Powerdown Revisited

NOTE: Here are some highlights of the article by Richard Heinberg

October 2007: If the Federal Reserve tries to solve the liquidity crisis by lowering interest rates, that just worsens inflation and exacerbates the dollar's problems. If the Fed raises rates to prop up the dollar, that forces the banks and hedge funds to confront their mountains of worthless paper and leads ultimately to defaults, bank runs, and bank failures.

Clearly the Fed fears the latter scenario more than the former, so by lowering interest rates this month it effectively pulled the plug on the dollar.

The Saudis are now preparing to de-link their economy from the US currency, while China is quietly selling off dollar-denominated assets. One way or another, Americans are going to soon see a rapid decline in their real standard of living.

$90 a barrel oil:

Part of the price hike resulted from the dollar's weakness, but - as Goldman Sachs has pointed out - the main reason was simply that demand is up while supply is down.

Global Climate change:

The single most important event of the month was the revelation that arctic sea ice is melting faster than even the most dire forecasts had predicted. This is significant because it shows the power of reinforcing feedback loops: as sunlight-reflecting ice melts, it leaves dark water in its place - which absorbs more heat, causing more ice to melt, and so on. This year's minimum extent of ice was about one million square miles (as of September 16); the previous record low was 1.5 million in 2005. The rate of melting this year was 10 times the recent annual average.

CO₂ growing faster than expected

According to the new study, carbon released from burning fossil fuels and making cement rose from 7.0 billion metric tons per year in 2000 to 8.4 billion metric tons in 2006. A metric ton is 2,205 pounds.

The growth rate increased from 1.3 percent per year in 1990-1999 to 3.3 percent per year in 2000-2006, the researchers added. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/336453_carbon23.html

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The circumstances that will shape our future.

Because of the impending peaks in the global extraction rates for oil, gas, and coal, the future almost certainly holds less available energy, in total and especially per capita. That in turn means that society will be less mobile. Coal and gas declines will produce widespread and enduring electrical grid outages. Energy constraints coupled with water scarcity and topsoil depletion also ensure higher food prices and likely widespread food shortages. Because powered machines will lack fuel, there will be substantially more need for human labor in agricultural production, as well as in the energy-efficient retrofitting of existing buildings and urban infrastructure. At the same time, there will be need for massive relocation of people away from areas where temporarily increased carrying capacity, established by cheap fuels, has vanished (think Los Angeles or Phoenix, or the massive squatter settlements on the outskirts of any number of huge cities in the global South): somehow, many of these people must move, or be moved, to where they can be near soil and water. As if all of that weren't enough, we also face environmental catastrophe from climate chaos and loss of biodiversity. All of these necessities and trends will pose enormous challenges to every organized society. How to deal with them?

Here are the three scenarios that I see as most likely.

1. Feudal fascism. This is basically similar to the Last One Standing option in Powerdown, though now I would frame it somewhat differently. A strong central government will organize work - though not in a way that many people will enjoy. Think agricultural work camps and slave-labor factories. The main selling point for the Fascist option (sorry for the word fascism, but while it's loaded with historical baggage it's also handy, familiar, and probably fairly accurate) would be the maintenance of order in a time of increasing social disintegration. If you were a member of an upper middle- class family clinging to its home, with a bit of gold or cash put aside and a few cans of food in the larder, wouldn't you fear marauding gangs going door-to-door stealing food and money? Wouldn't you welcome police patrols - even if they had a shoot-to-kill policy and about as much self-restraint as a Blackwater contractor in Baghdad? For the truly wealthy as well, protection of property would provide a powerful motive to support the repressive apparatus of state power - which, to be efficacious, would need to be both brutal and omnipresent: troops on street corners; total surveillance; torture and summary executions for dissidents. Forget freedoms of expression or assembly.

However, several decades down the line, energy shortages will grow so severe that it may become impossible to sustain centralized fascistic governmental authority over a continent-scale geographic area. At that point, fascistic national governments might break down into feudal regionalism featuring local warlords presiding over post-industrial serfdom.

2. The Eco Deal. Economist Susan George calls this option "Environmental Keynesianism" (see her essay at http://www.globalnetwork4justice.org/story.php?c_id=313). For a snapshot image, think of the 1930s New Deal revisited in the context of global ecological crisis.

Like Feudal Fascism, this scenario assumes a strong central government. But in this case, government applies itself to the transformation of societal infrastructure using an inclusive strategy that entails economic re-distribution and the fostering of a culture of democracy. In the New Deal, government created work programs and rebuilt infrastructure; there were even some interesting experiments (on the part of Arthur Morgan, when he worked for Roosevelt as head of the Tennessee Valley Authority) in the creation of self-sufficient small communities. Similarly, governments implement ing an Eco-Deal might create the financial capital with which to build electric streetcar systems in every city of 100,000 or more; super-insulate millions of homes and commercial buildings and provide them with geothermal heating; and reorganize agriculture on small-scale, organic model - creating millions of jobs along the way.

This dramatic change in national priorities will require the provision of public information. Currently, the commercial media promote consumerism; instead, a conserver message will be needed, motivating one and all to work together for the common good. There is a historic precedent here as well: in the New Deal and World War II, Hollywood and the advertisers pitched in (to some degree anyway) in the national effort, galvanizing the masses for collective effort.

In this case as well, when shortages deepen the maintenance of a central national authority will become more difficult; but here - if authorities have attempted to seed a culture of democracy (again as in the 1930s) - the nation organized around a centralized state might break down into some form of decentralized bioregionalism.

3. Bottoms Up. There is a strong likelihood that, at least in some nations or regions, strong central government will not survive the end of cheap energy - especially if electrical grids fail. In that case, neither the Feudal Fascist nor the Eco-Deal strategy would play out; instead, localities would be on their own. Local governments and citizen groups would have the task of maintaining order and flows of basic necessities. When hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, locals had a foretaste of this: it was mostly up to ad-hoc citizen groups and what was left of city government to rescue stranded families and deal with thousands of emergencies throughout the area. Yet that disaster occurred in the world's wealthiest nation, which maintained elaborately equipped disaster-relief agencies. Imagine a hundred Katrina-scale local disasters occurring intermittently in the context of an international economic crisis and protracted regional grid failures. What chance would there be, then, of a successful large-scale response effort?

There are those who will find the bottoms-up strategy appealing even in the absence of necessity - anarchists, libertarians, and other advocates of localism and opponents of state power. Here would be an opportunity to escape the oppressive, corrupt domination of the many by the few that has characterized every state, indeed every civilization, since the Pyramid Age. As societies come to have less energy available for transportation and communication, they are bound to decentralize anyway eventually; why not proceed directly to localism and bypass both of the big-government solutions outlined above, which are destined to fail eventually in any case?

The central challenge of the bottoms-up approach is that communities are ill equipped to provide even the most basic services (food, water, power, security) to their citizens absent a working nexus of complexly interconnected regional or national support systems. Even a century ago, communities were much more self-sufficient. Today, few cities in the industrialized world produce much in the way of food, clothing, or other necessities: hospitals depend on the constant delivery of medicines and a wide range of other supplies; grocery stores are continually restocked with food from hundreds or thousands of miles away; even water and electrical power may arrive by aqueducts and long-distance transmission lines. A temporary interruption of these services would certainly be survivable, but a town or city cut permanently adrift would quickly devolve into chaos. In that case, reorganization of society from the grassroots up would take time; meanwhile, an immense human tragedy would ensue.

Positive steps we could take:

Communities must begin now to redevelop their local support infrastructure - especially local food systems. City officers should be thinking about how to sustain emergency services, water delivery and wastewater treatment, and communications, given a prolonged scarcity or absence of fuel and electricity. Plans should be under way for the dramatic expansion of public transit services. Individuals can help jump-start all such efforts by speaking to elected officials...

.National leaders must quickly come to realize that any effort to follow economic plans based on projecting into the future past rates of growth in energy consumption will lead to systemic failure.

Only a dramatic, rapid, systematic reorganization of the economy to function with declining rates of energy flow can avert breakdown. Careful thought must be given to the dire implications of fascistic solutions to the emerging energy crisis, so that those solutions are not implemented as a knee-jerk response to societal stress. Nations must initiate efforts to forge cooperative strategies toward sustainable interdependence (such as the Oil Depletion Protocol) rather than geopolitical resource competition. Individuals can help foster these developments by educating elected officials and by actively opposing militaristic and fascistic measures.

Source: Powerdown Revisited by Richard Heinberg

http://globalpublicmedia.com/richard_heinbergs_museletter_as_the_world_burns

Join our Running on Empty caucus:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RunningOnEmptyDemocratCaucusWA/

and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RunningOnEmptyCaucusDemocratsUSA

WHY CLIMATE CHANGE CAN'T BE STOPPED

September 2007: As economies grow, they consume more energy and produce more carbon dioxide. And, obviously, each country wants its own economy to grow.

The argument that assumes that companies can replace their current capital stock with the most efficient technologies available today --something that is not likely to occur in the near future even indeveloped countries due to its considerable cost.

Unfortunately, given the scale and complexity of modern economies and the time required for new technologies to displace older ones, only a stunning technological breakthrough will allow for reductions in emissions that are sufficiently deep to stop climate change.

Without a technological or economic miracle, it would take a political miracle to reach an international agreement that would mandate the necessary emissions cuts to reverse the momentum behind our evolving global climate system.

In 2010, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, developing countries will emit nearly 20 percent more CO2 emissions than developed countries.

China's energy efficiency, it is still nearly seven times less that of the United States, according to the World Bank. At this rate, China's economic growth trajectory could add the equivalent pollution of another present-day United States to the climate system in a little more than a decade. Dollar-for-dollar, the most efficient way to cut global greenhouse gas emissions would be, in theory, to invest hundreds of billions of dollars to improve China's energy efficiency. But Congress would never support such an approach.

How long will voters in Europe and Japan, which have done the most to limit emissions, be prepared to make sacrifices for the global climate if they believe they are alone in doing so?

In 2005, a paper published by the U.N. Environment
Program put average global economic losses due to "great weather
disasters" at $100 billion per year, and projected that it was
increasing at about 6 percent per year -- enough to double every
twelve years, and to total $2 trillion for the period from 2007 to
2020.

The answer: Ride out the consequences of a warming world and we need to prepare now

International lenders like the World Bank have only begun to invest in projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions; they need to give greater emphasis to projects that limit developing countries' vulnerabilities to climate change. The scientific community will need
to do a much better job of predicting climate impacts at a regional and local scale. Governments will need to support this process, to collect and assess the information that results, and develop their own plans.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3980

Electrification of transportation as a response to peaking of world oil production - 19 Dec 2005

http://www.energybulletin.net/14492.html

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