Denial of reality and why doom porn has a role

Roughly half of American's (read: USA) don't believe in anthropogenic global warming. Most don't know what peak oil means. More than half doesn't even believe in evolution. Even those who believe in the science of climate change, are willing to do very little about it themselves.

While figures in Europe and especially Asia are certainly better, they reveal a similar pattern. People either deny reality or accept the facts, but not the consequences. That is, they go on living their lives merrily, as if business as usual is possible from here till eternity. You know, like you and I do.

What are the reasons for this?

In addition to the biological decision mechanisms of our mammalian and reptilian brains, which is nicely explained in the Nate Hagens video lecture a couple of posts down, the reasons could lie in the fact that to think the unthinkable is hard. If one abandons the safe confines of 'current prosperity forever' type of thinking, the realities are pretty grim.

Let's take an example. UK is coming out with their own carbon emission cut plans. How are they going to achieve them? Not by directly cutting emissions, but by buyin offsets from the poor nations. However, in order for the poor nations to be able to sell enough offsets to UK (and to US, continental Europe, Japan, etc) they'd have to cut 125% of their own emissions.

Now, one doesn't have to be an Einstein to understand that either the coming global gap and trade of carbon offsets is a total scam, or there will be a few billion less people on this planet in order for the numbers to make any sense.

That is the reality. No amount of tinkering with 20% less emitting cars is going to help any, when the system is based on growth and nobody is actually willing to downscale to a smaller economy (reason: monetary systems would crash uncontrollably as credit would start to contract in a deflationary spiral).

Thus, we get promises, smoke screens and assurances that everything will be right.

So, we believe in the fairy tales, because the reality is just way too grim to think about:

1. The earth passed it carrying capacity in mid 80s. We are in consumption and population overshoot. Overshoot is followed by an undershoot.
   
   
2. Fossil fuels support 85% of the world population. We are nearing the moment of combined fossil fuels peak.
   
   
3. The world agricultural and ocean fishstock production per capita is already shrinking. The likelihood of a serious worldwide food shortage increases almost every year.
   
   
4. We are constantly increasing our greenhouse gas emissions, while the probable date for irreversible catastrophic climatic change is almost here or perhaps already in the past
   
   
5. We are hell bent on growing our economies: producing and using up more - even when we know biodiversity is collapsing, pollution is increasing and people are not happier than before.
   
   
6. There are no technological fix-it-all solutions to peak oil, deforestation, climate change, groundwater depletion, soil erosion, biodiversity collapse or overpopulation. All solutions require that there are less of us, we consumer increasing less every day and work in an economy totally different than what we are used to.
   
   
7. Historically when civilizations have faces similar organizational issues around resource starvation, they have always collapsed. Not a single existing counter example exists of voluntary powerdown. Only the nations overtaken by others and forced to live below their previous means have been able to prune down. The rest: collapse, disorder, breakdown of civilizations and then eventually - near extinction.

See? That's why thinking about reality is hard. Resist the temptation to click the close button on your browser window and stop to think about your own reaction: why do you and we the people at large do not want to think the inevitable?

Because it means that most likely within your life-time, by the time you are ready to retire, there won't be any welfare, retirement, consumption, easy days, nice beach vacation air-destination holidays, 12 000 km all-the-year-around strawberries, $5 mp3 players from China, disposable diapers, throwaway seasonal clothing, or pretty much anything you take for granted when you look around. It'll be all gone, or pretty much ready to go in the next 20 years.

And your children? That's the hard part, isn't it? What kind of a life do you think they'll be living when 7-9 billion people will be fighting over the last bits of diminishing and still extractable resources, producing soil, potable water and energy?

What do you think happens to the natural pecking order within societies, when the majority of people - instead of machines - have to take care of the daily food production of the rest? When you remove most of the 100-300 energy slaves each of us enjoy today by burning coal, gas and oil in their various forms - what follows?

One doesn't have to be a great fan of disaster movies to understand that various conflicts and non-peaceful resolutions to various scarcities might be highly likely. Or do we honestly believe that all the people with starving children will just go meekly into the night?

Painful, isn't it?

That is precisely why doom porn has a role.

Because it brings pain backwards from the future to the present day. It shows what can be. It forces us to think about the unthinkable.

In the words of Herman Kahn:

"We must appreciate these possibilities. We cannot wish them away."

Not thinking about the unthinkable doesn't make it less likely. The reality is what it is, whethere one likes it or not.

Next post (coming soon) - "Doom porn for all".

Umbrella View of Resource Depletion and Human Behaviour

Stolen from TOD - an excellent overview of human thinking, evolution, energy and economy.

It's an hour of your time, very well spent.

The Slavery of Oil - Francois Collier

An excellent article on energy use, GDP, wealth and energy expenditure by a system modeler Francois Cellier:

The Slavery of Oil
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5388

Short snippets:

"As energy becomes more expensive, we may soon experience a situation where we spend our entire GDP and more just to procure the energy needed to maintain our life style. This claim is what I wanted to verify."

Last year as oil went up to $147/barrel, the procurement of oil alone started to near 12% of GDP. Oil is black gold and will be more so in the future. Even if price tanks this year to $30/barrel, it will multiply in years to come.

"This means that, if ever the price of energy should rise to a level of $0.37/kWh, we would spend our entire GDP just on the procurement of energy. This corresponds to an oil price of $590/barrel."

$590 of 2009 dollars sounds a lot. Still, many analysts have already flashed estimates of $300/barrel (inflatated) dollars. Even inflation adjusted that would be near $200-$250/barrel in a few years. So, roughly 30-40% of GDP.

"Why are the Norwegians spending more energy than the Swedes? There is no good reason for it. They do it, because they can."

This is a good reminder. If you have energy, you will waste it, even when it's expensive, as long as you can make for the additional expenses by selling surplus to others at a higher price. High oil prices only increase consumption in the oil exporting nations, as Middle-East countries so effectively demonstrated us in the past years.

Finland would probably be slightly below and to the right of Sweden. That is, less wealthy, but wasting more energy. Is that something to be proud of? Is that a good position to start from, once we start on a global liquid energy diet?

Lots of more good stuff in the article and in the comments below. Be sure to look at Euan Mearn's related follow up article at TOD also, titled "The Financial Return of Energy Invested".

Images for the Age

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Study. Understand.

Cars without Oil - Can it be done?

One of the recurring themes here and in other oil depletion blogs is the problem of cars. There are about 800 million oil powered motor vehicles on the roads of the world. That number is estimated to go up by a few hundred million by 2020 - even if the economy doesn't recover to BAU levels.

This poses many questions from the point of view of peak oil:

• Assuming near and sharp oil peak, where is the energy going to come from to power the cars?
• If not oil or brain dead bio-fuels, what is the fuel & and the energy carrier?
• Who's going to build the new cars?
• Which country is going to adopt this new system - requiring massive investments in infrastructure?
• Car fleet replacement rate is c. 2% p.a. - how long time will the transformation take?
• Who's going to fund all this massive investment?
• Can it be made economic to compete with ICE cars?
• Will it cut down our CO2 emissions?

Well, looks like Shai Agassi's (ex-SAP/Oracle) new company Better Place is asking exactly these questions and trying to answer them.

Below is Agassi's presentation from TED on the issue. Very good points and worth spending 20 minutes on, even if you don't share his optimism about replacing the worlds cars in a decade or so. Also, it is a very good showcase of rhetoric - enough data points to convince, emotions to draw you in, morality to remove defenses and hope to make you believe.

We need more people and examples like this. What can you do?

G-20 money *might* be enough, but oil will NOT be

Kjell Aleklett of ASPO and professor of physics at Uppsala University puts the G20 stimulus trillions into perspective for the whole world::

"The world’s wealthiest nations, the G20 group, have decided to light a fire but have forgotten a very important detail – to check whether there is sufficient fuel to enable the fire to burn.

During the last 20 years we have had global economic growth of approximately 3% per annum. Fuel use in the form of oil has increased, on average, by half of this rate, i.e. 1.5% per annum.

[W]e show that oil production from those fields that are currently in production will decrease by 6 percent per year during the next 5 years. This means a decrease in the rate of production by 18 million barrels per day after 5 years. The G20 nations want to increase oil use but the forces of Nature say that there will be a decrease.

The same nations that now require increased oil consumption will meet in December with the world’s other nations in Copenhagen. They will then discuss what measures they can take to reduce oil consumption.

What the G20 group should discuss is what investments will be required for this transformation of the energy system to become reality."

So where does it end? Will the next boom be cut-off by another oil crunch, leading again to a new bust, as the newly minted money and debt evaporates? The cycle begins anew, until we hit the oil ceiling again? Repeat ad infinitum?

"Why this is not the 1980s" - Matt Simmons Interview

Very interesting 43 minutes, going back 16 years and comparing the oil price dips of the 80s and 90s to that of last year.

If you are to understand why this is not the 80s in regards to oil, you need to see this.

Video of the day - Natural World - A Farm for the Future

Source: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4152340418943461860

Rebecca Hosking investigates how to transform her family's farm in Devon into a low energy farm to prepare for Peak Oil. Lot's of good stuff on farming, food production and oil dependency.

Tidbit of the day - Drinking Oil

"From start to finish, bottled water consumes between 1100 and 2000 times more energy on average than does tap water.

U.S. bottled-water consumption in 2007 required an energy input equivalent to 32 million to 54 million barrels of oil. Global energy demand for bottled water is three times that amount.

To put that energy use into perspective, Gleick says to imagine that each bottle is up to one-quarter full of oil."

" - Gleick & Cooley, Environmental Research Letters, 3/2009

Banks of the World

You've been warned. Twice.