A Drop of Rain

As pro-nuclear energy spin and PR damage control go into high gear as Fukushima continues to unravel and expose the type of lies and deceptions that have misled even well intentioned commentators, like George Monbiot, into accepting the negatives of nuclear energy for some (deluded) idea that it is a lesser of evils (this concept is itself a notion created by the nuclear spin industry, I am virtually certain) certain parts of this project become increasingly well defined. The thing I find most revealing is the notion, put forward by pro-nuclear apologists, innocently, or less so, that normal people are suffering from an irrational fear of radiation.

These types of falsehoods and misrepresentations of what is actually going on form the essence of all modern public relations, especially for heavy industrial consumers of non-renewables of all types, constitute a steady chipping away at a very accurate human response towards radiation, one that I would suggest is in fact highly rational. It is especially discouraging to find such things repeated by those who might otherwise pride themselves on being somewhat critical in their view of modern society.

What I find totally and utterly irrational is that when faced with the total inability to handle a process that was never meant to exist on earth, people continue to pretend that it’s a rational decision to create it. This is simply false. It was a refusal to start winding down power consumption, coupled with a military requirement to obtain nuclear materials for nuclear weapons, that was directly responsible for humanity entering this lunatic course of action in the first place.

The entire nuclear project has always been totally irrational, on so many levels it’s really hard to pick just a few, but here’s some: assumption, despite ALL history as positive proof against this faith, that societies will. continue to be able to handle these toxic systems as they change in fundamental ways. Poster child for this? Ukraine, today, requiring about 2 billion euros to create a new sarcophagus for Chernobyl.
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Now and again it’s worth looking at some of the points raised on issues of sustainability and the end of life as we know it.

I see as a given that our current system is going to change, and change fundamentally, as resource depletion continues to alter the ease with which we extract, and waste, non-renewable, or not quickly enough renewable, raw materials. I find myself tending to agree with John Michael Greer (aka: the ‘Arch Druid’) re the time frames over which the ensuing changes will occur, mainly because Greer’s views tend to match reality as we find it documented in our histories.

Greer also makes an effort to study actual history and related areas that touch on these questions, unlike most of the other commentators out there, and he also is pushing out information that tries to help deal with the issues, which you’ll see at the end of this essay, is really the core difference between those prophets of doom and those who will actually find the way forward as our present grows into the future.

However, I also believe that significant portion of people who think we will see a sharp steep global collapse are simply confusing a drop in available consumption levels with the end of all life (aka: The End of Life as We Know It).

A Realistic View of Real-World Change

The way this so called collapse (better called: change, adjustment, alteration in prevalent mythologies and deeply held cultural biases) develops will be regional, not global. I’ve thought that for a while now. This is, by the way, another reason I don’t consider myself a ‘doomer’. Regional alterations do not make for a unitary moment of doom, they are something we have seen throughout history. Remember, Italy in its center was largely empty after the Roman Empire moved its center to the east, and the Barbarians had invaded one too many times. Then time moved on, and Italy wasn’t empty any more. Norway’s northern regions were emptied of Norwegians after the black plague, but NOT of human habitation, the Saamies (Lapps) were happy to move back in and occupy the land with their nomadic reindeer herding way of life until very close to the modern era. There is, I think you have to agree, a certain ethno-centrism involved in the belief that the failure of a single means of human social organization is somehow ‘doom’, when for others, it might be the ticket to the possibility of living a real life again, freed from the bonds of industrial non-sustainable production. It all depends on your point of view.

The notion, presented by Greer, among others, that changes will occur in staircase form I think doesn’t require much of a leap, since changes are coming in staircase form already. Just as an example: Colin Campbell (retired petroleum geologist, and prominent peak oil observer and analyst) points to the technical peak of global oil extraction as being marked by extreme social, economic, and political volatility. I look around myself in 2010 and find just that. Resource wars ongoing, political instabilities, ongoing. So that part seems pretty much right on.

The Real Turning Point

I don’t like getting into more sci-fi speculations, but to me, it’s fairly obvious that the reason 1970 was the real turning point for the global human culture based on non-sustainable resource exploitation is that is when the global population went into serious overshoot, beyond carrying capacity. The real warning flag back then was the requirement of instituting industrial, non-sustainable farming techniques, called, in Orwellian style, the ‘green revolution’ in order to avoid famine and provide enough food stuffs to feed the now clearly non-sustainable population numbers created by ceaseless population growth.
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Sometimes a comment is made in an online discussion which really warrants a response on a much deeper level, because it reveals so much about how we look at our world and planet.

It’s very important to look at such views and see what’s actually driving them, because to do so gives us a way to learn how to see our real world environment.

“if the Worst Possible Scenario happened at all the world’s gas/coal power generation stations simultaneously” – well it happened, in part, there, we call it global warming these days. Not as spectacular as exploding reactor roofs, not as fast as a cloud of radioactive debris, but the effect is here with all of us, it is enormous and irreversible. But it’s out of interest when people make their judgements.

If all four units in Chernobyl would have burned as #4 obviously it would have been much worse, yes, it would have contaminated Europe badly, but far from inhabitable. And that reactor design was a goddamn pit of hell compared even these 40yr old BWRs. Now Fukushima looks like crap, it will do some harm, it will hurt people, but not to the extent you believe.

Of course nuclear waste from all plants must be taken care of, there is research, I believe there are already finished plans for reactors that besides producing power, burn this “spent” fuel to shorten it’s dangerous effects to about ~2 centuries, which, while I agree is a lot of time, still looks somewhat shorter than it would take to remove all those greenhouse gases your gas/coal plants gushed into the atmosphere.

60 years of nukes vs. 120 years of ff power generation, yet the negative effects are hard to compare.
(src: theOilDrum 2011-03-16)

No known human non-sustainable, large scale, centralized, culture has been able to correctly predict the condition of that human culture 2 centuries in its future.

Just 65-70 years ago bombs were being dropped on all key facilities in Europe, Russia/USSR, China was being bombed, Japan was bombed. That’s only 70 years, not even remotely close to 2 centuries. And that’s only one way things can and do go bad.

Yes 2 centuries looks shorter than multiple thousands of years, but there is no way this heavily industrialized system is going to exist in 2 centuries, sorry. It’s a blip in history, a dip at the bottom of the pit. Also, what we have to look at is our present, not some uncreated future.
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In the previous posting, I took a look at the notion of humanity digging itself down into a pit. The more I consider this view, the better a model I find it to describe the actions, thinking, and economic/political activities of modern humankind.

I’ve been following, as I noted in the previous posting, the writings of a wide variety of so called Peak Theorists/Commentators, and began to note certain… how to put this nicely?… let’s call it, oddities, about their views. Certain things don’t fit the facts, that is. This is not to discount the actual substance of the analysis presented, for example, as this recent WikiLeaks Cable clearly shows (story), the views criticized by the establishment as ‘nutty’ or ‘deluded’ are in fact basically exactly right. In this case, the leaked cable shows that the Saudis admit they have both overstated their reserves, by about 40%, exactly as it was said they had, and are lying about their ability to generate new supplies in terms of daily production rates.

So there’s no problem with most of the core engineering facts related to various so called ‘peak’ issues.

No, the problem lies much more deeply in my opinion, and that problem is rooted in how we as humans are chosing to view this situation. By projecting everything upwards, we in turn manage to suggest we are progressing. But we are not progressing, if we were, our planet would not be losing its ability to support life, the resources we are extracting at breakneck speeds would not be hitting extraction maxima, the ecosystem would be thriving, not dying off and losing diversity at record rates, and so on.

There is another serious problem with viewing matters as if we had attained some height, and that is that it suggests that all we need now to do is to step down from the peak and make our way back to the lower realms. In other words, don’t worry, gravity will pretty much take care of things for us.

I’ll be investigating these matters for a while, so I hope a few of you will bear with me, and possibly even contribute thoughts of value to the process. Please note that repeating dogmas and propaganda generated by the corporate media, especially the right-wing corporate media, is not a positive contribution, but it will be one of the areas I examine in the coming postings, if things go as planned.
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I’ve been giving some thought to the way the discussion about our present and future are engaged in online especially, also of course in print. A few things have struck me after tracking the main authors and sites (see right sidebar for some fo the better representatives of this genre) for a few years, most started by a sneaking suspicion that there is something wrong in the mindset that is driving the discussion. Some of these problems are somewhat obvious, for example authors who benefit from attracting attention to themselves, which in turn sells books. Others are less obvious, and quite a bit more insideous, since they actually make it hard for us to even see what the problem is.

Given the degree of the problem, one thing is becoming more obvious: any changes to come are going to happen in totally unexpected ways. Why? Because we are entering into uncharted territories when it comes to how we believe the world works versus how the world actually works. The key word here of course is sustainability. If you can come to understand this word, you are pretty much most of the way home.

Near term it’s hard to see anything positive happening politically in the USA, unless you consider a non-stop barrage of instigation to violence from the neo-con far right, resulting in, surprise, violence, as a positive. That model is tried and true, admittedly, worked well for the brown shirts too. Personally I’d suggest anyone with any integrity distance themselves from such types, unless that’s the future you want of course.

Or the idea that force-feeding even more capital into large corporate systems (aka, health care ‘reform’ [pray tell, how is forcing more money into the HMO system, thus making it stronger, reform?], military outsourcing, etc) is somehow going to help actually solve our problems.

The main structural problem the EU will face is lack of domestically produced resources. The main positive the core European nations possess: a reasonably coherent political system, and reasonably rational voters who actually understand things when pushed, and of course, a sense of place, of history, mental, linguistic horizons broader than the local walmart parking lot or corporate funded tv/radio shows…

Almost the opposite of the US, oddly.
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Sometimes it’s useful to stop thinking abstractly, and to stop guessing on a future we can as of yet only faintly make the outlines of in our daily lives, and to just see what’s going on here, now, today.

I like Bloomberg.com as a news site, because it aims at capitalists, and the USA is a capitalist country, so news pointed at them tends to be more accurate than most standard corporate mass media. This doesn’t mean you can turn off your critical thinking, but the news there is often real, and points to larger trends, since such trends are exactly what businessmen need to have a solid understanding of in order to hope to make good decisions.

So it struck me when I read Airline Era Ends as Carriers Cull 50-Seat Jets ‘Nobody Wants’ .

The 50-seat jets once prized by carriers such as Delta Air Lines Inc. are being culled from U.S. fleets as higher fuel and maintenance bills make them too expensive to fly.

By 2015, U.S. airlines will have about 200 jets with 50 or fewer seats, down from about 1,200, said Michael Boyd, president of consultant Boyd Group International Inc. in Evergreen, Colorado. More than 80 have been scrapped in 2010, he said.

Got that? I don’t know if you followed the airline industry when oil went to $147 a barrel, in 2008, but one prominent airline CEO stated that the global airline industry becomes non-viable at oil prices over $100 per barrel. This is because of economies of scale certain pricing models enable. In other words, airlines have basically three fixed costs: 1. the physical airplane, 2. fuel, and 3. labor/corporate. Debt costs would mainly be centered around the cost of the aircraft.
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If you don’t like the cost of deep water drilling, if you don’t like what you are seeing on your TVs, if you are shocked by the massive environmental costs of this BP Deepwater Horizon blowout, then push your representatives to establish far more powerful regulations on it. And by all means, do your part as well, stop driving so much. Less demand translates directly to less need to do deep water drilling. At least for now.

The real problem, of course, is that most currently producing large fields are in a state of decline, forcing oil companies to go offshore to get new sources of oil. Drill baby Drill simply allows a tiny bit more high risk offshore drilling to take place. Remember, initial estimates of the recoverable reserves in the Macondo reservoir (the one that is spewing out oil into the Gulf of Mexico now, that is) put them at about 50 million barrels. That’s 2.5 days supply for the USA, give or take, or about 0.6 days supply for the planet.

BP spokesman Jon Pack said it’s still possible there will be oil produced in the area. The reservoir may have held about 50 million barrels of crude, he said. www.businessweek.com

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You can check out what BP is putting out in video and other media a their Gulf of Mexico Response section of their site (see left navigation bar for various formats available, video, image, etc). For video feeds and other video, check out their Response in Video section.

Here’s a site with multiple live camera shots from different sources, deepwaterbp.com. Same site, their wall of ROV videos (takes a long time to load, click on any video to see it full size, esc to return).

Some of these are I think windows media, not sure, some are flash.