Saudi Arabia to U.S.: Drop Dead

Dubya went begging, cowboy hat in hand, for the sheiks to open their spigots for all us poor Americans. Their answer: shove off. Some superpower.

An interesting question arises, however: whether the Saudis CAN increase production. Everyone assumes that they can increase oil flows with the flip of a switch, doubtless based on their stated reserves. However, based on the research of Matthew Simmons and Stuart Saniford, there is substantial evidence that Saudi Arabian oil production has begun to go into decline. As Simmons has stated, if Saudi Arabia is in decline, then ipso facto the world has reached peak oil.

It's difficult to say of course, and only the benefit of hindsight will tell us whether this is the case. It is and it is not in Saudi Arabia's interest to allow the price of oil to remain at these historically high levels (today broaching $127 per barrel). Given that they are keenly aware that their reserves are finite, it is in their interest to get as much lucre as possible for what they can still pump. However, at a high enough price, the world economy will decline and, subsequently, so too the price of oil. Further, high prices will only stoke greater demand for alternative fuels. Saudi Arabia would likely only be willing to accept these latter conditions if they had little control over current high prices due to constrained supplies.

When we await our alternative energy future, we often do so with current assumptions of the existence of plentiful energy and accompanying wealth. However, investment resources will dry up as quickly as the empty petroleum wells in Saudi Arabia if those assumptions do not pertain. We saw how quickly billions of dollars disappeared with the flash of a computer screen during the credit crisis during last summer and in recent months. While we wait for market signals to kick in, the Saudis are enjoying the remaining years of their party while we willfully cling to the belief that the solution lies in their simply letting us buy more of their oil. Because we want it, it must be there (this is the most pervasive and generalized form of faith of our age, infecting people on the Left and Right alike). Just so, we demonstrate that the wages of gluttony is a loss of freedom and abject humiliation at the feet kings from the likes of whom we once declared independence.

Graduation Weekend at Georgetown

So many happy, expectant faces. Visions of success, travel, adventure. Proud parents. Professors in robes, as if they profess their faith. The students are good kids, and have been taught well by their elders about a world that has existed for about 150 years and yet which increasingly seems fragile, tenuous, even fanciful. They have few resources, have been taught little that will stand them in good stead, for a world that will be different. It all seems a bit surreal to me. I wish them all well - and hope that their future will not feel like a mugging.




(h/t J.P.)

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Jeremy Beer has called my attention to these lines from T.S. Eliot, in "The Idea of a Christian Society," written in 1939, nearly 70 years ago.

"We are being made aware that the organisation of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly. I need only mention, as an instance now very much before the public eye, the results of ‘soil-erosion’—the exploitation of the earth, on a vast scale for two generations, for commercial profit: immediate benefits leading to dearth and desert. . . . [A] wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and . . . the consequence is an inevitable doom. For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanised, commercialised, urbanised way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet."

Why was it possible for a renowned conservative to write such a thing over half a century ago, and now for such a statement - were it written today - doubtlessly to be reviled by conservatives who are deeply wedded to "organisation of society on the principle of private profit"? Certainly the Cold War was the intervening event that made possible, even necessary, the coalition - or fusion - between traditionalists and economic libertarians. Even as we can agree that Communism was a malevolent, pernicious, and false political dogma, can it be that one of its most enduring and lamentable legacies was this coalition in the West - in particular, the ascent of economic individualism over a healthy culture? If so, can we be so certain that we really did "win" the Cold War?

Certainly not if it turns out that Eliot was right - and growing evidence suggest that he was. We are indeed confronting alarming levels of topsoil erosion across the world, the result of the very efficiency of industrial production. Possessing the "wrong attitude" toward nature, we ultimately strip the world of any respect and sanctity, reflecting ultimately - as Eliot suggests - "a wrong attitude towards God." Or, as Berry has written, "if we understand that no artist - no maker - can work except by reworking the works of Creation, then we can see that by our work we reveal what we think of the works of God" ("Christianity and the Survival of Creation"). Our work today is one of profanation and ingratitude.

We are literally on the path to starvation because of the plenty we are producing. For starters, we will need to change our basic paradigm, as the assumptions of the above-linked article reveal:

"Organic farming methods also can reduce soil loss. [Such methods] have shown a marked increase in soil health, water retention and regrowth when organic methods are used rather than the traditional methods."

That is, organic farming is considered a new-fangled alternative to "traditional methods," i.e., industrial farming. I don't think I have to explain what's wrong with this formulation.

Peak Oil - Liberals vs. "Conservatives"

In a column yesterday, Paul Krugman discusses the widely held theory that the recent spike in oil prices is the newest financial "bubble." He entertains various possibilities and concludes that financial speculation is not the most fundamental basis of the rise in oil prices.

"The only way speculation can have a persistent effect on oil prices, then, is if it leads to physical hoarding — an increase in private inventories of black gunk. This actually happened in the late 1970s, when the effects of disrupted Iranian supply were amplified by widespread panic stockpiling.

"But it hasn’t happened this time: all through the period of the alleged bubble, inventories have remained at more or less normal levels. This tells us that the rise in oil prices isn’t the result of runaway speculation; it’s the result of fundamental factors, mainly the growing difficulty of finding oil and the rapid growth of emerging economies like China. The rise in oil prices these past few years had to happen to keep demand growth from exceeding supply growth."

In short, the rising cost of oil is due to rising demand and constant, even declining, supply.

What's most interesting about Krugman's column is his observation of the political reaction to the growing evidence of constrained oil supplies. He writes, "Traditionally, denunciations of speculators come from the left of the political spectrum. In the case of oil prices, however, the most vociferous proponents of the view that it’s all the speculators’ fault have been conservatives — people whom you wouldn’t normally expect to see warning about the nefarious activities of investment banks and hedge funds. The explanation of this seeming paradox is that wishful thinking has trumped pro-market ideology. After all, a realistic view of what’s happened over the past few years suggests that we’re heading into an era of increasingly scarce, costly oil."

The denial of the growing evidence of - yes - "peak oil" by commentators on the Right resembles their vociferous denial of global warming (more sophisticated responses now reveal that, all along, it wasn't the reality of global warming that bothered them; it was the implications. And they are daunting).

The same is true of the reaction on the Right about Peak Oil (in fairness, there's a good deal of techno-optimism on the Left as well; while the Right thinks there's plenty of oil - enough in ANWR to run our civilization for another century, it is implied - the Left thinks we're going to replace oil with algae and fairy dust.)

Krugman's column prompted Andrew Leonard over at Salon.com (their in-house Peak Oil man - h/t Joe Knippenberg) to post a smart column about "the peak oil culture wars," observing what should be obvious at this point - the debate isn't about the facts, it's about the implications. And, people on the Right - "fighting like caged rats" - don't want to entertain the possibility that all those "dirty Gaia-worshipping hippies might be right" - and worse still, we might have to change our behavior.

Writes Leonard:

"Partisan conservatives pooh-pooh peak oil (and human-caused climate change) because they think that to concede that these challenges are real and must be confronted is to acknowledge that greed is not always good, and that free market capitalism must be restrained, or at least tinkered with substantially. Peak oil and climate change are fronts in the culture wars, and to some conservatives, watching the price of oil rise as the Arctic ice melts, it might feel like being in Germany at the close of World War II, with the Russians advancing on one front while U.S.-led forces come from the other. The propositions that cheap oil is running out and the world is getting hotter -- as a result of our own activities -- threaten a whole way of life. The very idea that dirty Gaia-worshipping hippies might be right is absolute anathema.

"Given that many on the left also see peak oil and climate change as cultural battlefields, as weapons with which to assault enemies whose values they politically and aesthetically oppose (see James Kunstler), it's no wonder that some conservatives are fighting back like caged rats, or that they want to blame speculators for oil prices, or biased scientists for climate change."

My own view is that this debate is going to collapse as more people realize that our high oil prices are NOT the consequence of financiers or the evil oil companies stoking profits (all along, their production of oil is declining), but the cold hard facts of reality. The tired Left-Right consensus - one essentially designed to obscure that there is no real disagreement about whether a growth economy premised on an itinerant and rootless workforce is desirable - is going to collapse and something else will take its place. The great fear is that a new consensus will form that someone is to blame, and we have plenty of weapons to get what we want, or at least to distract us from our penury. The great possibility is that we will realize that a future of less driving, stable neighborhoods, greater localism, the reinvigoration of diverse local cultures isn't as bad as our kneejerk panic about impending change would lead us to believe. Surely this is something a "conservative" would not object to?

What may be most productive in coming years is to stop calling this cadre of economic libertarians - what we now call "the Right" or even conservatism - conservatives. There is nothing they want to conserve - nothing in the natural or moral ecology. They are rapacious exploiters who want to use every last natural and cultural reservoir for their own immediate profit - even at the price of leaving nothing for their children. Recall, it was Dick Cheney who said "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis all by itself for a sound, comprehensive energy policy." Probably true, but it's a damned good place to start, and we fool ourselves if we think we are not going to need substantial reservoirs of personal and political virtue in coming years.

Soon, if not soon enough, I predict, there will be a party of conservatives and a party of "live now'ers." Live now'ers have original sin on their side, and are likely to win a lot of votes until it's clear that the grasshopper was wrong and the ant was right. Then they will tell us it's time to get the guns. Are you sure that's the side you want to be on?

Y Reed Bukes?

Mark Bauerlein nails it - we're seeing the rise of "the Dumbest Generation." Will Tom Brokaw Jr. write a book about them? Will there be anyone left to read it?

A snippet:

Mr. Bauerlein presents a wealth of data to show that young people, with the aid of digital media, are intensely focusing on themselves, their peers and the present moment. YouTube and MySpace, he says, are revealingly named: These and other top Web destinations are "peer to peer" environments in the sense that their juvenile users have populated them with predictably juvenile content. The sites where students spend most of their time "harden adolescent styles and thoughts, amplifying the discourse of the lunchroom and keg party, not spreading the works of the Old Masters."

If the new hours in front of the computer were subtracting from television time, there might be something encouraging to say about the increasingly interactive quality of youthful diversions. The facts, at least as Mr. Bauerlein marshals them, show otherwise: TV viewing is constant. The printed word has paid a price – from 1981 to 2003, the leisure reading of 15- to 17-year-olds fell to seven minutes a day from 18. But the real action has been in multitasking. By 2003, children were cramming an average of 8½ hours of media consumption a day into just 6½ hours – watching TV while surfing the Web, reading while listening to music, composing text messages while watching a movie.

This daily media binge isn't making students smarter. The National Assessment of Educational Progress has pegged 46% of 12th-graders below the "basic" level of proficiency in science, while only 2% are qualified as "advanced." Likewise in the political arena: Participatory Web sites may give young people a "voice," but their command of the facts is shaky. Forty-six percent of high-school seniors say it's " 'very important' to be an active and informed citizen," but only 26% are rated as proficient in civics. Between 1992 and 2005, the NAEP reported, 12th-grade reading skills dropped dramatically. (As for writing, Naomi Baron, in her recent book, "Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World," cites the NAEP to note that "only 24% of twelfth-graders are 'capable of composing organized, coherent prose in clear language with correct spelling and grammar.' ") Conversation is affected, too. Mr. Bauerlein sums up part of the problem: "The verbal values of adulthood and adolescence clash, and to enter adult conditions, individuals must leave the verbal mores of high school behind. The screen blocks the ascent."

Faculty are constantly being pushed by administrators and their lackeys to incorporate more technology into their classroom "experiences." We are told to be electronically "with it," to promote online discussion, to increase opportunities to foster online communities and to use electronic interactive materials in lectures and discussions. It is implied that we should avoid circumstances where students are passive - such as during lectures (with JUST WORDS! The horror.... the horror....) or reading books. Anyone with half a brain knows that a lecture (at least a decent one) and a book (at least a decent one) is a remarkably interactive experience. However, it requires the hard work of attention and concentration, the ability to think, ponder, evaluate, criticize and incorporate even as the words continue. When we, the faculty, are told that we should liven up our classrooms with electronic bells and whistles, what we are really being told is to adjust ourselves to our students' shorter attention spans and the inability to concentrate for more than several nanoseconds on a line of thought or argument. Maybe we should meet our students more than halfway and just run our classes on Facebook. We could see which professors get "friended" the most!!

What is most alarming about the ascent of the electronic media is the utter decline of the book. Yes, our students read online, but what they mostly read is the parade of silliness on Facebook and MySpace. Few students read for the sake of reading, i.e., something that is not assigned. The passionate conversations about certain books some of us might remember having at 3 a.m. in the dormitories or on the campus lawn have given way to 24-hour glowing computer screens with entranced, solitary students in the reflected glare. If there is one thing we can do as educators, it's not to perfect our "assessment" metrics, nor to create more opportunities for "group learning," nor to jive up our class with another idiotic and mind-numbing PowerPoint presentation. No, the one thing we can do is to encourage our students to read good books and to talk about them with one another. It's an unsexy low tech option - too simple and difficult for our administrators to embrace - but the one thing needful on our campuses today.

We'll Think Up Something

Our techno-optimists continue to make a major category mistake: when responding to concerns about peak oil production, inevitably they reply that "technology" will come to the rescue. We're just a few gadgets away from the Jetsons and Knight Rider. We'll think of something.

The thought seems not to have occurred to them that technology is not, and cannot create energy (I guess they were absent on the day Mr. Verdigris covered the Laws of Thermodynamics in Physics 101). Yes, perhaps technology can marginally assist in the retrieval and more efficient utilization of various energy forms, but its cheerleaders wholly overlook the essential fact that it is not finally technology that extracts energy, but energy that extracts energy. We've been lucky (or damned unlucky) the past 150 years to have an energy source that required almost no energy to extract. Put a straw in the ground and watch it bubble up. What we're finding now is NOT that we lack energy - there's plenty of various forms of energy in the world - but that it's damned expensive to collect and utilize it. Which is to say, we need more to get less. That's when we start complaining about how expensive everything is...

To put an even finer point on it: technology does not create energy; energy powers technology. Take energy out of the equation, and technology is the main character in a Jules Verne novel. Leonardo DaVinci knew how to design an airplane; he just didn't have fossil fuels to bring plans to life. We will continue to know how to fly airplanes; we just won't have enough fuel to do so. (I was in the Quad Cities of Illinois over the weekend - a very good time was had by all - and it was disclosed in the Rock Island Argus, newspaper of record, that the direct flight from Moline to Las Vegas was slated to cease operation. It is increasingly too expensive for airlines to fly to smaller airports, and increasingly too expensive for people to gamble when most discretionary income goes toward filling gas tanks. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Las Vegas is a city with no future. Ditto Phoenix and Albuquerque, among others).

Case in point: it's getting difficult to get valuable metals out of the ground (among them uranium - the substance that's supposed to replace petroleum) because of energy shortages. According to this story on Bloomberg, "Runaway growth in emerging markets that's squeezing world oil supplies has led to electricity shortages, cutting output of commodities needed for ever-rising demand. Platinum jumped to a record in January after mines in South Africa closed for five days as utilities rationed power. Cobalt gained 58 percent in the past year as production growth in the Democratic Republic of Congo was limited by electricity supply. 'There will be a sustained level of risk from power shortages in the commodities markets,' said Michael Lewis, London-based global head of commodities research at Deutsche Bank AG. `We are pricing bigger supply losses as a result.'" I.e., less energy means less ability to get stuff we want. Including energy.

My strong suspicion is that we are going to find that much of what we regard as our technological prowess was actually our ability to burn fuel ever more creatively. Technology has been a particularly glitzy form of energy use, but little else. We suppose that technology will create us more energy, when it's actually using it up at astounding rates. We will find the inexorable laws of "EROEI" - energy returned on energy invested - will limit how much technology we can utilize when energy becomes constrained. We've got lots of fancy devices for extracting minerals and metals from the earth, but those technologies are being "underutilized" because of energy shortages. We've got lots of airplanes to carry people from Moline to Las Vegas, but mobility is getting too expensive. We've got lots of tractors - some with GPS systems, I learned at the John Deere pavilion in Moline (since the acreage of industrial farms is so immense that farmers need to be guided by satellite to their houses at night), but not enough fertilizer to spread on the crops (<==Read this link. And buy seeds).

Earth to techno-optimists: technology isn't going to make something out of nothing - especially when you need to plug it in to do anything. It's helping bring on the shortages it won't solve. Time to wake up and smell the humus.

Borrowing from Hu to Pay Abdullah

As if we needed any further evidence of the financial foolishness of our nation: it's coming to people's attention that the forthcoming "rebate checks" that were approved several months ago by suspiciously cooperative politicians, in order to stimulate the economy, will in fact be going to OPEC to pay for higher fuel costs (or, indirectly, to farmers who, in turn, buy fertilizers and pesticides that are made primarily of fossil fuels). In the midst of a "war against terror," our government is sending cash to its citizenry that will be used to further enrich the autocrats of the Middle East, especially to that nation that provided the dominant number of footsoldiers who flew the planes into the buildings of New York and Washington. Do we suppose that none of our largesse will find its way to outfits like bin Laden's?

No less ironic is the fact that the Federal government will go further into debt to finance this little boondoggle for our Middle Eastern friends, primarily borrowing the funds from the Chinese and other Asian nations. Coming or going, we continue the one time gigantic firesale of America to nations that do not mean us well.

My favorite little tidbit from the Bloomberg story linked above: OPEC and WalMart will be in competition for the rebate dollars. But here again we fool ourselves if we think this is a real competition. WalMart buys the dominant amount of its products from China, who in turn purchases resins for the massive quantities of plastics it manufactures from - yes, you guessed it - OPEC. Either way, it's a win-win for the Saudis and the Chinese and an absolute disaster for our children, upon whom we'll be saddling the debt from our continued profligacy and adding to the pile of discardable plastic while burning through the remaining cheap energy that we'll be purchasing with the largesse from the government. Where's the outrage? We're too busy shopping to notice.