story. Worldwide, there are 1.2 billion vehicles on the road. The population of the planet is over 7 billion. Therefore, there are at least 5.8 billion people alive in the world who don’t own a car. 

How can something be considered a necessity if 82% of us don’t seem to need it? In fact, owning a car becomes necessary only in a certain specific set of circumstances.

Here are some of the key ingredients: a landscape that is impassable except by motor vehicle, single-use zoning that segregates land by residential, commercial, agricultural and industrial uses, a lifestyle that requires a daily commute, and a deficit of public transportation.

In turn, widespread private car ownership is what enables these key ingredients: without it, situations in which private car ownership becomes a necessity simply would not arise.

Now, moving people about the landscape is not a productive activity: it is a waste of time and energy.

If you can live, send your children to school, shop and work all without leaving the confines of a small neighborhood, you are bound to be more efficient than someone who has to drive between these four locations on a daily basis. But the technosphere is rational to a fault and is all about achieving efficiencies. And so, an obvious question to ask is,

What is it about the car-dependent living arrangement, and the landscape it enables, that the technosphere finds to be efficient? The surprising answer is that the technosphere strives to optimize the burning of gasoline; everything else is just a byproduct of this optimization.


It turns out that the fact that so many people are forced to own a car has nothing to do with transportation and everything to do with petroleum chemistry.

About half of what can be usefully extracted from a barrel of crude oil is in the form of gasoline. It is possible to boost the fraction of other, more useful products, such as kerosene, diesel fuel, jet fuel and heating oil, but not by much and at a cost of reduced net energy.

But gasoline is not very useful at all. It is volatile (quite a lot of it evaporates, especially in the summer); it is chemically unstable and doesn’t keep for long; it is toxic and carcinogenic. It has a rather low flash point, limiting the compression ratio that can be achieved by gasoline-fueled engines, making them thermodynamically less efficient. It is useless for large engines, and is basically a small-engine fuel.

Gasoline-powered engines don’t last very long because gasoline-air mixture is detonated (using an electric spark) rather than burned, and the shock waves from the detonations cause components to wear out quickly. They have few industrial uses; all of the serious transportation infrastructure, including locomotives, ships, jet aircraft, tractor-trailers, construction equipment and electrical generators run on petroleum distillates such as kerosene, jet fuel, diesel oil and bunker fuel.

If it weren’t for widespread private car ownership, gasoline would have to be flared off at refineries, at a loss. In turn, the cost of petroleum distillates—which are all of the industrial fuels—would double, and this would curtail the technosphere’s global expansion by making long-distance freight much more expensive. The technosphere’s goal, then, is to make us pay for the gasoline by forcing us to drive. To this end, the landscape is structured in a way that makes driving necessary.

The fact that to get from a Motel 8 on one side of the road to the McDonalds on the other requires you to drive two miles, navigate a cloverleaf, and drive two miles back is not a bug; it's a feature.

When James Kunstler calls suburban sprawl “the greatest misallocation of resources in human history” he is only partly right. It is also the greatest optimization in exploiting every part of the crude oil barrel in the history of the technosphere.

The proliferation of small gasoline-burning engines in the form of cars enables another optimization, forcing us to pay for another generally useless fraction of the crude oil barrel: road tar. Lots of cars require lots of paved roadways and parking lots.

Thus, the technosphere wins twice, first by making us pay for the privilege of disposing of what is essentially toxic waste at our own risk and expense, then by making us pay for spreading another form of toxic waste all over the ground.

 Suburban sprawl is not a failure of urban planning; it is a success story in enslaving humans and making them toil on behalf of the technosphere while causing great damage to themselves and to the environment. Needless to say, you have absolutely no control over any of this.

You. Are. Not. In. Control.

You can vote, you can protest, you can lobby, donate to environmentalist groups, attend conferences on urban planning… and you would just be wasting your time, because you can't change petroleum chemistry.

That the need to make people buy gasoline trumps all other considerations becomes obvious if we observe how the technosphere reacts whenever gasoline demand falters.

When rampant wealth inequality started making owning a car unaffordable for more and more people, the solution was to introduce larger cars for those who could still afford one: minivans for the mommies, pickup trucks for the daddies, and for everyone the now common SUV.

And now that gasoline demand is dropping again because of falling labor participation rate and an increase in the number of people who telecommute, the solution will no doubt be driverless cars which will cruise around aimlessly burning gasoline.

Mommies may think that a minivan will keep their kiddies safer than a compact would (not true unless they have 8-9 kids).

Daddies may think that the pickup truck is a sign of manliness (true if you are some sort of gofer/roustabout; pickup trucks are driven by picker-uppers, a subspecies of gofer/roustabout).

But all they are doing is obeying “The Third Law of the Technosphere,” if you will: “For every improvement in the efficiency of gasoline-fired engines, there must be an equal and opposite improvement in inefficiency.”

So, perhaps you should just relax and go with the flow.

After all, being a slave in the service of the technosphere is not immediately life-threatening… unless you crash into a tree or get run over by a drunk. But there is another problem: this arrangement isn’t going to last. The net energy that can be extracted out of a barrel of oil is quickly shrinking.

In less then a decade the energy surplus required to maintain a car-centric lifestyle will no longer exist.

If private car ownership and daily driving are required of you in order to survive, then you won’t survive. There goes at least 18% of the world’s population, which will find itself stranded in the middle of an impassable landscape. Oops!

Given that you are not in control, and given that the car-centric lifestyle is an evolutionary dead end for your subspecies, what can you do?

The answer is obvious: you can plan your escape, then join the other 82% of the world’s population, which is able to live car-free. Some of them even manage to live entirely outside of the reach of the technosphere. Let their example be your inspiration.

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For Purely Technical Reasons

SUBHEAD: The electric car offers elites a way of setting themselves apart from the gasoline-burning riffraff. 

By Dmitry Orlov on 18 October 2016 for Club Orlov -
(http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2016/10/for-purely-technical-reasons.html)


Image above: The golf cart parking places are all full at the Lake Sumter Landing Town Center at The Villages, a gated retirement community in Florida. Photo by Stephen M. Dowell. From (http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/lake/os-ap-the-villages-is-nations-fastest-growing-20160324-story.html).

It is tempting for us to think that our technological choices—whether we choose to live in a city, a suburb or out in the country; whether we want to drive a pick-up truck, a gasoline-electric hybrid or ride a bicycle; whether we take a train, drive long distances or fly—are determined by our tastes.

We may flatter ourselves that we are in control, and that our choices are reflective of our enlightened, environmentally conscious values. This view rests on a foundation of circular reasoning: we behave in enlightened ways because we are enlightened, and we are enlightened because, to wit, we behave in enlightened ways.

As to why what we consider enlightened is in fact enlightened rather than a question of possibly questionable personal taste—that is not to be discussed: de gustibus non est disputandum.

But there is an alternative viewpoint, which seems more realistic in many ways, because it rests on a foundation of physical, technical specifics rather than fickle and arbitrary consumer preference, whim or taste.

From this viewpoint, our technology and associated lifestyle choices are dictated by the technical requirements of their underlying technologies, both physical (the operation of the energy industry, the transportation industry, etc.) and political (the operation of political machines that segregate society by net worth and income, relegating wage-earners to a global disenfranchised underclass).

A few years ago I found out that I needed to replace the diesel engine on my boat (the old one blew up definitively) and looked at a number of options, one of which was to replace it with an electric motor and a large bank of batteries.

The electric option was touted as being quiet, non-polluting, and having just enough range to get in and out of the marina and to get back to dock if the wind died during a typical daysail. It turned out to be more than twice as expensive as a replacement diesel engine.

As to what one might do to take such a boat any great distance (that involves many hours of motoring) the solution is to… add a diesel engine hooked up to a very large alternator, at triple the cost of just replacing the diesel. And so I just replaced the diesel.

Diesel engines have a lot of positive qualities: they can run continuously for tens of thousands of hours; they can be rebuilt many times just by replacing the bearings, the cylinder sleeves, the piston rings and the valves; they are exceptionally reliable; the fuel they use is energy-dense.

For these reasons, they are found throughout freight and construction industries and are used for small-scale power generation. They can be very large: the larger ships have engines that are as big as houses, with ladders welded to their cylinder walls, so that servicemen can climb down into them to service them after the cylinder head and the piston assembly are pulled out using an overhead shop crane.

Small diesel engines make a lot less sense, and the silliest of them are the ones found on small yachts. There are many aspects of their design that make them silly, but there is also an overriding reason: they use the wrong fuel.

You see, diesel is a precious commodity, used in the transportation industry (by trucks, locomotives and ships), and in construction equipment, with no alternative that is feasible. A cousin of diesel fuel is jet fuel—another petroleum distillate—that is used to power jet engines, again, with no alternative that is feasible.

And then there is a fuel that is only really useful as a small engine fuel: gasoline, that is. Gasoline engines beyond a certain size become much more trouble than they are worth.

Each barrel of crude oil can be distilled and refined into a certain amount of diesel and jet fuel, a certain amount of gasoline, some tar and some far less useful substances such as naphtha. The diesel is spoken for, because it literally moves the world; but if enough small engines cannot be found to burn all the gasoline that is produced, it becomes a waste product and has to be flared off at the oil refinery, at a loss.

Indeed, prior to Henry Ford coming up with the brilliant plan to build cars cheap enough for his workers to afford, gasoline was dumped into rivers just to get rid of it, because while everyone burned kerosene (a distillate, like jet fuel and diesel) in lamps, cars remained playthings of the rich, and there simply wasn’t a market for any great quantities of gasoline.

Therefore, it became very important to find ways to sell gasoline, by finding enough uses for it, no matter how superfluous they happened to be.

And although some people think that the private automobile is a symbol of luxury and freedom and feel the thrill of the open road, the reason they think that is because these ideas were implanted in their heads by the people who were tasked with finding a market for gasoline.

Alongside cars, great effort was put into marketing all sorts of other small engines: for lawn mowers, jet skis, motorcycles, ATVs, boat outboard motors… The only semi-industrial use of gasoline is in chainsaws, small generators and air compressors, service and delivery vehicles, and outboard engines.

And so people were sold on the idea of driving their own car, whether they needed to or not, and spending lots of time stuck in traffic—all so that they would pay for gasoline. By causing all that excess traffic congestion, they also created the need to widen roads and highways, generating demand for another borderline useless petroleum product: road tar.

And since there was a problem with cramming all these cars into cities (where cars are generally not needed if the cities are laid out using proper urban design, with sufficient numbers of tram, light rail and subway lines, etc.) the solution was to move everybody out to the suburbs.

And so the reason half of the US population now lives in suburbia and drives has nothing to do with their needs, and everything to do with the need to sell them gasoline.

Some people may react negatively to the idea that their suburban castle and their magic chariot are all just part of a plan to make them spend much of their life paying for the right to dispose of toxic waste in unsafe ways.

Rest assured, their pre-programmed negative reaction is part of the plan. Every effort has been made to program people to think that this waste disposal job—carried out at one's own expense—is, in fact, something that should be considered a sign of success.

The most efficient way to motivate a slave to perform is to convince him that he is free. To this end, driving is celebrated in music and film and portrayed as a way of life.

Calling it what it is—being a slave to a machine—is bound to cause cognitive dissonance, all the more so because driving a lot destroys one's mind: in the immortal words of a character from the movie Repo Man, ”The more you drive, the less intelligent you become.”

In this respect, most of the people living in the US are far past the point of no return, and it is pointless to attempt to impart to them any ideas that are discordant with the dead-end lifestyle into which they have been unconsciously coerced.

Getting back to electric vehicles, such as what my boat would have ended up if I were gullible and made of money: they are obviously a defective idea.

Their range is limited, they take longer to charge than it takes to fill a gas tank, and they use expensive and dangerous lithium-ion batteries that need periodic replacement.

There is not enough lithium available to continue making batteries for laptops and smartphones (which periodically burst into flames), never mind providing for a giant expansion of battery-building to support lots of electric cars.

Perhaps most importantly, they shrink the market for gasoline. So, what’s the reason behind the push?

It certainly isn’t part of any particular effort to electrify transportation in general, because no electric solution exists for ships or planes, and electrifying rail freight is an impossibly expensive proposition.

It certainly isn’t part of an effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions, because most of the ways electricity is currently generated is by burning coal and natural gas—and will be, while supplies last, because electricity is hard to store, and no matter how many solar arrays and wind farms are installed something will be needed to power the electric grid on overcast, windless days.

No, the push for electric cars is motivated by a different sort of technology—political technology. You see, the oil age is drawing to a close. Last year the oil companies only discovered 1 barrel of oil for every 10 barrels they produced; at the turn of the century it was closer to one for every four.

At the same time, most of the easy-to-get-at oil has already been produced, and now it takes 1 barrel’s worth of energy to produce something like 10 barrels, whereas at the dawn of the age of oil it was closer to 1 for every 100 barrels.

Such a low level of net energy production is turning out to be insufficient to maintain an industrial civilization, and as a result economic growth has largely stalled out.

And although large investments in oil production have succeeded in keeping large volumes of oil flowing, for now, this is turning out to be an ineffective way to invest money, with many energy companies, once so profitable, now unable to pay the interest on their debt.

And even though constant injections of free money are currently keeping developed economies from cratering into bankruptcy, it has been clear for some time that each additional dollar of debt produces significantly less than a dollar’s worth of economic growth. Growing debt within a growing economy can be very nice; but if the economy isn’t growing as fast, it’s fatal.

As the oil age winds down, personal transportation, in the form of the automobile, is bound to once again become a plaything of the very rich.

But then, when it comes to electric cars, it already is! And I don’t mean Tesla: the most commonly used electric vehicle worldwide is the golf cart.

And who uses golf carts? Members of golf clubs; guests at resorts; residents of posh gated communities; employees at corporate and academic campuses… And what do all these people have in common? They are all members of the salaried elite; they are definitely not members of the wage-earning class.

To them, the electric car offers a way of preserving a semblance of the status quo for themselves while setting themselves apart (in their own minds) from all of the gasoline-burning riffraff.

Let the great unwashed in the flyover states, with their pickup trucks complete with gun racks, burn what’s left of the gasoline while overdosing on synthetic opiates while the salaried elites and individuals of high net worth, ensconced in their campuses and gated communities, will create a different future for themselves, replete with wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars (until they all get shot by all those they have disenfranchised).
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End Amazon Crude!

SUBHEAD: The Amazon is Earth's most important carbon sink, most biodiverse rainforest, inhabited by indigenous people.

By Mike Goworecki on 30 September 2016 for Monga Bay -
(https://news.mongabay.com/2016/09/u-s-imports-of-amazon-crude-oil-driving-expansion-of-oil-operations/)


Image above: A pool of oil on May 1, 2009, in Lago Agrio, an Ecuadorean town in the Amazon where Texaco left contamination. Photo by Moises Saman. From (http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/37891-u-s-imports-of-amazon-crude-oil-driving-expansion-of-oil-operations).

• Oakland, California-based non-profit Amazon Watch released the report this week to highlight the impacts of oil operations on Amazonian biodiversity and indigenous peoples, as well as on refinery communities in the U.S. and the global climate.
  
• U.S. crude imports are in overall decline, the report notes. But imports from the Amazon are on the rise, so much so that the U.S. is now importing more crude oil from the Amazon than from any single foreign country.
  
• “Existing and proposed oil and gas blocks in the Amazon cover 283,172 square miles, an area larger than the state of Texas,” per the report.

Crude oil imported to the U.S. from the Amazon, most of which gets refined in California, is driving expansion of oil operations into the rainforest, according to a new report.

Oakland, California-based non-profit Amazon Watch released the report this week to highlight the impacts of oil operations on Amazonian biodiversity and indigenous peoples, as well as on refinery communities in the U.S. and the global climate.

U.S. crude imports are in overall decline, the report notes. But imports from the Amazon are on the rise, so much so that the U.S. is now importing more crude oil from the Amazon than from any single foreign country.

California’s refineries process an average of 170,978 barrels (almost 7.2 million gallons) of those imports every day — representing 74 percent of all Amazon crude imports to the U.S. and roughly 60 percent of total exports from Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.

“All commercial and public fleets in California — and many across the U.S. — that buy bulk diesel are using fuel that is at least partially derived from Amazon crude,” Adam Zuckerman, Amazon Watch’s End Amazon Crude Campaign Manager, said in a statement. “Therefore, virtually every company, city, and university in California and around the country contributes to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.”

The opening of new oil drilling concessions represents one of the most severe threats to the western Amazon, the group says. “Existing and proposed oil and gas blocks in the Amazon cover 283,172 square miles, an area larger than the state of Texas,” per the report.

“Oil is presently being extracted from only 7% of these blocks, yet national governments aim to exploit an additional 40%, including those slated for pristine, mega-diverse forests such as Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.”

In the report, Amazon Watch details the “triple carbon impact” of Amazonian oil extraction: carbon emissions are released when the rainforest is cut down to establish drill sites and the necessary roads and other infrastructure, which also means further destruction of the world’s largest carbon sink, and then even more emissions are created when the oil is ultimately burned for energy.

The Amazon plays a crucial role in regulating the global climate and hydrological patterns. The report notes that, therefore, deforestation in the Amazon can be said to contribute to the years-long drought in California, which is having a drastic impact on the state’s agricultural industry and causing massive wildfires.


Image above: Infographic "End Amazon Crude!" by Amazon Watch. Click to enlarge. From original article.

Of course, the Amazon is also home to the world’s highest levels of biodiversity, with more than 430 mammal species, 1,300 bird species, 56,000 plant and tree species, 5,600 fish species, 1,000 amphibian species, and 2.5 million insect species.

Just one hectare of Yasuní National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon contains 655 endemic tree species, more than all of the tree species in the United States and Canada combined. “Oil-driven deforestation gravely threatens this complex web of biodiversity, with recent studies linking major, exponential extinctions to forest loss,” the report states.

Esperanza Martínez, president of the Ecuadorian NGO Acción Ecologica, said in a statement that the crude oil that is imported into the U.S. from Ecuador “now carries with it a wave of disasters even greater than previous oil drilling history in the country, since drilling has begun in the Yasuní National Park. Yasuní is home to indigenous communities in voluntary isolation and forests full of immense biodiversity.”

Amazon Watch has also documented the impacts of oil operations on some of the hundreds of indigenous peoples whose traditional territories are in the Amazon. For instance, Peru’s Health Ministry reports that 98 percent of children in the indigenous communities of one oil-producing region of the Peruvian Amazon have high levels of toxic metals in their blood.

 In response, the country’s Environmental Ministry declared four river basins impacted by oil operations “environmental emergencies.”

“If you needed another reason why the time is now to stand up to the oil companies, this remarkable report provides it,” Bill McKibben, noted environmentalist, author, and founder of 350.org, said in a statement. “Ripping apart the Amazon rainforest and indigenous lives rubs salt in the deep climate wound our fossil fuel habit has created.”

McKibben authored an article back in 2012 for Rolling Stone entitled “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” in which he wrote that “We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn” and argued that as much as 80 percent of the world’s fossil fuel reserves would need to be kept in the ground if we are to avert the worst impacts of runaway climate change.

Just last year, a study published in the journal Nature supported McKibben’s calculations. The authors of the study wrote: “Our results suggest that, globally, a third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves and over 80 per cent of current coal reserves should remain unused from 2010 to 2050 in order to meet the target of 2°C.”

Bill McKibben wasn’t the only notable climate activist to highlight the importance of Amazon Watch’s findings.

“Scientific research continues to tell us that we must keep dirty fuels in the ground and continue the transition to 100% clean energy if we want to preserve our communities, protect the health of our families, and tackle the climate crisis,” Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said in a statement. “Putting an end to the destructive use of Amazon crude is a crucial first step in meeting that challenge.”

Amazonian peoples, many of whom consider oil to be the blood of Mother Earth, have long called on governments and corporations to keep it in the ground,” the Amazon Watch report states. “Now scientists are catching up with their calls, stating that we need to keep 80% of fossil fuels in the ground in order to have a good chance of averting catastrophic climate change.

As our planet’s most important carbon sink, the home to over 400 distinct indigenous peoples, and the world’s most biodiverse rainforest, it is urgent that we keep the oil in the ground in the Amazon.”

CITATION

• McGlade, C., & Ekins, P. (2015). The geographical distribution of fossil fuels unused when limiting global warming to 2 [deg] C. Nature, 517(7533), 187-190. doi:10.1038/nature14016

Amazon Watch commissioned Pulitzer Prize-winning animator Mark Fiore to create a short animation to accompany the report, which you can watch here:


Video above: Mark Fiore animation "End Amazon Crude!".From (https://youtu.be/v8PKR8vR77Q).

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Welcome to Slum Nation

SUBHEAD: German sensibility and American nonsense mark a contrast in culture... And they got Hitler.

Image above: Beer breakfast in Texas for a tailgaiter. From (http://blogs.houstonpress.com/eating/2008/11/choosing_a_breakfast_beer.php). By James Kunstler on 31 May 2010 in Kunstler.com - (http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/05/welcome-home-to-slum-nation.html) It's sad to be a citizen of a nation that can't do anything right. While BP was fumbling its "kill shot" into the Deepwater Horizon hole, and the dying pelicans were flopping in the poisoned marshlands, and rumors seeped across the Internet that nothing short of an atom bomb would avail to stop the underwater oil gusher -- not to mention, meanwhile, all the other problems out there, such as the ongoing melt-away of of capital in every corner of the world -- I found myself in Berlin, Germany, touring the city on a rented bicycle (after a 4,500-mile airplane ride, it is true).

When I was last there in '97, I was struck by how utterly all remnants of Hitler had been erased. I suppose it was a form of post traumatic stress syndrome. Quite a bit of memory has been recovered since then, and new monuments abound, from the Peter Eisenman-designed Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe -- very solemnly eloquent -- to a smaller memorial to Hitler's gay victims in the big park called the Tiergarten. Plaques explaining one Nazi horror after another are now liberally deployed around the old city center, and Herman Goering's Air Force Ministry was left standing as the last example of Third Reich art deco -- a form of extreme stripped down neo-classicism with all femininity removed, no curves, no ornaments. The site of Hitler's bunker is no longer a weed patch, but perhaps appropriately one of the city's rather rare surface parking lots, with a plaque telling the tale and tourist docents pointing out (I swear I heard this) that "...Hitler's bedroom lay about where that white Audi is parked...."

It seemed to me that, altogether, the German expression of regret appears deeply sincere now and absolutely straightforward, with no side-trips into the realm of excuses or attempted explanations. With the German social mentality now restored to normality -- laughter in the busy streets and all dark thoughts of race vengeance banished -- one was prompted to reflect on just how such a civilized folk could fall into a mass psychosis like Naziism. And by extension, it was hard to evade the question as to how the USA might not lurch into something worse. The Germans were punished pretty severely for losing (and starting!) the First World War. Depression and hyper-inflation drove them to their knees. I daresay, too, that something about industrialization meshed with their ethnic neuroses to very bad effect (though this is a subject that would take a book to lay out). Anyway, it drove them batshit. They followed a madman through the gates of hell and made a smoking ruin of their home place.

America today is arguably a far less civilized land, and even more neurotic, than the Germany of the 1930s. We live in places so extreme in ugliness, squalor, and dysfunction that just going to the store leaves a sentient American reeling in angst and anomie. Our popular culture would embarrass a race of hebephrenics. We think that neck tattoos are cool. A lot of our pop music is overtly homicidal. Our richest citizens have managed to define a new banality of evil. Our middle classes are subject to humiliations so baroque that sadomasochism even fails to encompass the finer points. And we don't even need help from other nations to run our own economic affairs into the ground -- we're digging our national grave with a kind of antic glee, complete with all the lurid stagecraft that Las Vegas, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue can muster.

Biking around Berlin -- especially the non-tourist neighborhoods, and the beautiful, shaded paths beside the little river Spree, where young people sat enjoying the simple tranquility of the waterside on a spring day -- I could only imagine the scene back home at the Indianapolis Speedway (or the dozens of Nascar ovals around Dixie) -- the frantic idiocy of America-on-wheels, the fat slobs in beer can hats grilling cheez dogs in the parking lots, letting loose their asinine rebel yells as though this made men of them, and above it all the deafening noise of a people literally driving themselves to death and madness.

Meanwhile, the evil plume of crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico grows ever-larger by the hour and every living thing in that quarter of the sea faces slow death. That's our memorial-in-the-making to ourselves. I feel sorry for Barack Obama in this situation. Dmitry Orlov is right: this is our Chernobyl. This is the cherry-on-top of all our feckless foolishness. Memorial Day this year is the welcome mat to our hard time. We'll be lucky if some honorable as-yet-unknown colonel in the wadis of Afghanistan comes home to overthrow president Glenn Beck, or whichever lethal moron ends up in power after 2012. We'll be a very different America then, with no going back.

Coming home to the USA was like re-entering a special kind of mega-slum where nothing that can be screwed up is left un-screwed up. My Delta flight was two hours late, of course. Amusingly, the explanation given was that new runways were under construction at JFK airport -- like, Delta just discovered it that morning, or somehow they've been unable to work that into their scheduling process after months and months. The things we tell ourselves are so absurd that even the late George Carlin couldn't make them up. We stopped on the tarmac at JFK because they didn't have a gate for us. We passengers were put onto some kind of people-mover contraption. The engine failed so we we sat in this steel box in 90-degree heat until they fetched another one. Then there was the journey through a set of dim tunnels to customs, and another journey up a steep ramp shared by motor vehicles and their exhalations to the terminal exit. Welcome home to Slum Nation. .

US gas demand is down

SUBHEAD: Speculators ignoring permanent drop in US gasoline demand. Image above: An abandoned car in the great plains after the Great Depression. From (http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/_b6X6BwFLBMsplWa4FPNpg) By Steven Zweig on 3 February 2010 in HeatingOil.com - (http://www.heatingoil.com/blog/oil-analyst-schork-oil-investors-ignore-permanent-change-in-us-gasoline-demand203) Gasoline demand will never recover, says analyst Stephen Schork, and it's not because of the recession. Gasoline is made from crude oil. In any logical trading world, gas should be more expensive than crude, owing to the additional processing and transportation costs. So why then is crude more expensive than gas on the NYMEX? Do traders know something the rest of us don’t? Not according to veteran industry analyst and commentator Stephen Schork. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. In Schork’s view, covered by the Financial Times on Tuesday, traders don’t know—or simply aren’t paying attention to—what’s manifestly obvious: gasoline demand is down and it never is coming back up again. Schork does not attribute the decline solely to the recession. In fact, he believes that a recovery has already begun, but that it’s not a return to the status ante quo, or how things were before. Instead, he sees a changed economy, one in which gasoline demand is persistently and structurally lower than before. Schork feels that a significant portion of U.S. gasoline demand has been “wiped off the map and is not coming back.” If not the recession—at least, not as a cause of long-term declines in consumption—what then? What has caused lower gasoline demand in the United States? Several factors: • New fuel standards for cars and trucks are improving mileage—and decreasing gasoline usage. By 2016, new vehicles in the U.S. auto fleet will be over one-third more fuel-efficient than today’s vehicles. • The growth in the number of cars is peaking—just about everyone who can have or wants a car will have one soon. Growth in the number of cars was a major driver of increased gasoline consumption over the past decades, but with the cars: people ratio getting close to 1:1 (it was 844 vehicles per 1,000 people recently), the number of cars is almost at saturation point. • The increase in alternative vehicle fuels, such as biodiesel, ethanol, plug-in hybrids and fully electric cars, compressed natural gas, hydrogen . . . the number of ways other than gasoline to power cars and trucks is growing. • Demographics—the U.S. population is aging as the Boomers age. As they age, people drive less. They don’t have to shuttle children to play dates and soccer practice, they take fewer family road trips, and as they retire, they stop commuting. • The rise of telecommuting, online business, and online shopping—more can be done with less travel. This doesn’t mean that gasoline will go away as an automotive fuel—the Energy Information Administration, for example, predicts that petroleum products (including diesel) will still provide 88 percent of the fuel for cars and light trucks in 2035. Of course, not that long ago, gasoline and diesel provided 100 percent of automotive fuel, so a 12 percent decline (almost one-eighth) is significant. Remember, gasoline is made from crude oil. So are diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, and a number of other products. Historically, however, gasoline has been oil’s main product—around 40 percent of each barrel of oil gets turned into gas. Since nobody uses crude itself—it’s called “crude” for a reason; it’s not fit for use—the demand for crude ultimately depends on the demand for its refined products. Lower gasoline usage equals lower crude demand, or as Schork put it: “Without . . . end demand for [refined] product, crude prices are fundamentally crippled on the upper bound.” That’s a jargon-filled way to say that oil prices can only go so high if less of the substances made out of oil are consumed. The obvious immediate losers are refiners—the companies that turn oil into gasoline and other distillates. Low gasoline demand hurt them throughout 2009, the result being refinery closures to improve margins and stop massive financial losses. Longer term, though, decreased oil demand will remake the petroleum landscape. Oil prices can only go so high without gasoline consumption to lift them. Certain technically exploitable—but difficult and expensive—unconventional resources, such as some tar sands and oil shale, will lay fallow from lack of need. A combination of lower crude prices and surplus refinery capacity will help moderate heating oil prices. Energy and technology more generally may be affected. Lower gasoline demand means lower gas prices; lower prices mean less urgency for alternative fuel vehicles. (Especially given their price premiums—why pay $5,000 or $10,000 more for a plug-in hybrid when gasoline is below $3.00 per gallon?) The environment will be affected: less gasoline consumption means fewer carbon emissions. Even without anything concrete from Copenhagen, less greenhouse gases should get into the atmosphere. We can still do better, but it’s a start. In short, all the financial, ecological, and technological assumptions based on rising (or at least flat) gasoline consumption need to be rethought. Oil traders have seemingly not gotten the message yet, but the message is there: it’s a new game. .