I like to keep up on the latest major books written on crude oil in order to get a sense of how the industry actually is evolving over time as we surf the bumpy plateau that was promised by so called peak oil theorists like Colin Campbell (official ASPO website). One noteworthy thing about guys like Campbell and Kenneth Deffeyes is that they are being proved disturbingly right in their longer term predictions, as is, sadly, M. King Hubbert.

The first really significant book released, right on the dawn of the current production plateau first reached in about 2005 was Matt Simmon’s Twilight in the Desert, which was essentially the first real shot across the bows of prevailing cornucopian (the belief that finite raw materials are in fact infinite) views held by both insiders and outsiders of the oil industry. While Simmons appeared to suffer a decline in the last year of his life, don’t be fooled, Twilight was a very well researched book on Saudi oil production, probably one of the best ever written, if not the best.

However, it’s also good to read some of the major works dealing with oil that don’t come from exactly the slightly outsider, critical, peak oil perspective, but which also contain a wealth of information about various aspects of the oil industry that might generally go less considered, such as speculation, refinery utilization and tuning for different oil types, and the role of public relations, as well as general styles of corporate governance among the Western majors.

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century (OMPP) goes a long way towards explaining some of the more technical intracies of how and why oil speculation can work, how big Western oil companies work from the inside, how PR is handled, and a wealth of specifics on topics such as refinery tunings towards various oil grades and sources. These specifics can help us understand how intertwined the entire process of modern oil, extraction, finance, governments, and corporate power, truly are.

For example, we learn that it is not simply how much raw oil in barrels there is on the market any given day, but how much per refinery per type of oil there is (heavy/light, sweet/sour, and a variety of combinations of these different grades). This is why, for example, you might hear Saudi Arabia claim it is producing extra, but then also complain that there are no buyers.

Since Saudi Arabia’s new production is now almost all what is called sour crude, that’s sometimes why more per day is not purchased even when it’s been extracted and is ready for shipment, it can’t be used, since there are no contracted refineries for that specific type of crude oil. I didn’t realize the requirements of matching refinery tuning to crude type was so specific. This book made me stop thinking of oil as one thing, just what they call petroleum liquids, like butane, propane, etc are also not properly assigned to that one thing, oil (plus liquids).

While the information the author got from his various sources is sometimes very eye-opening, I have to also warn any potential readers of a drawback: the author clearly used Western Oil company insiders as a primary source, so the general peak oil issue is of course slanted towards the words they used, and the message they internalize as officers of such corporations. In other words, the official view that given the right price and technology, production will be met.

As an aside, a growing number of oil company CEOs are beginning to admit that they will not in fact be able to meet supply by 2020. The US Army funded a study that puts the date close to 2015. So that view is generally now only promoted in order to continue to maximize shareholder value. Oil companies value depends on their reserves, and on the belief/bias of the market in terms of what they believe the company can achieve in terms of new reserves and production in the future. Because of this, the executives when interviewed almost always state an overly optimistic scenario, which reality proves wrong time and time again.

One such correction is very well covered by this book, the Shell oil reserve correction, which resulted in a huge downward revision of their total global reserve estimates. OMPP gives an excellent view of how that came about, from the insider’s perspective.

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century also covers quite in depth the John Browne years at BP, how Oil PR works, and what they have targeted. Any doubts you might have entertained about BP’s entrenched corporate cultural culpability re the BP gulf oil spill will probably be removed after you read those chapters on Browne’s aggressive share boost via expense cuts, safety, which is an expensive component of any oil drilling and extractio operation, yet one that only pays when the system fails, was first to be downgraded in priority, of course. The author goes into this story quite decently, and you’ll have a much better understanding of why some corporations really are in fact bad, and some are less bad.

I found one of the bigger flaws of the book the fact that the author appears to have had virtually no ins to NOCs (National Oil Companies), and that he depends too much on Western oil company sources that are biased. Another subtle bias is a tendency among Western oil majors to believe they could get more oil out than NOCs, which tends to simply not be true. In some cases, like Mexico’s Pemex, it’s probably accurate, but in cases like Norway’s Statoil, Brazil’s Petrobras, or Saudi Arabia’s Aramco, these companies are already absolutely top level oil extraction firms, second to none in terms of skill and technical ability.

I think many of you will find the refinery/speculation parts of OMPP especially educational, since they show ways that in fact prices really can be manipulated, and why one barrel in fact is not the same as another. In other words, despite popular beliefs to the contrary, oil is not fungible to the degree people like to think. Fungible basically means any one barrel can be replaced by any other barrel, no matter where it comes from or what type of crude oil it is.

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century is well worth the read, despite its varied flaws. You should be able to find it at better bookstores and libraries in your area today.

Other Material by Tom Bower

Tom Bower is a prolific investigative reporter and journalist, here are a few samples of his work:

• Drilling Down: A Troubled Legacy in Oil – WSJ – May 1, 2010 The spill in the Gulf of Mexico is the latest disaster for BP, which has been haunted by a history of cost-cutting
• Tom Bower in The Guardian Wide range of articles, many on the oil business, such as How the Sun King sank BP (the rise and fall of BP’s John Browne), Held over a barrel (oil producers, traders), Crude World by Peter Maass and The Squeeze (Paul Mason on two assessments of the oil business)

You have fewer pieces than she does, and have now entered into a phase of the game where, while you are a skilled and talented player, you are also clearly able to recognize that checkmate is inevitable. She’s also got some options in the game which you don’t have, although you were given the option to inspect them before the game started, but chose to ignore that in favor of making up your own version of the rules, which isn’t actually permitted in this game. In other words, the real rules are absolute and determined by Y, the rules we generate will fail but we believe they won’t.

Building a nuclear power plant at the edge of the ocean facing a massive and extremely active earthquake fault is an example of making up these rules and ignoring the more fundamental ground rules of the game. In that case, the rules they made up were: we will build a x meter high (6, I believe) tsunami defense wall. In other words, the rule is that the tsunami that hits in potential will be less than x meters high. Mother nature doesn’t care about these made up rules, so the tsunami was as big as it was going to be, ie, larger than the rule said it would be, x+y, the quake was stronger than they designed for, so that piece of the ecosystem is now compromised and heavily damaged, and thus, the position occupied by X is now weaker than it was 5 days ago.

Making up rules like this is extremely common in I believe all large scale cultures that practice excessive non-sustainable resource extraction. Out of sight out of mind is another form of this rule invention, which is the rule we apply to most of our generated waste products.

Your pieces are parts of your ecosystem. You can use them all up before being checkmated, or you can gracefully tip the king over and admit the inevitable defeat, thus preserving the lives and future viability of your various pieces.

While some might point to the so-called marginal economic benefit of using nuclear energy as opposed to coal fired power plant energy, I am unable to actually derive any meaning from the term ‘marginal economic benefit’ since from what I understand all nuclear power is not economically viable in the first place. That is is, if all mining, construction, de-activation, and most important, permanent long term waste disposal costs are taken into account, the plant is a zero gain enterprise.

If we forget the entire ‘economic’ modeling, which I think is a good place to start, and look merely at extraction rates and long term viability of the various options, it’s clear that none of the current options have any future.

If we shut down our nuclear plants, as some suggest when trying to demonstrate a lesser of evils type argument, we would probably increase our coal extraction / burning rates in the short term, with a net gain/change in the chess game of exactly zero, since the coal will get burned up anyway somewhere in the world in all cases, only maybe not as quickly in the case where nuclear plants are not closed down or built. So while that might appear to present a reason to build nuclear power, it’s a false premise, since in fact what would happen is we’d just burn the coal anyway. So the reality is we are burning the coal, creating CO2, and show no signs of stopping, and generating long term highly toxic wastes, which threaten to poison our environment long term. That’s lose lose, instead of lose alone.

Keep in mind they are currently majorly revising actual economically viable coal extraction re reserves, with massive downgrades in future reserves. No more 200, 300 year future talk, it’s now approaching 20 to 40 years to reach global maximum production levels (although I am suspecting, based on rapidly increasing coal prices globally, that these levels have possibly already been reached due to unexpected massive increases in global demand based on Chinese and Indian coal use), which is about the same timeframes re time to oil production maximums being achieved (aka: peak oil) that were being discussed when I started following the so called ‘peak oil’ issue in the late 90s.

I see this only in terms of a realworld chess game where we already have lost too many key pieces to nature to ever win, or even reach stalemate.

Future generations will curse us, believe me, they will curse the heated global ecosystem from CO2 emissions they are going to inherit from us, which will take about 1000 years to return to a more normal level, and they will curse our mountains of toxic wastes (including but not limited to nuclear) we leave behind, which can take tens of thousands of years to finally become reasonably non-toxic, if they ever do. Discussions of ‘economic benefit’ when the outcome is only destroying more of our ecosystem long term in all cases is just not something I can find any heart to really get into.

I don’t know or understand why so many modern humans cannot respect mother nature, and why or where their profound contempt for her rules and limits came from, but I am unable to participate in that contempt or self-centered focus on personal greed, consumption, and fulfillment of desires that were not even an idea in someone’s brain 80 years ago.

I see now that the requirement for all decisions to be taken in long term was not some side thing for those who managed to live more sustainably than we do, it was the only thing. Despite this I see ground for hope, but not in any way a hope that will satisfy artificial notions of economic development. But that’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing.

I have been reading, with great interest, Soros’s book The Alchemy of Finance, which strives to not be a work on finance, but on human behavior and social systems. It succeeds in my opinion. One of the key concepts therein is that the way we as thinking entities perceive reality is always filtered through our thinking, and this is not something you can get around. The requirement, so called, for x or y levels of energy consumption in my opinion fits in perfectly with this model. It’s a feedback loop, we believe we require x or y level, then we generate x or y level, then we believe we need x or y + 1, so we generate that. Once generated, that forms a new floor for what we believe is necessary for human existence, even though it’s totally obvious that it isn’t, nor has it ever been.

To be clear, what Soros is noting here is the inevitable failures of social ‘sciences’ to achieve the status of certainty that physical science is able to reach. In other words, there can be no social science because the agent who is investigating is the agent being investigated, and that agent contains biases that are not possible to work around. So what’s he’s talking about is understanding social systems. Personally I would go further, because I do not believe science itself actually is doing what it pretends to be doing, but that is going way too far afield, and would lead to pointless discussions that would do little good.

This recent Japan nuclear problem to me is a perfect test for the core premises of several books I’ve recently started digesting (Soros’s work here discussed, Taleb’s derivative and weaker, but still useful, Fooled by Randomness, as well as the excellent When the Lights Went Out – A History of Blackouts in America, by David E. Nye), and their premises are being proved not just slightly correct, but absolutely so.

The corollary of this point is that it’s not a one way process, ie, just as we adjust our world views to the x=x+1 process, so too when we hit the limit of that, determined by underlying tendencies and fundamentals, we are forced by material circumstances to adjust mentally to a model which now is x=x-1, until a new relative steady state is reached (itself an illusion, since only once actual sustainable living is reached can we discuss relatively steady states, but it’s an adequate working model).

So all the frantic statements and comments from people who insist that the x=x+1 condition are the only possible outcome and future for us are simply demonstrating Soros’s notion of reflexivity in an explicitly clear manner.

When x=x-1 becomes the prevalent bias, these people will vaporize, or rather, the bias will vaporize, and will be replaced by those who maintain equally adamantly that an ongoing x=x-1 is the natural condition, and it’s absurd to suggest otherwise. At some point in the distant future we will bounce off and on from x=x, each time being corrected, again, as we try to use x=x+1 model, and returned to the x=x model. This won’t be a choice, but it’s so far in our future it’s also pointless to even really discuss that future.

The core concept here is that there is no way for human beings to actually avoid the underlying bias and trendlines, which are mutually self-reinforcing, ie, there is no point of view outside of them that is solid, but we can note that this process exists, and then try to mold our thinking to fit this model, which in my opinion is a significantly superior model for understanding human actions and social thought.

To be clear: the bias we now internalize about yearly growth in consumption of electricity leads directly to yearly growth in consumption of electricity, it is a feedback loop. When our bias alters due to our views coming too far out of step with what the fundamentals can provide, the bias will swing to the negative side of the slope, which will involve declining, decreasing levels of electrical power consumption. How our biases achieve explanations to ourselves at that point remains to be seen, but one thing is certain, they will. I am glad to see such a fantastic real world test case here and now for these ideas, it’s rare real concepts can be so readily tested, Soros used the market to test these, but he knew the ideas were much larger than the market.

This is how Soros explains all bubbles and boom/bust cycles, and I would without hesitation include the growth/decline model as fitting this perfectly, only more slowly, and over a longer and more complicated period of time.

In other words, we view our normal as normal, but that normal itself is not fixed, it’s fluid, it changes. People don’t like change, but when it comes, it comes, one can either resist (as in rightwing climate heating denialism), or one can move with it, ideally a bit ahead of it to give you an edge. Not impossible at all. Difficult, sure. It’s worth noting that deliberately placing oneself behind the curve, as most climate heating denialists do, places you in a position where you may experience short term gain, but you are almost certain to have long term total failure, both as a country and as an individual. While it’s a possible course, it is neither wise nor offering long term advantage.

And that’s it for the latest view from the pit, we’ll see how things pan out as they panic and try to negotiate their way out of finite and absolute limits, in other words, call in more digging tools, we’ll bury the nuclear plants in cement and sand sarcophagi, then build more new ones, we need to power the excavation equipment at all costs, full speed ahead!

More than any other species, human beings are gifted with the power to manipulate our environment, and the ability to accumulate and transmit knowledge across generations. The first of these gifts we call technology; the other we call culture. They are central to our humanity.

Accumulating over thousands of years, culture and technology have brought us into a separate human realm. We live, more than any animal, surrounded by our own artifacts. Among these are works of surpassing beauty, complexity, and power, human creations that could not have existed—could not even have been conceived—in the times of our forebears. Seldom do we pause to appreciate the audacity of our achievements: objects as mundane as a compact disc, a video cellphone, an airplane would have seemed fantastical only a few centuries ago. We have created a realm of magic and miracles.

At the same time, it is quite easy to see technology and culture not as gifts but as a curse. After millennia of development, the power to manipulate the environment has become the power to destroy it, while the ability to transmit knowledge transmits as well a legacy of hatred, injustice, and violence. Today, as both the destruction and the violence reach a feverish crescendo, few can deny that the world is in a state of crisis. Opinions vary as to its exact nature: some people say it is primarily ecological; others say it is a moral crisis, a social, economic, or political crisis, a health crisis, even a spiritual crisis. There is, however, little disagreement that the crisis is of human origin. Hence, despair: is the present ruination of the world built in to our humanity?

Is genocide and ecocide the inevitable price of civilization’s magnificence? Need the most sublime achievements of art, music, literature, science, and technology be built upon the wreckage of the natural world and the misery of its inhabitants? Can the microchip come without the oil slick, the strip mine, the toxic waste dump? Under the shadow of every Chartres Cathedral, must there be women burning at the stake? In other words, can the gift of technology and culture somehow be separated from the curse?

Table of Contents (under fold)

Introduction
Chapter I: The Triumph of Technology
Gee Whiz—The Future!
Utopia Postponed
The Addiction to Control
From Separation to Boredom
From Affluence to Anxiety
Chapter II: The Origins of Separation
The Biological Origins of Self
Fire and Stone
Labeling the World
Mathematics and Measure
Keeping Time Images of Images
The Marvelous Piraha Cultivation and Culture
The Machine Religion and Ritual
The Playful Universe
Chapter III: The Way of the World
The Scientific Method
My Personal Age of Reason
Masters of the Universe
The Quest for Certainty
Reducing Reality
The Ghost in the Machine
The Origin of Life
Alone in the Universe
Chapter IV: Money and Property
The Realm of Me and Mine
Alone in a Crowd
The Anonymous Power
Social Capital
Cultural Capital
Natural Capital
Spiritual Capital
Time, Money, and The Good
The Economics of Other Interest and Self-Interest
The Crisis of Capital
Chapter V: The World under Control
The Total Depravity of Man
The Winners and the Losers Life and Death
Yes and No
The Pressure to Break Free
Molding Minds
The Great Indoors
Life under Contract
The War on Germs
The War on Suffering
Life in a Playpen
Chapter VI: The Crumbling of Certainty
The End of Objectivity
Truth without Certainty
Order without Design
The Nature of Purpose
The Purpose of Nature
Life without a Replicator
The Community of Life
The Genetic Plenum
Chapter VII: The Age of Reunion
The Convergence of Crises
The Currency of Cooperation
The Restorative Economy
The Age of Water
Technologies of Reunion
Work and Art
United Back to Play
The Medicine of Interbeingness
The Spirit of the Gift
Storyteller Consciousness
In Love with the World
Chapter VIII: Self and Cosmos
Human Nature Restored
The Fall
The Perinatal Matrix
The Gaian Birthing
Eulogy and Redemption
At Play Beside The Tower

The Rise and Decline of America’s Manmade Landscape
James Howard Kunstler
Simon & Schuster, 1993

While I’ve read a few other of Kunstler’s books (The Long Emergency, Home From Nowhere), I hadn’t gotten around to reading his first major non-fiction work, The Geography of Nowhere until last week.

Some of you may not be familiar with Kunstler, who is fast becoming a major spokesman for the post peak, long emergency world that is already now becoming increasingly obvious. A good place to start is his blog, named, typically abrasive Kunstler, ClusterFuckNation. While his polemical style doesn’t always work, it’s usually not that far off target, and he’s proving himself to be right far too often to just dismiss his thoughts out of hand.

To get a sense of how he thinks, check out a recent (March, 2007) talk he gave at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club.

You can also read a transcript of a 2005 [Matt] Simmons-Kunstler interview. Matt Simmons is a well respected oil industry investor who wrote a seminal book on the coming decline of Saudi oil production (read it if you haven’t, it’s great) Twilight in the Desert. Simmons, like Kunstler, seems able to engage in critical thinking, and is able to look at reality without falling into fantasy, so it made some sense for them to do this interview together.

Overview

From the author’s own site:

my first non-fiction book on the tragic sprawlscape of cartoon architecture, junked cities, and ravaged countryside where we live and work. I argued that the mess we’ve made of our everyday environment was not merely the symptom of a troubled culture, but one of the primary causes of our troubles. “We created a landscape of scary places, and we became a nation of scary people.”

I have to admit to being very pleasantly surprised by this book. Sometimes Kunstler can get a little sloppy (in The Long Emergency, for example), or repetetive (Home From Nowhere), but overall, The Geography of Nowhere did not disappoint at all. It’s well written, well researched, is filled with very interesting historical background that helps put the uniquely bizarre American suburban development into a perspective that actually makes some sense.

Kunstler’s core critique shows how much value the maligned ‘aesthetic’ component of life really can have, especially when you, as he does, come to understand aesthetic principles as being directly related to functional principles, to what makes life work, that is. It is only because we almost totally abandonned such concepts in exchange for a near obscene efficiency that we even have to be told this today.

I have increasingly come to view the term efficiency as a deadly trojan horse, designed to remove more and more of our lives from our hands, and into the hands of the various corporations seeking to profit from whatever part of life they are striving to monetize and capitalize. I remember arguing the wrong side of this question in Spain, coming to realize how wrong I was only years later as I saw just what happens to a society as it puts efficiency before life, community, and humanity.

You have to also keep in mind that Kunstler was way ahead of the curve on pretty much all the major issues we’re seeing come to a head today when it comes to the totally non-sustainable nature of our way of life. My favorite line of his is that suburban development “is the greatest misallocation of resources in human history”. Having grown up in such suburbs, and having had the good fortune to see and live in other types of environments for large parts of my life, I have to agree with this statement.

Home is What Developers Sell You
A House is What You are Left with When the Market Collapses

(All quotes from the hardcover edition, re page numbers)

Americans were as addicted to illusion as they were to cheap petroleum. They had more meaningful relationships with the movie stars and characters on daytime television shows than they did with members of their own families. They didn’t care if things were real or not, if ideas were truthful. In fact, they preferred fantasy. They preferred lies. And the biggest lie of all was that the place they lived was home.
pg. 169

This passage is becoming especially poignant today, when we see all around us American’s preferring lies and fantasy to reality. You see it in the elections, you see it in the obsession with gas guzzling SUVs, with the fairytale stories that housing could endlessly rise in price without every collapsing (a fantasy long ago given a name: ponzi scheme). But most of all, you see it in the fact that people in this country call a piece of mass produced garbage stuck in a horrible, inhuman environment, home. The use of the word ‘home’ is something that has grown to disgust me over the years, because it doesn’t refer to anything other than a house, somewhere to live.

I noticed the near magical quality this word is given when spoken by the media, you can hear the hushed reverence of the newscasters when they report on mass produced residences in mass produced developments being burned in a fire, for example. “16 homes were lost…”

As Kunstler points out elsewhere, in fact, the totem word home is used to refer to houses in the state of being lived in, or being purchased, but the term is dropped in favor of house when it’s sold. This is to help maintain the fiction that a manufactured residence in a manufactured environment has anything to do with the concept of home.

This type of clear thinking is why I like Kunstler, when he’s on, he’s really on.

The Lost Reality of Real, Working, Living, Communities

The term community has gotten so perverted that it is now used to point to the bizarrely antisocial online, internet based collections of people with some shared set of interests. This isn’t an accident, because today, most people have absolutely no idea what a real community actually is. Real communities are real places, filled with real people, who interact with each other in real ways, and contain real economies.

The small town life that Americans long for when they are depressed by their city apartments or their suburban bunkers is really a conceptual subsitute for the idea of community. But a community is not something you have, like a pizza. Nor is it something you can buy, as visitors to Disneyland or Williamsburg discover. It is a living organism based on a web of interdependencies – which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to one another, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse square, or the village green. “Most important,” Wendell Berry writes, “it must be generally loved and competently cared for by its people, who, individually, identify their own interest with the interest of their neighbors…”. That notion of community began to vanish in America after World War II.
pg. 185-186

All you have to do to verify this statement is walk down any suburban street, then go onto the next one, then the next one. You will pass by house after house, each sealed tight, air-conditioned, most of the inhabitants, if present, will be found watching TV in the family room, a term Kunstler discovers was invented as a euphimism for that space where television was watched. Television viewing being in most cases the primary activity the family actually engages in together.

All too painfully true…

The Real and the Unreal

Kunstler gives some pretty good examples in the book, one chapter devoted to three cities: Detroit, as an example of total failure, today; Portland, Oregon, an example of fairly rational urban planning; and Los Angeles:

The underlying problem that Los Angeles and the rest of the “developed” world faces is how to fashion an economy that is not an enterprise of destruction. That is, how to create sustainable economies and sustainable human habitats – cities and towns – for those economies to dwell in. The transition is going to be difficult. Los Angeles is not well-equipped to make that transition. The forms imposed on its rugged landscape are already obsolete. It is a model of the city as a consumptive machine, consuming raw land, petroleum, and vast amounts of water collected from remote hinterlands. The city’s present strategies for survival have little long term intelligence. The mainly seek to protect a previous bad investment, to keep the consumption machine running a while longer.
pg. 216

Since Los Angeles created the model that the entire so called ‘sun belt’ has followed, in America’s SouthWest, SouthEast, and Texas, this observation has grown even more problematic in the 15 years since Kunstler wrote this.

Already today, major SouthEastern cities like Atlanta are facing looming water shortages, and global warming is looking to make these issues even worse, as the sources for the water begin to retreat and fail, due to both overconsumption and simply not being there at all.

Kunstler then goes on to note how some of America’s favorite tourist destinations create bizarre mirrors for us to stare blankly back at our selves.

As the places where Americans dwell become evermore depressing and impossible, Disney World is where they can escape to worship the nation in the abstract, a cartoon capital of a cartoon republic enshrining the falsehoods, half-truths, and delusions that prop up the squishy thing the national character has become – for instance, that we are a nation of families; that we care about our fellow citizens; that history matters; that there is a place called home.
pg. 217

Thus, the underlying message of Main Street USA – for the grownups, anyway – was that a big corporation could make a better Main Street than a bunch of rubes in a real small town.

And Walt was right! Through the postwar decades Americans happily allowed their towns to be destroyed. They’d flock to Disneyland at Anaheim, or later to Disney World in Florida, and walk down Main Street, and think, gee, it feels good here. Then they’d go back home and tear down half the old buildings downtown and pave them over for parking lots…. pass zoning laws that forbade corner grocery stores in residential neighborhoods and setback rules that required every new business to locate on a one-acre lot until things became so spread out that you had to drive everywhere.
pg. 221

Zoning Laws Revisited

Kunstler’s focus on zoning is worth some major thought. He gets into it quite a bit more deeply through the book, and also in Home From Nowhere. The basic point is simple: by creating strict zoning for each type of human activity, the mix that creates a vibrant, living community, is destroyed in favor of different patches of monoculture, shopping malls, and so on.

To me the points on zoning make this a must read for anyone who actually cares about their environment, and helps go a long way in explaining just how we managed to create such utterly soulless environments for ourselves over the last 100 years.

The deeper truth, as Randall Arendt realized, was that typical zoning laws not only failed to protect the landscape, they virtually mandated sprawl… So, towns ended up splattered all over the countryside while the countryside completely lost its rural character. All you could build in present New England was Los Angeles.
pg. 264

In Closing

If you reflect on his closing comments, especially in light of the peaking of oil supplies, and soon of coal and natural gas, the solution is quite clear, although it’s still unfortunately a total mystery for most Americans:

We will have to downscale our gigantic enterprises and institutions – corporations, governments, banks, schools, hospitals, markets, farms – and learn to live locally, hence responsibly. We will have to drive less an create decent public transportation that people want to use. We will have to produce less garbage (including pollution) and consume less fossil fuel. We will have to reaquire the lost art of civic planning, and redesign our rules for building. If we can do these things, we may be able to recreate a nation of places worth caring about, places of enduring quality and memorable character.
pg. 275

Some people accuse of Kunstler of being a doomsayer, but I disagree completely with this view. I see him as he himself says, optimistic but realistic. He is not just criticizing, he’s offering very real solutions to a very real problem. He’s just not stupid enough to say that more of the same is going to solve anything.

Of course, when you push this matter a bit, you have to see a few things: growth in the sense we have known it for centuries, is simply not a part of this picture. Neither is globalized production, or any of the other freakish developments that have been pushed on us over the last 2 decades under the guise of the inevitable. As Kunstler noted in The Long Emergency, globalization is anything but an inevitable development, rather, it was never anything other than a temporary possibility created by a very temporary global oil glut which dropped prices for shipping and manufacture to ridiculous levels.

This glut is now over, demand is rising beyond the ability of supply, and the age of cheap shipping of doodads from China to Peoria, via huge container ships, and a fleet of trucks, is fast ending.

The same goes for petroleum based food production, perversely labled the green revolution.

Ok, he’s also unable to say the words: peak oil, and prefers to try to blame the producing nations for not pumping enough rather than admit the far simpler reality that they simply are experiencing finite geological constraints (pdf, new by Matt Simmons) that limit their ability to create higher flow rates.

In addition, politicians throw red meat to the crowd by promising to punish the oil industry for its huge profits, overlooking the small problem that much of this profit is not even made in the United States. In fact, it is not the oil companies, but producing countries like Venezuela, Mexico, Iran and Russia that are provoking the pending production crunch through lack of investment. National oil companies now control nearly 80 percent of worldwide reserves, leaving major Western multinationals with full access to only 6 percent.
[...]
Politicians have embraced ethanol as a policy that is good for consumers, the environment and farmers. Let’s be honest: ethanol is a great farm-subsidy program, but it is a multibillion-dollar distraction as an energy solution, and a mistake for both food prices and the environment. Corn prices have more than tripled since the end of 2005 despite record harvests, and ethanol’s net environmental benefits look increasingly dubious when we examine the large amounts of energy, water and fertilizer our farmers use to produce corn. Yet Congress—like King Canute commanding the tides—now wants biofuels production increased from seven to thirty-six billion gallons per year. Regrettably, we do not have the technology, land or water to produce that volume.

The brutal fact is that we do not know how to offset oil with other fuels on the scale that is required. Let me repeat this: there is no alternative energy elixir just waiting in the wings. So, if we cannot increase the supply of oil, then we must cut demand—ideally through efficiency and conservation.

But once again we see politics trumping economics. Government policy should encourage outcomes, but not mandate specific solutions and technologies—especially not those pushed by lobbyists.
J. Robinson West: former assistant secretary of the Department of the Interior, chairman of PFC Energy, Inc.

So finally people are beginning to understand the enormity of the crisis. Too bad they didn’t listen to Jimmy Carter back in the 1970s, who understood the long term repercussions of the energy problem back when it would still have been easy to fix it!

What’s so annoying about all this is having to have read this utter nonsense about a senile moron like Ronald Reagan over the last decade being proclaimed as some type of ‘great leader’ when all he did was open the door for catastrophic collapse by removing all the programs that Jimmy Carter had tried to put in place to actually start dealing with the energy and resource issues before it was too late!.

It’s somewhat incredible to go back and read Carter’s words in the 1970s:

Ten days ago I had planned to speak to you again about a very important subject — energy. For the fifth time I would have described the urgency of the problem and laid out a series of legislative recommendations to the Congress. But as I was preparing to speak, I began to ask myself the same question that I now know has been troubling many of you. Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?
[...]
The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.
[...]
Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy. As a people we know our past and we are proud of it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even the world. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom, and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose. But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.

As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.
[...]
What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another.
[...]
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.

Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny.
[...]
In little more than two decades we’ve gone from a position of energy independence to one in which almost half the oil we use comes from foreign countries, at prices that are going through the roof. Our excessive dependence on OPEC has already taken a tremendous toll on our economy and our people. This is the direct cause of the long lines which have made millions of you spend aggravating hours waiting for gasoline. It’s a cause of the increased inflation and unemployment that we now face. This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our nation. The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our nation. These are facts and we simply must face them.
[...]
Just as a similar synthetic rubber corporation helped us win World War II, so will we mobilize American determination and ability to win the energy war. Moreover, I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of this nation’s first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.
[...]
I do not promise you that this struggle for freedom will be easy. I do not promise a quick way out of our nation’s problems, when the truth is that the only way out is an all-out effort. What I do promise you is that I will lead our fight, and I will enforce fairness in our struggle, and I will ensure honesty. And above all, I will act. We can manage the short-term shortages more effectively and we will, but there are no short-term solutions to our long-range problems. There is simply no way to avoid sacrifice.
Jimmy Carter, speech, July 15, 1979

Now, when is the last time you heard ANY current politician speak this plainly?

We did not accept the challenge back then, but opted for the fantasies of Reagan’s trickle down, flood upward, economics, then we decided that was not enough, we wanted more, and went for the Clinton/Bush era’s idea of no sacrifice ever, bigger cars, bigger houses, then finally, no payment house purchasing.

Carter was the last rational president we had in this country, and we are not likely to get another one I’m sad to say. All the problems that Carter talked about 30 years ago are worse today, more deeply embedded in our social selves, in the society at large. Greed is now considered so normal that it’s not even thought worthy of comment.

The 7 cardinal sins (Lust; Gluttony; Greed; Sloth; Wrath; Envy; Pride) of the Catholic church are not moral virtues, they are a biological survival guide for a species long term success, and we are making virtues of vice today. Sadly they currently form the basic requirements for success in the Corporate world, and seem to be the main qualities that drive most Republicans in this country, and many Democrats. Most of whom now hope to have lucrative careers in the private, lobbying sector, after their government ‘service’ is finished.

If you never read it, Dante, in his Divine Comedy, placed those who violate the public trust right at the feet of Satan, in the inner of inner circles in Hell. And that for good reason.

You cannot place personal and social greed on a pedestal and expect long term success. You cannot tell the most greedy that they deserve more. This is what we have done. On every level, everywhere in the world, from the starving in Africa who still want more children, to the Wall Street banker who thinks that he deserves a 100 million dollar golden parachute even though he just drove his firm into bankruptcy.

Carter was right in the 1970s, and he’s even more right today. It’s time to look back at a time before lobbiests dominated our political system, and manipulated all forums for political discourse, and realize that not only was it not always this way, it does not need to be this way today.

What’s even sadder about rereading that speech is that some of the hoped for future ‘solutions’ are proving to be total dreams in terms of being viable long term replacements for Oil. Coal is an environmental disaster, tar sands and shale oil are massively inefficient to mine and process, and will never be more than temporary stopgaps in the process of moving to a massively slimmed down level of energy and commodity consumption.

You have to really separate the true renewables, like solar thermal, wind, tide, etc, from the ones that just push the problem to a new commodity, like the rare metals like gallium, indium (whose prices are skyrocketing already) and other exotic materials used in thin film solar, to the quickly depleting uranium, to anything involving coal and its subsequent CO2 emission problems.

To envision the real solution, imagine your resource and energy use is at most 20% of what it is now. Then less over time. That is what the real solutions will look like, anything else is just trying to postpone the inevitable.

People are not adding up the pieces. Global shipping breaks down as diesel and ship bunker fuel prices skyrocket. Air travel collapses as airlines lose the economies of scale that cheap fuel allowed. Even road construction begins to change radically as asphalt/tar begins to escalate rapidly in price. And this is all happening now, not in the future. And we’re only at $120 a barrel oil

It was hard to not pick this book up, it’s by the former secretary of labor Robert Reich. I like seeing how people in the system think about things, although I have to admit I’ve been avoiding the more classical liberal material, since there’s so much stuff that’s even more critical of the current system coming from what used to be called the ‘right’, but which now is starting to sound almost sane. Books like Conservatives Without Conscience, by John Dean, come to mind, for example.

Although the preface almost made my put the book down since it wasn’t very promising, with some pretty serious distortions of our currrent realities, like pretending that our media isn’t dominated by 5 large conglomerates, once the book actually started, it got increasingly more interesting, although sadly it also becomes increasingly more obvious why the Democratic party has so little of substance to say. Reich, as a party insider, shows us just what the Democratic party is missing today: a sense of outrage, coupled with a willingness to fundamentally question the status quo.

Some of the real eye openers were the degree to which the pre 1970s system managed to reasonably distribute the wealth, pointing out that for instance, under Eisenhower, the top tax rates were 91%, and under JF Kennedy, still up at 78%, and that the top 1% of income earners took only 7% of total income in 1950, compared to 19% in 1928 (pg. 37).

Hopefully you may have noticed that the percentages were higher right before the Great Depression hit, just like it is now. And that’s not a coincidence, when you don’t distribute the wealth, but hoard it, and become increasingly greedy, there is less flowing out into the system.

I won’t give a statistic by statistic breakdown of all the numbers, but as I work my way through the book, I’ll try to point out the more salient points.

Another things that immediately struck me was Reich’s immediate rejection of the notion that the so called Free Market had anything at all to do with the prosperity the USA enjoyed post WWII. Rather, he shows quite clearly that was existed was a fairly tightly controlled system of oligarchical industrial production, where a few corporations more or less completely dominated each major sector of the economy, working hand in hand with large unions and the government.

This is very important to understand, since the free market is one of the most abiding myths of the United States, and it certainly has almost no foundation in reality. Even today, if you look at some more modern versions of industrial enterprise, say computer operating systems or search engines, again, you find a small handful of companies completely dominating the market, with the bar to entry raised increasingly high to anyone who would like to compete in an actually free market.

No, the free market remains a myth, followed mostly by people who haven’t ever studied the real market, or who actually believe that the legal fiction of corporate person-hood is real, thus imputing the concept of free agents acting in a free market when discussing say General Motors competing with Toyota or Hyundai, as if these three megacorporations have anything to do with open and free competition between free individuals. In fact, the failure to grasp the problems with allowing legal fictions the same rights as physical, real people, is one of the core points of this book.

Long ago, in college, I had a political science teacher who pushed this point over and over. I didn’t really register why he thought this was so important, but as I see how entities that are essentially non-existent except for some legal paperwork then hide behind laws that were explicitly created to protect real people, who could be jailed, or even killed, if their violation were serious enough, I begin to understand just what a serious mistake allowing corporations to assume the protections due to living people while avoiding the consequences living people have to also accept when they mess up too badly.

The attempt to use legal person-hood to excuse bribery (aka ‘campaign contributions’), massive theft (for example Enron recently, although currently the number of corporations engaged in this type of cynical manipulation of their sphere of interest is growing disturbingly large), is just one clear example of just why this legal status has to be removed as soon as possible if human society is going to make it past the peaks we are fast coming up on, or have already passed by as I write now.

I had the great good fortune to live in Spain for a while, where I got to see what an actually free market looks like, in the form of the many public food markets they have there. The people who own the food stalls are not trying to take control over the entire market, they have small stalls, and might, if they are particularly good, or popular, expand to a few stalls over time. But that’s about it. And price, from what I found, was not the primary concern of either shopkeepers or shop visitors, it was a wide range of things, from quality, liking the shopkeepers, tradition (your mother shopped there), and so on. Seeing a real free market, where I was, as a consumer, free to buy VERY high quality foods and very good prices, and fresh, real foods, not processed junk, food which often was being sold directly from producer, or farmer, to the shop.

Such a genuine free market offered everyone quality, and a way to have a good life, with position and status, from the smallest grower/producer, to tiny little shops selling say only eggs, or pre cooked beans, for example, to fairly large, well stocked stalls.

You can find such genuine free markets anywhere in the world where corporations have not yet managed to destroy them, and the difference is striking, mainly because you are dealing with truly free producers, consumers, and shopkeepers, not fake legal fictions of paper corporate persons. Such truly free markets also have a minimum of large scale middlemen to get in the way. So all the money stays local, stays in people’s hands. Like our farmer’s markets here, only a bit more natural.