untitled
Ra Energy Fdn.
Raleigh Myers
Worksheet bio
http://raenergy.igc.org/bio.html
Blog
http://raenergy.blogspot.com/
If what we are contemplating is not fair to our progeny we have a failed
event in retrospect
--Raleigh
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest
exercises
in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral
justification for
selfishness."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
Solar Budget Solution for The Coming Long
Emergency
The Solar Budget is the discipline we are forced to learn. The
Solar Hydrogen Economy is the solution. Some may not have done the
research and still recite the mantras of the fossil thieves but that is
of no matter when climate change and economic failure is now the
enforcer.
http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-15,GGLD:en&q=Solar+Hydrogen+Economy
Some Century of Empowering Our Progeny Strategies
http://raenergy.igc.org/index2.html
Call to Action blog a virtual seminar for
change
http://www.google.com/search?q=Global+Vote+raenergy&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&filter=02Eigc%2Eorg%2Faction%2Ehtml
"Carol"
<radred@ix.netcom.com>
wrote in message
news:d3s87s$nfl$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu...
Published on Wednesday, April 13, 2005 by Rolling Stone
The Long Emergency
What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to
guzzle?
by James Howard Kunstler
A few weeks ago, the price of oil ratcheted above fifty-five dollars
a
barrel, which is about twenty dollars a barrel more than a year ago.
The
next day, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York
Times
business section. Apparently, the price of oil is not considered
significant
news, even when it goes up five bucks a barrel in the span of ten days.
That
same day, the stock market shot up more than a hundred points because,
CNN
said, government data showed no signs of inflation. Note to clueless
nation:
Call planet Earth.
Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that
"people
cannot stand too much reality." What you're about to read may
challenge your
assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind
of
world into which events are propelling us. We are in for a rough
ride
through uncharted territory.
It has been very hard for Americans -- lost in dark raptures of
nonstop
infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring -- to make
sense
of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of
everyday
life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of
9/11,
America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time
the
Long Emergency.
Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is
no
exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural
gas
underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life -- not
to
mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air
conditioning,
cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded
music,
movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense -- you name
it.
The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering
global-energy
predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That
argument
states that we don't have to run out of oil to start having severe
problems
with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to
slip
over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of
steady
depletion.
The term "global oil-production peak" means that a turning
point will come
when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given
year
and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline. It is
usually
represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the top of the
curve,
the halfway point of the world's all-time total endowment, meaning half
the
world's oil will be left. That seems like a lot of oil, and it is,
but
there's a big catch: It's the half that is much more difficult to
extract,
far more costly to get, of much poorer quality and located mostly in
places
where the people hate us. A substantial amount of it will never be
extracted.
The United States passed its own oil peak -- about 11 million barrels
a
day -- in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004
it
ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from
natural-gas
condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now.
That
means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio
will
continue to worsen.
The U.S. peak in 1970 brought on a portentous change in geoeconomic
power.
Within a few years, foreign producers, chiefly OPEC, were setting the
price
of oil, and this in turn led to the oil crises of the 1970s. In
response,
frantic development of non-OPEC oil, especially the North Sea fields
of
England and Norway, essentially saved the West's ass for about two
decades.
Since 1999, these fields have entered depletion. Meanwhile,
worldwide
discovery of new oil has steadily declined to insignificant levels in
2003
and 2004.
Some "cornucopians" claim that the Earth has something like a
creamy nougat
center of "abiotic" oil that will naturally replenish the great
oil fields
of the world. The facts speak differently. There has been no
replacement
whatsoever of oil already extracted from the fields of America or any
other
place.
Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates
of
when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010.
In
2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up,
and
revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi
Arabia
proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so,
the
most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur
that
2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.
It will change everything about how we live.
To aggravate matters, American natural-gas production is also declining,
at
five percent a year, despite frenetic new drilling, and with the
potential
of much steeper declines ahead. Because of the oil crises of the 1970s,
the
nuclear-plant disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the
acid-rain
problem, the U.S. chose to make gas its first choice for
electric-power
generation. The result was that just about every power plant built
after
1980 has to run on gas. Half the homes in America are heated with gas.
To
further complicate matters, gas isn't easy to import. Here in North
America,
it is distributed through a vast pipeline network. Gas imported
from
overseas would have to be compressed at minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit
in
pressurized tanker ships and unloaded (re-gasified) at special terminals,
of
which few exist in America. Moreover, the first attempts to site
new
terminals have met furious opposition because they are such ripe targets
for
terrorism.
Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly
understood
by the public and even our leaders. This is going to be a permanent
energy
crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with the disruptions
of
climate change, epidemic disease and population overshoot to produce
higher
orders of trouble.
We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed
conditions.
No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life
the
way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of
it.
The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign
of
cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome,
leading
many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will
come
true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing
ardently
for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative
replacements.
The widely touted "hydrogen economy" is a particularly cruel
hoax. We are
not going to replace the U.S. automobile and truck fleet with vehicles
run
on fuel cells. For one thing, the current generation of fuel cells
is
largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural gas. The other
way
to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would be electrolysis of
water
using power from hundreds of nuclear plants. Apart from the dim prospect
of
our building that many nuclear plants soon enough, there are also
numerous
severe problems with hydrogen's nature as an element that present
forbidding
obstacles to its use as a replacement for oil and gas, especially in
storage
and transport.
Wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with
"renewables" are also
unrealistic. Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face not only
the
enormous problem of scale but the fact that the components require
substantial amounts of energy to manufacture and the probability that
they
can't be manufactured at all without the underlying support platform of
a
fossil-fuel economy. We will surely use solar and wind technology
to
generate some electricity for a period ahead but probably at a very
local
and small scale.
Virtually all "biomass" schemes for using plants to create
liquid fuels
cannot be scaled up to even a fraction of the level at which things
are
currently run. What's more, these schemes are predicated on using oil
and
gas "inputs" (fertilizers, weed-killers) to grow the biomass
crops that
would be converted into ethanol or bio-diesel fuels.
This is a net energy loser -- you might as well just burn the inputs and
not
bother with the biomass products. Proposals to distill trash and waste
into
oil by means of thermal depolymerization depend on the huge waste
stream
produced by a cheap oil and gas economy in the first place.
Coal is far less versatile than oil and gas, extant in less
abundant
supplies than many people assume and fraught with huge ecological
drawbacks -- as a contributor to greenhouse "global warming"
gases and many
health and toxicity issues ranging from widespread mercury poisoning to
acid
rain. You can make synthetic oil from coal, but the only time this was
tried
on a large scale was by the Nazis under wartime conditions, using
impressive
amounts of slave labor.
If we wish to keep the lights on in America after 2020, we may indeed
have
to resort to nuclear power, with all its practical problems and
eco-conundrums. Under optimal conditions, it could take ten years to get
a
new generation of nuclear power plants into operation, and the price may
be
beyond our means. Uranium is also a resource in finite supply. We are
no
closer to the more difficult project of atomic fusion, by the way, than
we
were in the 1970s.
The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period
of
potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously,
geopolitical maneuvering around the world's richest energy regions
has
already led to war and promises more international military conflict.
Since
the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world's remaining oil
supplies,
the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in
effect,
opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to
secure
Iraq's oil but to modify and influence the behavior of neighboring
states
around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. The results
have
been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in that part
of
the world are not something we can feel altogether confident
about.
And then there is the issue of China, which, in 2004, became the
world's
second-greatest consumer of oil, surpassing Japan. China's surging
industrial growth has made it increasingly dependent on the imports we
are
counting on. If China wanted to, it could easily walk into some of
these
places -- the Middle East, former Soviet republics in central Asia --
and
extend its hegemony by force. Is America prepared to contest for this oil
in
an Asian land war with the Chinese army? I doubt it. Nor can the
U.S.
military occupy regions of the Eastern Hemisphere indefinitely, or hope
to
secure either the terrain or the oil infrastructure of one distant,
unfriendly country after another. A likely scenario is that the U.S.
could
exhaust and bankrupt itself trying to do this, and be forced to
withdraw
back into our own hemisphere, having lost access to most of the
world's
remaining oil in the process.
We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this
predicament. President George W. Bush has been briefed on the dangers of
the
oil-peak situation as long ago as before the 2000 election and
repeatedly
since then. In March, the Department of Energy released a report
that
officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real
and
states plainly that "the world has never faced a problem like this.
Without
massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will
be
pervasive and will not be temporary."
Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other
arrangements
for the way we live in the United States.
America is in a special predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices
we
made as a society in the twentieth century.
Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot away and to
replace
them with suburbia, which had the additional side effect of trashing a
lot
of the best farmland in America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as
the
greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has
a
tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we
will
defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible
liability.
Before long, the suburbs will fail us in practical terms. We made
the
ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway strips,
fried-food
shacks and shopping malls the basis of our economy, and when we have to
stop
making more of those things, the bottom will fall out.
The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale
and
re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind
of
communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way
we
work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become
profoundly
and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and
much
more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large
scale,
whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as
Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness
fall
away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of
economic
losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved
former
middle class.
Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency.
As
industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based
inputs,
we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live,
and
do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the
mid-twenty-first
century may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high
tech,
not "services" like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers
to tourists.
Farming. This is no doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises
extremely
difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of
work.
The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century
has
destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in
most
places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and
improvisational. Food production will necessarily be much more
labor-intensive than it has been for decades. We can anticipate the
re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring class. It will
be
composed largely of the aforementioned economic losers who had to
relinquish
their grip on the American dream. These masses of disentitled people
may
enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in
exchange
for food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will
remain
fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.
The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not survive
far
into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels" won't
be such a
bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The national chain stores'
12,000-mile
manufacturing supply lines could easily be interrupted by military
contests
over oil and by internal conflict in the nations that have been supplying
us
with ultra-cheap manufactured goods, because they, too, will be
struggling
with similar issues of energy famine and all the disorders that go with
it.
As these things occur, America will have to make other arrangements for
the
manufacture, distribution and sale of ordinary goods. They will probably
be
made on a "cottage industry" basis rather than the factory
system we once
had, since the scale of available energy will be much lower -- and we
are
not going to replay the twentieth century.
Tens of thousands of the common products we enjoy today, from paints
to
pharmaceuticals, are made out of oil. They will become increasingly
scarce
or unavailable. The selling of things will have to be reorganized at
the
local scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter
distances. It is almost certain to result in higher costs for the things
we
buy and far fewer choices.
The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the
least..
With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads
will
surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than
the
public realizes. If the "level of service" (as traffic
engineers call it) is
not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and
escalate
quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates
are
either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.
America today has a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed
of..
Neither of the two major presidential candidates in 2004 mentioned
railroads, but if we don't refurbish our rail system, then there may be
no
long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few decades from
now.
The commercial aviation industry, already on its knees financially,
is
likely to vanish. The sheer cost of maintaining gigantic airports may
not
justify the operation of a much-reduced air-travel fleet. Railroads are
far
more energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes, and they can be run
on
anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also
far
more economical to maintain than our highway network.
The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones
surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute
locally
sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns
and
smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which
will
probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful
and
tumultuous.
In many American cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis,
that
process is already well advanced. Others have further to fall. New York
and
Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being oversupplied with
gigantic
buildings out of scale with the reality of declining energy supplies.
Their
former agricultural hinterlands have long been paved over.
They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of necrotic suburbia that
will
only amplify and reinforce the cities' problems. Still, our cities
occupy
important sites. Some kind of urban entities will exist where they are
in
the future, but probably not the colossi of twentieth-century
industrialism..
Some regions of the country will do better than others in the Long
Emergency. The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that
it
prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late twentieth century.
I
predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become
significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as
well
as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air
conditioning..
I'm not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for different reasons.
I
think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the
grievances
of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the delusions
of
Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded behavior of
Southern
culture includes an outsized notion of individualism and the belief
that
firearms ought to be used in the defense of it. This is a poor recipe
for
civic cohesion.
The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems,
from
poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss. The
Pacific
Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better
prospects..
I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy or
despotism
and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social
traditions
and keep them in operation at some level.
These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is
going
to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that
this
is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its
knees
by a world-wide power shortage.
The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope -- that is, a
deep
and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is
any
positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits
of
close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and
physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that
really
matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead
of
being merely entertained to avoid boredom. Years from now, when we
hear
singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our
whole
hearts.
Adapted from The Long Emergency, 2005, by James Howard Kunstler,
and
reprinted with permission of the publisher, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
) 2005 Rolling Stone
###
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Franklin Roosevelt said that the domination of our nation by large
corporations is the
definition of fascism.
http://www.rense.com/general63/ssi.htm
"Fascism should more appropriately be called CORPORATISM because
it is a merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito
Mussolini (from Encyclopedia Italiana, Giovanni Gentile, editor).
http://raenergy.igc.org/republicanfascistparty.html
Ra Energy Fdn.
Raleigh Myers
Worksheet bio
http://raenergy.igc.org/bio.html
Blog
http://raenergy.blogspot.com/
Call to Action blog a virtual seminar for change
http://www.google.com/search?q=Global+Vote+raenergy&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&filter=02Eigc%2Eorg%2Faction%2Ehtml
Newsgroups beginning in the eighties click on date and web
http://groups.google.com/groups?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&q=%22Ra+Energy+Fdn%2E%22
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can
change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. - - Margaret
Mead
Let us experiment with laws and customs, with money systems and
governments, until we chart the one true course - until we find the
majesty of our proper orbit as the planets above have found theirs&
And then at last we shall move all together in the harmony of our sphere
under the great impulse of a single creation - one unity, one system, one
design.
Roger Bacon
posted by Raleigh myers @ 4/17/2005
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