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The Paradise Perspective: Commentary from a Free and Compassionate Alternate Reality Volume 2, Number 2 The Year Ahead (Part 2 of 2) by Glen Allport Exclusive to STR January
7, 2008
Whenever
you advise a ruler in the way of Tao, Counsel
him not to use force to conquer the universe. For
this would only cause resistance. Thorn
bushes spring up wherever the army has passed. Lean
years follow in the wake of a great war. Just
do what needs to be done. Never
take advantage of power. Achieve
results, But never glory in them. Achieve
results, But never boast. Achieve
results, But never be proud. Achieve
results, Because this is the natural way. Achieve
results, But not through violence. Force
is followed by loss of strength. This
is not the way of Tao. That
which goes against the Tao comes to an early end. ~
The Tao Te
Ching by Lao Tsu, verse Thirty (Translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane
English) -
- - - - Part
One of this column
looked at financial/economic issues and at politics and government action
for the coming year. On the economic side, I discussed why I see the bears
and especially the emphatic bears
as more likely correct than those who expect a mild recession or even
a recovery. In the political sphere, the big question is whether the
American people will begin moving their nation back, to even the slightest
degree, in the direction of liberty. The Ron
Paul campaign for president is the barometer here; Paul is focused
entirely on restraining government power very dramatically, in fact,
including ending the income tax, dismantling the Here
in Part Two, I will focus on three additional factors destined to play
large roles in the coming year: the supply/demand situation for natural
resources (especially oil and metals), the possibility of a serious rise
in food prices (beyond the alarming rise already seen in 2006 and 2007)
due to shortages, and environmental issues. I will end with a look at the
interrelations between these five areas, and at the way we might (but
probably won't) handle the situation for a positive outcome. Part One of
this column discussed the first two areas where I see potential tipping
points for the coming year; below I take up the narrative with number 3. -
3 - Oil,
Metals, and Other Natural Resources The
graph below shows the reality of peak oil, in this case for oil production
in the
http://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/us-production.jpeg You
can see a similar pattern in almost every oil-producing nation. Only a few
oil producers have yet to peak and then begin their slide into ever-lower
production. Oil may be abiotic
or abiogenic in nature (or not) but even if oil fields are slowly being refilled from deep in the Earth as some claim, the
refilling process is clearly not happening fast enough to be much of a
factor. If it were only one or two nations with inverted-V production
curves, I might question the idea of peak oil, but as you can verify here,
this is (and has been for decades) the typical path for every oil field,
for every oil-producing nation, and for the Earth as a whole the
planet having already passed
the peak oil production point in 2006 according to a widely-reported
study by the Energy Watch Group. Despite
much higher prices for oil (and for oil products such as gasoline,
plastics, and fertilizer), production levels remain stagnant or worse. New
production is indeed coming on line, but it is insufficient to offset the
combination of declining production in older fields and increasing demand
from the rapidly-industrializing
So:
if the economic incentives of much higher prices and ever-increasing
demand are not leading to
higher production of oil, what does that tell us? In
a nutshell, the inability of the market to increase production despite
increasing economic incentives to do so suggests that oil production cannot
be increased beyond present levels at least not profitably
even at $100/barrel price levels. That
one sentence encapsulates the death-knell of our oil-based, growth-based
economy. What we make of the situation remains to be seen, but the
future will NOT be like the recent past. We have reached a tipping-point
of historic importance. On a graph (of, in this case, world-wide energy
production per capita), it looks like this:
Dr.
Richard Duncan: The
Peak of World Oil Production and the Road to the Olduvai Gorge (via http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/) Can't
we use solar or wind or something else to replace the oil? Maybe. Eventually.
With the
newest solar panels offering $1/watt efficiency solar is looking
better than ever, and 21st Century technology combined with simple
ingenuity and market forces is bringing other forms of energy into
contention as well. But looking at the actual numbers makes clear how
dramatic is the challenge ahead: From
U.
S. Energy Sources and Consumption by Dr. Gerst A. Gibbon (PowerPoint
slideshow version here) 1
Quad = 1015 BTUs
As
you can see, increasing our solar use by a factor of ten
(from 2004 levels) would bring us to drum roll, please a single
quad, versus the 30.8 quads of
oil and natural gas we are using. And don't forget oil's easy portability,
high energy density, and the multi-trillion-dollar planet-wide
infrastructure already in place for oil, including, most likely, your own
car. And then we have plastics, fertilizer, medicines, and the million
other things made with oil
things that cannot be "made
from solar." I
have no doubt that we will
greatly and rapidly increase our use of solar, wind, and other non-fossil
energy resources, but it will not
be quickly enough to prevent
huge problems. By one estimate, we are already at least 20
years late in beginning mitigation sufficient to prevent major
shortfalls in supply. I remember the gasoline shortages of the 1970s
(skyrocketing prices, gas stations closed for lack of product, lines of
drivers waiting hours for fuel and often being limited to five gallons
at a time), and I fully expect worse much worse in the next few
years. The oil shortfall in 1973 was not a large percentage
and Given
enough time, markets solve most supply/demand problems, and they certainly
do a better job at this than coercive central planning, AKA
"government." But time is
an issue in some cases (thought experiment: you fall out of an
airplane without a parachute; will the market save you?), and we don't
have enough time for a seamless fix of many of today's problems even if we
did have a truly free market. I'll focus on Peak
Oil here, but the same basic points apply to Peak Metals and to
environmental damage and to many other issues: If governments weren't
wasting trillions of dollars on wars and other nonsense and if they weren't
steering oceans of money into pseudo-solutions like ethanol,
then the market might be able
to solve the diminishing oil supply problem before
TEOTWAWKI.
We would still have a painful transition period, but we might recover and
reach a comfortable equilibrium fairly quickly. But governments are doing what they always
do making things worse and wasting resources on a massive scale in the
process so I expect a disaster, by which I mean a long period of
serious-becoming-catastrophic disruption, including a spectacular
population die-off, before things stabilize. For a detailed look at the
supply picture, I can point you to Energyfiles.com, which bills itself as
"the worlds only B2B comprehensive oil and gas production,
consumption and activity forecasting service." The site provides information
and forecasts for oil-producing regions and nations around the world.
Click a few links at the site and check your favorite oil exporter try
Mexico [peak
year: 2004, with production dropping rapidly now] and Saudi
Arabia [peak year forecast for
2018, with a nearly-flat plateau for liquid oil gas is also on the
graph beginning in 2010 or
so]. These are America's
#2 and #3 suppliers, behind Energyfiles.com's
site overview
by Dr Michael R. Smith includes this: ". . . there is no painless way
to fill the gap. Of course it will be filled, partly from traditional
sources, partly from new alternatives, partly from simple efficiencies,
but a large portion will have to be filled by demand destruction. In the
real world demand destruction means poverty and conflict so we should be
working towards reducing our vulnerability to such destruction." The
good news here, for those who worry about global warming, is that all
those charts with the downward curves for oil production are telling us we
don't need to do anything to
reduce oil consumption: that is going to happen very soon whether we like
it or not. Handing control of the Earth to some fascist "third
way" authority headed by Al Gore will not be required. Readers
who are now appropriately terrified may wish to look into the many
alternatives to oil, such as nano-powdered
metal, which may eventually allow for the continuance of civilization
more-or-less as we know it. (Surprisingly enough, powdered metal looks
like a serious long-term contender as an energy carrier, especially since
it can be de-oxidized and reused. Powdered metal is not something you'll
be filling your car's fuel tank with anytime soon, however.) And some
believe Peak Oil is a
corrupt globalist scam. Others say the peak is probably years
away. But many experts believe the
peak has already occurred, although expensive and energy-intensive
replacements for conventional "light, sweet crude" blur the
picture, in part because some need a
half-barrel or more of oil-energy-equivalent to produce a single barrel of
useable oil. (The
previous four paragraphs with some changes are from my The
Key to the Future [July 2007]. This text was in a footnote and applies
perfectly to the topic at hand and as I am sometimes reminded, most
people don't read footnotes. With recycling now all the rage for
environmental reasons, I am reproducing these paragraphs with minimal
editing.) As
mentioned, other resources may be following depletion curves similar to
what we see with oil. Mankind has spent centuries mining near-the-surface,
easy-to-get, on-shore, high-quality ore for most metals, and since the
start of the Industrial Revolution this harvesting of ore has accelerated
dramatically. As with oil, we are not "running out" of metals
but are finding it more difficult and expensive to mine and refine enough
to meet demand and several factors (including population growth, war,
nationalization of resources, environmental concerns, declining production
from high-quality and easy-to-reach assets, and new, high-tech uses for
certain very rare metals) make it unlikely that the situation will
improve. Indeed, with energy
becoming rapidly more expensive, harvesting not only metals but
commodities of nearly every type is becoming more costly. -
4 - Food Among
the more horrifying examples of why government should never
be allowed to "set national policy" for anything
is the decision in the Even
if you never ate a kernel of corn directly, you would be affected by this
policy because millions of farm animals are fed corn. Beef, chicken, pork,
milk and other dairy products, and of course any food product that
includes corn as an ingredient from corn syrup to cereal, from
tortillas to cornbread is now under strong price pressure. With about
one-third of America's corn crop now going to ethanol, you'd have to
be well, maybe
an ethanol-industry spokesperson to suggest that higher food
prices are not due at least in part to this massive
redirection of food into the
making of fuel. This
food-into-fuel disaster is coming at the worst possible time, because
other factors are also causing higher
food prices, and not
only in the United States (see also here
and here).
In addition to the government-required use of ethanol in No
wonder commentators are saying that "the
era of cheap food is over." This will be a nuisance for the rich,
but an increasing problem for the middle class and a life-and-death
issue for the world's poor. -
5 - Environment In
addition to the freshwater crisis and the severe
pollution of rivers and lakes (especially in China and the developing
world generally), other environmental problems will increasingly intrude
on our awareness and I'm not talking about global warming, which I
believe is over-hyped by (in many cases) people hoping to drum up support
for yet more government control of our lives, and hoping for a
globe-spanning, one-world-government at that. The carbon footprints and
lavish living of the would-be beneficiaries of such schemes at every
Important Climate Conference is enough to call participant motives into
question; when someone with a private jet, several large SUVs or other
vehicles, and a 10,000 square-foot home tells me that I need to sacrifice my
lifestyle to save the planet, I can't help being cynical. The
Earth may be warming or not; some scientists see a severe
cooling trend on the way (see also here),
and in any case even as the Arctic is warming, Antarctica and other parts
of the planet are cooling but the Earth is always
warming or cooling, sometimes to the point of mile-thick
ice-sheets in temperate regions or tropical
conditions even in northern latitudes. The "warming/cooling"
debate provides another reason to keep government out of such things; in
the 1970s and 1980s, global cooling was such a concern that Time
Magazine did a feature story on the topic. On
their own, people and market organizations can redirect their approach as
conditions change and our knowledge improves, but once a government policy
gets set in stone, it develops a coercively-funded economic base. Special
interests grow up around the policy (think of the military-industrial
complex or the War on Drugs) and then
change becomes extremely difficult no matter how wrong and damaging
the policy turns out to be. What
I am concerned about is the death
of the oceans. We have already farmed
out many fish species, bringing their populations to the brink of
extinction or even past that point. As the Earth's human population grows
and as millions of the poor move into the middle class in There
is little to go on in terms of history; we haven't killed the oceans
before so we cannot use the speed of past events to forecast the future.
But the amount of damage already done, combined with the classic
supply/demand trainwreck we are seeing with increased demand for seafood
running into the rapid decline of many ocean species, makes me wonder if
2008 won't be the year that the public finally takes notice of the
problem. If we do not reverse the damage to the oceans soon, that damage will have huge and eventually devastating effects on the human world
and not only in terms of seafood pricing and availability. -
- - - - Conclusion 2008
will be a make-or-break year in many areas, and the five tipping points I
have discussed in this two-part column will interact with each other in
powerful but unpredictable ways. The
increase in coercive government power in the The
economic storm created by The
other three tipping points: energy, food, and the environment are all
potentially severe enough to slam into the public's awareness and to spin
both public sentiment and government action in ways that cannot be firmly
predicted. To the extent that people understand the harm done by coercive
government central planning many of the largest problems we face are caused
in whole or in part by government itself, and solving
problems is never a government strong point the freedom movement will
grow, and we will thus be more likely to respond to events intelligently
and to change our responses quickly, if and as necessary. To the extent
the public is convinced that only Rudy "freedom
is about authority" Giuliani or one of his clones can save us
from the various problems (real or otherwise) in life, we are headed for a
new Dark Age. Light or darkness? Freedom or tyranny? Will we respond to the challenges ahead with love and freedom, or with something else? These are always the important questions, and never more so than today. Glen Allport is the author of The Paradise Paradigm: On Creating A World of Compassion, Freedom, and Prosperity and maintains paradise-paradigm.net. This is one in a series of columns on the human condition.
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