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Most people know the tale of the blind men and the elephant. Each describes a part of the elephant. The elephant is said to be like a pillar by the blind man touching the elephant’s leg. The one touching the elephant’s tail says the elephant is like a rope and so on.

Now, let’s substitute so-called futurists for blind men in this tale and you get something even less reliable. Futurists are the soothsayers of our age. Of course, futurists have eyes to see at least. But they, like the blind men, almost never see the whole picture.

And, in this case they are giving us a description of something that is not even there for them to examine. The future doesn’t exist. It’s a mere concept. Unlike the blind men, futurists aren’t really describing part of a whole.

Typically, they imagine the future as a more magical version of the past where all kinds of new powers are made available to the individual: the ability to transmit emotions and memories through a worldwide “brain-net,” 3D-printed human organs based on our own DNA that replace damaged or diseased ones, re-creations of loved ones who have passed away with which we can interact as we did when they were alive.

Naturally, some futurists put the first humans on Mars in the 2030s. NASA apparently has a contest for 3D-printed designs of habitats suitable for humans on Mars. The idea that colonizing Mars will enhance the chances that humans will survive well into the future is already part of the culture. (Wait a minute! You mean really bad stuff could happen on Earth in our benign technology-laden future. But I digress.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Eternity, nature, society and the absurd fantasies of the rich

August 5, 2018

Eternity, nature, society and the absurd fantasies of the rich

Professor and author Douglas Rushkoff recently wrote about a group of wealthy individuals who paid him to answer questions about how to manage their lives after what they believe will be the collapse of society. He only knew at the time he was engaged that the group wanted to talk about the future of technology.

Rushkoff afterwards explained that the group assumed they would need armed guards after this collapse to defend themselves. But they rightly wondered in a collapsed society how they could even control such guards. What would they pay those guards with when the normal forms of payment ceased to mean anything? Would the guards organize against them?

Rushkoff provides a compelling analysis of a group of frightened wealthy men trying to escape the troubles of this world while alive and wishing to leave a decaying body behind when the time comes and transfer their consciousness digitally into a computer. (I’ve written about consciousness and computers previously.)

Here I want to focus on what I see as the failure of these people to understand the single most salient fact about their situations: Their wealth and their identities are social constructs that depend on thousands if not millions of people who are employees; customers; employees of vendors; government workers who maintain and run the law courts, the police force, the public physical infrastructure, legislative bodies, the administrative agencies and the educational institutions—and who thereby maintain public order, public health and public support for our current systems.

Those wealthy men aren’t taking all this with them when they die. And, while they are alive, their identities will shift radically if the intellectual, social, economic and governmental infrastructure degrades to the point where their safety is no longer guaranteed by at least minimal well-being among others in society.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Saudi retreat on oil IPO highlights dearth of reliable information on world oil reserves

July 30, 2018

Saudi retreat on oil IPO highlights dearth of reliable information on world oil reserves

Since late 2016 the financial media has been abuzz about what would likely be the biggest initial public offering (IPO) ever: The sale of 5 percent of the world’s largest oil company, Saudi Aramco, which is wholly owned by the government of Saudi Arabia. The IPO with its required disclosures would shed light on the inner workings of the company for the first time since it was nationalized in 1980 and lead to independent verification of its oil reserves and other assets.

It would be a large first step in unmasking the murky world of national oil companies (NOCs), the reserves of which are thought to represent 90 percent of the world’s total reserves of oil and natural gas according to one estimate.

With estimates that Saudi Aramco is worth $2 trillion, the sale of 5 percent to public shareholders potentially represents $100 billion, a valuation that would make such an IPO an all-time record and result in roughly $1 billion in fees for the lucky bankers handling the deal.

All that anticipation, however, has now come crashing down as the Saudi government seeks the funds it might have gotten from an IPO through other avenues. So, what happened?

First, oil prices rose significantly. When the Saudi government officially confirmed that it was seeking an IPO for Aramco in October 2016, Brent crude, the world benchmark, averaged just under $50 per barrel that month. While the IPO was being considered earlier that year, oil had dropped below $30. Last week it closed just below $75.

The government was thought to be desperate to reduce its rising deficits—due in large part to a precipitous drop in oil prices—by selling a part of the company. That seems an unlikely reason for the sale since the Saudis have ample money in a sovereign wealth fund and substantial credit with major banks.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

10 years after the oil price spike: Is peak oil a process rather than a moment?

July 8, 2018

10 years after the oil price spike: Is peak oil a process rather than a moment?

Ten years ago this week—July 11, 2008 to be exact—the price of a barrel of oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange hit an intraday high of $147.27, its highest price ever. By the following autumn the world economy was in shambles and the price of oil was tumbling. The oil price eventually bottomed out around $34 per barrel in mid-February the following year.

Oil prices started 2002 around $20 per barrel and then rose almost continuously until mid-2008. As they rose, the world’s best known critic of peak oil* prognostications, Daniel Yergin, began to look so foolish for having predicted ample supplies for decades to come that his firm finally reversed itself in mid-2008 and began to forecast higher prices. That should have been read as a contrarian signal; just two months later the oil bull market ended.

Peak oil thinkers at the time believed that their forecast of a nearby all-time peak in the rate of world oil production had been fulfilled. The official numbers seemed to confirm this. Petroleum geologist Kenneth Deffeyes’ had made a half-serious prediction that Thanksgiving Day 2005 would mark the all-time high for production. Production of crude oil including lease condensate (which is the definition of oil) was slightly more than 74 million barrels per day (mbpd) in December 2005, but thereafter declined.

Despite high and rising prices oil production failed to exceed that number for two years. In December 2007 production inched above the previous high mark and stayed there through July 2008, the month the oil price peaked. That month the world produced slightly more than 75 mbpd.

In August production fell by more than one million barrels and did not surmount 75 mbpd until two years later.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

OPEC production increase shows it’s still fighting U.S. shale oil

June 25, 2018

OPEC production increase shows it’s still fighting U.S. shale oil

It felt like opposite day as traders bid up the price of oil last week even as OPEC announced an increase in oil production that should have sent prices downward. The cartel decided it had room to move because of outages in Venezuela, Libya and Angola amounting to 2.8 million barrels per day (mbpd). The increase apparently wasn’t as much as traders had expected.

Even though oil prices have drifted upward from the punishing levels of three years ago, OPEC is still interested in undermining the shale oil industry (properly called “tight oil”) in the United States which it perceives as a threat to OPEC’s ability to control prices. So, it is no surprise that OPEC has chosen to increase output in the wake of lost production elsewhere. OPEC does not want prices to reach levels that would actually make the tight oil industry’s cash flow positive.

You read that correctly. The industry as a whole has been free cash flow negative even when oil was over $100 per barrel. Free cash flow equals cash flow from operations minus capital expenditures required for operations. This means that tight oil drillers are not generating enough cash from selling the oil they’re currently producing to pay for exploration and development of new reserves. The only thing allowing continued exploitation of U.S. tight oil deposits has been a continuous influx of investment capital seeking relatively high returns in an era of zero interest rate policies. Tight oil drillers aren’t building value; they are merely consuming capital as they lure investors with unrealistic claims about potential reserves. (Some analysts have likened the situation to a Ponzi scheme.)

To demonstrate how unrealistic the industry’s claims are, David Hughes, in his latest Shale Reality Check, explains that expectations for recovery NOT of proven reserves, but of UNPROVEN resources are exceedingly overblown.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Leaked U.N. climate change report shows inverted thinking on growth

June 17, 2018

Leaked U.N. climate change report shows inverted thinking on growth

The Reuters news service managed a genuine journalistic coup by getting an advance copy of a U.N. climate change report not due out until October. Given what the report says—it’s dire—and the fact that the climate isn’t going to stop changing while the report gets reviewed, somebody decided to get the ball rolling.

Reuters has so far chosen not to make the entire draft available. But from its reporting we can see already the contradictory thinking that remains a barrier to facing up to climate change, to wit:

Global warming is on course to exceed the most stringent goal set in the Paris agreement by around 2040, threatening economic growth…

This kind of thinking is so obviously inverted, and yet the inversion is entirely invisible to most people. While it may be true that global warming threatens economic growth, it is far more salient to say that economic growth threatens us with global warming.

There is a partial but perhaps unconscious recognition of this fact in the following from the Reuters story:

The report outlines one new scenario to stay below 1.5°C, for instance, in which technological innovations and changes in lifestyles could mean sharply lower energy demand by 2050 even with rising economic growth.

Generally speaking, changes in lifestyle on a scale necessary to bring about “sharply lower energy demand” would mean an end to economic growth. What is supposed to keep growth going in this scenario is, of course, technological innovation. While it is true that innovation can make energy production less carbon intensive, what it can’t do is prevent people from using more energy, especially if supply continues to grow and the price remains affordable. Energy efficiency generally makes energy cheaper even as the person being efficient saves money.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Plato’s dream and our modern nightmare

June 11, 2018

Plato’s dream and our modern nightmare

In a recent conversation a friend of mine described our modern understanding of the world around us as a conspiracy theory of the grandest proportions.

We posit theories which tell us that the phenomena we witness are merely ephemera resulting from an underlying structure of whirring particles—not even atoms anymore, but subatomic particles in such categories as bosons, leptons and quarks. This conspiracy gives us the theater that is our everyday experience, experience that cannot be explained in its own terms, but must be understood to be the result of forces hidden from our eyes and ultimately from all our other senses. The surface of things cannot be trusted.

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato gave us the first version of such a world in his theory of forms. Everything in our everyday existence is a pale imitation of ideal forms in the real world, he said. The perfect tiger exists in a different dreamlike realm where it offers a template for an actual tiger. The perfect chair in this other realm acts in a similar way. Our world is not the real one, but a mere ghost orchestrated by the real world which we can never know directly.

German philosopher Immanuel Kant appeared to update Plato with his categories of understanding. We humans understand the world using a sort of pre-programmed set of categories. Because of this we can never know a thing-in-itself. We are forever separated from the world we live in, doomed to perceive mere shadows as in Plato’s metaphorical cave.

Today, having arrived at the subatomic level, we build huge particle colliders to break matter into ever smaller bits, trying to get to the nub of existence, but never imagining that the world just might be “turtles all the way down.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The toxic price of convenience

May 28, 2018

The toxic price of convenience

As many as 110 million Americans may be drinking water contaminated by a toxic class of chemicals that according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are used in “stain- and water-repellent fabrics, nonstick products (e.g., Teflon), polishes, waxes, paints, cleaning products, and fire-fighting foams (a major source of groundwater contamination at airports and military bases where firefighting training occurs).”

The chemicals, referred to as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS, were detected by EPA-mandated testing of U.S. water supplies between 2013 and 2015. The full results of that testing have not been made public. An analysis done by the Environmental Working Group using available data uncovered the widespread contamination. The group’s analysis was released last week.

Firefighting foams are a major source of the contamination, primarily from their release during routine training drills at both civilian and military airports. But the desire of consumers for nonstick pans and stain- and water-repellent clothing and carpets brings direct contact with the toxic chemicals.

The desire to make our lives maintenance-free often creates unintended environmental and health consequences. Every decision to transfer a maintenance task to a chemical substance only complicates the goal of creating a healthy environment. One solution is simply to have fewer things that require maintenance, thus reducing the time we spend on maintenance. Another is to accept that we have a duty to maintain the objects which serve us in a way that does not poison others or ourselves.The response to problem substances is typically to find another chemical to do the same job. We did that after phasing out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), liquids previously used in refrigerators and air conditioners to transfer heat away from refrigerator and building interiors. CFCs were leaking into the atmosphere and destroying the ozone layer which protects living organisms from the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

America’s ‘Cadillac Desert’: Is there a substitute for fresh water?

May 14, 2018

America’s ‘Cadillac Desert’: Is there a substitute for fresh water?

Thirty years after Marc Reisner penned Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water his prophesy is being fulfilled. As the chalky rings which mark previous higher water levels around Colorado River reservoirs grow ever wider, Grist reports that major disputes are now afoot over the remaining water supply.

Modern economists have long told us not to worry about resource scarcity. Higher prices will bring on new supplies whenever resource supplies decline. And, if a resource truly is becoming unobtainable, then we’ll always find a substitute.

When I hear this, I often counter: “There is certainly some truth to what you are saying. But, please tell me what the substitute for potable water will be.” The response is usually to change the subject—for the obvious reason that there is no substitute.

A Scientific American article in 2012 put world freshwater usage at more than 9 trillion cubic meters for per year. Per capita, Americans, not surprisingly, consumed more than twice the world average. Certainly, there is much room for water conservation in America and in the American West.

But what does conservation mean when 70 percent of the world’s fresh water is used for agriculture? Of course, it means that conservation is going to affect food production. At first, it might mean simply making irrigation systems more efficient through, say, drip irrigation.

But once conservation has achieved all that it can achieve, what will we do? It is important to remember that what is normally measured when it comes to water consumption is “freshwater” consumption. The water optimists will point to the vast brackish aquifers still available to us humans, not to mention the almost limitless supply in the oceans. The fact that the U.S. Geological Survey was asked by Congress to survey brackish water availability in the United States is an indicator of how serious the situation has become.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Information overload, sustainability, and the emerging organization

May 7, 2018

Information overload, sustainability, and the emerging organization

Nafeez Ahmed, an exceptional journalist who writes at the intersection of resources and society, understands the complexity of the ecological predicament we humans face. In a piece he wrote last year, Ahmed asserted that our current arrangements are approaching a convulsive crisis point. One reason for this is as follows:

[T]he system faces a crisis of information overload, and an inability to meaningfully process the information available into actionable knowledge that can advance an adaptive response.

If he’s right, is there anything we can do? The short answer is maybe. The great human ecologist William Catton pointed out in his 2009 book Bottleneck that the mass media has become a conduit for propagating bad or at least inconclusive information. In short, the feedback we humans need in order to run our society in a sustainable way is dangerously lacking.

But what if we could reorganize society to better handle the information available and act on that information quickly, decisively and appropriately? Management consultant and author John Hagel may be able to shed some light on this. (Regular readers will recall that I was channeling Hagel in last week’s piece.)

Part of the reason we as a society have been having difficulty making sense of the vast amount of information we are getting is that most organizations are not very good at doing this.

Yet, technology now more than ever affords us the opportunity for what Hagel calls scalable collaboration and learning involving very large groups of people. Those companies and organizations that are mastering this opportunity can react with lightning speed and precision—all the while keeping an eye on the moving target that is our rapidly changing world.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is the CEO obsolete? A look the emerging organization

April 30, 2018

Is the CEO obsolete? A look the emerging organization

Recently, the writer of a guest editorial in The Guardian Weekly proposed a solution to what ails the world’s business schools: Shut them down. The author, Martin Parker, claims there are 13,000 business schools on the planet and he says that’s 13,000 too many. He says the reason he knows a total shutdown is the only remedy that will actually work is that he’s taught in business schools for the last 20 years.

His detailed critique covers a lot of territory, but I found one part of it particularly interesting in light of what I’ve been reading lately. Parker wrote: “If we want those in power to become more responsible, then we must stop teaching students that heroic transformational leaders are the answer to every problem[.]”

At first blush it seems as if we need more such leaders. But I think the point here is the same point which management consultant and author John Hagel is making in his book, The Power of Pull: This kind of thinking leads to passivity rather than the creative engagement which our society so desperately needs.

Hagel explains that what he calls “scalable” collaboration and learning are now the essential ingredients to have broad impact on society.

Legacy organizations (which means nearly all of our organizations) have largely been organized around economies of scale. Organizations can become more efficient in the delivery of goods and services, whether a corporation, a nonprofit or a government, if they scale up their size, break down and routinize all the needed tasks, and ruthlessly drive toward increased efficiency in operations. But, that works only up to a point because each increment of efficiency becomes harder and harder to achieve.

The result is what we see today. Employees working longer hours with increasingly stressful performance targets and less help to achieve them. Their routines and targets come from on high with little or no creative input from the employees.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The global village and the surveillance society

April 23, 2018

The global village and the surveillance society

Media savant Marshall McLuhan coined the term “global village” in 1962 in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy. Today, we take the concept of an electronically connected global population with instant access to practically every plugged-in person on the planet as a fact of life.

We often see our global village as a force for good, creating understanding and binding people across cultures regardless of distance. McLuhan saw the downside as well. In his book he notes:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.

It turns out that the global village has many key similarities to an actual village or small town. Fellow villagers and small town neighbors are much more likely to know about each other’s personal lives (often including many of the intimate details) than those who live in a large city. The anonymity and privacy today which so many prize and enjoy in the big city is quickly being eroded in the new surveillance economy. Living in the global village can now subject us to the same kind of scrutiny which those in small towns and villages have long been accustomed.

I say “economy” because the information collected on humans in the 21st century involves not just “Big Brother,” a term invented by writer George Orwell for an all-seeing authoritarian government, but also commercial enterprises which collect details on our lives—details available from our commercial dealings and publicly recorded acts (land sales and voting, for example) and other details which we voluntarily surrender to such sites as Facebook and LinkedIn.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fake news, algorithmic sentinels, and facts from the future

April 17, 2018

Fake news, algorithmic sentinels, and facts from the future

The suggestion that social media outlets need to police so-called “fake news” rings true on its face. Who wants to read news coverage known to be false? But what rates as “fake news” will be harder to define than we think.

And, putting algorithms in charge of policing those vast information flows claiming to be news will almost certainly not solve the problem. In a piece reflecting on artificial intelligence (AI) on the 50th anniversary of the release of the film, “2001: A Space Odyssey” writer Michael Benson tells us that “[d]emocracy depends on a shared consensual reality.”

Well, actually everything we do in groups, whether it’s democracy or going to a hockey game, depends on shared consensual reality. And, therein lies the problem. We are now in a fight not over opinions concerning the import of agreed upon facts, but over the consensus itself—whether scientific findings can be trusted, whether corporate-owned media can be believed, whether “objective” reporting is even possible, whether the history we were taught is indeed the “true” history of our country and our world.

Which consensus prevails will be crucial to every facet of our society. It is true that consensus views are constantly being challenged by events. To the extent that events can be fit into consensus views, the consensus can survive. In fact, the consensus can be tweaked when necessary. The idea that free trade is always good has been tweaked in the past to admit that it is not good for everyone and that those who lose their jobs need special assistance. The consensus survived and free trade agreements continued to flourish.

Now, the consensus is vanishing. Large parts of society do not believe that the current system serves them well. Wealth is being shifted up the income ladder as middle- and low-income families find their wages stagnant or declining.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Migrant caravan: Foreshadowing the future and reflecting the present

April 9, 2018

Migrant caravan: Foreshadowing the future and reflecting the present

The march of hundreds of Central American migrants through Mexico has inflamed tensions between the Trump administration and the Mexican government and focused attention on the United States’ southern border.

The ostensible reasons for the march are familiar: The migrants were fleeing corruption, social and political turmoil, and lack of opportunity in their home countries. Many were from Honduras which suffered a coup in 2009 that continues to divide the country politically including during the last election in which supporters of the challenger to the incumbent president claim their candidate was cheated out of a win.

All of this reminded me of Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints. In it, impoverished Indians seized hundreds of ships docked in their harbors and set sail to find a better place to live. (The book was published in 1973 when many believed that millions of Indians and other Asians would likely starve in the coming decades due to poor agricultural yields. The full effects of the so-called Green Revolution still lay ahead.)

In the novel, as the seaborne caravan makes its way westward, first to the Suez Canal, where it is repelled, then around the Cape of Good Hope, Europe braces for what it believes is an inevitable invasion of desperate Indians.

A vitriolic debate ensues inside France about whether the country should try to help the Indians or simply repel them.

Raspail, a celebrated author in France, was denounced as a racist when the book was released. His book continues to be a favorite among American white supremacists. And, former Trump advisor, Steven Bannon, is reported to be a fan of Raspail.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The troubling realities of our energy transition

March 19, 2018

The troubling realities of our energy transition

I recently asked a group gathered to hear me speak what percentage of the world’s energy is provided by these six renewable sources: solar, wind, geothermal, wave, tidal, and ocean energy.

Then came the guesses: To my left, 25 percent; straight ahead, 30 percent; on my right, 20 percent and 15 percent; a pessimist sitting to the far right, 7 percent.

The group was astonished when I related the actual figure: 1.5 percent. The figure comes from the Paris-based International Energy Agency, a consortium of 30 countries that monitors energy developments worldwide. The audience that evening had been under the gravely mistaken impression that human society was much further along in its transition to renewable energy. Even the pessimist in the audience was off by more than a factor of four.

I hadn’t included hydroelectricity in my list, I told the group, which would add another 2.5 percent to the renewable energy category. But hydro, I explained, would be growing only very slowly since most of the world’s best dam sites have been taken.

The category “Biofuels and waste,” which makes up 9.7 percent of the world total, includes small slivers of what we Americans call biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel), I said, but mostly represents the deforestation of the planet through the use of wood for daily fuel in many poor countries, hardly a sustainable practice that warrants vast expansion. (This percentage has been roughly the same since 1973 though the absolute consumption has more than doubled as population has climbed sharply.) The burden for renewable energy expansion, I concluded, would therefore remain on the six categories I mentioned at the outset of my presentation.

As if to underline this worrisome state of affairs, the MIT Technology Review just days later published a piece with a rather longish title: “At this rate, it’s going to take nearly 400 years to transform the energy system.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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