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The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 3
The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 3
Energy – Demand Collapse Followed by Supply Collapse
As we have noted many times, energy is the master resource, and has been the primary driver of an expansion dating back to the beginning of the industrial revolution. In fossil fuels humanity discovered the ‘holy grail’ of energy sources – highly concentrated, reasonably easy to obtain, transportable and processable into many useful forms. Without this discovery, it is unlikely that any human empire would have exceeded the scale and technological sophistication of Rome at its height, but with it we incrementally developed the capacity to reach for the stars along an exponential growth curve.
We increased production year after year, developed uses for our energy surplus, and then embedded layer upon successive layer of structural dependency on those uses within our societies. We were living in an era of a most unusual circumstance – energy surplus on an unprecedented scale. We have come to think this is normal as it has been our experience for our whole lives, and we therefore take it for granted, but it is a profoundly anomalous and temporary state of affairs.
We have arguably reached peak production, despite a great deal of propaganda to the contrary. We still rely on the giant oil fields discovered decades ago for the majority of the oil we use today, but these fields are reaching the end of their lives and new discoveries are very small in comparison. We are producing from previous finds on a grand scale, but failing to replace them, not through lack of effort, but from a fundamental lack of availability. Our dependence on oil in particular is tremendous, given that it underpins both the structure and function of industrial society in a myriad different ways.
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The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 1
The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 1
Intro
A great deal of intelligence is invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow, 1976
More and more people (although not nearly enough) are coming to recognise that humanity cannot continue on its current trajectory, as the limits we face become ever more obvious, and their implications starker. There is a growing realisation that the future must be different, and much thought is therefore being applied to devising supposed solutions for that future. These are generally attempts to reconcile our need to make changes with our desire to continue something very much resembling our current industrial-world lifestyle, with a view to making a seamless transition between the now and a comfortably familiar future. The presumption is that it is possible, but this rests on foundational assumptions which vary between the improbable and the outright impossible. It is a presumption grounded in a comprehensive failure to understand the nature and extent of our predicament.
We are facing limits in many ways simultaneously – not surprising since exponential growth curves for so many parameters have gone critical in recent decades, and of course even more so in recent years. Some of these limits lie in human systems, while others are ecological or geophysical. They will all interact with each other, over different timeframes, in extremely complex ways as our state of overshoot resolves itself (to our dissatisfaction, to put it mildly) over many decades, if not centuries. Some of these limits are completely non-negotiable, while others can be at least partially mutable, and it is vital that we know the difference if we are to be able to mitigate our situation at all. Otherwise we are attempting to bargain with the future without understanding our negotiating position.
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The Anglo-American empire is preparing for resource war
The Anglo-American empire is preparing for resource war 
The control of resources remains a core factor in US considerations for sustaining global US hegemony in the face of rising geopolitical influence of its major rivals
Last week, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff released the new National Military Strategy of the United States of America, 2015.
The report’s main theme is that “globalisation” and “demographics” are pushing forward trends that are undermining US military superiority, including its capability to sustain “international order”. It sets out how the US military intends to keep ahead of those trends.
Although imbued with flowery technocratic language, when read closely in the context of recent history, the document is ultimately a blueprint to shore-up a dying empire, and reveals much about the reigning ideology of US military supremacism.
Challenges
“The United States is the world’s strongest nation, enjoying unique advantages in technology, energy, alliances and partnerships, and demographics,” the document observes. “However, these advantages are being challenged.”
The report notes that globalisation is catalysing “economic development” while simultaneously “increasing societal tensions, competition for resources, and political instability”.
Of course, the strategy document does not mention that since 1980, under the age of neoliberal globalisation, even as GDP per head has risen, the “vast majority of countries” have experienced a “sharp increase in income inequality,” as documented by a flagship 2014 report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
In the wake of the new era of slow growth and brutal austerity ushered in after the 2008 global banking collapse, the risk of the dire economic climate sparking civil and political unrest is increasing. But what the document also misses is that growing risk is itself a symptom of the uneven “economic development” that constitutes GDP “growth”.
– See more at: http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/anglo-american-empire-preparing-resource-war-1170119289#sthash.zPz1ELd2.dpuf
Sustainability Metrics, Growth Limits, and Philanthropy
Sustainability Metrics, Growth Limits, and Philanthropy
As the metrics of sustainability become ever more robust and sophisticated, it is ever more apparent to many of us who study those metrics that industrial civilization, as currently configured, is unsustainable.
Ecological footprint analysis tells us that we are presently using 1.5 Earths’ worth of resources annually. We are able to do this only by drawing down renewable resources at a rate that exceeds their ability to regenerate; in other words, by stealing from the future.
Planetary Boundaries analysts have identified nine crucial parameters that define a safe operating space for humanity within the global ecosystem. We are currently operating outside that safety zone with regard to four of the boundaries. Exceeding just one boundary far enough, long enough, imperils both human society and the ecosystem on which it necessarily depends.
The most widely discussed of those boundaries is the planetary carbon budget. As we all know only too well, the CO2 content of the atmosphere now exceeds 400 parts per million—up from the pre-industrial level of 280ppm—and we appear to be well on our way to 450, 550, or even 650ppm, while climate scientists have determined that 350 ppm is the safe limit.
Those numbers, plus extinction rates, rates of ocean acidification, rates of topsoil erosion, and rates of deforestation, are the metrics of sustainability that tend to be most frequently discussed by environmentalists, and the alarming numbers being reported for these indices are certainly sufficient to support my opening assertion that current industrial society is unsustainable. However there are two other important metrics that have fallen out of fashion, largely because many people assume they measure society’s health rather than its vulnerability. One is human population growth. We all love humanity, but how much of it can the Earth support? World population stands at about 7.3 billion, and is on course to reach between 9 and 11 billion later this century. Yet a growing human population makes all those previously mentioned ecological perils—including climate change, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and soil degradation—harder to address.
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Is the next threat too many ‘them’ in a resource-scarce future?
Is the next threat too many ‘them’ in a resource-scarce future?
Defence planners are haunted by visions of angry, marginalised black people endangering corporate power when climate change topples their governments
Last week, Israel hosted the 15th Annual Herzliya Conference, run by the Institute for Policy and Strategy (IPS), a hawkish think tank specialising in national security.
The conference brought together senior political, corporate, industry and military-intelligence officials from across Western Europe and, of course, within Israel, to discuss the biggest threats to Western and Israeli interests related to Middle East turmoil.
American delegates and speakers included US Secretary of State John Kerry; Tony Blinken, US Deputy Secretary of State; Amos Hochstein, US State Department Special Envoy for International Energy Affairs; Stephen Krasner, former US State Department director of policy planning under Bush; Robert Hutchins, former director of the US National Intelligence Council.
Also present were senior European and other leaders, including Nicolas Sarkozy, former president of France; Bilahari Kausikan, ambassador-at-large and former permanent secretary at Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Daniel Kurtzer, former US ambassador to Israel and Egypt; Lubomir Zaoralek, Foreign Minister of the Czech Republic; Jose Maria Asnar, former prime minister of Spain and a News Corporation board director.
Then there were miscellaneous players from a range of industries: Francois Henrot, vice chairman, Rothschild Bank; Rick Kaplan, head of IBM in Israel; Yossi Matias, vice president of engineering at Google; John Hofmeister, former president of Shell; Peter Clark, former deputy assistant commissioner, and head of the anti-terrorist branch and national coordinator of terrorist investigations for the London Metropolitan Police Service, and many more.
Senior current and former Israeli government, military and intelligence officials also participated.
– See more at: http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/next-threat-too-many-them-resource-scarce-future-1828774537#sthash.7XKYD5tV.dpuf
Why EIA, IEA, and BP Oil Forecasts are Too High
Why EIA, IEA, and BP Oil Forecasts are Too High
When forecasting how much oil will be available in future years, a standard approach seems to be the following:
- Figure out how much GDP growth the researcher hopes to have in the future.
- “Work backward” to see how much oil is needed, based on how much oil was used for a given level of GDP in the past. Adjust this amount for hoped-for efficiency gains and transfers to other fuel uses.
- Verify that there is actually enough oil available to support this level of growth in oil consumption.
In fact, this seems to be the approach used by most forecasting agencies, including EIA, IEA and BP. It seems to me that this approach has a fundamental flaw. It doesn’t consider the possibility of continued low oil prices and the impact that these low oil prices are likely to have on future oil production. Hoped-for future GDP growth may not be possible if oil prices, as well as other commodity prices, remain low.
Future Oil Resources Seem to Be More Than Adequate
It is easy to get the idea that we have a great deal of oil resources in the ground. For example, if we start with BP Statistical Review of World Energy, we see that reported oil reserves at the end of 2013 were 1,687.9 billion barrels. This corresponds to 53.3 years of oil production at 2013 production levels.
If we look at the United States Geological Services 2012 report for one big grouping–undiscovered conventional oil resources for the world excluding the United States, we get a “mean” estimate of 565 billion barrels. This corresponds to another 17.8 years of production at the 2013 level of oil production.
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“Mad Max: Fury Road” Is a Resource-Conscious Blockbuster for Our Time
“Mad Max: Fury Road” Is a Resource-Conscious Blockbuster for Our Time
When the first Mad Max was released back in 1979, the era’s reigning existential threats were nuclear winter and, to a lesser extent, peak oil. Set in a not-too-distant dystopian future and against the harsh backdrop of rural Australia, viewers’ ability to map their own fears onto the screen was crucial to that film’s success.
The film doesn’t just rebuke the greedy.
Although the fears have changed, you could say the same thing about Mad Max: Fury Road, the series’ long-awaited fourth installment. Released this month in the midst of California’s historic drought and increasingly bleak studies about the likelihood of catastrophic climate change, the film plays more on viewers’ anxieties about a carbon bomb than a nuclear one.
Director George Miller’s pitched focus on resources reflects today’s embattled context to a tee. Mad Max is not only a rollicking, white-knuckle action flick on spiked 6-foot wheels. It also carries an important and all-too-timely message, shouted defiantly by no less than an aged, graffiti-scrawling woman wielding a shotgun: “You cannot own a human being!” nor the planet on which they live.
Miller’s eponymous antihero, Max Rockantansky (Tom Hardy), inhabits a parched dystopia created by dual resource crises. Invoking political strategist James Carville, the movie’s opening-by-way-of-background announces, “It’s the oil, stupid,” briefing viewers on the water wars, oil shortage, and subsequent state suppression that jolted humanity into chaos. As the world’s supplies of fossil fuels and water dwindle, its citizens are reduced to a single instinct: survival.
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In Denial: We Pursue Endless Growth At Our Peril
James Steidl/Shutterstock
In Denial: We Pursue Endless Growth At Our Peril
As we’ve been discussing of late here at PeakProsperity.com, humans desperately need a new story to live by. The old one is increasingly dysfunctional and rather obviously headed for either a quite dismal or possibly disastrous future. One of the chief impediments to recognizing the dysfunction of the old story and adopting a new one is the most powerful of all human emotional states: Denial.
I used to think that Desire was the most powerful human emotion because people are prone to risking everything in their lives – careers, marriages, relationships with their family and close friends – pursuing lust or accumulating 10,000 times more money and possessions than they need in their desire for “more.”
Perhaps it was my own blind spot(s) that prevented me from really appreciating just how powerful human denial really is. But here we are, 40 years after the Club of Rome and 7 years after the Great Financial Accident of 2008, collectively pretending that neither was a sign warning of the dangers we face — as a global society — if we continue our unsustainable policies and practices that assume perpetual growth.
Economic Denial
In the realm of economics, the level of collective denial gripping the earth’s power centers is extraordinary. Perhaps that should be of little surprise, as we’re now at the height of the largest set of nested financial bubbles ever blown in world history.
The bigger the bubble(s) the bigger the levels of denial required to sustain their expansion. These bubbles are doozies, and that explains the massive and ongoing efforts to prevent any sort of reality from creeping into the national and global dialog.
To understand this pattern of avoidance of unpleasant realities, consider the behavior of cities — even entire nations — which cannot bring themselves to talk openly about their state of insolvency, let alone do something about it.
Letter to a Plutocrat: Your Pipeline Made Me a Criminal
Letter to a Plutocrat: Your Pipeline Made Me a Criminal
Dear Sir/Madam:
I’m writing to you who control our government now — that is, the big corporations of the world. Let’s not pretend it is otherwise. Thanks to a system in which money buys elections, nearly all of our politicians are in your employ.
Thanks for wrecking everything.
If I were a Millennial, this might not surprise me or even be worthy of mention. They have grown up in the system as it exists now, and many of them are too cynical to fight. But I’m from Generation X, and we still thought we had a chance to make our own destinies. In recent years that’s become increasingly difficult.
The future my kids face will include a deteriorating national infrastructure, underfunded public schools full of stressed students and the traumatized poor, and a world of permanent wars started by my own country, mainly against people much worse off than ourselves. And worst of all, their future is jeopardized by your refusal to see that the Earth cannot take anymore plundering of resources.I’m going to be frank. I’m a member of the intellectual elite. I’m not working class and I’m not poor, but those distinctions aren’t what they used to be. My father worked his way out of Depression-era Oklahoma to become a professor at Harvard. I was given the best education money could buy, because that’s what my parents valued. I never got a D or F in my life, and when I got a few Cs (trigonometry nearly killed me), I heard about it from my mother and father–they thought they knew what it took to get ahead in the world. I have degrees from Smith College and Harvard University.
– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2015/05/letter-to-a-plutocrat-your-pipeline-made-me-a-criminal/#sthash.ydUlGRuZ.dpuf
William Catton’s warning
William Catton’s warning
William Catton Jr., author of the seminal volume about our human destiny, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, died last month at age 88.
Catton believed that industrial civilization had sown the seeds of its own demise and that humanity’s seeming dominance of the biosphere is only a prelude to decline. His work foreshadowed later works such as Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, Richard Heinberg’s The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, and Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.
In Overshoot Catton wrote: “We must learn to relate personally to what may be called ‘the ecological facts of life.’ We must see that those facts are affecting our lives far more importantly and permanently than the events that make the headlines.”
He published those words in 1980, and now, it seems, at least some of those facts have made their way into the headlines in the form of climate change, soil erosion, fisheries collapse, species extinction, constrained supplies of energy and other critical resources, and myriad other problems that are now all too obvious.
But, even today, few people see the world as Catton did. Few realize how serious these problems are and how their consequences are unfolding right before us. Few understand what he called “the tragic story of human success,” tragic because that success as it is currently defined cannot be maintained and must necessarily unwind into decline owing to the laws of physics and the realities of biology. We can adjust to these realities or they will adjust us to them.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Peculiarities of Russian National Character
Peculiarities of Russian National Character
Whereas prior to these events the Russians were rather content to consider themselves “just another European country,” they have now remembered that they are a distinct civilization, with different civilizational roots (Byzantium rather than Rome)—one that has been subject to concerted western efforts to destroy it once or twice a century, be it by Sweden, Poland, France, Germany, or some combination of the above. This has conditioned the Russian character in a specific set of ways which, if not adequately understood, is likely to lead to disaster for Europe and the world.
Lest you think that Byzantium is some minor cultural influence on Russia, it is, in fact, rather key. Byzantine cultural influences, which came along with Orthodox Christianity, first through Crimea (the birthplace of Christianity in Russia), then through the Russian capital Kiev (the same Kiev that is now the capital of Ukraine), allowed Russia to leapfrog across a millennium or so of cultural development. Such influences include the opaque and ponderously bureaucratic nature of Russian governance, which the westerners, who love transparency (if only in others) find so unnerving, along with many other things. Russians sometimes like to call Moscow the Third Rome—third after Rome itself and Constantinople—and this is not an entirely empty claim. But this is not to say that Russian civilization is derivative; yes, it has managed to absorb the entire classical heritage, viewed through a distinctly eastern lens, but its vast northern environment has transformed that heritage into something radically different.
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Few jobs despite booming Mozambique economy – Features – Al Jazeera English
Few jobs despite booming Mozambique economy – Features – Al Jazeera English.
Maputo, Mozambique – Beto Magumane Cossa was orphaned at 14 when his father was killed by a woman with whom he was having an affair.
Alone and with no other family living in Magude, a rural district 155km from the capital Maputo’s shopping malls and luxury hotels, Beto lived off the money his brother sent home from working as a miner in South Africa.
Life was difficult but manageable – the money his brother sent home was enough to keep Beto clothed and fed. If things got tight, the neighbours helped Beto out by giving him food. But a few years after their father’s death, Beto’s brother returned home sick with HIV/AIDS and couldn’t work. Beto tried to find a job to support them both, but no one would take him on.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Questions We Should Have Asked about Technology
Questions We Should Have Asked about Technology.
Why China’s slowdown is taking a heavy toll on Canada | Jeff Rubin
Why China’s slowdown is taking a heavy toll on Canada | Jeff Rubin.
If beaten up Canadian investors are looking to assign blame for the bruising suffered by their portfolios of late, they could do worse than point an accusatory finger at China. The resource super-cycle that drove valuations so much higher over the last decade is now hobbling along at a snail’s pace and China is a big part of the reason why.
A slowdown in China’s economic growth is exacting a heavy toll on resource-based economies like Canada’s. Domestic coal mines are being shuttered due to tumbling coal prices. In Ontario, hopes to mine chromite deposits in the so-called Ring of Fire are fading as steel markets continue to weaken. At the same time, British Columbia’s plans to ship liquefied natural gas to Asian markets are being scuttled as LNG prices come off their highs. Similarly, lower oil prices are prompting Big Oil to shelve plans for multi-billion dollar oil sands projects in northern Alberta.
Seeing a simultaneous pullback in spending on big resource projects isn’t a coincidence. Look around the world at what’s happening in the resource space and it’s easy to see that new sources of supply aren’t helping prices. Consider the oil market, for one, where prices are now treading at four-year lows. Part of the reason for the decline is all of that new oil flowing from fracked shale formations in places like North Dakota, Texas, and southeast Saskatchewan. It’s often said that the best cure for high prices is high prices and that’s exactly what’s happened to oil after the big run up to $147 a barrel. Indeed, an extended super-cycle made new sources of supply economically viable in nearly any resource market you care to name.
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