Wednesday, 1 August 2018

What I've Been Reading, July 2018

This month, I've moved further in the direction of curating this list and added new sections for topics that particularly interest me. In the context of this blog, that is—I'm leaving out woodworking articles, recipes and most politics, so far.

I don't put a great deal of effort into hunting for articles on any particular topic, so the size of each section will vary from month to month. Also, for the most part, the articles are listed in the order I found them.

Links

Miscellaneous

Collapse

Peak Oil

Climate Change

Economic Contraction

The Scientific Consensus

Lacking an Owner's Manual

The human body/mind/spirit doesn't come with an owner's manual, and we continually struggle to figure out how best to operate them.

I just started this category this month and the moment I did articles that fit started popping up everywhere I looked, so the list is probably a little unbalanced in this direction this month.

  • How a Young Woman Lost Her Identity, by Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker
    Hannah Upp disappears for weeks at a time, forgetting her sense of self. Can she still be found?
  • "Find Your Passion" Is Awful Advice, by Olga Khazan, Medium—The Atlantic
    A major new study questions the common wisdom about how we should choose our careers.
  • What Do 90-Somethings Regret Most?, by Lydia Sohn, Medium
    I interviewed the oldest people I know. Their responses contradict popular research about aging and happiness.
  • Why you shouldn’t share your goals, by Aytekin Tank, Medium—The Startup
  • Caves all the way down, by Jules Evans, Aeon
    Do psychedelics give access to a universal, mystical experience of reality, or is that just a culture-bound illusion?
    "...how do we know if our trips reveal ‘ultimate reality’ or just the reflection of our subconscious?"
    It may be that this should have gone in the "scientific consensus" section, since it is written by someone with a preconceived notion who is willing "hold his ideas to critical account" (and good for him):
    "I am a fan of the mystical theory of psychedelics. I have accepted it since I first read Huxley’s Doors of Perception as a mushroom-munching teenager. I have had mystical-type experiences on psychedelics that have been deeply important in my life (as well as some awful experiences). However, like all academics, I need to be able to hold my ideas to critical account, or otherwise stop pretending to be a researcher and leave the academy to start a religion (as Timothy Leary did in 1966 with the League for Spiritual Discovery, which used LSD as its holy sacrament). So, in the spirit of critical enquiry, I want to suggest that there are several problems with the mystical theory of psychedelics."
  • The Wisdom of the Sloth: Is Sleep a Lost Virtue?, by Joel Frohlich , Knowing Neurons
    "We are with sleep where we were with smoking 50 years ago. We had all of the evidence about the … disease issues, but the public had not been aware, no one had adequately communicated the science of, you know, smoking to the public. The same I think is true for sleep right now."
  • How Do I Stop Forgetting What I Learned So Quickly?, by William Cho, Medium—Student Voices
  • 'Boy or girl?' Parents raising 'theybies' let kids decide, by Julie Compton, NBC News
    "One way of shielding children from gender stereotypes: Keep their biological sex secret."
    I suspect there are quite a few socially conservative people around who will have trouble with this and make trouble for children being raised a theybies. Just chill.
  • You Might Not Actually Be Struggling With Depression, by Benjamin Sledge, Medium—Heart Support
    But you may be dealing with depression’s lesser known evil twin.

Intelligence

Refugees and Migration

Puerto Rico

Poverty, Homelessness, Minimum Wage, UBI

  • Where Financial Inequality Is Rampant, by, Niall McCarthy, Statista, The Statistics Portal
  • What It Really Means to Be Marginalized, by Thrity Umriga, Medium
    Growing up amid the beggars and laborers of Mumbai, I wanted to know what it was like to live their lives.
  • The United States Has a National-Security Problem—and It’s Not What You Think, by Rajan Menon, TheNation
    Conflict abroad is not the biggest threat to most Americans’ lives.
    It’s time to rethink the American national security state with its annual trillion-dollar budget. For tens of millions of Americans, the source of deep workaday insecurity isn’t the standard roster of foreign enemies, but an ever-more entrenched system of inequality, still growing, that stacks the political deck against the least well-off Americans. They lack the bucks to hire big-time lobbyists. They can’t write lavish checks to candidates running for public office or fund PACs. They have no way of manipulating the myriad influence-generating networks that the elite uses to shape taxation and spending policies. They are up against a system in which money truly does talk—and that’s the voice they don’t have. Welcome to the United States of Inequality.
  • You can’t just put homeless people in tiny houses, by Miles Howard, The Outline
    Rather than confront America’s housing crisis head-on, some cities are asking homeowners to build tiny rental units in their backyard.

Autonomous Vehicles and Artificial Intelligence

Books

Fiction

I was reading both the John Barnes books for a second or third time, but they deserve it.

Non-Fiction

I'm still wading slowly through The Bell Curve, in order to be able to criticize it with some degree of credibility. Less than 200 pages to go at this point. This has also lead to reading some scholarly articles about IQ on the web, further slowing down my other reading. I did manage to read a couple of non-fiction books this month, though.

  • The Informed Gardener, by Linda Chalker-Scott
    Disappointingly, this is mainly about landscape gardening. But it does do some pretty significant debunking.
  • Democracy in Chains, by Nancy MacLean
    My eldest son Michael lent me this book. It answers a question he and I have often pondered, "Why do people vote against their own interests?" The answer is clearly that a great deal of money has been spent to convince us that our best interests lie with the very rich and their right to accumulate more wealth, regardless of the effect on us.
  • The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, by Kristin Miller, billmoyers.com
    A Q&A with author Nancy MacLean about the elusive James McGill Buchanan. MacLean's book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, tells the story of one James McGill Buchanan, a Southern political scientist and father of “public choice economics".
    If you don't read the book, at least read this interview.
Posted by at 5 comments:

Wednesday, 25 July 2018

Preparing for Collapse, A Few Rants

Beans and Squash in My Front Yard Garden

For a while now I been promising that when I got some other things out of the way, I'd actually talk about preparing for collapse. And that is just what I'm going to be doing in this and the next few posts.

Unfortunately, my crystal ball isn't any better than anybody else's, probably worse than some. What I'll be recommending will reflect my own biases and weaknesses. But even so, I think I do have some insights that will be of value to many people.

Among these insights are a few things that I feel the need to rant about. Let's get that out of the way first.

Rant 1: A Fast and Hard Collapse, NOT

I should admit that by using the phrase "preparing for collapse" I am really being somewhat misleading. As I see it, collapse is not a single event that will occur at some point in the future, but a process that has already been going on for several decades, since the oil shocks of the 70s. Progress has been coasting slowly to a stop while collapse gains momentum. This will continue.

I certainly don't buy into the whole idea of a hard, fast, apocalyptic collapse. That is a fantasy that allows us to imagine getting rid of many of the less pleasant aspects of modern life all at once. Get it over with and start fresh, so to speak. In particular, I think many people see the complete and final collapse of the financial system as freeing them from oppressive debts and jobs they hate. A pretty drastic way to solve those problems....

And of course many of us have been influenced by apocalyptic fiction. A sudden and cataclysmic event certainly sets the stage for a dramatic story. But let's try to keep reality and fiction clearly separated in our thinking.

At any rate, what I want to talk about is how to survive the slow and unsteady collapse that I believe we are experiencing, so that is what I'm going to do. There is much less to be said about surviving hard, fast, widespread collapse because it is much harder to do and there are fewer strategies that are likely to succeed. Still, much of what I have to say would apply to some extent, should I turn out to be wrong and things all fall apart all at once.

As I have said before this that collapse has been and will continue to be uneven geographical, unsteady chronologically, and unequal socially. Certainly there will occasionally be sudden downward bumps, but in some locations more than others and effecting various social strata differently. And then there will be a partial recovery and things will carry on for a while, somewhat worse than they were before.

This will continue on for quite a few more decades before we finally reach the bottom and the dust begins to settle. At that point, in a few lucky locations, there will still be people arguing that nothing much has really changed. For most of us, though, it will be clear that a great deal has changed and not for the better. Already the world is significantly different than it was when I was young and the strategies that served well in those days are not something I would recommend now.

Perhaps most importantly, we'll need to recognize that collapse is happening and act appropriately rather than carrying on doing the same old thing, trying to fine tune a system that is fundamentally broken and wondering why things don't improve.

Rant 2: Lifeboats and Eco-Villages, NOT

For quite a while yet it will not be feasible for most of us to completely sever our ties with BAU (Business as Usual). We'll find ourselves going in two directions at once, trying to prepare for collapse while still being dependent for many of the necessities of life on the very system that is collapsing. Of course, part of our preparation will consist of reducing key dependencies. But it is challenging to reduce those dependencies when BAU can supply our needs for less than they can be produced locally. This makes it hard to earn much of a living as a local, sustainable producer—the prices you have to charge mean that only those who are well off can afford to indulge themselves with your products.

Many have suggested setting up a lifeboat community or an eco-village in a remote location and waving BAU goodbye. Some days it is tempting, but there's a long list of problems with that approach. It's hard to find a group of people who are both interested, willing to sever their ties with BAU and competent. It costs a lot of money to set up such a project. There are getting to be fewer and fewer remote areas that BAU has not claimed and/or spoiled, and where the locals would welcome you. Those that are left are less than ideal (to cold, too hot, too dry, too wet, poor soil, etc.). In any area where farming is feasible, there are likely to be property taxes and building codes. So you can't completely withdraw from the money based economy if you are going to pay your taxes, and it may be difficult to build the way you'd like to without running afoul of the building code.

Better to reconcile ourselves to having a foot in both worlds for now, and whole heartedly become a part of the communities in which we find ourselves living. We can quietly prepare for the day when BAU is more obviously faltering and local production can compete successfully. Of course some communities are more suitable for this than others.

Rant 3: Renewable Energy and Eco-Modernism, NOT

There are some people who recognize problems like peak oil and climate change but think they can be solved by switching over to high tech, low-carbon renewables (mainly wind and solar) and re-organizing things to be more efficient, allowing us to go right on with a green washed version of BAU, and keep the economy growing. These folks don't understand the economic problems with the low EROEI of renewable energy sources, or the degree to which those energy sources are dependent on fossil fuels for their manufacture, installation, operation and maintenance.

Eco-modernism is a particularly egregious example of a plan to fix our problems using technology. It relies on the idea of absolute decoupling. That is, being able to reduce our impact on the resource base and environment while still improving our standard of living and allowing the economy and our population to grow. So far, our best efforts have only achieved a small amount of relative decoupling. That is, at best, increases in population and standard of living have led to slightly less than proportional increases in impact, but nothing approaching decreases in impact that are needed.

Looking realistically at what technology can do, I find it hard to see how it could be otherwise and expect that collapse will force us to reduce both our population and level of consumption. At such lower levels of consumption, energy use and technology, renewable energy sources such as biomass, wind, moving water and passive solar will no doubt supply essentially all of the energy we use. But nowhere near enough to support the sort of high tech industrial civilization we have today.

Rant 4: Violence, NOT

Violence is another area where ideas based on apocalyptic fiction are likely to lead you astray. Conflict is necessary to make a story move along, and a long tradition of collapse porn saturated with interpersonal and inter-group violence has lead many people to see that as the only way things can unfold. Food becomes short, the "have-nots" go after the "haves" and mayhem ensures. This may make good reading, but it's not so much fun in reality, and certainly not something I'm interested in.

So, I am not a survivalist, and you won't find me talking much here about security and defense. There are lots of other sources of that sort of information, if it interests you. I'm more interested in not being where the fighting is likely to break out and setting things up in the community where I am so that co-operation is a more likely outcome than serious conflict. Like giving people better alternatives than violence, meeting them with food rather than guns. The trick is being able to do so.

Rant 5: Back to the Good Old Days, NOT

A number of well known voices in the "collapse sphere" have claimed that recent advances in social justice such as feminism and equal rights for LGBTQ people are likely to be rolled back during collapse. The argument is that these freedoms are possible only in a society with lots of surplus resources. These guys are men who are obviously uncomfortable with what they see as disadvantageous changes to the power structure of our society. They have a socially conservative fantasy of collapse putting them back in charge. But really, that is not the way it works.

First of all, while we will be returning to levels of energy use and material consumption that were common one or two or even more centuries in the past, it isn't really possible to go back to the way things were then. We are starting from a different place, we know a lot of things now that we didn't back then, and formerly oppressed people who have been given a chance at equality aren't going to give it up so easily.

Second, if you look across the world and throughout history, the patriarchy is far from universal and many societies working at very much lower levels of consumption than ours have functioned quite well as matriarchies or anarchies. A patriarchy is neither the most natural way to organize human societies nor the most efficient.

I am an old white guy too—if I can accept social changes, so can you.

Rant 6: Saving the World, NOT

Some have accused me of being out to save the world. It's pretty clear that by the world, they mean "Business As Usual" and in my opinion that world needs not to be saved, but to be shut down as quickly as possible. Sadly, this isn't going to happen voluntarily. Too many powerful people and institutions have a vested interest in keeping things going as they are. Heading straight toward collapse, in other words. A collapse that will see a drastic reduction in human population and consumption of resources per capita. This isn't going to be much fun to live through and many of us won't. The only good thing about it is that it will be the undoing of the very system that caused it. And when it is over it may be possible to continue on in a more modest, less destructive way.

Rant 7: Crunchies and Woo

I've noticed lately that posts on this blog often draw positive comments from people who go on to make it clear that they are "Crunchies" who believe in one sort or another of idea that isn't supported by the evidence, that isn't reality based—what I call "woo". After they've said such nice things to me, I always feel bad having to break it to them that I don't agree. Most of these folks are organic farmers or gardeners, who have bought into the "naturalistic fallacy" and think that everything that's natural must be good for you. In fact the products of organic farming and conventional farming about equal in terms of safety these days. That's good news for the many people who can't afford pricey organic food and don't have a garden to grow their own. The bad news is that both conventional and organic farming are also about equally unsustainable, mainly due to their reliance on energy from fossil fuels. We need to develop a "sustainable farming" that's based on science, not woo.

The tagline for this blog is "A reality based approach to life in the age of scarcity." When I use the terms "evidence based" or "reality based", I mean ideas that are supported by the scientific consensus. Many people today unfortunately believe that the scientific consensus supports BAU, and that's no wonder since BAU does its best to encourage that view. Fortunately, it's not true. The scientific consensus supports some things on the Crunchy side and some things on the BAU side, because those things happen to be true. The scientific method is an excellent tool for filtering out biases, political or otherwise. There really isn't any good reason for ignoring its results.

But to be clear, comments from Crunchies of every sort are welcome here, just be aware of what the project of this blog really is and, that if you are peddling woo, you'll get a gentle but firmly negative response.

Enough ranting for now. Time to talk about what we can do to prepare for the continuing process of collapse. We need to anticipate where current trends are taking us, and harder still, when things as likely to reach a tipping point and changing more drastically.

First off, I'd say that if you are new to this, give it a year or so to sink in before making any big decisions, and don't do anything rash in the meantime. Then you may want to consider some changes in the way you are living. What those changes might be will be the subject of my next few posts.

We'll be considering the following subjects, and probably a few more:

  • where you want to be—where bad things are less likely to happen
  • who you want to be with—people you know, trust and can work with
  • what you are doing—something that can support you, and allow you to develop the skills and accumulate the resources you will need

While waiting for my next post (these things often take a while), here are a few links to articles which may be of help:

On this blog:

Sharon Astyk hasn't been very active as a writer lately, but her earlier writings are a great source of practical advice on "Adapting in Place", which is exactly the sort of preparation I'd advise you to do.


Links to the rest of this series of posts, Preparing for (Responding to) Collapse:

Posted by at 12 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, 17 July 2018

Autobiographical Notes, Part 5: Becoming a Kollapsnik

Kincardine Community Garden

In the process of writing these autobiographical notes (1, 2, 3, 4), I realized how much living through the downsizing and breakup of Ontario Hydro prepared me to accept the ideas of Peak Oil and the Limits to Growth. I had learned a lot about the limitations of both human organizations and technology as solutions for our problems.

Then I watched my kids and their spouses spend their time as members of the "precariat", working underpaid, part time and totally insecure jobs. They never joined the ranks of the homeless, but on several occasions that was only because I was there to help. Many others are not so fortunate. This convinced me that our society is already failing miserably, not even capable of providing the basic needs of many of its members. This despite the fact that others, sheltered from reality by their wealth and privilege, see this as the best of times, with nothing but further progress in sight for the future.

In 2005 I retired from Hydro One at age 51. Typically people in that position start accumulating toys and having fun with them (hopefully—the fun seems to be the hard part). This is often financed by going back to work on contract for Hydro One, OPG or Bruce Power, collecting an excellent wage and a pension as well. But if I had wanted to go on working I would have stayed in the job I already had.

C&I Graphics, my design, printing and sign making company kept me busy about half of the available working hours, which was enough. For the first time in years I managed to get enough sleep. But I also knew about Peak Oil and the likelihood of it leading to some sort of crash/collapse. Such a crash would mean that neither my pension or my business could be relied on to support my family and I. My mind inevitably turned to preparing for what was coming.

You might ask, why not get involved in some sort of activism? Well, it seems to me that the efforts of most activists are focused on bandaid fixes to minor aspects of the problems facing us, and that they are unlikely to have any great amount of success because doing so would rock the "business as usual" (BAU) boat too much. Further, the activist themselves are highly invested in the continuation of BAU, even though it lies at the heart of the problems they claim to want fixed.

The only exception that comes to mind would by activism in the service of identity politics, where there has been some success in addressing racial and LGBTQ issues. Probably because the changes these people are seeking don't much threaten BAU. I congratulate these folks on their successes, but identity politics has little to do with the issues that concern me most.

In any case, it was clear to me that what we faced was a predicament, not a problem. In other words, something that couldn't be solved but to which we would just have to adapt. My main concern was, and is, to determine what those adaptations need to be and get started making them. BAU is doomed and there is no chance that we'll fix what's wrong with it before it is too late. But I do believe that being well prepared will greatly increase one's chances of making it through collapse relatively undamaged.

If you weren't there, I would guess that it is difficult to imagine the degree of panic in the peak oil community in the years leading up to 2008. It really seemed like we were facing a hard, fast crash and it was going to happen soon.

Almost everyone these days is dependent on the global infrastructure network for the very necessities of life. An economic crash, an energy crisis, the many consequences of climate change, either jointly or severally, all promised to damage that network and leave us in a very tough spot. As a former employee of an infrastructure company, the failure of infrastructure seems quite plausible to me. Indeed I was personally involved in the efforts to patch the power grid back together following the widespread outage in north eastern North America in August of 2003. This sort of thing was not some hypothetical possibility to me, but rather a very immediate reality.

And I had always had a keen interest in doing things for myself, making things and understanding how things work, which lead easily enough to a collapse preparation mindset. The only question was how exactly to start preparing. Even in 2006 I didn't think collapse would be sudden and permanent. I've written at length about this, but the upshot is that, initially at least, being prepared for relatively short infrastructure outages would be a big help.

I'm somewhat concerned that the following will be taken as virtue signaling or boasting. It has happened before—I prepare a list of things I've done to prepare for collapse, and somebody sees it as a challenge. Nothing could be further from my intention, which is more to show you how I have put a lot of effort into not actually accomplishing very much.

We built our house in 1982 with energy efficiency in mind. We have R40 in the walls, R60 in the attic, double pane windows (lots of them facing south), well insulated and sealed doors and an air exchanger to maintain air quality.

We have electric heat, with a long range plan to add a wood stove, which we never seem to get around to. The expense of having a chimney built is probably the biggest obstacle, even though the foundation for the chimney was part of the initial build. But hopefully later this year we'll get started on that project.

As it turned out, overheating in the summer was a bigger problem than being cold in the winter. In mid 1980s we put in an attic fan, which was a big help since it almost always cools off in the evening here and we can cool the house by drawing in cooler air from outside.

In 2007 we built a set of awnings to go over the south and west windows on the main floor. This stops the house from heating up during the day in the summer. We take the awnings down in the fall to let the sun in for the winter and put them up again in the spring. A bit of extra work, but worth the trouble. And the awnings have worked well enough that we didn't have to replace our window air conditioning unit when it failed.

Kincardine is often very cloudy in the winter, so solar heating is less effective here than you might think. Our large south facing windows are sometimes more of a liability than a asset in the winter. Over the last few years I built insulating panels to slip into the windows to reduce heat loss. But there are a couple of problems with this.

You have to get a good air seal on the warm side of the panels, or warm moisture laden air gets to the cold side and condenses, which isn't good for the wooden window frames. I haven't found a solution that allows the panels to be taken in and out easily, on a daily basis, but "tuck tape", normally used for sealing joints in vapour barrier, works well for those panels that can be left in all winter.

The other thing is that when the sun does shine on a window with an insulating panel in it, it really heats up the sunny side of the panels, enough to crack the window glass. We've only had this happen once so far. But this past winter I pulled back to just putting the panels in windows that are shaded most of the winter. I'm looking for a seal that would allow the panels to be inserted and removed easily.

At any rate, our house is well enough insulated and sealed that it takes a fairly long power outage before the temperature inside drops much. So far, most power outages hereabouts are less than 8 hours long, during which time the temperature in the house only drops a few degrees.

It was pretty clear to me by 2006 that food would be a major problem during a collapse and I had always had an interest in gardening and cooking. That spring, I set up a garden in raised beds in our front yard. We have continued with this since then, gradually expanding and improving the garden.

But our front yard is not large and limits the amount of food we can grow. In 2010 a community garden started up in Kincardine and I became involved, taking one plot in 2010 and 2 plots ever since then. Since 2015 I have been the co-ordinator for the garden, keeping things running fairly smoothly and interfacing with the municipality, which is actually quite supportive.

Even so, we still don't have a lot of garden space, certainly not enough to be anywhere near self-sufficient, even in the vegetables that grow well around here. For a couple of years, 2012 and 2013, we had some space in the large garden of friends who have a farm north of Kincardine. The gardens worked out well, as did sharing the space, but it was too far from home, too much time spent driving and I was still running C&I Graphics, so time was at a premium.

I have more time now that C&I is gone, but I'm co-ordinating the Community Garden, writing this blog and spending time with our grand kids, so we haven't tried to expand the gardens any further.

The space we have is enough to let us learn what works around here and how to cope with the problems that inevitably come up. That first year we used the techniques in the book Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholemew, but we learned the limits of that method pretty quickly. The plants are quite close together and in raised beds. You have to use really rich soil to support that sort of density, and even with good soil, there is a limit to how close together plants can be and prosper, since they are competing for sunlight. The raised beds are good in that they warm up and dry out earlier in the spring so you can get a head start on the season. But they dry out quicker in the summer and must be watered religiously.

The good news is that we live in the middle of a productive farming area and no one hereabouts need fear starvation in the event of a collapse, provided someone can organize a switchover to production for local consumption and the use of farming techniques that don't require a global scale network of suppliers.

In the short run, I am more concerned about occasional interruptions in deliveries. So we started, as far back as 2006, to stock more food in the house, using the "store what you eat, eat what you store" method. Turns out that it's convenient to mostly have everything we need in the house and it saves money to stock up during sales and to buy in bulk.

Beyond the food storage, we've also worked on being well prepared for emergencies. I've written more about that in a couple of posts in the early days of this blog, here and here.

Carolynn and I have always enjoyed cooking from scratch, having learned a lot from our mothers and grandmothers. I've been baking bread for more than 40 years now. We have a couple of hand cranked flour mills, some grain in stock and more is available locally. During the last few years I've taken up cheese making.

We've made an effort to reduce the waste we produce, composting everything that is compostable, switching to cloth shopping bags, and cloth rags instead of paper towels, using less, repairing what can be fixed, reusing where possible, and recycling.

In addition to the gardening, bread and cheese making, I've been developing a number of useful skills, including wood working and blade sharpening, and weaving willow baskets from willow I've harvested locally.

But no man is an island and it soon became clear to me that all my efforts would be easier as part of a like minded community. So I set out to find a group of people to prepare with and rely on. This turned out to be even harder than I had expected.

I started mentioning what I was finding out about collapse to friends and family. Most rejected the idea as absurd, only a very few even really listened to what I had to say and fewer still ended up agreeing with me.

Around 2010 I started hearing about the Transition Town Movement, got myself a copy of the Transition Handbook and began wondering how to get a Transition Town started here in Kincardine. I am not any sort of extrovert and had no idea of how to get a group of people together.

One day in the spring of 2011 some people from the local anti wind turbine group dropped by my print shop to pick up some posters I had printed for them at the same time as one of the members of the Meaford Transition Town group came to pick up some Farmers Market flyers. We got talking about Transition and decided to try to set up a group in Kincardine. Something that would be more positive than the negative activism the anti wind people were involved in (as they themselves said).

In 2011 and 2012 Transition was a big thing in Southern Ontario, but since then it has petered out and you hardly hear about it at all. I've since talked to a number of people and heard that there is a tendency for the transition groups to be co-opted by activists (various sorts of "antis") and used as platform to further their goals, with transition (preparation for collapse) soon fading into the background.

Anyway, we had several meetings and set up the Penetagore Transition Town in the summer/fall of 2011. I met some new people, some of whom became good friends. But there was a lot of "woo" (beliefs not supported by evidence) that rubbed me the wrong way. Still, I had read that Transition Towns were often made up of a mix of such folks and rationalists, and if you didn't make a big deal of it, it was possible for them to work together effectively. So I hung in there.

It wasn't long, though, before it became clear that many of the people in the group were activists and looking for something to fight against rather than something positive to do, despite what they had originally said. The issue of bringing natural gas to Kincardine came up and they were eager to oppose it. When it became clear that this was the direction the Transition Town really wanted to go, I dropped out of the group and then it pretty much fell apart. Nothing more has been done since then, but I am happy to say that I am back on speaking terms with everyone who was involved. That's an important thing in a town this small and who knows what may develop in the future.

In the fall of 2011 I was diagnosed with prostate cancer and in the winter of 2012, while recovering from the surgery, I started this blog. I was writing to take out some of the frustration I felt.

Since the enlightenment, the scientific method has enabled us to build up a good bit of reliable knowledge about the world we live in, always subject to revision as that same method refines and expands what we know. This "scientific consensus" is really the best understanding we have and you'd be a fool to ignore it, even though it is far from a final and absolute truth. But many ideologies today would have us believe whatever suits them, regardless of what the scientific consensus says. Two of those ideologies are of primary interest here.

On one side we have what I've been calling BAU (Business as Usual), made up people who believe that business can just continue along as usual, that we live in the best of times and that progress will continue and keep making things even better. Unfortunately this implies that humanity and the economy will keep growing. Most people don't see any woo in that, but such exponential growth has inevitable consequences, especially on a finite planet like ours. I talked about this at greater length in a post entitled the Biggest Lie.

Industrial civilization has turned out to be a wonderful device for turning natural resources into pollution, while producing a small amount of comfort and convenience for a few of the more fortunate of its members. Unfortunately there are finite quantities of both natural resources and sinks for pollution on this planet and BAU refuses to recognize this. We are currently running into some of these limits: depletion of fossil fuels, climate change, ocean acidification, shrinking habitat space and so on. Even if we find a way around one limit, we'll soon run into another. This was explained very clearly in The Limits to Growth, a book which I reviewed in great detail in a series of posts back in 2016.

One of the greatest "achievements" of BAU is the way it has convinced almost everyone that it is "scientific"—science and progress are firmly linked together in our minds, even though the scientific consensus clearly points out what's wrong with BAU.

To make the situation even worse, it seems that there is very little chance that BAU will change. The short term interests of a great many powerful people and institutions count on BAU continuing on its present course.

On the other side we have the counter culture, what I call the "Crunchies", who see what's wrong with BAU and would like to fix it. But they are fooled by BAU's claims about science and thus refuse to accept much of the scientific consensus. In the process they end up believing in a lot of things that aren't supported by the evidence—woo, in other words.

Sadly this means that many of the efforts made by Crunchies to change the world for the better are misdirected and a lot of effort is spent fighting things that aren't doing any harm while ignoring things that are.

My position is that of being a Crunchy (opposed to BAU), but without the woo. Indeed if I had it to do again, I'd probably call this blog "Crunchy Without the Woo". Starting in May of 2016 I discussed this idea in a series of post entitled "BAU, Crunchies and Woo".

Surprisingly, I've found there are a few other people in the world who think like this, and a number of them are regular readers of this blog. We don't agree 100% on everything, but then no one does. And that is something we all need to keep in mind while we are searching for people we can work with. We also need to keep in mind that people (including me) aren't all of a piece—we hold a variety of beliefs, some of which reflect reality and some which do not. And of course this is not a black and white thing, but a range of grays. It is quite possible to work together with people who are just reasonably close to being "of the same mind", and to reach decisions by consensus where everyone is just fairly happy with the results. Especially in the life and death situations we will face as collapse progresses, when it will be more important to survive that be proven absolutely right on every issue.

I find myself especially drawn to "working together in groups for mutual support". This idea has immense potential to insulate the members of such groups from the chaos in the world around them and to meet their human needs in ways that BAU does not do well even now and will do even less so as time passes. Indeed I would say that the formation and operation of such groups is at the heart of the response we need to make to the collapse of BAU.

I think many different variations on this theme need to be tried in order to see what works and what doesn't. And we need to be open to adopting what works for other people and discarding that parts of our own approach that aren't working. I am a big fan of "dissensus", which is the opposite of consensus, and consists of agreeing to disagree and wishing the other guy well while he goes his own way. In the coming decades, as energy become less available and the economy contracts and can no longer support the current level of centralization and complexity, we will be forced to decentralize, relocalize and simplify our society. Under these conditions, dissensus will become somewhat easier—we simply won't have the wherewithal to force our ideas on other groups, nor they on us.

Within these groups, we will find ourselves not worrying so much about a rigid ideology, and more about friendship and helping each other when the going gets tough. So the thing to do now is find some friends and practice getting along with them. This is by no means easy, but it is the direction we need to be heading. It is encouraging to find, that even though I am an introvert and quite shy, I have a fairly large network of acquaintances to draw upon—the people I knew while working at Ontario Hydro/Hydro One, the customers and suppliers I got to know while running C&I Graphics, the people at the Community Garden, my wife's large family (including our own kids and grandkids) and her far ranging networks, the group of guys organized by my friend Dave Leigh, who get together with regularly for coffee, and the people his wife Sylvia gets together to play trivia once a month at the Royal Canadian Legion.

Well, I think that just about finishes up my series of autobiographical notes. Next time I'm planning to start a new series of posts, looking in more detail at strategies for living through collapse.


Links to the rest of this series of posts:

Posted by at 20 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, 1 July 2018

What I've Been Reading, June 2018

This note used to say that the links below appear in the order I read them and was meant imply that they were more or less random in their subject matter, other than being of interest to me. Recently I started a few new sections at the bottom of the links on subjects that are of particular interest to me. But I can see that as time passes I am moving to a greater degree of "curation", which the dictionary tells me is about organizing and maintaining a collection. Applied to this collection of links and books I guess this will mean selecting links less randomly and trying to make them relevant in the context of this blog and whatever is going on in the world during the month.

But my originally statement still applies to the first section of links—they are pretty much random and just in the order I read them.

Links

Intelligence

Refugees and Migration

  • Five myths about the refugee crisis, by Daniel Trilling, The Guardian
    "...how likely is it that states which treat migrants with such callousness will behave similarly towards their own citizens?"

Poverty, Homelessness, Minimum Wage

Books

Fiction

Non-Fiction

I'm still wading slowly through The Bell Curve, in order to be able to criticize it with some degree of credibility. Almost half way through at this point. This has also lead to reading some scholarly articles about IQ on the web, further slowing down my other reading. I did read a couple of short non-fiction works this month, though.

  • This is Water, by David Foster Wallace
    "Some thoughts, delivered on a significant occasion, about living a compassionate life."
    As a committed atheist, I don't agree with the author's thoughts on the impossibility of not worshipping. I do agree that many people do worship things other than God, that are a bad or worse than God. But the important part is what the author has to say about the importance of seeing things from the other guy's viewpoint.
  • Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, by David Graeber
    An excellent little book about anarchism.
Posted by at 2 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, 14 June 2018

Autobiographical Notes, Part 4: My Peak Oil Journey

For some time now I been intending to do a post about "My Peak Oil Journey", describing how my understanding of Peak Oil has evolved over the years. I think it will fit nicely at this point in my series of autobiographical notes.

Throughout the history of this blog I've focused on three of the challenges we face: Climate Change, Peak Oil, and Economic Contraction.

I first became aware of climate change in the late 80s and had no trouble accepting its reality. I expected that nuclear fusion or possibly renewable power sources, especially solar, would take over from fossil fuels and solve the problem with ease. But things have not worked out quite so well.

Sometime in 2000 or 2001 I first heard of Peak Oil. Again, my initial reaction was that improved technology would solve the problem. But I was drawn back to the topic repeatedly and by the time I retired from Hydro One, I was convinced that this is not a problem we are going to solve. I retired with a very nice pension, but also a keen awareness that this pension was contingent on the continuing growth of the economy. And even that early on, my reading about Peak Oil made it pretty clear that continued economic growth was far from a sure thing.

My current understanding of the economy took much longer to come together, and is intimately intertwined with my understanding of Peak Oil.

In the early 2000s many people, myself included, had quite a naive understanding of how Peak Oil might play out. I think many of us thought of oil fields as big underground tanks, originally full of oil. In this view we'd be able to keep pumping oil out of the ground until one day it suddenly ran dry. We also thought that the demand for oil was quite inelastic and running out would cause a very serious disaster, quite possibly the collapse of industrial civilization.

There was a lot of speculation about the amount of oil that was actually left, and good reason to suspect that official estimates of oil reserves were artificially inflated. Both the privately owned oil companies and the OPEC countries had (and still have) much to gain from claiming that their reserves are larger than they are in reality. Some of the agencies estimating future oil use numbers based them solely on predicted demand, without considering the realities of the supply side at all.

Gradually, this way of thinking came around to a more realistic picture of porous rock formations saturated with oil and gas and capped with layers of impermeable rock. Drill through the cap rock and the oil (and gas) would start running out. With this more accurate picture came many inconvenient details which gradually, as events played out over the years, became more obvious.

The rate at which oil comes out of the ground is determined by the geology of each particular well, and is at a maximum when the well is new and declines as the well ages until eventually it is no longer profitable to operate the well, the costs of operation being higher than the small remaining production is worth. This happens before all of the oil is removed from the well. There are techniques such as water injection which can be used to increase the rate at which oil comes out of a well, but this may increase the decline rate so that the total production of the well is less in the end.

Discovery of new oil resources must make up for the decline of existing wells and allow for increased use of oil as the economy grows. For the last few decades this has not happened, and it appears to me that the production of "conventional" oil peaked around 2005. This was reflected in the increase in the price of oil from around $12 per barrel in late 90s to just over $140 per barrel in the summer of 2008. The price of oil goes up as demand exceeds supply or even if events make it seem that supply might soon be constrained. It seems that in the months leading up to the summer of 2008, both of those factors were involved in making the price of oil spike upwards.

Looking back on the effect of oil price on the economy, post 2008, it became clear that almost every recession since the 1950s had been preceded by a spike in the price of oil. It turns out that the demand for oil is not nearly so inelastic as some had imagined. When the price goes up we see what is known as "demand destruction"—economic growth slows and people find themselves short of cash, cutting back on discretionary spending and doing whatever they can to use less energy. If the price goes high enough, even conservation begins to look like attractive.

At the same time, the idea that there is no alternative to oil turns out to be a little too simplistic. As the price goes up, oil wells that have been shut down as unprofitable become profitable again. Alternative forms of oil, what is known as "non-conventional oil" (deep offshore oil, Arctic oil, fracked oil, heavy oil and bitumen from tar sands) which had previously been too expensive to bother with, also become economically feasible.

The demand for oil dropped off from 86.3 million barrels per day in 2007 to less than 84.5 in 2009, and the price dropped to just over $40 per barrel. As the economy recovered, non-conventional oil made up for the decline in production of conventional oil and total demand increased to over 99 million barrels per day in 2018. Higher prices 2010 to 2014 (peaking at over $100 per barrel in early 2014) no doubt drove developments in non-conventional oil, while at the same time slowing the recovery of the economy.

In that period (2008 to 2014) the idea of Peak Oil was alive and well. Lots of people were interested, there were numerous websites and books being published, and a variety of groups, (of which the Transition Town movement is probably best known) sprang up in an attempt to bring people together to prepare for what was coming.

And while overall global oil production kept growing, many oil exporting countries reached their production peaks. In a phenomenon described by "The Export Land Model", this happened even quicker than it might have otherwise. As most such countries were experiencing growth in their own economies and improvements in their standards of living, so their domestic consumption of oil was increasing, leaving even less to export than could be accounted for by natural decline, and putting their balance of payments in an ever worsening situation post peak.

In the Middle East climate change brought on increased temperatures and droughts, making agriculture less and less feasible. And this was at a time when money to import food and jobs for bankrupt farmers fleeing to the cities were both in short supply. There is no doubt in my mind that both climate change and peaking of oil exports were factors in the so called "Arab spring". But changing governments does little to improve the situation when there are real, fundamental problems that even the best government would be hard pressed to cope with. In general, everywhere in the world, there is growing disillusionment with new governments, elected to deal with economic and social problems, who turn out to be just as inept as the old ones, and just as much in denial about what's wrong.

It was sometime after 2008 when I put together the missing pieces in my understanding of economics.

The first thing was to realize that it's not really about money.

Money is just a convenient set of tokens—a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. Of course, a whole "meta" level of business, the financial sector, is based on money. But it's vital not to lose sight of the underlying realities.

The second thing was to understand role of growth in the economy.

Modern economies run on credit. Money is created by the banks as debt and those debts must be paid back with interest. The extra money for the interest comes from yet more loans. This works fine as long as the economy is growing and the banks have good confidence that debtors will continue to pay back their loans, with interest. If the economy stops growing, or even if its growth slows down very much, governments, businesses and individuals who have taken out loans find themselves unable to continue making their payments and are forced to default on their loans. Too many defaults and the banks themselves start failing. So it is vital that the economy continue to grow.

The third thing is the role of energy in the economy.

The reason that debtors can pay back loans is that they used the borrowed money to set up enterprises that create more value than the capital and labour that are put into them. This surplus value can be used to pay off loans, with interest, and leave something as well for the owners of the enterprise. Or in the case of large companies, pay dividends to the investors. Conventional economic theory is pretty vague about where this extra value comes from. But when I read up on "biophysical economics" it became clear to me that the extra value comes from the energy inputs to the process, because the energy costs substantially less than the value it enables us to create.

That Wikipedia article I linked to doesn't mention the two sources where I learned about biophysical economics: Energy and the Wealth of Nations by Charles Hall and Kent Klitgaard, and Life After Growth by Tim Morgan. Morgan also has a website with up to date information.

Extra value (wealth) coming from surplus energy was true to a limited extent even in the past when energy came in the form of food and was converted in mechanical form by human or animal muscles. Things improved somewhat when we learned to harness the mechanical energy in moving air (wind) and falling water. But with the invention of engines that could convert the heat of burning fuel into mechanical energy, things really took off. These engines could drive automated factories which could produce goods with a fraction of the human labor previously required. This started with steam engines burning coal to pump water out of coal mines, replacing horse powered pumps. What followed was the industrial revolution.

The economy grew as it never had before, and as long as abundant cheap energy was available, it continued to grow.

Throughout the history of fossil fuel use, we've used the lowest hanging fruit first—the easiest to access and the highest quality fuels among those. With the result that as time passes, the remaining fuels are harder to access and/or of poorer quality. This leads us to concept of Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI), and the related idea of surplus or net energy.

Taking a typical oil well from the early twentieth century, the energy equivalent of 1 barrel of oil would have been used to get 100 barrels of oil out of the well. This gives you an EROEI of 100, and surplus energy of 99 barrels of oil equivalent.

Looking at present day corn based ethanol, to produce 1.3 gallons, it takes the energy equivalent of 1 gallon of ethanol. This gives you an EROEI of 1.3 and surplus energy of .3 gallons of ethanol equivalent.

This can be helpful in choosing the sorts of energy we should be using—early twentieth century oil wells are something we can only dream of today and the corn ethanol business is hardly viable without large subsidies. But there is more to it than that, because surplus energy is what drives the economy and makes economic growth possible. If you look at all the energy sources a country uses and calculate a weighted average EROEI, it can tell you quite a lot about that country's economy.

As that average EROEI declines toward about 15, economic growth grinds to a halt and it becomes difficult to raise capital to start new ventures and to maintain existing infrastructure. Below 15 a modern industrial civilization quits working. Because this is a weighted average, choosing to produce more energy from low EROEI sources makes things worse while temporarily seeming to make them better. It has been estimated that the current average EROEI of the world economy is around 11. Of course some lucky countries are doing much better than that.

But because of our "lowest hanging fruit first" approach, EROEI continues to decline. Real economic growth appears to have stopped in the 1990s, with governments using clever new ways of calculating gross domestic product, and unemployment and cost of living statistics to make things look better in the short run. And low interest rate policies to encourage lots of borrowing and keep the economy growing, again, in the short run.

By early 2014, oil prices had topped $100 per barrel and it looked to many of us like the economy might fall apart again as it had done in 2008.

But then oil prices started to fall, bottoming out below $40 per barrel. Why the slump happened is not well understood, but it had been predicted by a few (notably Nicole Foss of the Automatic Earth) as yet another step on the way to Peak Oil.

There was a glut in oil supply from 2014 to 2017. Several factors contributed to this.

The first, no doubt, was the increase in non-conventional oil production, particularly tight oil in continental US, accessed through the "hydro-fracturing" process, commonly referred to as "fracking". Contrary to popular belief this was not enough supply all of America's demand for crude oil. But it did add about 4 million barrels a day to US oil production.

All the hype about fracking as a new source of crude oil and natural gas caused some people to conclude that Peak Oil was dead, and that any shortage of oil was a very long way in the future. Even President Obama announced that there was enough tight oil to last 100 years. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. In 2017, the United States produced an average of about 14.2 million barrels per day, and consumed about 19.8 million barrels per day, with the difference made up by imports, changes in petroleum inventories, and petroleum refinery processing gain.

No doubt fracking has significantly decreased the amount of oil the US has to import. But this is temporary—the decline rates of fracked wells are much higher than those of conventional wells and most of the sweet spots in the tight oil plays have already been used up. Realistically, America's supply of tight oil will likely run out early in the 2020s.

But even if there was enough tight oil and gas to last 100 years, fracking is a classic case of trying to use a low EROEI energy source (somewhere between 3 and 5, in this case) to keep an economy going. You might expect that this oil would be more expensive than conventional oil, but as we learned in 2008, high energy prices cause recessions, which should lead to over-production and lower prices.

Parts of this happened—oil prices certainly went down. But oil consumption continued to grow, by about 1.7% per year. Strangely, it appears that this extra energy did not result in corresponding growth of the US economy. It is a bit of a puzzle where the energy went, until you realize that fracking is a very energy intensive process (the "energy invested" part of EROEI). Fracking itself is the "gas guzzler" that was causing the growth in US oil consumption. This is what I call "energy sprawl", where the extensive infrastructure and energy use required to make low EROEI energy sources work begins to dominate the economy and the landscape.

OPEC was initially unwilling to cut back production to bring the price back up, but in late 2016 an agreement to cut production was signed by many OPEC producers and Russia as well. At the same time, many other non-OPEC producers were experiencing natural decline.

The price of oil bottomed out just under $40/barrel in early 2016, bounced around in the $40s and low $50s, and then in mid 2017 started to increase pretty much steadily, as the glut began to dwindle. Today the price is in the high $70s/barrel and has topped $80 in the past few weeks. The glut is over and the U.S. government has quietly asked Saudi Arabia and some other OPEC producers to increase oil production by about 1 million barrels a day to bring the price down to a more acceptable level.

OPEC economies were hurt badly by several years of low prices and one suspects they will be only too glad to increase production. The question is how long they will be able to do so before the natural decline rates of their oil fields catch up with them.

The major oil companies were hurt by low prices too, and cut back on their investment on discovery in order to save money. This has left us in a very bad situation as far as oil supply goes over the next few years. Trillions of dollars would have to be spent on discovery to catch up with demand. It seems to some of us that there is no sweet spot where oil prices are low enough to keep the economy growing and high enough to make the oil business profitable.

In any case, it seems unlikely that there are actually sufficient oil resources out there even if we could find the money to spend on discovery. Beyond natural supply decline and reduced spending on discovery, we are seeing geopolitics playing a role in Peak Oil as well. Major oil producers like Venezuela are facing sanctions and internal economic chaos. Their oil industry is suffering as a result and production is falling off. If President Trump gets his way, something similar will likely happen with Iran. An overall peak in production will likely occur sometime in the next few years.

How will the economy respond to this? Not well, to be sure, but the specific details will include some surprises that are very hard to anticipate.

That's my "Peak Oil Journey", to date at any rate. No doubt there is more to learn. We're pretty good at explained what just happened, but not so good at predicting what's coming next. It always seems to involve something we just haven't considered yet.

While I was following the story of Peak Oil, my life carried on and I tried to prepare for the challenges that lay ahead. Eventually this lead to me starting this blog and calling myself a "Kollapsnik". More on that next time.


Links to the rest of this series of posts:

Posted by at 11 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, 5 June 2018

What I've Been Reading, May 2018

This note used to say that the links below appear in the order I read them and was meant imply that they were more or less random in their subject matter, other than being of interest to me. Recently I started a few new sections at the bottom of the links on subjects that are of particular interest to me. But I can see that as time passes I am moving to a greater degree of "curation", which the dictionary tell me is about organizing and maintaining a collection. Applied to this collection of links and books I guess this will mean selecting links less randomly and trying to make them relevant in the context of this blog and whatever is going on in the world during the month.

Links

Intelligence

  • The unwelcome revival of "race science", by Gavin Evans, The Guardian
  • Socioeconomic Status Modifies Heritability Of IQ In Young Children, by Eric Turkheimer et al, University of Virginia
    "Results demonstrate that the proportions of IQ variance attributable to genes and environment vary nonlinearly with SES. The models suggest that in impoverished families, 60% of the variance in IQ is accounted for by the shared environment, and the contribution of genes is close to zero; in affluent families, the result is almost exactly the reverse."

Poverty, Homelessness, Minimum Wage

Puerto Rico

Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Vehicles

Books

Fiction

  • Step to the Stars, by Lester del Rey
    I originally read this when I was about 10 years old. Re-read it purely for nostalgic reasons.
  • Nemesis Games, by James S. A. Corey
    Book five of the Expanse series.
  • On a Red Station Drifting, by Aliette de Bodard
  • Into the Fire, by Elizabeth Moon
    Another episode in the "Vatta's Peace" series
  • After the Last Day, by Don Hayward
    The author is a fellow I actually know, who lives in Goderich, the next town south from Kincardine along Lake Huron. What mainly attracted me to the book, though, is that it is a story of life after the collapse of civilization in the area where I grew up. It starts in the town where I went to high school, and then the plot expands to include most of Southern Ontario and a small part of Northern Ontario. Don has done a pretty good job of sketching out the events following a major financial collapse.

Non-Fiction

I'm still wading slowly through The Bell Curve, in order to be able to criticize it with some degree of credibility. This has also lead to reading some scholarly articles about IQ on the web, further slowing down my other reading. So I didn't read any other non-fiction books this month, even those I have a growing pile that I'd like to get to. To make up for this lack, here is a short list of some gems from my bookshelf:

Posted by at 6 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)