Big
Picture series # 9
Peak Oil: The future
ain't what it used to be!
Note to: The Prince Edward County Agricultural
Advisory Committee
April 18/05
Subject:
Peak Oil: The future ain't what it used to be!
Recommendation:
That the family farming community become the focal/fulcrum point
for revolutionary social change.
In times before fossil energy use, 90%
of people worked in agriculture. According to Bob Williams,
OFA, today 2% are farmers, and human population
has grown by a factor of 10. The physical work of those now not
in agriculture is being done, principally, by the energy
within oil. Oil is one key ingredient of the nitrogen-based fertilizer
that enabled the green revolution. Oil energizes about
99% of today's industrial transportation including tractors and
pickup trucks. If oil availability stopped today, civil society
would soon collapse. But it's not quite that bad.
The Hubbert Peak represents
the point when, globally, oil extraction can no longer meet oil
demand. Hubbert's 1956 prediction that US oil extraction would
peak in 1970 was correct: USA now depends on 60% imported oil.
The same criteria predicted global oil would peak in the first
decade of 2000. Statistical indicators suggest we are now at or
very close to peak: i.e: North Sea oil peaked a few years ago,
and now UK and Norway have recently become importers. The largest
field in Saudi Arabia, Gharwar, appears to be
at peak. Energy demand is growing in India and China at 3
and 4%/ year! Canada and other G8 nations expect
continuous exponential economic growth. (While economic
growth is not a direct indicator of energy usage, they are closely
related: Renewables are not nearly ready to
fill the gap.) Many energy experts suggest that our current
80+ million barrels a day of oil extraction, from our finite
earthy endowment, will soon falter - and begin the downward
slide. When supply cannot meet demand, the price goes up. Now
in the $50s, and then to ?, $105?
Today's fragile economic system evolved with
cheap oil enabling New Zealand lamb and African apples to compete
with local farm production and for Picton fresh water fish processors
to export most of their product. Because refrigerated transportation
is so relatively free and easy, the County's last meat processor
is going out of business. Only very large
operators can compete in the cheap oil economy of globalization
where sound farm practices are often secondary to cheap food production.
But cheap oil appears to be coming to an end
within your near future and will no will doubt have an
enormous impact on our children's future. The potential domino
effect of farm and civil infrastructure breakdown is discussed
by a UK researcher at this note. Unfortunately, the serious issues
of the day are not just the end of cheap oil but also the ecological
impact of exponential growth in global human activity that has
been enabled, to a large degree, by the use of fossil fuels over
two centuries. Warnings by scientists are becoming more numerous
and more alarming. They even question the survivability
of today's very young.
50 years ago only a few geophysicists, scientists
and investigative individuals spoke openly about the implications
of Peak Oil. Gradually more and more people recognized the issue.
Each year there are more books on the subject. Today even some
bank managers are now alarmed, and some oil executives speak
publicly about it.
But our provincial or federal politicians don't
talk about the implications of Peak Oil. Indeed, it is nowhere
on the political landscape ( Kyoto and carbon credits are political
anxiety reliving band-aids). There are likely many reasons for
avoidance of this issue. Some of these may be:
-
Individual and group-think denial that the prevailing status
quo social heading - continued exponential economic growth
in a globalized integrated world marketplace - might
not be physically possible in a finite planet. Note:
exponential growth + time = infinite!
-
The most obvious way to deal with peak oil and ecological
decline would be to take immediate steps to reduce human activity,
our ecological footprint, and our
dependence on oil and other fossil fuels.
-
But the implications of the above #2 comment are enormous
in political terms: Jobs, social security, banking systems,
corporate powers, stewardship of the commons, international
and provincial trade agreements, jurisdictional territories,
individual responsibilities and rights, etc., would all be
affected. And no one government can deal with all of these
issues.
Historically, when human civilizations get
into a predicament such as 1, 2 and 3, they proceed blindly until
some vital part of the system reaches limits, then violent revolution
and/or major collapse occurs, as well documented by CBC's
Massey Lecturer, or in Jared Diamond's book, Collapse.
In all of these documented collapses, only a part, some corner,
of Earth's Mother Nature was involved. Now we are talking about
THE BIG ONE. The principle component of the energy life-blood
of global industrial society is about to go into remission. This
time all continents are involved, including Antarctica where penguin
territories now shrink from global warming.
But who will/can help?
The entrepreneurial family farming community
is the human society that works closest with Mother Nature, the
land and the water, and are the most likely to grasp the spirit
of change. Farming men and women are the most likely to quickly
understand today's enormous dependence on oil as both energy and
fertilizer. Agra corporations, one vehicle of globalization, have
weakened the family farming community, but as a group, farmers
are in a far better position than any other community to sound
the alarm bells and help brake/break our national and the international
hypnotic-like fixation on economic growth beyond ALL other considerations.
The current form of economic globalization
is intensely wasteful of energy, ecology
and human resources: note. There are many other viable options
and social headings that could avert collapse or full meltdown
of our ecological, economic and/or political systems.
All of society is fully dependent on farm produce.
Farmers hold the trump-negotiating card!
The County Agricultural Advisory Committee
cannot solve the problem alone, but we could:
-
Request the Environmental Advisory Committee investigate
the credibility of the data presented herein;
-
Have a meeting specifically about Peak Oil, to discus the
nature of local and larger implications, including the effect
on your profit margin this year, and future;
-
Reach out to other rural groups while making recommendations
to local council for strategic change toward greater local
autonomy.
My recommendation, That the family farming
community become the focal/fulcrum point for revolutionary social
change, may at first seem like a wild exaggeration to a conservative
group like farmers, but please keep an open mind as you study
the matter.
Don Chisholm UEL
613 476 1700 donchism@magma.ca
A good way for busy farmers to get a daily
quick view of world and local issues relevant to meaningful subjects
is at http://www.safewatergroup.org/.
You will find headline information from local and round the world
with a brief paragraph and a web link, updated daily.
Notes:
Nov 05 Massey Lectures
(CBC) by Roger Wright, now bestseller book: A Short History
Of Progress (p73)
Picton Gazette, March 30/05:
Bob Williams, long time local farmer speaking of change says:
“Less that 2% of Canadians are actively farming now he says.
But agriculture is vital to our economy, to the environment, to
many aspects of our life.”
Dr. M. King Hubbert, geophysicist,
correctly predicted in 1956 that US oil production would peak
in 1970. Campbell, Younquist and others used the same technique
to predict global oil extraction would peak early in 2000. Statistical
indicators suggest we may be there. See
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/
The Bank of Montreal's analyst
Don Coxe, indicates the largest field in Saudi Arabia, Gharwar's
days are fated. http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/08B97BCF-7BE6-4F1D-A846-7ACB9B0F8894.htm
See presentation at Ryerson
University conference: “In (1) we recognize that Human Activity
is altering Earth's ecological systems, our only source of life,
and yet in (2), we vote for governments that promise to make it
worse. When pondering this view of the human dilemma the words
Syndrome, Malignant, and Ideology come to mind.
http://www.safewatergroup.org/Big
Picture/Big_picture5.htm
See letter in Picton Gazette
July 04, now at Safewatergroup Big Picture series, # 1 at http://www.safewatergroup.org/Big%20Picture/Oil%20in%20the%20wind.htm
>There were
echoes of that call in this month's forecast by Goldman Sachs
that current record oil prices may have entered a "super
spike period" that could see them nearly double to $105 a
barrel. <
<http://news.ft.com/cms/s/78dcf0d8-a894-11d9-87a9-00000e2511c8.html>
Picton Gazette April
6/05 “ Big Island meat processors looking forward to retirement”
Thursday, 17 February
2005 “ The modern, commercial agricultural miracle that
feeds all of us and much of the rest of the world is completely
dependent on the flow, processing and distribution of oil, and
technology is critical to maintaining that flow. Without timely
and expensive inputs, yields of all basic food crops, as well
as seed for the following year's crops, would plummet or stocks
simply disappear because....”
http://www.powerswitch.org.uk/portal/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=452&Itemid=2
“Planet
Earth stands on the cusp of disaster and people should no longer
take it for granted that their children and grandchildren will
survive in the environmentally degraded world of the 21st century.
This is not the doom-laden talk of green activists but the considered
opinion of 1,300 leading scientists from 95 countries who will
today publish a detailed assessment of the state of the world
at the start of the new millennium.” http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=624667
Check your personal
ecological footprint at
http://www.myfootprint.org/
Footprint:
> Francisco, USA—Redefining
Progress today released an update of the world's leading indicator
of sustainability, the Ecological Footprint™ Accounts. The
2004 Footprint of Nations concludes that the world's wealthiest
nations are mortgaging the future at the expense of today's children,
the poor, and the long-term health of the Earth. Through excessive
consumption of non-renewable resources, a handful of countries
are depleting global reserves at a faster rate than ever before.
These problems are compounded as wealthy nations continue to grow
their economies by exploiting the resources and economic impact
is due to the use of fossil fuels, shifting to renewable energy
can dramatically lessen a country's Footprint. Even a developing
nation with a small per capita Footprint can have a very large
overall Footprint when its population grows rapidly. Sustainable
modes of production and consumption and attention to social equity
can help decrease national Footprints and improve quality of life
around the world.
http://www.rprogress.org/newmedia/releases/040322_foot.html<
World's Wasted Wealth
by JW Smith points out that with subtle different social goals,
all needed work could be done with half the labor and energy intensity
and we would, in general, have a better standard of living. Review
at Oil in the wind.htm
Reviewof: Collapse
by J Diamond, originally in New York Times
THE VANISHING
by MALCOLM GLADWELL
In "Collapse,"
Jared Diamond shows how societies destroy themselves.
Issue of 2005-01-03
Posted 2004-12-27
A thousand years ago, a group of Vikings led
by Erik the Red set sail from Norway for the vast Arctic landmass
west of Scandinavia which came to be known as Greenland. It
was largely uninhabitable—a forbidding expanse of snow
and ice. But along the southwestern coast there were two deep
fjords protected from the harsh winds and saltwater spray of
the North Atlantic Ocean, and as the Norse sailed upriver they
saw grassy slopes flowering with buttercups, dandelions, and
bluebells, and thick forests of willow and birch and alder.
Two colonies were formed, three hundred miles apart, known as
the Eastern and Western Settlements. The Norse raised sheep,
goats, and cattle. They turned the grassy slopes into pastureland.
They hunted seal and caribou. They built a string of parish
churches and a magnificent cathedral, the remains of which are
still standing. They traded actively with mainland Europe, and
tithed regularly to the Roman Catholic Church. The Norse colonies
in Greenland were law-abiding, economically viable, fully integrated
communities, numbering at their peak five thousand people. They
lasted for four hundred and fifty years—and then they
vanished.
The story of the Eastern and Western Settlements
of Greenland is told in Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How
Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" (Viking; $29.95).
Diamond teaches geography at U.C.L.A. and is well known for
his best-seller "Guns, Germs, and Steel," which won
a Pulitzer Prize. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel," Diamond
looked at environmental and structural factors to explain why
Western societies came to dominate the world. In "Collapse,"
he continues that approach, only this time he looks at history's
losers—”like the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi of
the American Southwest, the Mayans, and the modern-day Rwandans.
We live in an era preoccupied with the way that ideology and
culture and politics and economics help shape the course of
history. But Diamond isn't particularly interested in any of
those things— or, at least, he's interested in them only
insofar as they bear on what to him is the far more important
question, which is a society's relationship to its climate and
geography and resources and neighbors. "Collapse"
is a book about the most prosaic elements of the earth's ecosystem—soil,
trees, and water—because societies fail, in Diamond's
view, when they mismanage those environmental factors.
There was nothing wrong with the social organization
of the Greenland settlements. The Norse built a functioning
reproduction of the predominant northern-European civic model
of the time—devout, structured, and reasonably orderly.
In 1408, right before the end, records from the Eastern Settlement
dutifully report that Thorstein Olafsson married Sigrid Bjornsdotter
in Hvalsey Church on September 14th of that year, with Brand
Halldorstson, Thord Jorundarson, Thorbjorn Bardarson, and Jon
Jonsson as witnesses, following the proclamation of the wedding
banns on three consecutive Sundays.
The problem with the settlements, Diamond argues,
was that the Norse thought that Greenland really was green;
they treated it as if it were the verdant farmland of southern
Norway. They cleared the land to create meadows for their cows,
and to grow hay to feed their livestock through the long winter.
They chopped down the forests for fuel, and for the construction
of wooden objects. To make houses warm enough for the winter,
they built their homes out of six-foot-thick slabs of turf,
which meant that a typical home consumed about ten acres of
grassland.
But Greenland,s ecosystem was too fragile to
withstand that kind of pressure. The short, cool growing season
meant that plants developed slowly, which in turn meant that
topsoil layers were shallow and lacking in soil constituents,
like organic humus and clay, that hold moisture and keep soil
resilient in the face of strong winds. "The sequence of
soil erosion in Greenland begins with cutting or burning the
cover of trees and shrubs, which are more effective at holding
soil than is grass," he writes. "With the trees and
shrubs gone, livestock, especially sheep and goats, graze down
the grass, which regenerates only slowly in Greenland's climate.
Once the grass cover is broken and the soil is exposed, soil
is carried away especially by the strong winds, and also by
pounding from occasionally heavy rains, to the point where the
topsoil can be removed for a distance of miles from an entire
valley." Without adequate pastureland, the summer hay yields
shrank; without adequate supplies of hay, keeping livestock
through the long winter got harder. And, without adequate supplies
of wood, getting fuel for the winter became increasingly difficult.
The Norse needed to reduce their reliance on
livestock— particularly cows, which consumed an enormous
amount of agricultural resources. But cows were a sign of high
status; to northern Europeans, beef was a prized food. They
needed to copy the Inuit practice of burning seal blubber for
heat and light in the winter, and to learn from the Inuit the
difficult art of hunting ringed seals, which were the most reliably
plentiful source of food available in the winter. But the Norse
had contempt for the Inuit—they called them skraelings,
'wretches'—and preferred to practice their own brand of
European agriculture. In the summer, when the Norse should have
been sending ships on lumber-gathering missions to Labrador,
in order to relieve the pressure on their own forestlands, they
instead sent boats and men to the coast to hunt for walrus.
Walrus tusks, after all, had great trade value. In return for
those tusks, the Norse were able to acquire, among other things,
church bells, stained-glass windows, bronze candlesticks, Communion
wine, linen, silk, silver, churchmen's robes, and jewelry to
adorn their massive cathedral at Gardar, with its three-ton
sandstone building blocks and eighty-foot bell tower. In the
end, the Norse starved to death.
Diamond's argument stands in sharp contrast
to the conventional explanations for a society's collapse. Usually,
we look for some kind of cataclysmic event. The aboriginal civilization
of the Americas was decimated by the sudden arrival of smallpox.
European Jewry was destroyed by Nazism. Similarly, the disappearance
of the Norse settlements is usually blamed on the Little Ice
Age, which descended on Greenland in the early fourteen-hundreds,
ending several centuries of relative warmth. (One archeologist
refers to this as the 'It got too cold, and they died' argument.)
What all these explanations have in common is the idea that
civilizations are destroyed by forces outside their control,
by acts of God.
But look, Diamond says, at Easter Island. Once,
it was home to a thriving culture that produced the enormous
stone statues that continue to inspire awe. It was home to dozens
of species of trees, which created and protected an ecosystem
fertile enough to support as many as thirty thousand people.
Today, it's a barren and largely empty outcropping of volcanic
rock. What happened? Did a rare plant virus wipe out the island's
forest cover? Not at all. The Easter Islanders chopped their
trees down, one by one, until they were all gone. "I have
often asked myself, 'What did the Easter Islander who cut down
the last palm tree say while he was doing it?'" Diamond
writes, and that, of course, is what is so troubling about the
conclusions of "Collapse." Those trees were felled
by rational actors—who must have suspected that the destruction
of this resource would result in the destruction of their civilization.
The lesson of "Collapse" is that societies, as often
as not, aren't murdered. They commit suicide: they slit their
wrists and then, in the course of many decades, stand by passively
and watch themselves bleed to death.
This doesn't mean that acts of God don't play
a role. It did get colder in Greenland in the early fourteen-hundreds.
But it didn't get so cold that the island became uninhabitable.
The Inuit survived long after the Norse died out, and the Norse
had all kinds of advantages, including a more diverse food supply,
iron tools, and ready access to Europe. The problem was that
the Norse simply couldn't adapt to the country's changing environmental
conditions. Diamond writes, for instance, of the fact that nobody
can find fish remains in Norse archeological sites. One scientist
sifted through tons of debris from the Vatnahverfi farm and
found only three fish bones; another researcher analyzed thirty-five
thousand bones from the garbage of another Norse farm and found
two fish bones. How can this be? Greenland is a fisherman's
dream: Diamond describes running into a Danish tourist in Greenland
who had just caught two Arctic char in a shallow pool with her
bare hands. "Every archaeologist who comes to excavate
in Greenland . . . starts out with his or her own idea about
where all those missing fish bones might be hiding," he
writes. "Could the Norse have strictly confined their munching
on fish to within a few feet of the shoreline, at sites now
underwater because of land subsidence? Could they have faithfully
saved all their fish bones for fertilizer, fuel, or feeding
to cows?" It seems unlikely. There are no fish bones in
Norse archeological remains, Diamond concludes, for the simple
reason that the Norse didn't eat fish. For one reason or another,
they had a cultural taboo against it.
Given the difficulty that the Norse had in
putting food on the table, this was insane. Eating fish would
have substantially reduced the ecological demands of the Norse
settlements. The Norse would have needed fewer livestock and
less pastureland. Fishing is not nearly as labor-intensive as
raising cattle or hunting caribou, so eating fish would have
freed time and energy for other activities. It would have diversified
their diet.
Why did the Norse choose not to eat fish? Because
they weren't thinking about their biological survival. They
were thinking about their cultural survival. Food taboos are
one of the idiosyncrasies that define a community. Not eating
fish served the same function as building lavish churches, and
doggedly replicating the untenable agricultural practices of
their land of origin. It was part of what it meant to be Norse,
and if you are going to establish a community in a harsh and
forbidding environment all those little idiosyncrasies which
define and cement a culture are of paramount importance. "The
Norse were undone by the same social glue that had enabled them
to master Greenland's difficulties," Diamond writes. "The
values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate
conditions are those values that were previously the source
of their greatest triumphs over adversity." He goes on:
To us in our secular modern society, the
predicament in which the Greenlanders found themselves is
difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their
social survival as much as their biological survival, it was
out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate
or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity
in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth.
Diamond's distinction between social and biological
survival is a critical one, because too often we blur the two,
or assume that biological survival is contingent on the strength
of our civilizational values. That was the lesson taken from
the two world wars and the nuclear age that followed: we would
survive as a species only if we learned to get along and resolve
our disputes peacefully. The fact is, though, that we can be
law-abiding and peace-loving and tolerant and inventive and
committed to freedom and true to our own values and still behave
in ways that are biologically suicidal. The two kinds of survival
are separate.
Diamond points out that the Easter Islanders
did not practice, so far as we know, a uniquely pathological
version of South Pacific culture. Other societies, on other
islands in the Hawaiian archipelago, chopped down trees and
farmed and raised livestock just as the Easter Islanders did.
What doomed the Easter Islanders was the interaction between
what they did and where they were. Diamond and a colleague,
Barry Rollet, identified nine physical factors that contributed
to the likelihood of deforestation—including latitude,
average rainfall, aerial-ash fallout, proximity to Central Asia's
dust plume, size, and so on—and Easter Island ranked at
the high-risk end of nearly every variable. "The reason
for Easter's unusually severe degree of deforestation isn't
that those seemingly nice people really were unusually bad or
improvident," he concludes. "Instead, they had the
misfortune to be living in one of the most fragile environments,
at the highest risk for deforestation, of any Pacific people."The
problem wasn't the Easter Islanders. It was Easter Island.
In the second half of "Collapse,"
Diamond turns his attention to modern examples, and one of his
case studies is the recent genocide in Rwanda. What happened
in Rwanda is commonly described as an ethnic struggle between
the majority Hutu and the historically dominant, wealthier Tutsi,
and it is understood in those terms because that is how we have
come to explain much of modern conflict: Serb and Croat, Jew
and Arab, Muslim and Christian. The world is a cauldron of cultural
antagonism. It's an explanation that clearly exasperates Diamond.
The Hutu didn't just kill the Tutsi, he points out. The Hutu
also killed other Hutu. Why? Look at the land: steep hills farmed
right up to the crests, without any protective terracing; rivers
thick with mud from erosion; extreme deforestation leading to
irregular rainfall and famine; staggeringly high population
densities; the exhaustion of the topsoil; falling per-capita
food production. This was a society on the brink of ecological
disaster, and if there is anything that is clear from the study
of such societies it is that they inevitably descend into genocidal
chaos. In "Collapse," Diamond quite convincingly defends
himself against the charge of environmental determinism. His
discussions are always nuanced, and he gives political and ideological
factors their due. The real issue is how, in coming to terms
with the uncertainties and hostilities of the world, the rest
of us have turned ourselves into cultural determinists.
For the past thirty years, Oregon has had one
of the strictest sets of land-use regulations in the nation,
requiring new development to be clustered in and around existing
urban development. The laws meant that Oregon has done perhaps
the best job in the nation in limiting suburban sprawl, and
protecting coastal lands and estuaries. But this November Oregon's
voters passed a ballot referendum, known as Measure 37, that
rolled back many of those protections. Specifically, Measure
37 said that anyone who could show that the value of his land
was affected by regulations implemented since its purchase was
entitled to compensation from the state. If the state declined
to pay, the property owner would be exempted from the regulations.
To call Measure 37— and similar referendums
that have been passed recently in other states—intellectually
incoherent is to put it mildly. It might be that the reason
your hundred-acre farm on a pristine hillside is worth millions
to a developer is that it's on a pristine hillside: if everyone
on that hillside could subdivide, and sell out to Target and
Wal-Mart, then nobody's plot would be worth millions anymore.
Will the voters of Oregon then pass Measure 38, allowing them
to sue the state for compensation over damage to property values
caused by Measure 37?
It is hard to read "Collapse," though,
and not have an additional reaction to Measure 37. Supporters
of the law spoke entirely in the language of political ideology.
To them, the measure was a defense of property rights, preventing
the state from unconstitutional takings."If you replaced
the term 'property rights' with 'First Amendment rights,' this
would have been indistinguishable from an argument over, say,
whether charitable groups ought to be able to canvass in malls,
or whether cities can control the advertising they sell on the
sides of public buses. As a society, we do a very good job with
these kinds of debates: we give everyone a hearing, and pass
laws, and make compromises, and square our conclusions with
our constitutional heritage—and in the Oregon debate the
quality of the theoretical argument was impressively high.
The thing that got lost in the debate, however,
was the land. In a rapidly growing state like Oregon, what,
precisely, are the state's ecological strengths and vulnerabilities?
What impact will changed land-use priorities have on water and
soil and cropland and forest? One can imagine Diamond writing
about the Measure 37 debate, and he wouldn't be very impressed
by how seriously Oregonians wrestled with the problem of squaring
their land-use rules with their values, because to him a society's
environmental birthright is not best discussed in those terms.
Rivers and streams and forests and soil are a biological resource.
They are a tangible, finite thing, and societies collapse when
they get so consumed with addressing the fine points of their
history and culture and deeply held beliefs—with making
sure that Thorstein Olafsson and Sigrid Bjornsdotter are married
before the right number of witnesses following the announcement
of wedding banns on the right number of Sundays—that they
forget that the pastureland is shrinking and the forest cover
is gone.
When archeologists looked through the ruins
of the Western Settlement, they found plenty of the big wooden
objects that were so valuable in Greenland— crucifixes,
bowls, furniture, doors, roof timbers—which meant that
the end came too quickly for anyone to do any scavenging. And,
when the archeologists looked at the animal bones left in the
debris, they found the bones of newborn calves, meaning that
the Norse, in that final winter, had given up on the future.
They found toe bones from cows, equal to the number of cow spaces
in the barn, meaning that the Norse ate their cattle down to
the hoofs, and they found the bones of dogs covered with knife
marks, meaning that, in the end, they had to eat their pets.
But not fish bones, of course. Right up until they starved to
death, the Norse never lost sight of what they stood for.
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