Life after oil

Plastics now and forever!

2011-03-26T17:39:00.000+01:00

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The work on this blog has been at a standstill for half a year. There are two reasons for that. All texts here are translations of my original Swedish-language texts about different aspects of peak oil and related subjects. Due to lack of time, I have (and will) prioritize my Swedish-language blog. The second reason is that I had so much work to do that also my Swedish-language blog was in hibernation during the last three months of 2010.

The die-hard reader will always have the option of google-translating my Swedish-language texts into the language of your choice. I have for example recently written a series of texts about "peak oil computing". I have also written a series of texts about recent unrest and uprisings in the Arab world (using Egypt as a prism) that have little to do with a thirst for democracy and much to do with public dissatisfaction the plight of the dirt-poor and with the effects of resource challenges such as oil, food and water.

Anyway, this is the independent sequel of my last blog post about Alan Weisman's book "The World Without Us" which I published here almost half a year ago. In the preceding text, I did not cover the one chapter in the book that dealt with plastic ("Polymers Are Forever"), but rather saved that discussion for this text. First, a super-brief introduction to the connection between plastic and oil, by the (Swedish-language) blogger Jonas sustainable blog:

"In principle, all plastics is made from raw materials derived from oil. Packages, bottles, electronics, furniture, shoes and clothes. All is largely made of plastic. In many applications, plastics is superior to other materials with regards to density and strength. It is also cheap to manufacture plastic products."

The use of plastic materials has virtually exploded after World War II. Small (2 mm) plastic cylinders called “nurdles” is the raw material of the plastic industry. These cylinders are melted and then shaped into anything and everything. We produce more than 5 000 000 000 million nurdles each year (100 billion kilograms). The U.S. is a net exporter of plastic and 4.6% of all petroleum in the U.S. is used to produce plastics (2006).

Of all the plastics ever made, only a minor part has been recycled or burned. Unlike cardboard or aluminium bottles, not all plastic is equal:

”There are so many different types [of plastics], and so much of it really can’t be recovered because either volumes aren’t sufficient or it really doesn’t have a lot of value in terms of the marketplace”

The rest of all plastic ever made, maybe up to 1 billion tons (the U.S. produces 30 million tons of new plastics each year), is still out there somewhere in the environment. Until evolution produces microbes with plastic-degrading enzymes, there is nothing in nature that can break down plastic. This can be compares with the discussion about vulcanized rubber in the previous text.

Plastic on land which is not buried in a garbage dump is broken down slowly by the sun's ultraviolet (UV) rays - but plastic in water is another story. Plastic floating on a water surface is cooled down and may be protected from the sun’s rays by algae. Plastic that does not float in the water is completely safe from UV rays.

Unfortunately, a not unsignificant share of the plastics that have been produced over the past 60 years has ended up in the oceans. For some decades, the same forces that break down stones into sand over time - wind, waves and tides – have grinded down plastic into smaller and smaller pieces. Over time plastic pieces have thus become smaller plastic pieces and then even smaller plastic pieces - but there is no evidence that plastic of any size or shape is chemically degraded and disappears from the seas.

Jellyfish and birds eat small colorful plastic balls in the belief that they are fish eggs (yellow-brown ones are mistakenly taken for krill). For some reason, nurdles and other small plastic fragments unfortunately act as magnets for a variety of hazardous chemicals. What are the effects when the extremely unpleasant PCB chemicals (previously used as softeners in plastics but banned in the late 1970's) are released from the 1960's plastics it is bound to during hundreds of years to come in a worst-case scenario? Nobody knows.

When plastics is broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, it finds its way further and further down the marine food chain. We can be horrified by images of dead birds, animals choking on plastic bags or entangled in the left-behind plastics from a six-pack of beer in the woods, but what happens when krill or even smaller plankton ingest plastic particles? These creatures can not break down the plastics, and if a sufficiently small organism eats a sufficiently small plastic particle, one of two things can happen. Either the plastic particle is not small enough, gets stuck in the intestinal canal and kills the organism, or the plastic particle is small enough and passes right through the organism.

But what happens on the way? Could it be that the plastic particle emits chemicals that have been bound to it, or that the particle at some future date (if or when it finally breaks down) will give off substances that are toxic, or in other ways dangerous to living organisms? Nobody knows, but we know that all living things in the oceans, including the smallest of organisms at the bottom of the marine food chain, will soon ingest a dose of plastic particles. Will the nasty coloring chemicals that are often found in brightly colored plastics become concentrated higher up in the food chain? Nobody knows.

If we humans disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow, the plastic we have manufactured would persist for a long time. Plastics has been around for only a few decades, and that is not long enough for us to know what the long term effects that these materials have. We may note that of all the hundreds of different kinds of plastics there are, none has died a natural death yet, and we thus have very little knowledge about what such a death looks like. One may reflect upon the fact that just as there is a lot that we don't know about the dangers of plastic, there was a lot we didn't know and could not have guessed about the dangers of fossil fuels 100 years ago (noise, exhaust fumes, smog, carcinogens, global warming etc.).

Since most plastics floats, the majority of all that there is in the oceans is transported by currents and accumulates on our beaches and in other places. The most conspicuous place where plastic flock when it is about to “die” was discovered (or rather made known to the general public) in the late 1990s and is located in the Pacific between Hawaii and California. That is the home of the country- or maybe even continent-sized North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, also known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

In this huge floating rubbish dump, much of what has blown into the water during the last 50 years in an area the size of half of all Pacific coastlines eventually end up. There are endless amounts of plastic bags, plastic caps, plastic cups, plastic foil, fishing nets, balloons and so on. The total amount of plastic in this artificial continent is unknown but was estimated to weigh 3 million tons and to cover more than 25 million square kilometers in 2005 (i.e. almost 60 times larger than a large European country such as Sweden).

The image of a continent of plastic is actually misleading, since most of the "continent" only consists of (strongly) elevated concentrations of plastic particles at or near the surface of the ocean. These particles can not be seen from a satellite, and the only way to determine the boundary is by taking samples of water and analyze them. Since there is no established boundary between "normal" and "elevated" levels of debris, the estimated size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch varies by up to a factor of 20.

In addition to the plastics that is located at or near the surface (i.e. most of it), there are plastics in the depths of the sea as well as somewhere inbetween. Since the floating garbage patch is located in international waters, individual states tend not to worry about it too much. Some of those who visit the garbage patch describe the visit as surreal – here you are in the middle of nowhere, thousands of miles from land, encountering both familiar and strange artefacts that suddenly pop up - a motorcycle tire, a life jacket, a construction worker's hard hat and so on. An expedition to the garbage patch found that:

”plastic debris was present in 100 consecutive samples taken at varying depths and net sizes along a 1,700 miles (2,700 km) path through the patch. The survey also confirmed that while the debris field does contain large pieces, it is on the whole made up of smaller items which increase in concentration towards the Gyre's centre, and these 'confetti-like' pieces are clearly visible just beneath the surface.”

Last year, similar plastics graveyards were discovered/mapped in the Atlantic (the North Atlantic garbage patch) and in the Indian Ocean (the Indian Ocean garbage patch), but we now know that there are no fewer than five such gyres in the oceans where plastic is accumulated. They are identified and studied in the project 5 Gyres.

Since most of the plastics in the oceans is not found in large islands of plastics, but rather in numerous tiny small pieces, there is no good way to clean it up. In addition, the oceans are sort of large, which makes cleanup impractical, to say the least. The bottom line is that the only way to limit the amount of plastics in the oceans is to use less plastics and be more careful about what happens with it when and after we throw it away.

In a public relations ploy from last year, Swedish global appliance maker Electrolux scooped up plastics from a number of gyres and built six "showcase vacuum cleaners" from it. This seems rather sympathetic, since the company’s stated goal was to:

“bring attention to the issues of plastic pollution and the scarcity of recycled plastics needed for making sustainable home appliances”

Electrolux for sure have pinpointed the problem, but the solution - "sustainable" home appliances - feels a bit strained. Anyway, Electrolux has put together a nice video (50 seconds) about the “Vac from the sea" project which is worth watching.

Another multi-million dollar high-profile-PR-project that I feel ambivalent about is the three-month Plastiki expedition of last year - conducted in a catamaran built from recycled plastic. I get similar vibes from this project as I do when Al Gore on the one hand preaches about reduced energy use, but on the other hand owns several luxury homes and flies a private jet. The driving person behind Plastiki, David de Rothschild, illuminates my own ambivalence towards the project:

”People hear it's a kid from a wealthy European family with a beard who's an environmentalist (and think), 'Surely this must be a stunt.' But I'm not afraid of drawing fire. Our culture has slowly disassociated itself from nature. But that's a model that has failed us. We must rethink it."

Finally a few words about the images of dead birds above. The photos were taken by photographer Chris Jordan and are part of a series of thirty equally scary images, "Midway: Message from the gyre" (2009). Jordan writes about this project:

”These photographs of albatross chicks were made in September, 2009, on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking. To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.“

All of his images thus show albatross chicks that died from suffocation, starvation or poisoning and whose decay allows us to see what their "last meal" contained. An albatross normally lives for 50 years and an albatross female lays only one egg once a year or once every second year. This slow reproductive cycle makes the demise of every single albatross chick extra tragic. It has been estimated that up to 40% of all albatross chicks die as a result of their involuntary plastics-eating orgies. Our plastics consumption has increased by nearly 10% annually in recent years and one of many problems is all the plastic bottles which are used only once and then thrown away. Some of these bottles find their way to the sea and finally end up in a gyre far away from you.

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"The world without us" by Weisman (2007)

2010-10-02T15:58:00.000+02:00

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Alan Weisman’s book “The World Without Us” (2007) is perhaps the book with the least obvious connection to Peak Oil among the books I have chosen to write about on this blog so far. However, by putting on my Peak Oil glasses, it is possible to find an intersting enough angle from which to approach the book.

The book is based on a thought experiment - what would happen if all humans disappeared from the surface of Earth from one day to the next? "Picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow '. What would happen to everything we have built? What would happen to the artifacts we leave behind us?

Weisman describes what would happen to our pets and zoo animals, our skyscrapers and roads, our bridges and houses. In a fascinating chapter, he describes what has happened to the district Varosha, which is located in an untouched no man's land in Cyprus ever since its sudden abandonment in 1974. Similarly, he describes what has happened to the city of Pripyat as nature has gradually regained the city and its surrounding areas since the abandonment of the city due to the nearby Chernobyl accident in 1986.

Weisman laconically observes man's hubris and folly - there are so many examples of both in the book that you quickly lose count. What is there for example to say about a lake (next to a factory for chemical weapons in Denver) that is so toxic that ducks die just moments after they land in the water, and aluminum-bottomed boats rot away in less than a month? I suspect that Weisman expects mankind (or at least all human civilization) will disappear from the face of the Earth sometime between tomorrow and a hundred years from now. However, the author maintains his poker face through the book and it is ultimately impossible to determine his attitude to man's disappearance.

The book is exciting and it sold very well in the U.S. What I briefly will focus on in this text, are those parts of the book that specifically deal with energy issues. I also intend to write a follow-up on blog post about plastics – a fantastically flexible petroleum product - by using the book’s chapter about plastics as a springboard for further thoughts on that matter. For the audio-visually oriented blog reader who does not want to read the book "The World Without Us", I can recommend the film Aftermath: Population Zero, and the 20 episodes long post-apocalyptic-science-fiction-speculative-documentary-television series Life After People.

So... what would we humans leave behind us on Earth if we suddenly disappeared? It would not be our illuminated cities, for sure, because without people the flow of electricity would quickly come to an end. We have on the other hand quite some reprocessed uranium lying around. Naturally occurring uranium in the earth's crust consists of 0.7 percent U-235 (half-life 700 million years). We humans enrich (concentrate) this uranium isotope, and in the U.S. alone there are 500 000 tons of depleted uranium (half-life 4.5 billion years). Depleted uranium is a heavy and tough metal with several applications, for example armor-piercing grenades. After having been fired, such grenades will keep emitting radiation throughout the earth's remaining lifetime...

Almost all radioactive waste (fuel rods as well as gloves) is now stored "temporarily" at various locations above ground - in the U.S. there is only one place for permanent storage below ground, and there they do not handle the really toxic stuff, but only "low-and midlevel waste". With humans gone, there will sooner or later be a fire close to radioactive waste, and radioactive ashes will then spread across oceans and continents. (Even today, with humans present, the control is not always the best - many accidents have occurred where radioactive waste has leaked out).

In Sellafield in England, liquid radioactive waste is mixed with molten glass and large glass block are then stored in air-conditioned warehouses. In this case, there is no need for a fire - a permanent lack of electric power is enough for temperatures to begin to rise and accident to become a given. The same goes for all the basins of cooling water which for many decades have served as "temporary" storage locations for spent fuel rods. When the water evaporates, the temperature in the basins rises both literally and metaphorically. There are nearly 450 nuclear power plants on Earth. Perhaps all this radioactivity (which will be around for billions of years), will give rise to exciting new mutations that will compensate for all plant and animal species we humans have made extinct? Or will this simply be the last time we give the finger to the rest of the planet from beyond our graves?

Two other long-lasting “gifts” that we leave behind us are a result of coal mining - "mountaintop removal", which disfigures the landscape, and a "redesigned" atmosphere. In this context, humanity is an increasingly violent volcanic eruption that has lasted without interruption since the 1700s. The geological cycle will eventually bring CO2 levels back to what existed before humans began to influene the climate, but it will take approximately 100 000 years. Or longer.

On a somewhat smaller level, we will leave a lot of (car) tires behind us. When natural rubber is vulcanized (heated and mixed with finely powdered sulfur), the end product is one big molecule. Since World War II, we can produce synthetic rubber instead of natural rubber with the help of the oil-extracted hydrocarbons styrene/polystyrene and butadiene (today there are many different kinds of synthetic rubber, but this combination is still used in 50% of the total synthetic rubber production). The world's largest rubber factory (Goodyear) is located in Texas, conveniently connected to some of the world's largest oil refineries and to the industrial megaplex that stretches from Houston and 80 km along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

The process of vulcanizing rubber is unfortunately irreversible - you can not melt down a tire and produce something else out of it. Tires are here to stay, and until evolution produces a microbe that likes to eat its hydrocarbons spiked with sulfur, only ozone and ultraviolet rays can break down the rubber-sulfur atoms. You could by all means burn the tires, but that is hardly a good idea:

”With all that carbon in tires, they can also be burned, releasing considerable energy, which makes them hard to extinguish, along with surprising amounts of oily soot that contains some noxious components we invented in a hurry during World War II.”

In the United States, on average one third of a billion tires are thrown away annually (one tire per person). Add to that the tires from the rest of the world. We might not leave as much as a trillion tires behind us on earth, but by now we have probably enriched the environment with hundreds of billions of virtually non-degradable car tires.

Some of the longest-lasting man-made artifacts are located in Texas, along the Gulf of Mexico coast. There are approximately 500 underground salt domes located hundreds of meters below ground and whose contents have been dissolved by water (being pumped in by humans), and whose walls consist of impermeable salt crystals. The domes are used as a place for storage fossil gases, including the most hazardous and flammable ones, such as ethylene. The best thing future explorers can do is to leave these dangerous substance where they are (stored under extreme pressure), but how could they know? A topic that Weisman touches on several times in the book is the challenge of communicating that some places are dangerous, or in some other way making future explorers understand that they should leave certain locations alone (e.g. storage locations for uranium).

What would happen to all above-ground structures in this huge industrial park? Weisman refers to all the products resulting from the refining process in an almost poetic manner: “the geometry of petro-chemistry: circles, spheres, and cylinders – some tall and thin, some short and fla, some wide and round."

If someone has time to press the stop button, there would be no immediate danger, but the petrochemical products would eventually leak out or be dissolved in the air as the tanks rust away. If instead the whole machinery would continue to run but unmonitored, pressures and temperatures would remain high and the outcome would be widespread explosions and fires.

Maybe a big chain reaction would burn up the whole caboodle - possibly during a period of several weeks, or perhaps as a long series of more isolated incidents which are spread out over time.

But if there was a chain reaction in which several petrochemical plants burned up at the same time, many extremely toxic substances would be emitted into the air simultaneously (such as hydrogen cyanide, the active component in the WWII extermination camp gas Zyklon B). In the worst case scenario, this would cause a chemical “mini-nuclear winter” with dire consequences to say the least:

”They would also release chlorinated compounds like dioxins and furans from burning plastics. And you’d get lead, chromium, and mercury attached to the soot. Europe and North America, with the biggest concentrations of refineries and chemical plants, would be the most contaminated. But the clouds would disperse through the world. The next generation of plants and animals, the ones that didn’t die, might need to mutate”

In this less than cheerful tone, I end this text about what we humans would leave behind us if we disappeared from the earth's surface from one day to the next. Since the reason for our disappearance is a mystery in the book, it is difficult to know whether Weisman’s excursions into unknown territory represent a happy or unhappy ending for mankind. As a contrast to all the toxins and all the misery that we would leave behind us, our mysterious disappearance would also mean that most plants and animals on earth would flourish, since plants and animals would thrive where there are no people. An interesting example referred to by Weisman (in addition to Chernobyl which was mentioned above), is the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, and other similar areas of conflict in the world that are too dangerous for people to stay in. In practice, those areas function as nature reserves and they are teeming with biodiversity.

"The World Without Us" also has a very interesting chapter about plastics that I have not touched on here. Rather, I intend to write another text with that chapter as a starting point. I conclude this blog text with a question that you may ponder in the meantime. There is an infinite number of gadgets made of plastic in today's society. But what happens to the plastic after we throw them away?
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"Reinventing collapse" by Orlov (2008)

2010-09-16T16:56:00.003+02:00

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There are many books that warn of impending climate change, environmental disasters or other calamities. Peak Oil may be regarded as one of those "other" calamities that could bring our civilization to its knees. Sometimes - rarely - I read about climate scientists and other researchers who privately are approaching the conviction that we’ve come to the end of the road, that regardless of what we do from now on it will be too little, too late, or that it still might be possible to do something effective, but that nothing will happen in time since public support and political will are missing (think Copenhagen).

In case you share those views, you should probably not exhibit them in a public debate, because that would immediately make most people view you as failed, incompetent, idiotic or at least as an oddball. Thus, since no one knows anything for certain about the future and since we all hope for the best, even people who are pessimistic about the future show a (probably somewhat strained) "positive attitude" when speaking publicly:

”You see, most people don’t want to be too alarmed, and they don’t want to hear about problems to which there are no ready solutions. So world-savers frequently try to tailor their public statements so that large numbers of people won’t be frightened to the point of despair and paralysis. How many times have I been told, “Keep it positive! Emphasize solutions!” Yet I can’t tell you how often I’ve sat down with an activist whose latest policy paper is all about solutions, and in heart-to-heart conversation they reveal that they don’t really think our species has much of a chance of avoiding major catastrophe, maybe even extinction.”

Similarly, there are many books that spend lots of efforts to carefully build up and impose realistic (and scary) threats, but then ends with one or more substantially shallower sections about what we should do - preferably immediately - to relatively painlessly "save the world":

"many of the book authors now writing about peak oil, climate change, species extinction and myriad other urgent environmental and resource topics usually end their otherwise grim analyses with [...] "the happy chapter," a chapter with solutions and responses which will supposedly help us to avert catastrophe."

As I have pointed out earlier, it may therefore feel almost refreshing when someone who actually believes that we are moving towards cataclysmic change also describes what the changes will be like.

Dmitry Orlov's book "Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet example and American Prospects" (2008) is such a book. Dmitry Orlov has a background that makes him especially suited to depict collapse dynamics. He is not a scientist nor an "expert", but characterizes himself as an "eyewitness". He lived his first 12 years in the Soviet Union and in the aftermath of the Soviet empire's collapse a decade later, he undertook numerous business and family trips back to his old country. As an ethnic Russian who had lived half his life in the United States, he was located in-between two cultures and could easily slip between watching the events "from within" (as a Russian) and "from the outside" (as an American). His unique perspective, his sharp eye, his offbeat analyses and his sardonic sense of humor makes his book a real gem.

The book's message is as actually a real downer, but Orlov’s intelligence, black humor and very Russian naturally indifferent attitude - "to a Russian, 'hard worker' sounded a lot like 'fool'" - makes the book a very pleasant reading experience. The book is full of resigned shrugs regarding the possibility for any individual to prevent the coming societal collapse. We're not talking about saving the world here - the best we can hope for is to save our own skins! Orlov believes, however, that a collapse in no way is the final end:

”Civilizations do collapse [but] the process can take many centuries. What tends to collapse rather suddenly […] is the economy. […] There is a part of the population that is most vulnerable: the young, the old and the infirm; the foolish and suicidal. There is another part of the population that can survive indefinitely on insects and tree bark. Most people fall somewhere in between.”

Communism coming to an end and the Soviet social system collapsing did not lead to total anarchy overnight. Although violence and insecurity increased, the vast majority of people survived from one day to the next and from one year to the next. Still, the experience of getting through those years was like someone pulling the rug out from under your feet, not just once, but several times, and every time you tried to stand up again, the rules had changed - and usually for the worse. Dmitry calls this process "loss of normalcy".

The fundamental question that Orlov is preoccupied with in his book is: What can we learn from the Soviet Union's collapse and what is to be expected when the U.S. collapses? (NOTE: when the U.S. collapses - at some point during Orlov’s lifetime – not if). The book begins with a comparison between U.S.A ("the U.S.") and the Soviet Union ("the S.U."). Unlike other such comparisons, this one is not about the ways in which the empires are (were) different from each other, but instead about how they are similar in area after area. They both wanted what every superpower strives for - technological development, economic growth, full employment and world domination - they just happened to have some different ideas about the means to achieve these goals.

”The ingredients I like to put in my superpower collapse soup are: a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil (that magic addictive elixir of industrial economies), a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget and ballooning foreign debt. The heat and agitation can be provided most efficaciously by a humiliating military defeat and widespread fear of a looming catastrophe. […] It took a couple of decades for the United States to catch up, but now all the ingredients are in the pot and starting to simmer. […] Let us not even try to imagine that this will all just blow over. Make no mistake about it: this soup will be served, and it will not be tasty!”

This is followed by a comparison between the Soviet and the U.S. in area after area (accommodation, transportation, food, medicine, education, work, religion etc.). What is interesting is that from a collapse perspective, the U.S. is much worse off than the S.U. in area after area. The reason for this is (somewhat counter-intuitively) that as everything functioned so poorly in the S.U., people were already inadvertently collapse-prepared and they were used to solve many problems by and for themselves. The U.S. is instead like a well-lubricated machine, but this unfortunately means that people and social structures will be more unprepared to face the consequences of a failing society. The very worst scenario, according to Orlov, is a perfectly functioning, growing economy that one day suddenly collapses.

An example of accidental collapse preparation is the fact that many Russians had a little patch where they grew their own food. Although these small kitchen gardens only represented 10% of the agricultural land, they accounted for 90% of domestic food production. When society collapsed, many people already had a habit of taking care of (some of) their own food supplies, and the kitchen gardens saved many lives.

”In spite of the monumental failures of Soviet agriculture, the overall structure of Soviet-style food delivery proved to be paradoxially resilient in the face of economic collapse […] there was no starvation and very little malnutrition. But will fate be as kind to the United States?”

In the U.S. (and in Sweden), most people are totally dependent on a large and complex system for growing and distributing food and on the fact that the supermarket shelves are replenished every day. On top of that, U.S. citizens also need copious amounts of (affordable) gasoline to refuel their cars so that they can get to the supermarket in the first place.

Orlov points out other equally fascinating paradoxes. Since there was no profit motive in the Soviet Union, there was no incentive for planned obsolesensce in the few consumer products that were produced. Instead, they constructed simple, functional and sturdy (but oh-so-ugly) refrigerators that were sufficiently durable and repairable to function long after production of a model was stopped.

This may be compared with my a-few-years-old-but-broken pot rack from swanky Myresjökök (it's in the corner cabinet of my kitchen). To reduce the life expectancy, Myresjökök has chosen to complement the robust stainless steel rack with a few small plastic details that hold the rack in place in the cabinet - and already when the pot rack was brand new, I knew that the plastic parts would be worn out, become brittle and sooner rather than later would break (much sooner than the metal in the rack itself of course). The rack is virtually impossible to repair for a layperson, and if the manufacturer decides to not keep these small plastic details (worth a dollar or so) in stock (with no profit margin), I will have to buy a new rack for more than 400 USD, or learn to do without ... That is how the (over)mature capitalist consumer society works today. My loss, someone else's gain.

Another difference between Russia and the United States is that Russia is a rich country that is (more than) self-sufficient in terms of energy. This made it possible, although not easy, for Russia to "bounce back" after the collapse. The U.S. is instead the world's largest energy importer. Who will be interested in selling energy to the U.S. at a point in time when the mighty U.S. economy is a thing of the past? Thus, on this point as well, the U.S. has a weaker position than Russia when it comes to getting through a collapse safe and sound.

What then is recommended by Orlov and his likes, who like bloodhounds have an unrivaled sense of smell in regards to detecting and analysing systemic weaknesses? A less laconic person than Orlov who has uncovered many fundamental problems with the "system" writes as follows:

"I have written ad nauseam about the impending financial cataclysm that awaits our nation. I have spent countless hours documenting the unsustainable path of our politicians' financial decisions and lack of courage in addressing the forthcoming tragedy that grows closer by the day. Our political system is so corrupt and dysfunctional that there is absolutely no chance that our path will be altered at the voting booth".

The author is obviously very frustrated, and the reason for his frustration is the expectation that "the system" should work better than it does. Orlov has no such expectations, and his view is therefore very different and strange to us Swedes who essentially have high confidence in politicians and the political system:

"The Soviet Union had a single, entrenched, systemically corrupt political party, which held a monopoly on power, The US has two entrenched, systemically corrupt political parties, whose positions are often indistinguishable and which together hold a monopoly on power. […] It is a tribute to the intelligence of the American people that so few of them bother to vote […] the American version [of democracy] is little more than window-dressing for the real business of politics, which happens behind closed doors and mainly involves the exchange of vast sums of money.”

”Although people often bemoan political apathy as if it were a grave social ill, it seems to me that this is just as it should be. Why should essentially powerless people want to engage in a humiliating farce designed to demonstrate the legitimacy of those who wield the power?"

Orlov’s faith in political solutions can not be any lower than it already is. At one point he writes that "politics has great potential for making a bad situation worse". What Orlov instead praises are people without strong convictions - people who mind their own business and who do what needs to be done, and refrain from being bothered about how others should live their lives.

"The Russian people are exceptionally patient: even in the worst of post-collapse times, they did not riot and […] They coped as best they could. The safest group of people to be with in a crisis is one that does not share strong ideological convictions”

The fact that Orlov has little confidence in the possibilities of changing the world politically does not mean that he advocates apathy on a personal level. On the contrary. It is only when we stop listening to politicians and stop caring about what is being said on TV or in the newspapers that we can start to prepare ourselves and change our own lives - although it is extremely difficult to act on knowledge which is contradicted by our everyday experiences and by most of the people around us.

Rather than attempting to […] stop the world and point it in a different direction – it seems far better to turn inward and work to transform yourself into someone who might stand a chance, given the world’s assumed trajectory.

Good ways to prepare include physical changes (keeping fit and in good health), psychological changes and changes in habits (including learning new things).

A recurring argument used by Orlov is that a collapse tends to make (economic) weaknesses into strengths, and vice versa (food production, consumer products etc.). He takes this idea to its logical endpoint where his ideas become completely absurd - or not. It is not easy to decide whether to take his proposal seriously, since his perspective is so unusual and counter-intuitive:

"It is not necessary for the United States to embrace the tenets of command economy and central planning […] We have our own methods that are working almost as well. I call them ”boondoggles.” They are solutions to problems that result in more severe problems than those they attempt to solve. […] The combined weigth of all these boondoggles is slowly but surely pushing us all down. If it pushes us down far enough, then economic collapse, when it arrives, will be like falling out of a ground-floor window."

It seems to me that Orlov should judge the 2008-2009 economic crisis and its impact in the U.S. as something Good on the whole. Based on the belief that an economic collapse is inevitable, it seems preferable to the author that "a few at a time" (all the losers of the crisis) get the "opportunity" to cope with a crumbling existence, and the "privilege" as pioneers (on the road that many more soon will wander) to invent creative ways to cope with fewer resources. This should in any case be much better than if all at once have to handle the dire consequences of a collapse, with anarchy and chaos luring around the corner.

I do not think I misinterpret Orlov. Elsewhere in the book he says that the best way to prepare for an economic collapse is to try to live, as far as possible, as if the collapse has already happened. Get by with as little money as possible and make yourself independent of the regular economy ("demonetize"). Grow your own food. Operate in the gray area between the black and the white economy by trading favors and strive towards obtaining robust networks of friends, acquaintances and contacts. Learn to repair things that break and take care of what others throw away. In short, learn to live without a "silver lining".

To Orlov, the poor and those who manage to live on the margins ("conscientious economic underachievers and various categories of the creatively underemployed") are the unsung heroes of our time. We need to draw inspiration from them and from ”Those parts of the population that have recent or continuing experience with circumstances that have forced them to provide for their mutual welfare – recent immigrant groups, minorities and the poor.”

The opposite of living on the margin is to tightly connect your destiny to the current economic system. Such a thightly coupled relationship will hurt a lot when the financial system collapses. After the Soviet collapse, it turned out to be the successful middle-aged men who were the most psychologically vulnerable. After their careers ended, their savings evaporated and their properties become worthless, all their self-esteem disappeared. They tended to be overrepresented among those who drank themselves to death and among those who committed suicide.

Although Orlov's book is slim (160 pages), I have had time to highlight only some parts of it. If you want to learn more about what the future might look like and how to prepare yourself, I recommend that you read the entire book. Not only is the book funny and pleasant to read, but there is also value in reading a text with such a strange and thought-provoking perspective!

If you (despite my recommendations) do not want to buy the book, there are some previously written texts on the internet covering parts of the book's content:
- "Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century" (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) (2005)
- "Closing the 'Collapse gap': The USSR was better prepared for collapse than the U.S." (2006)
- Orlov’s blog, Club Orlov, has a very low volume but high quality
- On the site "Creative loafing" there is a text about Orlov’s book and a few related books.
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Peak Oil, "Big Education" and "Big Science"

2010-09-02T11:12:00.003+02:00

.Image: Big Education; graduation ceremony

Image: Big Science; Linear Accelerator interior, Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, 1957

My previous text discussed the set of arguments I use to try to explain what each member of society should know, worry about and act upon before peak oil strikes us with full force. In this text, I develop some ideas that relate to, but didn't quite fit the previous text. It starts out a little rambling but moves on the the issue of peak oil and higher education/research in the second half of the text. You can jump there directly if that is your main cup of tea, I've made it easy to find.

Peak oil is unfortunately a new idea to most people, and the natural reaction for someone who has never heard about it is to instinctively simply push all this worrysome new meme away and carry on living life as usual, as before.

Unfortunately, peak oil will not disappear just because we choose not to think about it. We still have a date with peak oil in the future, and the time of this date is approaching relentlessly and without regard to what we happen to think or feel. (Think of the Titanic as a ship that had a date with an iceberg.) But in the case of peak oil, it is not so much a date as a "shotgun marriage" that will last forever after.

One of, if not the main problem with peak oil is this great ignorance. Comprehension among too many of our non-PO-educated friends is and will remain sadly inadequate as we are moving towards the chaotic post-peak-oil era. NOTE: In order to avoid being accused of being overly pessimistic I would like to stress that some things most likely will turn out for the better compared to today - but only after we have passed through a turbulent and confusing period.

In plain language: We have no idea what life will look like on the other side of peak oil and how long it will take to get there. But there is no doubt (to me) that the transition will be painful. Major social change is always painful. Individuals will suffer when entire business areas (for example air travel) are eradicated and people loose their jobs, and when things we have taken for granted are denied to us not only temporarily, but for all time (holidays in Thailand, or to able to buy what we like on a Saturday afternoon in the shopping mall).

But back to the topic of societal ignorance and misunderstandings in relation to peak oil. To not understand what is happening and why it happens naturally reduces the chances of making the right decisions and doing the right things at the right time - both on an individual and a societal level. Until the very end, individuals will get into debt to buy new, fancy cars for tens of thousands of dollars, and we will continue to build new airports and new highways until the very end. A guy who sat across me at a party last year told me he had just bought a house in Thailand and he hoped to be able to visit it a few weeks every year and rent out to tourists the rest of the time. I wish him good luck but I don't expect he will have much.

If we who think of oil and energy as critical factors are right, and if our way of thinking turns out to be a good “lens” through which we can understand our world today and tomorrow, then the absence of this lens will make people not see the connections, become confused, make the wrong decisions, throw good money after bad and accuse the wrong parties when the effects of their choices in life collide with a non-cooperating reality. Such a “lens” through which we interpret and understand data and processes is what researchers usually call a "theory". And without one, our thoughts are easily led in the wrong direction. Richard Heinberg has expressed it as follows:

''...yet people won't be talking about the oil peak. They'll be talking about the unemployment figures. They'll be talking about the high price of food. They'll be talking about the fact that you can't get on an airliner and travel anymore because the airline industry has collapsed, there are only a few carriers still in business and tickets are astronomically expensive. They'll be talking about the latest war or terrorist incidents. They will have completely lost sight of the one event that caused all of those effects.''

Peak oil, higher education and research

Regarding my own area, higher education, I take for granted that it will at best shrink considerably in size and scope. As late as in the early 1950's less than 5% of an age cohort in England, France or Australia went on to higher education/university studies - and that still represented a doubling compared to only a decade or two earlier (according to Alison Wolf in her great book "Does Education Matter?: Myths about Education and Economic growth").

Today in Sweden, virtually everyone with the capacity (and some without it) start senior high school at the age of 16 (98-99% of an age cohort). Furthermore, about 40% of an age cohort now commence some sort of higher (university) education before the age of 25. There is (or has been) a political (Social Democratic) goal that 50% of an age cohort should proceed to higher education, but I don’t know the exact reason why. The general arguments I have encountered are precariously weak in their logic and vaguely refers to slogans about "democracy", "competing with the rest of the world" or perhaps something about "preparing for the knowledge societey". I assume that the whole thing is half dogma and half a disguised (and expensive) measure to reduce unemployment numbers among the youth.

The last figure I pull out my magic hat is that up to 3% of an age cohort in Sweden nowadays study to complete a Ph.D. degree. I can not remember if this figure refers to people who start or who finish their Ph.D. studies – in any case it results in quite a few Ph.D. students – approximately 3,000 new ones each year in a small country such as Sweden! Of course, all those long years in school cost a lot of money, and the educational-industrial complex is another line of “business” that peak oil will substantially reduce the size of.

I believe that if we will afford to maintain higher education and research (which of course anyway has to shrink in size and scope), we will see substantial changes in priorities within and between different research areas and academic disciplines. It is hardly a wild guess that there will be less funds allocated to "big science", that is, large-scale projects usually funded by a government or groups of governments, with a Big Budget, Big Staffs, Big Laboratories and Big Machines. There will be less funding for researchers interested in large particle accelerators and in the origins of the universe. We can just forget about projects that require lots of scientists and terribly expensive equipment in order to achieve incremental (and marginal) results of doubtful practical utility.

Quite recently (June 22) I read on the front of the magazine Computer Sweden that "KTH [the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden] invests 133 million" SEK - 20 million USD - in buying a new supercomputer which will be one of the fastest computers in Europe (temporarily of course). I find it hard to understand why an expense of 133 million is called an "investment". A more proper headline would be that "KTH spend 133 million". The negative equivalent to "KTH invests" would be “KTH wastes 133 million”. In any case, it is hard to believe that anyone 10-20 years from now will receive funding to by a gadget for 133 million SEK, with the possible exception of energy research in some much-needed area.

But a computer for 20 million USD is a drop in the ocean compared to the more than 6 000 million Euros that France and the rest of Europe now have to fork up for the 2012 construction of an experimental fusion power plant (ITER). The project is now on shaky economic ground after the financial crisis and as the costs are running away from what was earlier projected and budgeted (and that is even before any actual construction has started). There are other partners in the project (U.S., Russia, Japan, Korea, China, India), and the total estimated cost for this experimental power plant is currently 16 000 million Euros. And the costs might become significantly higher if we take into consideration that they have grown by 10 000 million Euros (!) compared to calculations made back in 2001. I will happily bet (and give the generous odds 5 to 1) that this fusion power plant will never be completed. Is there anyone who dares to bet against me? Construction is planned to take 10 years and I will generously let my offer stand until 2030. The fight for money has already begun and "researchers in other fields [are] wondering whether their funding will suffer if funds are diverted to ITER".

Overall, today's specialization in the research community (where people qualify themselves by knowing a lot in increasingly smaller areas), is likely to decrease as the number of scientists and the amount of available money for research decrease. To know more and more about less and less will become a dead end, whereas the ability to connect various areas will become more interesting. Perhaps the interest in some "soft" social sciences such as psychology, sociology, political science and peace/conflict research will increase - provided that those research fields start to investigate peak oil-related questions:

- How can we live together in a world of shrinking resources?
- How can we provide treatment / therapy to people who are addicted to shopping but who are no longer able get their "fix"?
- What do we do with middle-aged skilled careerists who have lost their job, their car and their house, and consequently their identity, their drive and their motivation?
- How can we understand the (coming) popular movement of gardening?
- How can we deal with young people’s (justified) disappointment and aggression towards the generation of their parents?
- What are we to do with all Peak Oil refugees when they knocks on our door and want to enter? Or with climate terrorists with little or nothing to loose?
- How do we phase out all the benefits that the state has generously offered without having too many people suffer too much?
- How should society cope with declining stock markets (which will also affect our pensions)?
- How do we create institutions at a local level that can work towards reducing dependency on the rest of the world?
- How do we rebuild our strategic basic industries which left Sweden 20 or 50 years ago?
- How do we transform our agriculture to become less energy intensive?
- What kind of health care can we afford in the future? How should it be organized? How do you explain in a pedagogical way that surgery X or medicine Y is no longer available?
- How do we create a primary and high school curriculums (and find teachers) who can prepare our youth for the real 21st century?
... and so on ...

Of course, energy research will be of immense interest. Maybe there are also lessons to be learned from the use of technology in today's developing countries (for example on the use of mobile technology and low-tech off-grid energy solutions)? Just the idea of a reversed transfer of knowledge from developing countries to more developed countries is staggering...

Of course, researchers will no longer be able to travel back and forth all over the world to attend conferences, so the transfer of knowledge between researchers will by neccessity become more regional (or can the Internet make up for decreased mobility?). Swedish researchers (as well as the population in general) will have to put up with travelling only in Europe, or maybe, as time goes by, only in Scandinavia, or Sweden. This contraction will of course affect which languages our youth will learn in primary school and high school. We ought to experience a renaissance of languages spoken in areas geographically close to us (not the least Norwegian and Danish), and a decreased interest in "exotic" languages such as Arabic, Japanese and Chinese.

One last guess that does not feel too daring is that economics in its present form will be discredited and kicked to the dust bin of history in the same way that scientific communism was non-honorably retired 20 years ago. My guess is that as the world changes, traditional neoclassical economists in particular will be depicted as Quislings of our time or even as accomplices to the crash, and they will become as popular as racial anthropologists are in today's university world.

Nevertheless, we need some kind of economic theories, and the ones I believe are most likely to suceed are the (presently) radical ideas of biophysical and ecological economics. The non-negotiable starting point for these theories is what the Earth can bear - how extensive our human (economic) activities can be without destroying our environment and our ability to create wealth even in the (far) future. When we move from expansion to contraction, we also move from the economy of opportunities to the economy of restrictions - or why not the economy of the real world.

In the 1800s we hunted whales to the end of the world, on journeys that lasted several years, in order to illuminate our homes. When whales began to run low, we were saved by the discovery of kerosene, but what will save us this time? Many are those who have read too many fairy tales or watched too many movies to be able to imagine a story without a happy ending. Those are the people who got frustrated when Obama or BP simply failed to fix that oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico right away. At best, they suspect monumental incompetence and at worst they suspect a conspiracy. They have a skewed picture of reality, because they are convinced that every challenge can be solved by American know-how, and that a group of brilliant-but-misunderstood scientists somewhere had a solution, but were hampered by evil bureaucrats or the governments from once and for all plugging that hole (see "American faith in magic Technological exacerbates frustration with the Gulf of Mexico oil leak").

Unfortunately, I personally believe there of courser aren't any guarantees of happy endings except in fictional stories - products created for a mass market – whose purpose is to make us feel comfortable. The last 200 years has been one long success story - at least for us here in the West. Unfortunately, the good times will not last forever. What irritates me is that we have not used the good times to prepare for the bad.

In the Bible, Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s dream of seven fat and seven lean cows as representing seven good years to be followed by seven years of poor harvests. Pharaoh had the Egyptians prepare by storing food during the good years, and they survived the crisis (hooray!). But we have lived with an unprecedented abundance, without giving tomorrow more than a fleeting thought once every leap year. Instead of starting to slow down, we continue to press the pedal to the metal right into the hairpin curve.

Dmity Orlov argues that if we put our trust in an intervention from "outside", the only "reasonable" hope is that friendly extraterrestrials will show up just in time to save humanity (all seven billion) and our consumption-addicted society. As if.

I think our grandchildren will hear many, many stories and moralizing tales about arrogance, wastefulness, gluttony and short-term thinking and that many of the stories will have unhappy endings ("that’s what happens if you don’t..."). These stories will constitute an appropriate training for entry into a tough world, and also a good way to mentally work through challenges and changes happening around us in Sweden and abroad.

In all honesty I am more pessimistic about our (society's) lack of understanding and our inability to cope with peak oil, than I am about peak oil itself. Thus, if we used our still-considerable resources to immediately start preparing society for peak oil, then I would not be very worried at all. And if pigs could fly...
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Points of departure

2010-08-22T21:16:00.001+02:00

.
Figure. Optical illusion of simultaneous expansion and contraction.

The Swedish blogger Ylven recently wrote a text [in Swedish] about how clueless people are when she tries to explain what peak oil is, even though she leaves plenty of (grim) hints about what it will mean. Either people do not understand the problem at all, or they understand the problem but believe that "everything will be fine". Maybe they have eaten too many Chinese fortune cookies, because, as you may know, such cookies contain only positive messages. When I had some guests over earlier this spring, I told my guests that on my fortune cookie the surprising message was "Oil will peak and you will starve" (everyone in this particular company understood the joke). Looking at my joke in a different light, you may find the seeds of both a public educational campaign as well as a business idea which I gladly share with you - "Peak Fortune Cookies" - with messages such as "Oil will peak and your car will run out of gas", "Oil will peak and you will eat turnip and bark bread", "Oil will peak and you will lose your job", or why not "Oil will peak and you will be drafted to fight a resource war"?

I’m a university teacher and by now I have been able to sneak in some peak oil information as background to other things I talk about a couple of times. The reaction I get from the audience is usually the same as Ylven gets even though I have a "captive audience" who can not immediately stand up and leave the room. Based on a couple of these experiences, I have had to think long and hard about some of the starting points I have personally come to take for granted, and I now emphasize these in my talks in order to increase the likelihood of my point to be understood by the audience. These starting points are assumptions that I have incorporated into my own world view and also arguments that might persuade others. These assumptions are interrelated and they form a logical chain that is easy to follow but hard(er) to refute:

1 Peak oil is now. And if not exactly now, then at least very soon. But already today’s "normal" oil price is many times higher than the price a decade ago, and no one believes that the long-term trend will be broken and that the price will go down in the future. It is difficult today to imagine how we could increase oil production significantly over a longer period of time. Instead, we need to run faster and faster and chase harder- and-harder-to-find oil just to manage to remain in the same place (see the red queen). This claim can be backed up by tables and graphs.

2 Peak Oil is a predicament, not a problem. A problem can be solved, but a predicament has to be handled or countered by adopting better or worse strategies. A predicament can not once and for all be "solved" or "overcome". The fact that we will all die one day is an example of a predicament. You may extend or shorten your life (for example by eating healthy food and exercising or by smoking and taking risks in traffic), but in the end it makes no difference, for you will in any case die. You can not cheat the Reaper; he is standing somewhere, waiting to take you into his arms for the final embrace.

3 Peak oil = peak energy. Oil accounts for around 37% of global energy use and up to 95% of all transport depends on oil. When oil becomes (more) expensive it will become expensive to transport goods (globalization stops) and to transport people (travelling will become prohibitively expensive). No single type of energy and no combination of energy sources may cover up for the steady shortfall in oil production by a few percent per year. In addition, we have already picked "the lowest hanging fruit" also with regards to coal and gas, which together with oil constitute 85% of the global energy production. Furthermore and as the icing on the cake, it is said that there are some problems nowadays having to do with the climate as a result of us burning up all those non-renewable fossil fuels...

4 Peak Oil = Peak Economy. There is a strong correlation between energy consumption and economic growth. We can for sure hope for "decoupling" - to be able to have continued economic growth while maintaining or even reducing energy use - but no country has ever managed this Indian rope trick and that does not bode well. Maybe we are high on energy, listening a little to closely to the voice of intoxication, but it will unfortunately all too soon be replaced by a massive hangover.

The second point (above) is by the way an argument with unmatched know-it-all qualities. If you first explain what a predicament is by using death as an example, you may then easily move on and explain why Peak Gold (which occurred a decade ago) is a good example of a finite-resource predicament. As for the mining of gold, for each year you get less gold for the money (the investments) - from 12 grams of gold per metric ton of ore in 1950 to 3 grams of gold today. Gold is a good example of why the production of all non-renewable resources will always ultimately reach a peak and then begin to fall and/or why we have to run faster for each year to remain on the same spot (mine more ore to get the same amount of gold).

With this groundwork in place, any further objections to any of the arguments above may be rejected with a claim that the person objecting is suffering from denial and is trying to convert a Peak Oil predicament into a problem that may be fairly easily solved (with new technologies - electric vehicles, new energy sources - wind or nuclear power, redressing economic inequalities in the world or in a specific country, by mobilizing unparallelled political will, global agreements or some other miracle cure).

In any case, at around this point I usually stop bringing forward relatively cocksure claims (which if necessary may be backed up), and instead take a more humble stance. This is also where it starts to get really interesting when I further claim that:

5 The future will bring "disruptive" changes. (From Peak Fortune Cookies: "Oil will peak and you will face disruptive changes"). We will face many and big changes in the coming decades, but when haven't we in the previous decades? But the big point here is that the "direction" of these changes will be changed: Peak oil implies Big Changes. But not changes within the framework of the current system, but changes of the framework itself. Obama trump card was "change" ("Change We Can Believe In"). In the election campaign, “change” was a call full of promises, something to hope for and believe in. Unfortunately, the changes that await us will hardly be welcomed by anyone.

I imagine that somewhere during the coming decade (2010-2020), or at the latest in the decade thereafter, we will experience a shift from an expanding system (increasing amount of energy, more natural resources being exploited, increasing global population, more wealth, better welfare, people's expectations about the future being bright and so on) to a system in a state of contraction and shrinking.

We have lived with an expanding system for a few hundred years and all our economic and political structures (as well as our expectations for the future) are therefore adapted to a world of More, Better, Bigger, Faster, More Advanced, Newer, Cheaper and Two-For-The-Price-Of-One. The political challenges of distributing the material surplus of a growing cake is of course a breeze compared to the political challenges of distributing the cutbacks and austerity measures of a shrinking cake. This spring's riots in Greece has given us a foretaste of the problems we are facing. The change from the former (an expanding system) to the latter (a contracting system) will thus be "difficult". As you understand, this is a gross understatement, since (all) our current structures are ill-suited to manage this new reality.

If I allow myself to be a little bit pessimistic, I can not exclude the possibility that all of our current political structures (including a democratic government and perhaps the nation-state itself) will appear to be dysfunctional and break down as they are shown to be unable to cope with the problems we will face in the coming decades. Think of "failed states" such as Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Congo, Afghanistan etc. These are places where the state has withdrawn from many of its commitments (healthcare, education, police and judiciary, infrastructure, etc.) and where small groups/clans /regions must cope as best they can and not seldom in competition with other groups/clans/regions.

This is by all means a speculative worst-case scenario, but I in any case feel very certain about my claim that we will experience disruptive changes where the direction of the changes and societal "development" (or rather, degradation) will break off from what we and our parents have become accustomed to regard as normal (expansion and better times just around the corner).

To specify exactly what this will mean - what will happen, in what order and on what timescale - is of course an infinitely harder task. Despite the difficulties, it is these issues that interest me the most, rather than issues about production volumes and the exact time and date of peak oil, i.e. issues that Kjell Aleklett’s research group in Uppsala is mainly dealing with. What captures my interest is not "When will peak oil happen?" but rather "What happens next?". And although specific predictions are difficult or impossible to make, broad development lines are at least possible to comment or speculate on.

Some of my earlier texts have dealt with such questions about what might happen when energy becomes more expensive, for example "Energy free of charge", "Transportation free of charge" and “Death of Rationalization”.

I have some semi-developed ideas related to the text above, and I might concretize them in a follow-up to this post.
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"Is Eco Ok?" (Formas Fokuserar 2003)

2010-04-21T21:20:00.000+02:00

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The Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (Formas) publishes “Formas Fokuserar” (“Formas Focuses”) - a series of paperback books where Swedish researchers have their say and write short, simple texts on current issues. The book "Is Eco Ok? On organic farming in Sweden" (2003) was the first book, and by now Formas has published some 15 books in the series. The books are usually a few hundred pages long, but this particular book is very neat (smaller in size than a pocket book) and thin (115 pages). Nevertheless, the book contains no less than 13 texts by 18 different authors. Most of the authors have connections to (different departments at) the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).

Although the book is aimed towards an interested general public, parts of the contents was quite unfamiliar to me, and I learned a few new things when I read the book: "Manure is composed of feces, urine, bedding straw, feed residues and water. Depending on consistency, manure is classified as liquid, semi-liquid, solid or deep litter."

I have previously written [in Swedish] about other books that deal with agriculture's dependency on oil. In this book, however, energy and oil plays a subordinate role and you have to figure out the connection yourself since none of the authors have (or barely even mention) such a perspective. Instead, the starting point of the book, as formulated in the introduction, is that "Scientists do not agree on which type of cultivation is best for human health and the environment - conventional or organic. What do they really know about the differences? That is the question this book wants to answer."

Although the book is seven years old, a debate flared up in Sweden recently pertaining to the book’s main question; which kind of agriculture is best - conventional or organic? Marit Paulsson (Swedish member of the European Parliament and mainly involved in agricultural politics) published a new book where she claimed that conventional agriculture is our only hope if we want to grow enough food for all of mankind. "Yields are lower in organic farming. The surface of the earth is not big enough to grow organic food for everyone, therefore it is not a sustainable global solution. It is more important to find pesticides that are better than the ones used today."

A week later, DN (the largest morning newspaper in Sweden) published a longer article where both critics and proponents of organic food stated their claims. The claim that organic food has smaller yields and is therefore a problem from a global perspective is only partly true. The biggest problem during the past few decades is not that there is not enough food on Earth, but that the poorest people don't have enough buying power to compete for the food that is produced.

For us living in the rich countries food has never been cheaper - we have never spent such a small fraction of our income (around 10%) on buying food as we do today. The problem is that there are no incentives to grow food for paupers who can not pay for themselves, and that we in the richer countries are not prepared to spend a whole lot of money on buying and giving away food to the poor. If the 25% poorest people on earth (living on $1.50 per day or less) were ten times richer, we would automatically (due to market mechanisms) grow more food and less bio-fuels for cars. In addition, we would grow more crops for humans and less crops for animals (meat production is inefficient). And we would throw away less food. I see hunger today more as an effect of the uneven distribution of wealth, than as a matter of an absolute and inevitable global food deficit.

The arguments for or against, and the differences between the two types of cultivation (organic and conventional) are various and multidimensional. Consequently, there are often uncertainties about the results of different studies, and there is room for different players (who have different ideological and economic interests to defend) to interpret the findings in different ways. The issue is further complicated by the fact that there may be larger differences within one type of cultivation than between the two types, depending on for example agricultural intensity, the lay of the land (landscape) and the farmer’s attitude to biodiversity. But let us start from the beginning and go through the dividing lines.

Conventional agriculture uses inorganic fertilizers and chemical pesticides. Organic agriculture instead uses alternative methods and stresses the need to harness natural processes. Organic farming in Sweden is today largely equivalent to KRAV-certified food. KRAV is an acronym for the Swedish Association for Alternative Cultivation, an organization that was founded in 1985. KRAV establishes minimum requirements that must be fulfilled for certification, and inspects the production at all KRAV farms at least once a year. Farmers may follow KRAV rules by personal conviction and/or for economic reasons.

As for fertilizers (which provides nutrients to the soil), conventional farming uses inorganic fertilizers and organic farming uses manure (animal poop :-). Neither is good in too large quantities, and since manure is a 'live' product, it is more difficult to dose.

Previously, crops and livestock were integrated on the farm and nutrients circulated naturally between them. Now the animals disappear from the mid-Swedish farms and areas for grazing are there replaced by grain production. The grain is then transported to the southern parts of Sweden where the animals are nowadays located. In order to compensate for the absence of animals in mid-Sweden, farmers have to add inorganic fertilizers. In southern Sweden, the number of farms is decreasing, but the number of animals on the remaining farms is increasing. There, large amounts of manure tends to become a waste product rather than an asset.

There is simply no incentive to take care of manure in conventional farming since inorganic fertilizer is used instead. One weakness is that excessive use of inorganic fertilizers is based on the undeniably doubtful assumption that there will always be cheap phosphorus and cheap natural gas available to produce these fertilizers in the future.

The second difference between conventional and organic farming has to do with the use of pesticides. In the old days, weeds and pests were kept under control by letting different plant species follow each other (crop rotation). These methods have been replaced by a more one-sided, high-yielding and economically profitable agriculture. You can now grow the same crops for many years in a row and solve the resulting problems (weeds and pests) by using chemical pesticides. During the first half of the 20th century, weeds were removed by hand. With the help of large mechanized farm machinery, it is now possible to fight weeds and pests at 10 kilometers per hour and 12 meters wide at a time.

Unfortunately chemical pesticides used in agriculture contain at least 140 different substances. They are sprayed directly on crops which are used as food for humans or to feed animals, and pesticides are actually poisons whose purpose is to harm living organisms. Traces of pesticides are found in the food we eat and in the water we drink, but in small quantities and below legal limits. However, little is known about possible long term effects and about the interactions between different substances. There is no evidence that the substances we use today have long-term health effects on humans, but some pesticides are persistent and could cause long-term problems which in the worst case takes a lifetime to make themselves known. Something we can be quite certain of is that pesticides have indirect effects that are quite unfavorable:

"pesticides have led to changes in flora and fauna of the agricultural landscape and is one of the reasons why biodiversity is reduced. [...] Food availability in the form of insects, spiders and weeds is reduced. This has caused bird life to decline greatly since the 1970's. An important aspect of plant protection is that the pest's natural enemies are disfavored by the chemical substances, which in turn may lead to an increased need for pesticides. "

Biological diversity may in this context be viewed as an insurance. If the environment and the climate changes, species which do not seem important today may prove to be so tomorrow. Historically, agriculture has led to increased biodiversity. However, during the past 60 years, with agriculture developing towards more specialized and large-scale farms, biodiversity has instead decreased. Biodiversity benefits from that which characterizes organic and conventional agriculture - the absence of pesticides, grazing animals that add organic manure to the ground, crop rotation, micro-climates/small habitats in the landscape etc.

Large-scale farming has also reduced the genetic diversity of cultivated crops and animals in recent decades. Globalized breeding and processing of crops is accelerating this trend and threatens to replace the more local varieties with high yielding animals and genetically modified crops (GMOs). By optimizing on a single factor - such as economic efficiency – one must always sacrifice on other factors - such as biological efficiency. Reduced genetic variation and larger production units makes the food system more vulnerable, for example by increasing the risk that a disease will have a huge impact on the global food production system.

The equivalent of pesticides for animals is the routine deworming with chemical substances that is used in conventional agriculture. Organic farming has not been able to develop alternative methods that achieves the same result, although farmers in the old days knew quite a lot about how to limit the impact of parasites.

In addition to the keywords environment and health (both for animals and consumers), questions about food and agriculture seem to revolve less around facts about specific sub-issues than around perceptions of the whole. An example is the fact that consumer perceptions are not always consistent with what is actually best for the animals. We navigate a wide range of perceptions and forces encompassing ideology, ethics, lifestyles, environment and profitability, and we judge things based on ideological, utopian, scientific and pragmatic ideas.

A perspective that is sparsely represented in this book is the question of how sustainable current agricultural practices are based on their dependence on oil. A very good (50 minutes long) documentary from the BBC, "A farm for the future", is all about this. The book mentions in a few places that a lot of fossil energy is needed to produce inorganic fertilizers and that organic farming uses less energy than conventional farming. These facts are not emphasized though since the knowledge of a near-term peak in global oil productions and an understanding of the implications thereof did/does not yet exist in the minds of the man-on-the-street (or the run-of-the-mill researcher in the ivory tower of academia).

It is frighteningly clear - from a peak oil perspective - that conventional farming won't be conventional for that much longer. Unlike Marit Paulsen, I would argue that it is conventional agriculture that is not sustainable in the long run. An fossil-free organic farm is sustainable – but it may unfortunately prove to be the case that what is unsustainable is 6.7 billion persons on Earth (and counting...). That organic farming does not use chemical fertilizers and pesticides is a necessary but not sufficient condition for sustainability in the long run. Today, we face the challenge of finding alternatives to mechanized, oil-consuming farming, and simultaneously produce enough food for everyone. Food is likely to become more expensive in the future, and what does that mean for the poor people of the world who do have no access to land in the urbanized present?
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Yemen's Insoluble Problems

2010-03-30T11:57:00.001+02:00

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Image: For how long will he stay happy?

In my previous text about Yemen, I wrote about how we in recent years have been able to watch this poor country slowly run out of its only significant export product - oil. While this is bad enough, it is not, unfortunately, the only problem facing Yemen. In this second and final text about Yemen, I describe the cavalcade of problems facing the country besides falling oil production and dwindling oil exports.

If Yemeni oil is running short, what else can a poor, overpopulated country with few natural resources export? Besides oil, the main exports have been agricultural products and cheap manpower to richer neighbors (who send money home, known as "remittance"). Since Yemen’s problems are so numerous and large, this text could be very long. I have tried to keep the length down by listing some additional challenges that Yemen faces in bullets:

- The unemployment rate is between 20 and 40 percent. Despite this, a few thousand refugees from Somalia arrive every month. These refugees now amount to at least 150-200 000 persons and they further increasing competition for jobs, and, presumably, social tension.

- 20 years ago, a relatively large number of tourists visited Yemen. The numbers have declined and fell further when the Al-Qaeda began to attack tourists in 2007. Today, tourism has fallen by at least 90% compared to the peak years. Many of those who now visit the country are Yemenis living abroad traveling home to see their families.

- Yemen has high military expenditures and is fighting against Al-Qaeda in the east, separatists in the south and, especially, (possibly Iranian-backed) rebel clans in the north. The rebels in the north threaten to draw Saudi Arabia into an armed conflict. For Al-Qaeda, Yemen has become an important country (they thrive in collapsing states). For strategic and geopolitical reasons, the United States are also being drawn into Yemen, which may become “the next Afghanistan". 'An impoverished country that is strategically located on one of the world's busiest shipping lanes, Yemen has declared war on Al-Qaeda under pressure from Washington and Saudi Arabia. " In January this year, Obama said "So as president, I've made it a priority to strengthen our partnership with the Yemeni government".

- If Yemen advances from being a "failing state" to become a full-fledged "failed state" (they are currently in 18th place on the 'failed state index"), stability in the region will deteriorate further. With increased rebel, pirate and terrorist activities, it may be difficult for oil tankers and container ships to pass through one of the world’s most important sea lanes (with Yemen in the north and the "failed state winner" Somalia in the south) on their way to the Suez. Needless to say, traveling around Africa is a long and costly detour.

- The country has a very high rate of malnutrition - over one third of the population is undernourished (which is comparable to the poorest countries in Africa). Nearly half of the children between two and five years old are undernourished and show signs of stunted growth:

“[The boy] is 18 months old and severely undernourished. In an effort to save his life, his parents traveled a long way to the therapeutic feeding centre here in Taez Town, leaving behind another seven children, all under the age of 15. […] The baby […] had hardly eaten in days. He looked miserable, with sunken eyes and a dry mouth. When [he] did not show signs of improvement, his desperate family – facing a huge hospital expense – took him home. “We decided to take him back to where he belongs and trust God for his salvation,” said the boy’s mother.”

- In addition to oil, agriculture has been an important part of Yemen’s economy. But deforestation, soil erosion and expanding deserts make it difficult to maintain production. However, the biggest problem is the dry climate and water scarcity which has been "resolved" by (illegal) drilling of new wells to pump up groundwater. Over time, traditional crops which do not need much rain have been replaced by fruits and vegetables requireing irrigation.

- 50 years ago, an estimated 50 000 people lived in the capital Sana’a. To provide today's two million inhabitants with water is an enormous challenge, not least because the city is located 2,000 meters above sea level. Sana’a’s own groundwater is on the decline and is expected to run out completely in a few years. There have been talks about moving the capital as the situation is changing from bad to untenable.

- Did I mention the endemic corruption? The heavy administration? That the current President Ali Abdullah Saleh has been in office for more than 30 years (first in North Yemen and during the last 20 years in the united Yemen)? No? I may come back to that later ... if I get a small gift "under the table".

If you scrape on the surface, you will find many more other problems that could be highlighted. One historical example is how Yemen just two months after unification in 1990 bet on the wrong horse by supporting Iraq in the Gulf War - despite the fact that Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (until then) had provided important financial assistance to the country. As an effect of this gaffe, Saudi Arabia took the opportunity to expel almost one million Yemeni guest workers.

A contemporary example shows how several of the factors above interact. A camp with refugees from the unrest in the north houses 10 000 refugees. They people are poor and the children are undernourished. "Few of the displaced are used to washing regularly because water is scarce in Yemen, and few use toilets, preferring to leave waste in the open." This presents a problem when 10 000 people live close together and there are now fears of outbreaks of cholera in the camp.

In addition to geo-political and humanitarian problems that follow from reduced oil exports, a large and growing population, extreme poverty, internal strife and political instability, there is another major concern - perhaps the greatest of them all – which I would like to shed some light on, namely food and water.

"Yemen's water share per capita is less than 100 cubic meters a year, compared to the water poverty line of 1,000 cubic meters.” World average is 2500 m3 of water per person per year.

There is a shortage of water in large parts of the Middle East, but poverty and lawlessness makes the problem more difficult to address in Yemen than in most other places. Unlike wealthier neighbors, Yemen can not afford to build desalination plants, and tribal flare-ups and civil unrest makes it dangerous for engineers and hydrologists to travel to many parts of the country. Even water purification is difficult in Yemen. Existing facilities are poorly managed and some priests "have declared the reuse of wastewater to be a violation of Islamic principles".

Wells are drying up and the price of water has quadrupled in less than five years. The government is trying to prevent farmers from drilling new wells to the (rapidly receding) underground aquifers, but has little power – especially far away from the capital. It is easy to see a vicious circle with water scarcity and rising violence as its two main components.

A special problem for Yemen in particular is the strong cultural position of the mildly narcotic plant qat (khat). Most Yemeni men (and some women and even children) chew qat daily (some men can chew qat for 5-10 hours or more per day - see the picture above). "By 4 in the afternoon, most men walking the streets of Sana'a are high, or about to get high." Since qat reduces appetite, it contributes to malnutrition. In 2007, the World Bank noted that

"Qat […] drains the family budget; has adverse health effects; negatively affects work performance and thus contributes to poverty. Weaning consumers from the qat habit will be difficult, because its production accounts for some 6 percent of GDP and 14 percent of total employment. Qat consumption requires around 10 percent of the household budget of all income groups, which comes at the expense of basic food, education and health."

I have seen other (official) reports that almost half (!) of the money in some households is spent on buying qat. In addition, qat is a very thirsty plant that grows better when it gets more water. Different data indicate that between one quarter and one half (!) of all the water in this dry and thirsty country is used for growing qat. The output of qat has been growing every year, not the least because it is an easy plant to grow and because farmers earn much more by growing qat than by growing food. According to some reports, qat cultivation has increased 10-fold between 1970 and 2000 and has continued to grow explosively during the last 10 years. Like so many other things, qat cultivation is interconnected with other problems in a seemingly insoluble cluster:

"Despite the danger, Yemen isn't about to go cold turkey anytime soon. Not only are most of the country's leaders landowners deeply involved in khat production, the leaf may be one of the few things still holding Yemen together. [...] "Khat plays a big role in keeping people calm, and keeping them off the streets. But it's also delaying change. It's hard to convince people to act now."

It is hard to finish these two texts about Yemen with a "happy chapter" about how everything, despite all the problems, will be fine in the end for the 25 million people living in the country today (or the 60 million who are "estimated" to live there in 2050 - how that could ever happen). The best I can think of is to point out that Yemen, as far as I know, has not been affected by AIDS – in contrast to many poor countries in Africa...

But even without AIDS, Yemen is a dry, overpopulated, poor and violent country that lives on borrowed time. It is difficult to see how even very generous loans and assistance could keep an increasing societal disintegration at bay even during the next few years. Likely effects of a societal disintegration are migration, famine, growing lawlessness and more. We can expect to read more about Yemen in the newspapers in the near future (just as there are reports today about trouble in and around Somalia). A foretaste of what’s to come was given on Christmas Day, when the "underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt to blow up an American passenger plane put the perpetrator’s Yemeni Al-Qaeda training in the spotlight.

Here is a recent text that does not really add much to my two texts about Yemen, but that still supports these texts by describing the interconnected problems of water, violence, qat, al-Qaeda and the fact that the Yemeni capital Sana’a may become a ghost town within a decade or two. "Yemeni water trader Mohammed al-Tawwa runs his diesel pumps day and night, but gets less and less from his well in Sana’a, which experts say could become the world's first capital city to run dry".
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Yemen's Big Concern

2010-03-22T11:49:00.000+01:00

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Almost a year ago I wrote a text [in Swedish] about Mexico's problems with oil production dropping dramatically. The past summer, BP Statistical Review of World Energy was published for the 58th time, and Mexico was the country whose oil production decreased the most in absolute numbers during 2008. The decrease, compared to the previous year, was more than 300 000 barrels of oil per day. That is more than 9% of Mexico's entire production, but only slightly more than 0.3% of global oil production. However, I placed the text about Mexico in a larger context; which countries are more, and which countries are less vulnerable to the changes that peak oil will bring?

Here I choose to continue with that theme - "countries that will have a hard time after peak oil" - and look closer at the Arabian Peninsula. The Arabian Peninsula is dominated by Saudi Arabia, and there has been some "fuss" about Dubai fairly recently, but here I focus on Saudi Arabia's smaller and much poorer neighbor to the south, Yemen. Where both Saudi Arabia and Yemen are facing similar challenges (large populations in relation to food production and availability of water), the countries have significantly different abilities to deal with these challenges since Saudi Arabia is a very rich country whereas Yemen is very poor. But first a little detour.

Before a trip to Morocco 10 years ago I read a travelogue about "Arabia". The book, "Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761-67", was about a scientific expedition to Yemen, where a disciple of the Swedish botanist Linnaeus, the talented Peter Forsskål, participated. The expedition started in 1761, and two and a half years later Forsskål died of malaria in the city of Jerim. Conditions on the expedition were tough to say the least, and only one of five expedition members returned to Europe six years after the expedition started. My memories of the book are now somewhat vague, but I remember that the image of "Yemen" (southern Arabian Peninsula) was not very attractive. Sparsely populated, very poor already then and with an unbearable climate:

"The climate is very hot and humid along the coast, temperate in the western mountain region with monsoon rains, extremely hot and dry desert climate in the interior of the country. There are significant differences in temperature, particularly between day and night. In the summer, daytime temperatures may reach 40 degrees [Celsius], in the winter the temperature at night may reach below freezing."

When South Yemen and North Yemen were unified and became Yemen in 1990, the new country was one of the poorest in the world, and it is still the poorest of all countries in the Arab world (GDP per capita is below U.S. $1,000/year). Approximately 40% of the population lives on less than $2 per day. Only 50% of the women are literate. The society is strongly patriarchal with polygamy and a high rate of infant mortality.

Demographic trends in this barren and resource-poor country, despite, or perhaps because of poverty and patriarchal traditions, have been explosive; in just 50 years the population has quadrupled! The average family size is seven people and two-thirds of the population is under 24 years of age. On a surface that is only slightly larger than Sweden, but considerably less hospitable, almost 25 million people live. Since the birth rate even today is the fourth largest in the world, population is expected to rise to 40 million by 2030 and 60 million by 2050. I am skeptical that this will actually happen, because Yemen has Very Big Concerns.

Yemen is not a very well known country, and since some Arab countries have huge oil reserves and others do not, it might not be easy to place a country on the world oil map. Yemen is a country that has oil, albeit in small quantities. And the oil reserves are shrinking rapidly. If Mexico was the country whose oil production fell the most in absolute terms in 2008, Yemen was the country whose production decreased the most in relative terms - the oil production fell by a whopping 11.6%.

It is difficult to know how to illustrate a country's oil production, but in an attempt to understand the figures one could compare Yemen with the fellow oil producing countries Denmark and Norway. All three countries reached their peak oil production in the first half of the previous decade (2001-2004). At its peak,Yemen's produced 457 000 barrels of oil per day (165 million barrels in 2002). That is almost 20% more than Denmark's maximum oil production (in 2004) and 1/8 of Norway's maximum oil production (in 2001). According to BP's figures for 2008, oil production in all three countries has since have decreased by between 26% (Denmark) and 33% (Yemen).

Mexico has "only" reduced its oil production by 17% since its peak in 2004, and Yemen also beats Mexico hands down in another respect. Whereas oil revenues account for 40% of the Mexican state budget, they account for more than 70% of Yemen's national budget! Moreover, oil accounts for almost 90% of the value of Yemen’s exports and as much as 30% of Yemen's total GDP. The figures for the entire year of 2009 are not yet ready, but the figures for the first 10 months of the year look disastrous. It was a bit difficult for me to get all the figures together, but some detective work from various sources yielded the following:

In 2002,Yemen’s oil production peaked at more than 450 000 barrels of oil per day. A few years later, in 2006, Yemen produced almost 390 000 barrels of oil per day (140 million barrels annually). Of this oil, 55 million barrels (40% of the production) were used by Yemen itself, and the rest – 85 million barrels – was exported.

Two years later, in 2008, Yemen produced only 305 000 barrels of oil per day (110 million barrels annually), and during the first 10 months of the year almost 40 million barrels were exported. If we assume that the country managed to export 50 million barrels in total throughout the year (which is doubtful, since oil production was declining), domestic consumption has risen from 55 million barrels to 60 million barrels (55% of the production) in two years. This is in line with figures indicating that domestic consumption rose by another 2.5 million barrels from 2008 to 2009.

This trend illustrates well the so-called "Export Land Model". The model states that exports from an oil-producing country may drop very quickly if the country chooses to increase (or maintain) its domestic consumption while production falls. And the domestic oil consumption actually has increased in Yemen. According to some data (from a good analysis which largely overlap with this text), domestic (subsidized) oil consumption increased by as much as 50% from 2001 to 2009, that is, during the same period that oil production declined by more than 30%. Consequently, from 2001 to 2009, oil exports declined by more than 50%!

The figures from the first 10 months of 2009 indicate that Yemen only managed to export slightly less than 25 million barrels (which implies at the most 30 million barrels for the whole year). Thus it looks like the domestic oil consumption during a period of four years from 2006 to 2009 has risen each year, while oil exports - the country’s largest, total dominant and almost only source of income – has fallen by a shocking two-thirds during that same period of only a few short years (from 85 to almost 30 million barrels). The trend is clear – oil exports have fallen by around 20 million barrels per year during the last three years and if nothing drastic happens, Yemen already would, at some point during 2011, have to import oil to meet domestic needs. But with what money?

In addition to the domestic oil consumption "stealing" oil which could be exported for much-needed revenue, the government spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year to subsidize the domestic (increasing) energy consumption. Already in 2005, various subsidies were the single largest item in the state budget, and subsidies of fuel amounted to nearly 25% of total government expenditure. Despite demands from the World Bank, Yemen has failed to reduce its subsidies on oil and electricity (all electricity in Yemen is generated by oil-fueled power plants). When the government actually tried to reduce these subsidies in 2005, the result was riots. Because of the failure, the World Bank reduced its contributions to Yemen by a third.

From 2008 to 2009, in addition to a dramatic reduction in oil exports by one third, the average price of oil dropped from 107 to 60 dollars/barrel. This resulted in a decline in oil export revenues from more than 4 billion U.S. dollars to less than 1.5 billion U.S. dollars for the first 10 months of the year (an amazing decrease of two thirds from one year to the next!). Yemen’s oil production is projected to continue to decrease every year and may be a closed chapter within 10 years. Previous years' upward trend in oil prices did until 2009 mask Yemen’s problem of declining production and declining exports, but now the problems appear terrifyingly clear.

It is appropriate to point out that Yemen has recently started to export liquefied natural gas (LNG), "Production of LNG began in October 2009. The Yemeni government expects the LNG project to add U.S. $ 350 million to its budget." That this would fully compensate for the decline in oil production is, however, an impossibility; "Yemen has done little planning for a post-petroleum economy, and most analysts doubt state expectations that natural gas will be able to fill the void left by oil."

This text will be followed by a second and final text about Yemen’s problems (yes, Yemen has many more problems than "only" that the dwindling oil production). Already after this text one may conclude that Yemen is smoldering – and it gets worse...
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"The last days of economic growth" by Forsberg (2007)

2010-03-03T11:53:00.003+01:00

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In the preface to "The last days of economic growth: Green clash over worldviews" (2007), Björn Forsberg describes how the book emerged from thoughts and ideas that did not fit his Ph.d. thesis in political science. The whole book, but especially the first few chapters, are written without any trace of mercy as Forsberg pummels his ideological opponent. Even if the environmental and climate challenges are central to the book, Forsberg’s furious accusations are primarily addressed at the "root of evil" – a society based on the idea of endless economic growth. This book is the fourth book I write about in this blog and it so happens to be the first book that is written in (and only accessible in) Swedish. It is probably pretty safe for me to state that this is the only place where you can learn anything about this book unless you happen to know Swedish.

Forsberg is very aware of peak oil, and behind his criticism of the growth cult there stands a man with an eye on the global and national energy situation, and with full knowledge of the fact that we will move towards more and more expensive energy in the coming decades. I happen to agree with Forsberg about much of what he writes, and when I read the book it felt like he had managed to beautifully formulate what I myself - with peak oil as a starting point - tentatively had begun to write about elsewhere. Therefore, this text will basically be an abstract of Forsberg’s book, even though I basically only treat selected parts of the book.

The cover photo (above) shows a picture of Las Vegas, an impossible city that may also serve as a metaphor for an impossible society and an unsustainable civilization. Las Vegas shines, flashes, beeps and sounds 24/7. A completely artificial environment where nifty watchmakers have even managed to "stop time" in order to entice guests to stay and gamble some more. And no one is cheated as all actors willingly play their roles on the Las Vegas scene while at the same time, this city in the middle of the desert, is a fragile colossus on clay feet, a city that could not exist without enormous subsidies of energy, food and water.

According to the prevalent green rhetoric, there is today consensus about the environmental objectives of [Swedish] society – because “we all want what is good for the environment". In addition and according to the same "narrative", we don't any longer only think the environment is important, but actually prioritize the environment in our actions.

Forsberg rejects these two "truths" utterly and completely, and his whole book treats the fundamental conflict between the environment and the (growth-based) economy. Forsberg assumes that economic growth necessarily ("demonstrably") means increased pressure on ecosystem resources, and argues convincingly that economic growth is always given priority when it comes in conflict with concerns about the environment. New technologies with significant economic potential, such as genetically modified crops or 3G phone networks always take precedence over the principle of precaution and over considerations about possible adverse health effects. Forsberg illustrates the problem with an example that is so obvious that it does not really merit any further comments:

"During only five years, from 2001 to 2006, the amount of electronic waste in Sweden tripled. [...] According to business professionals, part of the explanation is the sales boom for flat-screen television sets [...] and the trend towards an ever-shorter life span of consumer electronics products, white goods and other household technologies. That spells bad news for the environment, but, as we all know, it also means growth."

The conflict between the environment and the economy, and the systematic subordination of the environment vis-à-vis growth, leads to a situation where measures to improve the environment are possible and acceptable only if all of the following conditions are fulfilled:

1) Measures are not perceived as troublesome, as something that requires sacrifices.
2) Measures are not financially burdensome.
3) Measures do not threaten economic growth.

These conditions alone make many actions impossible, including the most effective ones, like reduced consumption of energy, transportation and goods. The basic problem is simply that it is impossible in our growth based society to cope with, or win legitimacy for measures that threaten economic growth. The measures a growth based society can cope with, and which today's environmental policies focuses on, instead meet one of the following four criteria:

- The measure is beyond the economy's vital interests and are not associated with any major expenses. Thus it is acceptable to protect remote and inaccessible nature reserves with low economic potential (note: the protection status of a nature reserve may be reviewed at the same moment it is discovered that the area contains some exploitable, economically valuable resource).

- The measure has a relatively marginal cost. It is possible to prohibit specific, particularly hazardous chemicals (DDT, PCBs, CFCs, etc.), since such regulations are limited to few products and the negative economic impact is only borne by a small number of firms and industries (note: serious efforts to try to limit CO2 or other greenhouse gas emissions would affect many sectors and companies negatively and the costs are thus perceived as too high).

- The measure is obviously necessary to protect long-term economic interests. The introduction of fishing quotas in order to prevent fish stocks from collapsing is an example of this (note: the fishing industry is routinely protesting loudly about such limitations).

- The measure creates a lot of goodwill and economic growth. If an environmental protection measure has the potential to become an engine of growth for the environmental technology industry (so-called "cleantech" or "greentech"), and lead to increased export incomes, an irresistible "win-win" situation may occur (note: if an environment protection measure does not imply opportunities for (future) economic gains, or even restricts the industries' profit opportunities, it is relegated to the dunce’s corner).

In the rare cases where a (relatively radical) proposal for regulation (finally) is presented, powerful forces are immediately mobilized and will - with mechanical precision - claim that competition will be distorted, that the Swedish industry will risk collapsing, that the government should not interfere with the free market, and so on.

Forsberg's conclusion is that environmental issues nowadays have a prominent position in speeches, in policy statements and in political moves - but that this only gives the appearance of action, since the political will to actually back up these fancy words does not exist. What we have in abundance is an important but rarely noticed difference between what is said and what is actually done.

What is actually done is to commission a steady stream of environmental inquiries whose findings, conclusions and recommendations are then scrupulously ignored. Inquiries and investigations pile up and their ample existence as measured by the number of pages written provide an alibi and a semblance of national mobilization for the environment. Forsberg himself has participated in several such inquiries and questions the usefulness of his contributions to "the mountain of infrequently read and negligibly influential reports which are the harsh reality of environmental commissions".

Responsibility for this pitiful situation does not all fall on the shoulders of our politicians. On the contrary, no one is without blame, and apparently it is perfectly fine for me as an individual to demand “solutions” from politicians while at the same time refusing to accept environmental reforms which will have any direct consequences for me and my lifestyle! In summary, there is a "barrier of individual comfort, powerful special interests, economic short-sightedness and other layers of resistance that prevents a transformation of society."

Another blameworthy actor is the mainstream media. The supposedly serious morning papers have difficulties rising above their daily time horizon. The built-in dramaturgy of news media simply does not allow for long-term monitoring of complex issues. Sudden crises and disasters (like a couple of recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile) are better at driving sales, and thus get a higher coverage. Current events spread across multiple pages, while decisive trends are dealt with in short paragraphs near the bottom of the reader's attention span.

As readers we are lulled into a feeling that everything is (more or less) in order. Accidents certainly happen on a regular basis (usually at a comfortable distance), but we do not have to be confronted with stories that compel us to reconsider our way of living here and now. I propose that 9/11 and Katrina created such a trauma for Americans precisely because it was, for the American public, something that happened to "us" instead of (only) to "them". Forsberg gives an example of media's miserable coverage of important issues in the context of a two-day seminar in 2006 about how Sweden could cope with a future without oil:

"A participating economy reporter from the TV channel 4 honestly explained that the subject of our seminar was too ‘long- term’ for the evening economy news. The workshop could only become a news story for TV if we could also comment on short-term winners and losers of the increase in oil prices that happened to take place the previous day. The issue of long-term consequences of increased scarcity of oil [...] on the other hand, was not perceived as an economically relevant issue in the editors evaluation of economic news."

Forsberg’s conclusion is that (commercial) media only conveys messages that do not come into conflict with the current economic system and with powerful economic interests (advertisers). Maybe the editors of the evening newspaper do not even notice the contradiction between asking what politicians are doing about climate change and, on the same spread, encouraging readers to fly to Rome for 200 Swedish Crowns (less than 30 USD). Forsberg states that if a newspaper claims to take the climate issue seriously, while at the same time encouraging readers to fly on weekend trips or participate in "petrol revolts" (tame Swedish protests against the petrol taxes - usually involving nothing more than signing your, or a fake, name to a list - no Tea Party protests hereabouts) - then the newspaper is not a credible actor and it is a part of the problem rather than the solution.

Furthermore, society is permeated by a newspeak which tends to lead us astray, reduce the problems and mentally bind us to an ecologically destructive social order:

- A detergent is marketed as environmentally friendly, when it in reality is actually only less environmentally unfriendly. If the detergent was really environmentally friendly, then it ought to improve the environment, so that we would like to pour as much of it as possible into the Baltic Sea (compare this jargon with the term "green car").

- When people talk about "accessibility" in relations to traffic, what they actually mean is accessibility for cars. The car is implicitly, but at the same time exceedingly clearly, the very model for how we "should" move around in society. Accessibility for cyclists or pedestrians is a subject that is most often ignored, and cyclists are by default treated as obstacles for (the cars’) mobility.

- Glass, newspapers and materials that can be composted are described as "garbage" or "waste" rather than "resources".

- In the midst of the Swedish election campaign in 2006, one of the biggest Swedish newspapers proclaimed that "The Green party harbors most eco-villains". The explanation behind this blown-up claim was that Green party voters on the average owned old cars than voters for other political parties. Being environmentally friendly was thus unproblematically defined as "owning a new car". But it is not unlikely that Green party sympathisers to a greater extent than others do not own a car at all (overlooked perspective). Nor is it unlikely that cars often play a smaller role in the lives of Green party voters’, making the voters drive less and therefore on average have older cars (overlooked perspective). Moreover, it is obviously better for the environment to lovingly maintain and use a car as long as possible before buying a new one (overlooked perspective). The claim could (should) just as well have been "Green party has the most eco-heroes".

- When fundamentally psychopathic companies locate their operations to countries that offer the best conditions (that is, countries that have the lowest social and environmental requirements), it is considered perfectly normal and a sign of "sound business strategies". On characteristics of psychopaths (equally applicable to companies?):

Psychopaths [...] do not experience shame, guilt, or remorse for their action. Psychopaths lack a sense of guilt or remorse for any harm they may have caused others, instead rationalizing the behavior [...] Psychopaths also lack empathy towards others in general [...] Psychopaths also have a markedly distorted sense of the potential consequences of their actions"

The framework for public debate and for our very thinking is formed in these and similar manners. To talk about limits to growth is regarded as character traits of a narrow-minded, fundamentalistic, reactionary person. Anyone who persists is dismissed and not allowed to participate in the "serious" public debate. Furthermore, he/she runs the risk of being labeled "eco-religious" or of being an "environmental Taliban". But, Forsberg asks, when was the last time you experienced an economist, business leader or growth-oriented politicians being called "growth religious" or a "growth fundamentalist"?

Gold Medal in newspeak, however, is awarded to the astroturfing company-funded networks and organizations that are responsible for promoting a growth agenda and obstructing and keeping the environmental issues away from public debate - but that gives the impression of working for the environment with names like "Information Council on the Environment" and "The Climate Coalition.” The former was funded by, among others, the National Coal Association, and in the list of members of the latter organization, you could find some of the world's largest oil companies (Exxon, Shell, Texaco, BP) and car manufacturers (Ford, GM, DaimlerChrysler). Forsberg quotes author Andrew Rowell:

"Since its inception in 1983, the Citizens for Sensible Control of Acid Rain has spent over $7.5 million attempting to defeat acid rain legislation, without a sensible citizen in sight, just some large electricity companies."

Forsberg's book addresses many other issues, such as the problems (the growth-oriented thinking) of the green movement and of the Left, the problems with a debate climate shaped by Right-wing growth worshiping think tanks and "lomborgians" (after the discredited Danish environmental skeptic Bjørn Lomborg), the problem of "ecomodernism" (the popular and politically viable idea that sustainable development and economic development go hand in hand and that environmental problems may be viewed as the next economic growth engine), the personal problems trying to decrease your environmental footprint in a society that is configured for a high-and-increasing level of consumption, and, the problems for a researcher to obtain funding for research that is non-growth-oriented or even critical of economic growth (for example relating to peak oil).

Forsberg’s thoughts and suggestions for possible solutions are mainly about localization (the opposite of globalization). Forsberg advocates "an economy guided by proximity and transparency", which is nurtured by positive social visions of a sustainable society. It is not possible to do justice to these ideas in a few short sentences and it is a pity the book has not been translated into English!

My only complaint is that the book sometimes feels slightly "messy". The sources to some of what I have written about above (media, newspeak) are found in at least two or perhaps three different places in the book. A text that has grown organically during a period of five years would have benefited from more help from an editor with a firm hand and an eye towards making the text better structured. Beyond that complaint I advice anyone (the few of you read this text and who can also read Swedish) to buy the book and read it for yourselves.
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"The Plan" by Black (2008)

2010-02-17T20:25:00.001+01:00

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Author Edwin Black's niche is to, assisted by dozens of volunteers, sieve through libraries and archives and write extremely well-researched books. He usually spends a couple of years doing research before he cranks out a new book, but he made an exception for the sleek, no more than 130 pages long "The Plan: How to rescue society when the oil stops - or the day before" (2008).

A little more than a year ago, I wrote [in Swedish - not yet translated to English] about his first oil-related book, "Internal Combustion: How corporations and governments addicted the world to oil and derailed the alternatives" (2006). Here I review the 2008 "sequel".

The book's starting point is America's (in)ability to cope with an acute fuel crisis. It does thus not start off with the “ordinary” peak oil scenario based on a relatively slow decline in global production but rather takes as its starting point a rather sudden change for the worse. "Oil will ’peak‘ [...] the very hour a person cannot pump a gallon of gas or buy bread on an unstocked supermarket shelf because someone thousands of miles away has cut the lines of supply".

Although the book does not primarily deal with what exactly caused this sudden decline, it starts by giving an overview of how dependent and vulnerable the U.S. is if the daily supply of oil from neighboring and more distant countries would suddenly decline (the three largest exporters of oil to the United States are Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia).

When it comes to Saudi Arabia, Black points out that the oil from the world's largest oil field, Ghawar, must pass through three vulnerable choke points on its journey to the U.S. and other export markets. At Abqaiq, two thirds of Saudi Arabia's oil is processed and prepared for shipment by tankers before the oil is sent to the port of Ras Tanura. Subsequently, all oil tankers have to travel through the 50 kilometers narrow Strait of Hormuz in order to reach the oceans. Of all the oil in the world that is transported by sea, approximately 40% has to traverse the narrow Strait of Hormuz, and Black calls these three choke points "the solar plexus of the planet." If any of these three sites were to be knocked out, the world would immediately go down for count.

In 2006, an attack by al-Qaeda against Abqaiq was averted, and Iran has threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz if the country is invaded by the United States or Israel. For Black, the question is not if, but when a collapse of the oil supply (of some kind) takes place.

What then constitutes an acute oil crisis? At a 5% decrease in the oil volumes that are accessible to the Western world, the U.S. President may give permission to release oil from the strategic oil reserve. A decrease of 7% would trigger an "international crisis under emergency treaties", and a decrease of 10% would be a disaster which, according to an energy expert, would be "so off the chart that we cannot even model it". That does not sound very reassuring, does it? “The Plan” is Black's answer to what the U.S. needs to do to cope with a prolonged (more than 30 days long) reduction in the availability of oil by 5-10%.

After stating that some (few) Western countries have plans for how to handle such a situation, Black makes a point of the fact that the United States Does Not Have a Plan - beyond letting the (marvelous, magical, miraculous) market handle such a never-occurred-before situation. To Black, his own book is right now the plan - the manual - for how to face such a crisis. In fact, the book is partly written as a manual, and therefore in places tends to become a rather dry read. The book's longest chapter is structured in the form of 18 regulations, and each regulation is followed by a discussion of the necessity and consequences of the regulation in question. Some of the regulations are quite formally written - ready to be immediately implemented in a real crisis:

"Regulation 15: Marine Restrictions on yachts, speed boats and non-commercial pleasure craft. Within one week of an oil supply emergency declaration, all non-commercial marine craft, including but not limited to private yachts, speed boats, recreational vessels and personal watercraft, shall be unable to refuel in the Continental United States, except in an emergency, until retrofitted to accept alternative fuel or propulsion system."

These 18 regulations govern everything from prices and rules about the sales of refined petroleum products, to how to deal with the strategic oil reserve, carpooling, speed limits (55 mph or 90 km/h, except "in the countryside"), idling, public transportation (very cheap or free), trailers, the black market and so on. Petrol price are set to a predetermined level that does not price the poor out of the market - since everyone must have the chance to get to a hospital or to work (for example as a cleaner in a hospital). The price of petrol will thus remain "reasonable", but the amount you will be able to buy will be rationed.

One of the regulations states that a car’s fuel economy will determine how often the car may be driven; if a car cannot be driven at least 15 miles per gallon (mpg) - 6.3 kilometers per liter of gasoline – it may not be driven at all before it has been rebuilt/retrofitted. Cars with a fuel economy of up to 25 mpg may be driven one day per week, up to 35 mpg may be driven every second day, and for cars that have a fuel economy of 36 mpg or better (15 kilometers/liter) there will be no restrictions.

All these regulations are short term measures which are to be implemented during the very first week. Eventually, all cars and other vehicles must be rebuilt so that they may be driven on fuel other than petrol. Regarding alternative fuels Black is agnostic – he thinks that people should use whatever works best in different parts of the United States and lists the available options: hydrogen, ammonia, alcohol (e.g. ethanol), biofuels, compressed natural gas (CNG) or electricity. Unfortunately, in the U.S. today it is very difficult to get around the rules and "upgrade" a car to drink other beverages than gasoline, so the starting position for the future growth industry if retrofitting cars is poor. The rigid rules of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have prevented the commercialization of alternatives to gasoline, thus nurturing a small (illegal) underground culture where people upgrade their cars at their own risk and using equipment from abroad.

Who is to blame for the vulnerable situation that the United States and the rest of the Western world now finds itself in? Black identifies four main culprits:

- OPEC bears some responsibility but gets off lightly; it was the West who invaded their territories after the First World War and created vassal states which supplied cheap oil, and, it was also the West who voluntarily made themselves dependent on OPEC’s oil.

- The second scapegoat is the public and their (spineless) representatives among politicians.

- Oil companies (Big Oil) are according to Black more blameworthy than OPEC and the general public. They have enriched themselves while they have made society more dependent on oil, and have at the same time delayed and discouraged all possible alternatives. In the second quarter of 2008, America's largest oil company, Exxon Mobil, made an astronomical profit of 11 680 million dollars. If you remove all oil companies from the list of America's 500 largest companies (Fortune 500), Exxon earned more money than all the other companies combined during that period.

- Black though reserves the greatest blame for Detroit and the American car companies. Already in the childhood of the automobile, the nascent automotive industry sabotaged and manipulated the alternative, better solution - the electric car. From a long history of "subversive activities", Detroit becomes the main scapegoat for its recent 35 year long campaign of obstruction and foolish decisions. The automotive industry has repeatedly made the wrong turn ever since the first oil crisis in 1973 made it clear that the U.S. was vulnerable due to its dependence on oil. Despite this obvious vulnerability, Detroit has since then built, sold and exported many millions of gas-thirsty cars which have exacerbated and already-bad situation. Actor Alex Baldwin (no kidding) reflects on Detroit's burden of debt:

"The heads of [US automakers] did not spend the last thirty years lying in bed each night, sleepless. They did not turn their spouses in the wee hours and say, "How do I serve the automotive needs of the American public and better protect their health and safety AND help them conserve energy?" [...] Instead, they spent billions of dollars attempting to bribe the Congress to avoid putting in seat belts and air bags, installing catalytic converters and reaching more ambitious fuel efficiency standards. For the most part, they succeeded."

Based on all of this, Black concludes in his 18th and final regulation that the oil and automotive industries must absolutely not be involved in any discussions about how to solve the oil crisis:

”Iowa corn producers, Detroit carmakers, oil companies and other forces of petroaddiction must be kept out of the fix. They will destroy it, dilute it, distract it, dismantle it, or divert it. […] if lobbyists are not excluded from the rescue plan, then any plan will be doomed.”

Right now, two out of the three major American car companies are down for count (General Motors and Chrysler). In a way, they have thus been "punished" for their sins. But from another perspective, they have instead been absolved and have left their sins behind them, because it is no longer possible to claim compensation from them - and especially so if the compensation should be proportional to the harm these companies more or less deliberately have inflicted upon society.

In some ways Black may come acress as extreme. His answer would be that a major threat must be countered with measures that (to some) may seem extreme (today). In other ways, however, he is moderate in his approaches and assumptions. Something I find to be a weakness is that he never criticizes or even reflects upon fundamental assumptions about the American way of life based on cars and long distance transportation, despite the fact that he clearly makes an effort to think about the ‘real’ price of gasoline:

”The true price of every gallon of gasoline, adding in expenditures for tax subsidies and government programs, harm to our health as a result of toxic emissions, environmental damage and military operations to protect the supply, is almost impossible to reliably calculate […] But some of the most quoted and informed studies conclude the true cost of oil to be more than $15 per gallon”

The claim that oil and gasoline actually cost much more than what you pay at the petrol pump is in line with the contents of a report ("Powering America's Defense: Energy and the Risks to National Security") from the military think tank CNA. The report, written by CNA's military advisory board (consisting of 12 retired generals and admirals) states that the real cost of providing U.S. military with fuel is between 15 and hundreds of dollars per gallon (!), depending on the need for security and logistics to ensure that the fuel is in the right place at the right time. These prices for example include costs to protect maritime transports and to station troops and maintain numerous military bases abroad.

A concrete example is a specific study from Iraq, where only 10% of the fuel for ground troops is used by tanks and other vehicles that "deliver lethal force". The remaining 90% is used by armored vehicles, trucks and helicopters that deliver and protect fuel and troops. Another example is the estimated cost of $42/gallon for aerial refueling of fighters. Of course, these calculations do not include "softer" aspects such as pollution of the environment or poor health among military and other personnel mentioned by Black above.

When the gasoline price skyrocketed in 2008 and many Americans were brought to their knees, the price of a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. reached unheard-of levels of $4 per gallon. This price is not at all high from a Swedish perspective where we have to go back to the end of the 1980's to find such "bargain" prices! But, a $4 per gallon price tag on gas in the U.S. is two to three times as much as the price during the period 1990-2004. Today, in the midst of a raging recession, the price of gasoline is slightly higher than $2.50 per gallon, and already that price is too much for many (un- or underemployed) Americans.

Although The Plan is a crisis plan, Black would prefer for it to be implemented already before a major crisis arises. A nice thought, but don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen – the ideas are far too rational to be taken seriously.
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The energy consumption of avatars

2010-02-10T00:58:00.004+01:00

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Are virtual worlds environmentally sustainable? Based on such thoughts, Nicholas Carr wrote a blog post some three years ago, in December 2006, about how much power we use when we use virtual worlds. It provoked strong reactions, not the least because the title of his text was "Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians". Still three years laters, texts (such as this one :-) about avatars, eletricity, climate impact and Brazilians show up like a jack-in-the-box. I will here go through Nick’s line of reasoning and the criticism he encountered before I go on and analyze the ways in which we can think about these issues. I recently wrote about the energy footprint of Google searches and will eventually come around and write about the power consumption and carbon footprint of PCs and data centers. Computer servers consume one percent or so of the world electricity supply. That might not sound like much, but their power consumption grows by 15-20% per year (which is equivalent to a fivefold increase in 10 years).   

At the time when Nick Carr posted is question, the virtual world Second Life was visited by somewhere between 10 000 and 15 000 avatars at any one time. To run it all, no less than 4000 servers were required. In the absence of actual figures as to the electricity consumption of the company that runs Second Life - Linden Lab - Nick made a few assumptions:  - Each server in Linden Lab’s data center burns through 200 watts and then uses an additional 50 watts to cool the data center.  - Every home computer that is connected to Second Life uses 120 watts.   

This would mean that the 4 000 servers in question use (4 000 servers) x (250 watts) x (24 hours) = 24 000 kWh (kilowatt hours) each day. Additionally, the power consumption of all home computers is (12 500 PCs on average) x (120 watts) x (24 hours) = 36 000 kWh each day. Altogether these computers and servers would thus use 60 000 kWh per day and if we divide this electricity consumption between 12 500 avatars, each of them would use 4.8 kWh for each 24 hours of existence in the game/virtual world Second Life.   

How much is 4.8 kWh per day then? Well, it adds up over the days and months and becomes 1750 kWh per year which is comparable with the electricity consumption per capita in Brazil (according to the 2003 data that Nick had access to).

  In the ensuing discussion, Nick was quickly corrected by a person who was employed by Linden Lab. Previously, each computer server ran a "region" in the game but now, a server may run up to four "regions". The correct figures for Linden Lab’s electricity consumption is therefore (1 000 servers) x (225 watts) x (24 hours) = 5 400 kWh per day - that is, less than 1/4 of the original estimate (which, however was based on a fuzzy statement by the CEO of Linden Lab). The new figures gives that an avatar consumes approximately 1 200 kWh per year instead of 1 750 kWh, and that Linden Lab’s servers account for a relatively small part of that power consumption while the home computers account for more than 85% of the total power consumption.   

Almost six months later (May 2007), Nick is once more corrected when a new, better-informed (?) employee from Linden Lab presents new figures. To begin with, the average number of avatars are now 30 000, and the number of servers has risen to 2 000. In addition, both servers and home PCs draw significantly more power when the run Second Life. Now, Linden Lab’s power consumption is instead (2 000 servers) x (500 watts) x (24 hours) = 24 000 kWh. The rule of thumb is that for every watt that a server uses, the same amount of energy is needed to cool the data center where the server is housed. Power consumption at home is estimated to be (30 000 computers) x (250 watts) x (24 hours) = 180 000 kWh per day. In total, these 204 000 kWh divided into 30 000 avatars becomes 6.8 kWh per day. That is equivalent to 2 500 kWh per year and the home computer accounts for almost 90% of the total power consumption. Latvia, Romania and Argentina are a few countries that had a power consumption in the neighborhood of 2 500 kWh per capita in 2005. In Sweden, we used more than 15 000 kWh per person in 2005.

  Taking all of this conflict (and constantly changing) information into account, what conculsions can be drawn so far?

  - The Internet changes constantly. To get current figures is like chasing a moving target. What are the figures for Second Life right now? According to the latest figures (Jan 2010) there are currently 18 million accounts (avatars) registered in Second Life, but only 750 000 of them (5%) log in to Second Life each month. These avatars spent a total of 118 million hours (!) in Second Life during the third quarter of 2009.
  
- Information about the number of servers and their power consumption varies widely and therefore seems not be that reliable (see above). Power consumption can obviously not have been one of the heavier costs when running virtual worlds - or they would have kept better track of the figures. The same has probably been true also for other companies that rely on data centers such as Google, Flickr, Blizzard etc., but things might be changing now as the energy prices have been marching upwards during the last couple of years.

  - A computer at work uses 120-150 watts, but a computer that runs Second Life (or World of Warcraft or any other computer games) can use up to twice as much power as these applications make use of your computer's capabilities to the max. Data center use a lot of power, but you home computer that utilizes these services draw a lot more and get less work (computer cycles) done per unit of energy used.

  - It is difficult to determine the usefulness (or damage) of using virtual worlds. On the one hand, you use a lot less energy (and generate considerably less pollution) if you cancel a trip and instead meet in a virtual world. But a computer uses a lot of electricity - if the option is an electricity-free activity (take a walk, talk to a neighbor, help your children do their homework).   

- Ideas are hard to kill. Although Nick’s figures were refuted and modified immediately, the "meme" about Second Life and the electricity consumption of Brazilians remains alive and pops up now and then to the chagrin of some.

  The main objections raised against Nick’s argument above was that no real person is connected to Second Life 24 hours a day and that Second Life actually had 700 000 "active user" (whatever that means) at the time. So the power consumption of each person who used Second Life would have been just a 50th of Nick’s original calculation. Furthermore, any computer that is used for 24 hours a day 365 days per year uses more energy than the average Brazilians whatever that computer is used for (playing Second Life or doing something entirely different).   

Both ways of looking at this problem is correct, but these different perspectives choses to focus on slightly different things. Any individual physical person who plays Second Life did that for less than an hour a day on average and thus uses a moderate amount of energy. But each avatar in Second Life has the same (or higher) power consumption (per hour, per day or per year) as many people on earth have.   

I think Nicholas perspective is interesting, not the least because some information technology pundits sometimes tend to completely ignore that computers are physical objects that have required resources (raw materials, energy) for their manufacture, that consume electricity throughout their lifetime, and that one day will be scrapped/recycled. Computers obviously have an ecological footprint and the size of that footprint should naturally be explored further. This is a topic I will come back to later. 
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"A thousand barrels a second" by Tertzakian (2007)

2010-01-31T20:18:00.001+01:00

Peter Tertzakian has a double education in geophysics and economics and is "Chief Energy Economist" at a Canadian energy investment company. His book "A Thousand Barrels a Second: The Coming Oil Breakpoint and Challenges facing an energy dependent world" was published in 2007, but was, based on the contents of the book, presumably written up around 2005. The book's title, "A Thousand Barrels a Second" refers to the rate at which we globally extract and consume oil today; a thousand barrels is equivalent to 159 000 liters of oil per second - or 86 million barrels of oil (more than 13 000 000 000 liters) per day. Of these incredibly high volumes of oil, nearly half ends up in a gas tank close to you.

Peter does not talk about "Peak Oil" but about "the coming oil break point”. Exactly how these terms differ from one another is not easy to know, and one may speculate about the reason(s) for Tertzakian to avoid the more conventional/well-known term. My guess is that it is not easy for someone who works in the energy industry - and is richly rewarded for his efforts - to undermine or create too much suspicion about the sustainability of the current system. You may discuss the challenges ahead in terms of "enormous changes", but you must also strive to find the right tone and a balance between your concerns and your utmost confidence that we can and will cope with these problems.

It is a bit strange though, because Peter describes exactly the same grim picture as more conventional oil peak advocates do when he talks about today's energy realities: that oil production in the United States peaked in 1970, that our oil thirst is unquenchable and unsustainable, that all the major oilfields in the world have been discovered and that the trend is that we find less and less oil each year. Today, a newly discovered "large" oil field satisfies the global need for oil only for a few days or weeks. One example is the Hibernia oil field off Newfoundland, Canada. It is one of the major oilfields discovered during the past 30 years, but the total (estimated) amount of oil there is equal to only 11 days of global consumption.

The "break point" that Tertzakian referers to is one of four phases in a cycle that each dominant source of energy passes through: Pressure buildup, Break point, Rebalance and Growth and Dependency. The oil crisis of the 1970s marked a break point which caused a nearly fifteen year long period of rebalancing. We are now, since 2001, in the pressure buildup phase, and this time the break point and rebalancing phase will be more dramatic, longer and more difficult, since there are no easy solutions, no new technologies and no suitable energy substitutes that can solve our current problems.

A recurrent theme in Tertzakian’s book is that changes in our energy infrastructure take time. The size and shape of our infrastructure and of the energy industry today is the result of decisions made one or more generations ago. He compares this with the "abrupt" and smooth transition from whale oil to kerosene, a shift that took "only" 20 years during the second half of the 1800s:

"Changes in the world of energy are measured not in months, not in years, but often in decades. The abrupt transition from whale oil to kerosene took less than two decades. In the history of energy substitutions, that’s a duration of time akin to an eye blink."

This "quick" shift can be compared to the transition from wood to coal, a shift that took 75 years (1825-1900) despite the fact that coal is in many ways superior to wood (it contains more energy per unit volume, burns hotter and does not rot). The more we build on and refine our current solutions (the "Growth and Dependency" phase), the more difficult the transition to some other form(s) of energy:

”Recasting consumer habits is a large undertaking, but the primary obstacle to real change comes from the inflexibility of the technological standards and physical infrastructure that are placed up and down the energy supply chain. For example, our oil-fed energy supply chains have developed over a 145-year-old growth cycle […] We are dependent on this multitrillion dollar global infrastructure as much as we are dependent on the petroleum that feeds the entire supply chain.”

Since the development of new energy sources and technologies in the energy field takes decades from experiments to scalable applications, Tertzakian emphasizes that during the next 10-20 years, there is no radical new technology ("no magic bullet") that will solve the problems we face today.

On the contrary, oil has many attractive properties that no other energy source has. Oil for example contains a lot of energy per unit volume, is easy to store, easy to transport and easy to scale up. Unlike previous transitions, the coming transition will be a switch "down" to energy sources that in some respects are "not as good" than oil. This makes the problem of finding replacements even more challenging, and the transition more difficult, longer and harder to get going. Exactly because oil is such a flexible and powerful energy source, we have found so many uses for it, and at the same time made ourselves completely dependent on it. According to Tertzakian, gasoline and diesel are nothing less than "the Microsoft Windows operating system of the transportation world."

“The better and more robust a fuel is, the more we put it to work in our daily lives. In turn, the more successful a fuel is, the more necessary it becomes to the well-being of the overall economy. This creates a dependency that grows deeply rooted over time.”

Tertzakian reproduces an imperialistic quote in the spirit of harsh realpolitik that Richard Nixon uttered in the midst of the oil crisis of 1973. Nixon pinpoints the positive aspects of increased energy usage (which goes hand in hand with increased economic growth), but completely misses the negative aspects of increased dependency and increased vulnerability:

”There are only seven percent of the people of the world living in the United States, and we use thirty percent of all the energy. That isn’t bad; that is good. That means we are the richest, strongest people in the world and that we have the highest standard of living in the world. That is why we need so much energy, and may it always be that way.”

The only thing Nixon forgot for the quote to be “perfect” - completely updated and adapted to Bush-speak - was to ask God to bless the United States... In the early 1970s, the U.S. imported 10% of its oil, but 35 years later that figure has risen to over 65%, and the country is now so stuck in that trap that it has to go to war (Iraq) in order to secure its oil imports.

How many new sources of energy have been introduced over the past 100 years, Tertzakian asks rhetorically. The answer is one (1) and that power source is nuclear energy which currently accounts for approximately 6% of the world's total energy production (about one-sixth of the oil's share). Renewable energy sources (solar, wind, geothermal, wave energy) are this far insignificant and associated with theoretical and practical problems that make it difficult for them to play a major role in the industrialized countries' energy mix for at least the next 10 years. Tertzakian claims that they may be useful in the rebalancing process after a break point, but they will not in any meaningful way replace oil or avert the coming break point (energy crisis). Another example of the long lead times to develop new energy sources is Canada's oil sands. To my surprise I learned that the history of mining oil sand in Alberta started already 40 years ago – and only recently reached substantial volumes.

In the book's first chapter, Tertzakian tells the story of our hunt for whales. In 1751, it was discovered that spermaceti oil from Sperm whales (and later whale oil) was valuable. Every Sperm whale may carry up to two tons of spermaceti oil in its skull and the function of this oil is still not completely understood. But humans know what the oil may be used for - namely to produce candles. Since these candles were better than any comparable alternative, the whaling industry expanded in the subsequent decades. 100 years later, whales had become scarce and you had to go to the ends of the earth and back again on trips that lasted up to four years in order to find the whales (a chapter in the book is actually called "To The Ends of the Earth"). Just in time before the whales got extinct in the mid 1800s, the fossil fuel kerosene took over the task of illuminating our homes and our growing cities.

Tertzakian makes a point of the observation that our quest for oil today is just as desperate as the hunt for whales was a few decades into the 1800s. Today we hunt for oil in every corner of the world and we head off to the most inhospitable environments, the deepest oceans and the most politically corrupt and unstable countries in our quest for more oil. Unfortunately, the good oil -- "light sweet crude" – is becoming harder and harder to obtain:

”For light sweet crude, the evidence strongly suggests that we are very close to Hubbert’s peak, and that we have reached the stage […] where we must start exploiting secondary and synthetic sources to prolong the onset of the overall oil peak.”

It is impossible to get any closer to the theory of peak oil without actually embracing it. As the "good" oil is running out, we must now turn to the worse, "sour" oil that contains more sulfur, costs more to refine and is more harmful for the environment. Other alternatives are even worse, for example Canada's oil sands - a source of energy that no one would have considered if the better options had still been easy to exploit. After the lowest hanging fruit has been picked, we should from now anticipate more expensive oil. This has implications far beyond more expensive transportation, since our entire society and everything we consume directly or indirectly depend on oil and petroleum products (for example plastics).

Thus, it is obvious to Tertzakian that we approach the mother of all break points and that the effects will reach into every household and every home. The four phases of the break point are 1) complaining and paying up, 2) conserving and being more efficient, 3) adopting alternative energy sources and 4) making societal, business, and lifestyle changes. This process could easily last for decades. Regarding the fact that we currently do nothing or very little to prepare for the coming break point, Tertzakian writes:

”At a break point […] lifestyle changes can seem like painful sacrifices until we readjust. It is the pain of those sacrifices that makes any political administraion reluctant to tell the whole truth about our energy situation. Until the evidence of the need for change is more obvious to all citizens, it will be difficult politically to make the necessary tough choices.”

Tertzakian soberly notes that today's politicians have nothing to gain, but much to lose by trying to act proactively. Since there are no quick solutions with immediate positive effects and no political gain in making decisions which make sense only in the long term, politicians prefer the (non-)strategy of “wait-and-see”.

An example is the issue of raising taxes on gasoline in the United States. Such a decision would be very wise in the sense that it would "encourage" people to make the "right" personal financial decisions. But it would also be political suicide. In the United States, the individual's right to buy the car (or SUV) he or she wants is just as holy as the right to own a gun - and there are a lot more car owners than gun owners in the U.S… There are also many practical problems with a high petrol tax. In order for such a tax to be efficient, there must be functioning alternatives to using a car in the form of public transport. In addition to high costs for expanding public transport, it is also exceedingly difficult to make it work in the United States after 20+ years of emigration to suburbs which have been spreading in all directions around American cities.

At the end of the book, Tertzakian paints himself into a corner in his attempts to propose solutions that on one hand will have some effect, and on the other hand will be "lifestyle neutral". There are big savings to be done regarding personal transports (cars), but it all ends up in a few weak proposals about smaller and lighter cars, lower speed on the roads and other bits and pieces of plaster on these open wounds. On the whole, however, the book is a nice read. Its main merit is to give an understanding of how difficult, challenging and time consuming it is to switch away from the oil infrastructure we have been building piece by piece for more than 100 years. The author’s analysis is good, but the concluding recommendations are a bit too weak to stand on par with the size of the problem. A review of the book which draws attention to completely different aspects can be found here.

Since I bought this book, Tertzakian has published another book: “The end of energy obesity: Breaking today's energy addiction for a prosperous and secure tomorrow".
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The Effects of the Crisis - Part 6

2010-01-26T21:53:00.001+01:00

This is part six in a set of articles about the losers of the American economical crisis. The first article set out to describe the background to the following texts (including the connection to Peak Oil). In the previous text I wrote about those who desperately try to enter the labor market after substantially lowering their demands. In this text I go on to those who risk going hungry unless they receive support from state authorities and/or NGO’s. Sensitive readers who think that all stories (may) have happy endings are warned.

After the summer, in August, the number of evictions in the US exceeded 300 000 for the sixth consecutive month. The desert state of Nevada had the highest numbers of all states - in August every 1 out of 62 households received an eviction note. Half of the state’s population live in Las Vegas with surroundings. The reason behind these evictions is of course the state's outstanding unemployment numbers reaching the highest level in 26 years. “As long as 15 million Americans are unemployed, record foreclosures will continue.”

Let us remember that many of those who are now losing their homes did not have the vilified sub-prime loans, but the less risky prime loans. The difference is, to put it simply, that those who got sub-prime loans in hindsight should never have been given any loans at all, but by now, also ”ordinary” people are affected. When house prices have lost 30-40% of their peak values, many find themselves in a position where they can not sell their houses without losing (a lot of) money. Losing you job on top of that quickly becomes a recipe for being foreclosured.

The situation is sad, but since the number of evictions decreased marginally with 0,5% from July to August (from 360 000 to 358 500), there must have be a non-marginal number of economy journalist who positively but misleading stated that ”the bottom has been reached”, and ”we are turning a corner now”. I'm sure you recognize the chirpy chatter of those who always report on bad news with phrases such as "no-one could have foreseen that...". Some things really have to be believed to be seen, and nothing is more alluring than seeing (or inducing that there just have to be) a light at the end of the tunnel. But the light at the end of the tunnel has unfortunately been turn off due to budget cutbacks...

In reality there seems to be few lights at the end of tunnels - only more tunnel ahead. The question is not any longer what parts of society are affected, but what parts, if any are not? After the previous years’ shopping spree and a hangover that saw the middle class’ savings decrease with 40% in value, unemployment can be followed by a quick leap into the captive arms of poverty. Where American poverty was previously associated with the countryside or run-down inner city areas, it is now spreading to suburbia, including the most luxuriuos suburbs.

“The crisis is also making itself felt in posh Georgetown, a historic residential neighborhood in Washington D.C. which is home to many politicians, lobbyists and attorneys. Anyone who forgets to lock his car at night can expect to see unwanted guests sleeping in it by the next morning. When one local woman, who works at a Middle Eastern embassy in Washington, opened her car door one morning, she was astonished to find a woman holding a purse and wearing a pearl necklace sitting on the seat. The humiliated woman covered her face, apologized politely and quickly left her sleeping quarters.”

Sergio Gallardo, a 33 years old Californian ex-construction worker is perhaps a more representative victim of the economic crisis. He belongs to the formerly middle class and lived in a four room apartment together with his wife, his five children (between 3 and 13 years old) and the family’s German Shepherd. He has now lost his flat, his wife, his car and has had to pay almost 1000 USD a month to live together with his children in a 10 square meter big (small!) room in a cheap motel for the last six months. Dogs were not allowed there so he was forced to leave his dog at an animal shelter. As if this was not enough, the Gallardo family are living right in the middle of, and can look straight into a world of luxury that has now become utterly unattainable for them:

“The Costa Mesa Motor Inn is in Orange County, an upscale area not far from Los Angeles, familiar to many TV viewers as the setting of "The O.C.," a series about the glamorous love lives of spoiled teenagers. The motel is next to an exceedingly green golf course, and a new shopping center across the street offers lattes for adults and play zones for children. But there is nothing glamorous about the Costa Mesa Motor Inn […] Toy cars lined up on a windowsill in room 1108 serve as a reminder of better days. "We were able to take the toy cars with us, but I had to throw most of the toys into the dumpster," says Sergio Gallardo.”

The only comfort they have is that they are not alone. Being forced to move to a motel is a fate they share with many others, and at least there are many kids in the motel for Sergio’s children to play with. But we can expect the childrens’ school performance to suffer from the cramped new circumstances; children that are crammed together in a tiny motel room are probably not excelling when it comes to homework, or perhaps even when it comes to getting to school in the first place

Several examples of the effects of the crisis come from California, a state with so many problems that "California is on the verge of becoming the first failed state in America". The quote is remarkable as the term ”failed state” usually refers not to American states, but to the world’s poorest and most chaotic countries; places like Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe or Afghanistan.

On the other side of the continent, in one of the US’ most impoverished states - West Virginia, we find a more traditional picture of poverty. A wooden house with white paint flaking and located in the outskirts of a town with less than 1000 inhabitants, is home to a family who never thought they would have to ask for help. The father of the family works in a fast food restaurant and makes 6 dollars an hour, but he has to drive almost 100 km to get to work. He says that he went down for count last year when gas prices spiked and were then followed by a drastic increases in food prices. Even the town mayor blames the oil price for impoverishing his citizens:

“‘I blame everything on the price of gasoline. When it went up to $4 a gallon 18 months ago it affected everybody. It forced up the cost of food and utilities. People were working all day and they still weren't earning enough to pay all the bills,’ he said. ‘Food prices you can combat a bit because people can grow their own gardens. They can kill deer, fox. You can eat 'coon. But gasoline affects everybody. They just can't make it.’“

Most recipients of social benefits like food stamps or social welfare payouts in West Virginia do have a job, they just don't make enough money to make ends meet in order to pay for gas, food and the utility bills. Many food stamp recipients need more and have to ask for food packages from food banks (food pantries) or visit soup kitchens. Soup kitchens which used to mainly serve single homeless men now see entire families with children lining up to get themselves a hot meal.

In West Virginia's schools, teachers look out for children from families they know have a hard time - children that might not get enough food at home. Without telling neither the children, nor the parents, the teachers slip ”backpack snack packs” with peanut butter, fruit and energy bars into the childrens' packpacks on Fridays to ensure that they will not go hungry over the weekend. The teachers try to be discreet since parents are often ashamed to admit that they must accept help in front of neighbors and friends.

Judging from the high unemployment numbers and the picture I draw above, it is not very surprising that the numbers of people receiving food stamps in the US is reaching new heights. After the seventh consecutive month of increase, the number of needy exceeded 35 Million individuals in June (more than 10% of the entire population and the highest numbers since the food stamp program started 40 years ago). We are here talking about ”the (supposedly) richest country in the world”... Nevada, where the number of needy increased by 45% year on year, is again ahead of the pack.

"In a year, despite food stamps and other resources, the USDA reports that 17 million Americans went hungry. One out of every *FIVE* children went hungry last year – a jump from one in six last year. Child hunger is increasing dramatically, much faster than adult hunger. In some states in the Midwest, including Ohio and Illinois, the numbers were one out of three. Think about that – about the fact that in the middle of the densest stands of calories in the world, one out of every three kids in a classroom goes hungry. Half a million children are frequently hungry."

The Food Research and Action Center asserts that the high numbers do not only reflect the high unemployment figures, but also a combination of other factors such as low salaries and the fact that many Americans have been forced to work fewer hours as a result of the economical crisis. As I have highlighted above, some who actually do have jobs still don't make enough to buy food and other neccessities.

When you receive food stamps, you do not actually get vouchers any longer, but a kind of credit card which can only be used to buy food in stores that are associated with the program (and you can not buy alcohol, tobacco, cat food, soap, dental paste, toilet paper or medicine). A single person on average gets around 125 USD a month, and a family with four members get around 275 USD. Almost 80% goes to households with children (these numbers are a few years old though).

There are also many private initiatives in the US beyond the state-financed system. When I search the internet for Swedish soup kitchens the results are scarce. The Salvation Army’s soup kitchen in Norrköping had to close when a zealous civil servant recently deemed their premises to be too small and difficult to keep clean. The Sundbyberg Salvation Army’s soup kitchen serve food two days a week. I am sure there are other soup kitchens out there, but they are either few or difficult to find online.

In the US there are 63 000 soup kitchens and food pantries handing out food packages to those in need. They are currently flooded by visitors and are under pressure because of he overwhelming need. According to Feeding America, ”The nation's largest domestic hunger-relief charity”, the demand has increased by 30% since the beginning of 2009 and until mid-year. On Manhattan, The Church of the Holy Apostles serve 1250 meals a day, but that is not enough and many who turn up are forced to leave without receiving anything. While the demand has increased, in these times of crisis, corporations and individuals are cutting down on donations to soup kitchens, shelters and other initiatives for very poor.

In the last example, we move back to California, but this time not to the great cities, but to the heartland of Californian agriculture - Central Valley. Central Valley is as large as quarter of Sweden and has a population of around 6.5 Million people. Agriculture is the main industry, and Central Valley is one of the most high-yielding regions in the world. In spite of this, a combination of disasters have put this granary in a dire situation.

“The Central Valley […] has suffered in the recession amid low demand for products like milk and almonds as well as a collapse in its once-booming housing market. At the same time, the region is grappling with drought and federal environmental rulings that have reduced water shipments to local farmers to as little as 10% of their normal allotments.”

For these reasons, many farmers have decided to only use a part of their land, and thus the demand for workers to harvest and package the agricultural products have diminished. Unemployment in Central Valley is now higher than in the rest of California, and it is higher in California than in most other American states (Michigan with its former car industry and Nevada have higher unemployment numbers). The result is that authorities find themselves forced to distribute food to poor agricultural workers who live in one of the most fertile agricultural regions in the world! In some communities around 80% of the inhabitants need food support!

“At the recent food distribution in Selma, 46-year-old Leticia Reyes waited to load food in her car. Laid off a few weeks ago from her $1,200-a-month job at a fruit-packing plant, the mother of four said the family is left to pay its $600 monthly rent and other bills on her husband's $900-a-month pay as an auto mechanic and her $600 in monthly unemployment benefits. "We're really struggling, so this food helps a lot," said Mrs. Reyes.”

This text has been about those who are unemployed or under-payed and struggle to pay for the bare necessities of life - including food. In spite of terrible living conditions they at least have a roof above their heads. In the next text - the last in this series, I will continue to those who live on the very bottom; those who were poor already before the crisis, and also those who weren't, but now have slipped and landed hard in shelters, on camping grounds and in tent camps.
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Extreme commuting

2010-01-21T10:42:00.003+01:00

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I have myself commuted 350 kilometers by rail on both a weekly and daily basis for a period of more than a year. It was tough. It is possible to justify in various ways, but it is still exhausting in the long run. I had an agreement with my employer to work 80% (4 days per week), of which I worked from home one day per week, so in reality I “only” performed my daily commute three days per week. It was tiring enough. The train left the central station at 7.15 and came back 18.45. Add a 30 minute trip to this to get to and from the central train station. That means I came home at 19.15 on a Tuesday evening and had to leave home 6.45 the next day. When you come home relatively late and know that you have to get up early the next day, you are not so keen to do things or meet friends in the evenings (what’s left of it after you have had dinner that is).   

During this period, I had one child in kindergarten. My wife had to leave and pick him up during the three days I was gone every week (short days at a demanding job for her part). I did the same thing during the two days I was in Stockholm every week. I mostly used the two-hour train journey to sleep or to work. During that period of my life, I fit the category of "extreme commuters" - a category (defined by the U.S. Census Bureau) referring to those who travel at least 90 minutes to get to work (and thus spend at least 3 hours per day commuting).   

The average time it takes to travel to your work in the U.S. is 25 minutes. One in six (19 million persons) need more than 45 minutes to get to work and nearly 3.5 million Americans are extreme commuters (3% of the workforce). Most of those live near a handful of mega-cities (if you can use the term "near" when you daily travel for hours to get to and from your workplace). Paradoxically, the states in the U.S. where people spend the least time commuting to work are also some of the most sparsely populated states (South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Montana). In New York, people spend twice as much time to get to their jobs as in South Dakota - a state in which 800 000 persons live in an area that is almost as big as half of Sweden. (Sweden is by European standards a relatively large and sparsely populated country, but there are still more than 9 million people living here.) Similarly, it is possible that people on average spend less time getting to their jobs far up in sparsly populated northern Sweden than around Stockholm.   

From 1990 an on, extreme commuters have been the fastest growing segment of commuters in the U.S., and the number of extreme commuters doubled between 1990 and 2005. What were the driving forces behind this development? Do remember that extreme commuters travel no less than three hours per day, but some can spend four, five or six hours traveling to and from their jobs.   

A 2006 competition for "America’s longest commute" was won by a man who had driven 600 km to and from his job as an engineer at Cisco in San Jose (California) daily since 1989. He left home at 4.30 every morning and the trip took at best three hours. The return trip could take four or five hours (more traffic) and he was usually home between 20.00 and 20.30 in the evenings. His commute was bearable thanks to ad-free satellite radio and audio books. And thanks to coffee we may assume, as he drank "about nine" cups on each trip, and squeezed in a total of 30 cups of coffee each day. Winning the competition was an eye-opener, but he was on the whole satisfied with living on a horse ranch next to the beautiful Yosemite National Park. A woman who had taken the same decision and made the same trade-offs was portrayed in a longer (highly recommended) story in The New Yorker. She lives in a nice house, but the quality of her everyday life is by most standards poor:

  “She gave up cooking some years ago. Now she gets home, feeds her dogs, then heats up soup or pizza she buys at a pizzeria on weekends. She takes a shower and goes to bed, maybe watching a taped episode of "CSI". ”  

Then there is also this story of 42 commuters who sit down together on the 5 a.m. bus and arrive to New York City two hours later. There is of course always someone who is more extreme, such as Greg Wixted who commutes between London and Dubai each week (if you can call it communing?).   

There are several more or less good reasons to commute long distances. Perhaps your spouse works closer to home, but your job is far away? Maybe you've always yearned for a rural lifestyle? But the strongest driving force behind extreme commuting in the United States has been a desire for better quality of life (!) and the wish to have your own little piece of the American dream; to buy a nice house with a big lawn in a nice area with good schools, low crime, clean and decent neighbors and soccer practice for the kids on Saturday mornings. The payoff is alluring to many, but the costs are high:   

" ‘Drive until you qualify’ is a phrase that real-estate agents use to describe a central tenet of the commuting life: you travel away from the workplace until you reach an exit where you can afford to buy a house that meets your standards. The size of the wallet determines that of the mortgage, and therefore the length of the commute. [..] in this equation you're trading time for space, miles for square feet. "   

For each exit I pass on the highway, and for every mile I drive away from the city, the price of houses decrease by several thousands of dollars. Fewer cars around the neighborhood (think of the children!) is ironically another reason to move far away from the city - even if the most mundane errand then requires a trip by car, and even though each of my trips contribute to more cars in the neighborhood. Eventually I reach the point where even my modest income is enough to realize my dreams of home ownership. If I do not earn enough, I drive a bit further, and if I want a bigger house, I drive a bit further again. Some can not afford to live near their jobs and look for housing in the exurbs, "the suburbs of the suburbs". For others the allure is "big city salary, small town living". Regardless of the reasons, nothing has until recently been able to stop this trend of moving further and further away from the city center (see for example the report “Communing in America” (2006) by the Transportation Research Board).   

Many of those who have made the decision to live far away from the city have taken this decision primarily based on economic grounds. Unfortunately, many have put themselves in a quandary by buying the biggest and nicest house they can afford, instead of something more modest, a bit smaller and with a more affordable price tag. Once you've bought the most expensive house you can afford, you can no longer afford to resign from your distant and (relatively) well-paid job. Even if there are jobs available closer to home, the salary would not be enough to cover the costs of your big house. Nearby small-town jobs offer small-town salaries. Regardless of how tough the commute is, you will no longer have the choice not to spend hours each day commuting to and from your job. The basic problem I describe here is of course not unique to extreme commuters - anyone can overspend on an apartment or a house - which down the road can limit job and life choices. It doesn’t even have to be a house, it can just as easily be a car, boat, summer cottage or many small purchases that add up on your credit card.   

Everyone can understand that it is not good to financially overextend yourself, thereby painting yourself into a corner, but other effects of extreme commuting are more difficult to predict. Studies indicate that people overestimate what they get from their commute (money, gadgets, luxury - material wealth) and underestimate what they lose (social contacts, hobbies, health - social welfare). Negative effects on mental and physical health ("Commuting is also associated with raised blood pressure, musculoskeletal disorders, increased hostility, lateness, absenteeism, and adverse effects on cognitive performance") could perhaps be guessed at (although many believe that it of course doesn’t apply to them).

Really shocking to me however is the fact that the American sociologist Robert Putnam believes that your social contacts decrease by 10% for each extra 10 minutes of communing. A person who walks for a few minutes to get to her job would thus have almost twice as many social contact as someone who spends an hour getting to her job. When commuting continues year in and year out, the many long hours away from home can also lead to family and marital problems.   

If we move on to the psychological consequences, I’m sure few have given them any thought before they decide to take on the extreme commute. People often say they appreciate the time alone in the car. It is possible to gather your thoughts, listen to music, radio, or an audiobook. But the driver's seat is a lonely place. People behave the same way in a car as if they were alone in a room or as if they were socially isolated. One symptom is the extremely aggressive behavior that some drivers fall into ("road rage").   

"Commuting makes people unhappy, or so many studies have shown. [...] When you are commuting by car [...] You are not spending time with other people. [...] Two hours or more of leisure time [...] are now passed in solitude. "   

I wrote above that "regardless of the reasons, nothing has until recently been able to stop this trend." Several of the texts I link to are a few years old. But as of two years ago, you suddenly see a variety of reasons for why the trend to move further and further away, and to travel longer and longer distances, has reached the end of the road (sic!). The housing market has collapsed in the U.S. and the conditions for getting a loan have toughened up. Gasoline prices shot through the roof in 2008 and will go up again. Unemployment is high. It has become much more difficult to finance a new car. Some have begun to see the benefits of living more densely and to be able to perform everyday errands on foot. And climate change can set tough new standards on cars and emissions in the future. All of this - and more generally the effects of the economic crisis – acts in concert to now suppress extreme commuting in the United States. It is naturally the houses that are the farthest away (from everything) that have lost most in value when prices start to fall:   

"houses priced the same in 2006 [...] but in different parts of a city were selling for dramatically different amounts a year later depending on their distance from the center of town"   

The dream of owning your own house has gone to pieces for the Discianno family. It turned out that the family had overextended themselves financially and had to leave their house - but the daily four-hour commute remains. More dreary stories can be found in "Long-distance commuters' trip to nowhere." To live far, far away has gone from being affordable to expensive due to several interacting factors. The effects of last summer's oil price shock is summarized by the caption "Fuel prices shift math for life in far suburbs":   

"Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy prices inflate the costs of reaching, heating and cooling homes on the distant edges of metropolitan areas. [...] The rising cost of energy is now a primary factor pushing home prices down in the suburbs, particularly in the outer rings."   

Much of what is written above can gently be adapted to Swedish conditions. Many cities an hour away from Stockholm by train have become "possible to live in" as the X2000 high-speed train network has extended its reach during the last two decades. But what is interesting about the United States is that it is possible to find so much that from a Swedish perspective seems extreme. In the U.S. 90% of all people travel to their jobs by car and 85% or those commuters drive alone. Three out of four Americans thus travel to their jobs alone in a car. Or take the "city" of Phoenix in Arizona. "The city alone covers 517 square miles. Surrounding it is 14.000 square miles of desert dotted by seas of rooftops." All of Sweden is only 12 times larger than Phoenix and its suburbs. In fact, the whole of the Netherlands (14 200 square miles and with a population of over 16 million inhabitants) is on par with Phoenix-plus-suburbs. Extreme. Grotesque. Untenable.   

At this point I however have to confess that I've written about two different phenomena in this text. The first is the phenomenon of extreme commuting – no matter if it is being conducted by car, bus, train or plane. To travel for hours each day has an effect on the individual and on society. But the question of the environmental and economical sustainability of extreme commuting is a different question. It may be that the long distance train commute can continue for a long time after trips of similar length by car (in distance or time) has become an impossibility for most people. Many long-distance commuters in the Stockholm region travel by rail. They may suffer the same effects on physical and mental health as extreme car commuters in the U.S., but their commute is less unsustainable than driving a gas-guzzling car (or worse, a SUV or pick-up truck) alone and for hours on end every day.   

This blog is called "Life after oil". It is obvious to me (but not apparent in most texts about extreme commuting), that if gasoline becomes significantly more expensive after the oil peak, it will be far too expensive to commute alone by car for hours on a daily basis. If/when the flow of oil starts to dry up just a little, the gas prices will hit the roof again and many will suffer – and Americans are more vulnerable than Europeans.

  What many may not think of is that the suburbs as a phenomenon - the very idea of working in, but living outside of the city - was an impossibility before we started to build light rail in the second half of the 1800s. To begin with, this was an option only available for the wealthiest of businessmen. Llewellyn Park outside New York was the first modern suburb (1853). Small residential communities grew up along the new railroad tracks that snaked their way out of the city in different directions. With the widespread adoption of the car, it was suddenly possible to "fill the gaps" and develop the city in all directions (regardless of direction of the diverging rail tracks).

If it becomes significantly more expensive to own and drive a car in the future, areas far away from the city, and especially those with poor access to public transportation, will be considerably less attractive, or atrophy. I believe that extreme commuting by car will become a rarity in Sweden and the United States in a not too distant future. The future of extreme commuting by bus and train is harder to predict, but well worth keeping an eye on (I might come back to this topic in a future blog post).

  Changes start in the periphery. One can get glimpses of the future by looking for isolated observations, thoughts and trends that may at first seem insignificant or sometimes bizarre - but that is part of a larger puzzle. It is a pity that mainstream media rarely writes about such issues, but rather heavily covers current events in detail but often without placing them in a comprehensible context.
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The Great Reskilling

2010-01-17T19:32:00.009+01:00

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Rob Hopkins has founded and popularaized the Transition Town movement. One of his ideas is The Great Reskilling. The basic idea is simple - the twin challenges of peak oil and climate change mean that society will change fundamentally, and this will in turn force each one of us to acquire new knowledge and skills. These "new" skills are often old skills; knowledge of how to do things in a world of drastically reduced access to energy, and incidentally leading to a much lower environmental impact. They include old craft skills, resource management and farming -- knowledge that was alive and widely distributed in society only two generations ago:

"Re-learning the skills that our grandparents took for granted, such as how to use hand tools, how to build our own structures, how to mend and make clothing, how to make our own medicine, how to forage, grow, preserve and store our food."

To some extent, The Great Reskilling is about turning the clock back. Not for dogmatic reasons ("technology is evil") or for romantic reasons ("everything was better in ye olde times"), but because the required direction of action - given coming (energy) resource scarcity and climate change concerns - is so obvious. And it is thus better to start acting now, rather than to wait until we have no other choice than to learn everything all at once. However, we should of course hold on to any and every technology that we can possible manage to maintain. From this perspective, it is clear that cars are not a sustainable transportation technology, and that resources for transporting people (in cities) already today should focus on rail traffic and bicycles, rather than wasting resources on building brand new roads.

A good text about the kinds of knowledge we all need to acquire outlines a long list which includes cultivation and storage of (part of) your own food, husbandry, sewing, carpentry, basic mechanical skills and much more. One could add many more things to such a list, for example basic medical knowledge. However, ultimately you end up with a long list of things which - until now - we have not had to concern ourselves with, becuase it has been so easy to go to the supermarket to buy our food, to buy a cheap (and fashionable) shirt if we get tired of the old one, and to buy a new tool as soon as the old on breaks (or we can't find it).

The problem with such a list is that it might feel overwhelming for an individual to get started. Indeed, you must have a strong will to take the first, and second, and the tenth step, when it is so easy to throw-away-and-buy-a-new, when there are so many "must-haves" and when popular culture distract us and steals our time. But reskilling is not just about the skills you need, but also about how to acquire them. Hopkins writes about "reskilling events" and the benefits of organizing or participting in such activities. Reskilling events:

- Teach people new (old) skills
- Bring people together, helping them to build networks
- Give strenght and convey a sense of "can do it myself" (as opposed to powerlessness)
- Create links between the generations when old skills are being taught to the young (or middle-aged)
- may result in physical manifestations which act as "advertisement" for the newly acquired knowledge

Hopkins' guess is that these events will initially be short courses, and that the ambition and the length of the courses may increase over time. Of course, many people could participate in these events/courses without having any deeper thoughts about potential/future needs for the knowledge they acquire - they just do it simply because they think it is fun and because they want to immerse themselves and learn something new. From these observations, I will make a detour to the ecovillage-to-be that I am involved in and then return to the topic of reskilling.

Since the beginning of May 2009, I am one of six co-owner of a farm with 22 hectares of land in Sörmland (just south-west of Stockholm). Much has happened since then and more will happen in the future. There are one hundred issues on various levels to discuss, decide on and implement (who fixes a broadband connection and who copies the keys, how do we keep track of which co-owner has been spending how much money on what and how much of which plants we should grow where, what policy should we have regarding land use etc.)

One thing we did during the summer was to arrange courses. These courses were about things we wanted to learn, and they were all in line with the push to reskill ourselves. Our thought was that if we have our own farm and want to learn practical skills, then why not carry out activities in the form of courses at the farm where others are also welcome to participate? We decided to organize three courses on our farm last summer. They were all open to the public and as it so happend, they all turned out to be successful:

- Building with natural materials (including clay, rammed earth, strawbales etc.)
- Permaculture Design
- Local Economic Regeneration

Here are brief summaries of the courses, from the most practical to the most theoretical:

"Building with natural materials" was about building with natural and locally occurring materials (clay, sand, straw, sawdust, cow dung). The course was practical, offering a hands-on experience of different building techniques. The goal of this three-days course was for the participants to build something concrete, but even more important, to learn about and try a variety of building techniques.

"Permaculture Design" was about creating/designing ecosystems for human benefit. The idea is not complicated, but the term permaculture (permanent agriculture) is most likely unfamiliar to most people. In permaculture, natural ecosystems are the model, and the goal is to "design" new ecosystems so that they produce food and other goods that are of benefit for humans. The basic ideas are well summarized here:

"Imagine a natural forest. At the top is a roof of tree crowns, beneath it small trees, large and small shrubs, herbs and land covering plants, as well as plants that primarily exist below ground level and climbing plants that occupy all levels. The production of organic material is surprisingly high in comparison with, for example, a wheat field, which consists of a single layer of about half a meter. Imagine what an abundance this forest would contain if it consisted of edible plants! It would greatly surpass the yield of the wheat field!"

[I don't have the original text, this is a translation back to English from the Swedish edition]

Unlike the other two courses, "Local Economic Regenertaion" was a theoretical course. The premise was that current economic theories have brought the capitalist economic system to the brink of a systemic collapse. As we pass peak oil, the period of cheap energy will end. Less energy means reduced production and the end of globalization and long transports. The trend will be towards local (regional, national) production of goods and services.

Based on this, how can we create local economic regeneration in an economy beyond growth? What should we switch to, and how? What can you produce that is profitable both today and after the coming changes? How can you initiate, finance and be a successful entrepreneur even if it becomes increasingly difficult to show a bank how you will be able to repay your loans (because of economic turbulence and questioning of old economic "truths")?

This brings the text back to where it started - to the ideas underlying the Transition Town Movement and the Great Reskilling. We, in our ecovillage-to-be, feel that we have done some of our share by arranging courses, and feel confident about continuing to organize other courses in the future (in fact, we organized another course two months ago, I might come back to that later). And there are many suggestions for new course topics: food conservation, building a root cellar, building houses with timber and stone, foraging for edible plants and herbs, brewing beer, beekeeping, aquaculture and so on. The list could easily become very long since there are lots of things that we would like to know more about.

Today, people participate in courses like these because they find them interesting and fun. Tomorrow, the kind of practical knowledge such courses provide may become a hard currency. As a bonus, you meet interesting people and extend you social network when you attend these courses!
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Death of rationalization

2010-01-01T11:18:00.000+01:00

. Image: People are cheap and machines are expensive in India. The opposite is true in Sweden.

   Many naturally occurring phenomena follow a normal distribution and are therefore well described by a "bell curve". Since the average length of men in Sweden is 180 cm, a high proportion of Swedish men are in the range of 175-185 cm. Some are shorter or longer, but most are in any case between 170-190 cm. If we broaden the span further to 165-195 cm, not many men at all are outside of that range. The same principle of course also applies to women and children (e.g. “weight curves” for newborn babies) and many other characteristics where there is a random natural variation.

  The road network of Sweden is in a similar manner more or less "normally distributed". On a map of Sweden's road network (below), most medium-sized cities have a handful of roads leading to and from the city. Some have only three, more cities have four or five roads and a few cities are nodes that have six or more roads leading to/from them. The number of roads is thus fairly evenly distributed and there is only a difference of a factor of two between having three roads (which are few) and having six roads (which are many).

   The "opposite" of a normal distribution is a "power law" distribution. With a power law distribution, it is no longer meaningful to try to locate an average and the difference between “few” and “many” will differ with a factor much greater than two. If we look at the network tying together Europe’s airways, we see a very different pattern compared to the road network, with a small number of very well-connected airline hubs and a large number of "feeder lines" that connect smaller cities/airports to a single or a few hubs. Large hubs in the European airspace - Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London and Madrid - link together a large number of destinations near and far. In Sweden, Arlanda airport outside of Stockholm is just about the only hub where people transfer between international and domestic routes.  

Just as the normal distribution appears all around us, so does power laws. Every year there are innumerable small earthquakes, hundreds of medium-sized, but on average only one major earthquake (more than 8 on the Richter scale). Sales of cultural "perishables" such as published books, music, computer games and box office (cinema) tickets also follow a power law distribution. A small number of computer games (books, movies, artists) account for the majority of all computer games sold, and of all copies of a specific computer game that are sold, a disproportionate number are sold the first weeks and the first months - after which the numbers taper off into a trickle.  

The business literature does not talk about power laws, but about the 80-20-rule; 20% of all X account for 80% of all Y:
 - 20% of those who call customer service account for 80% of all complaints 
- 20% of all salespersons account for 80% of all sales
 - 20% of all criminals account for 80% of all crime
 - 20% of the population own 80% of all resources  
- 20% of all software bugs in a computer program account for 80% of the problems  
- 20% of all websites account for 80% of all traffic   

It is moreover in the nature of power laws that 20% of 20% of all X account for 80% of 80% of all Y – that 4% of landowners own 64% of all land and 4% of all software bugs account for 64% of all problems. The bottom line is that the differences between "much" and "little" can be huge - even if it doesn’t always follow that the distribution is precisely 80-20 - sometimes it can just as well be 70-30 - but it is primarily the principle of uneven distribution that is of interest here.   

The structures of these two types of networks (the highway network as described by the normal distribution and the air network as described by power laws) are thus very different. Which brings us to the concept of peak oil, centralization and localization. In former times, slaughterhouses, bakeries, breweries and dairies were small, numerous and more or less evenly distributed across the country (just like roads are). Now they are big and they are located to only to a few places. According to the Swedish National Food Administration there exist (only) 25 “large-scale slaughterhouses” in Sweden that they oversee (and some of these slaughterhouses are – in line with the power laws - very much larger than others).

Six of these 25 Swedish slaughterhouses are run by Scan, one of northern Europe's largest food companies (working mainly with meat). As if by coincidence, I read in a Swedish trade journal (“Agriculture News”) that one of Scan’s six facilities (in Uppsala) will be closed and that most of the activities at another facility (in Skara) will disappear in the near future. "The slaughter and butchering of cattle and sheep [will] be centralized to Linköping and the slaughtering and butchering of pigs will mainly be located to Kristianstad. [...] Total headcount will be reduced from 3 000 to around 2 500. Some of the employees may be offered jobs at one of the locations where activities will be centralized." In a column in the same issue of Agriculture News, the journalist Erik Brink writes appreciatively about Scan’s plans for restructuring their business:

  "closure of all slaughter in Skara is just the next step in Scan's crusade to get the Swedish meat producers to better adapt to market conditions. All old emotional trash will be cleared out and only that which makes business sense will remain."  

"Adapt to market conditions" is in this context equivalent to going big and "large-scale". If you follow the transports going to and from these (currently) 25 large-scale slaughterhouses you will see that they are hubs with many long transports going to and from them (similar to the air network). There has been a push to rationalize and scale up the size of plants for decades, always moving towards an equilibrium that basically depends on the relationship between the cost of energy and the cost of labor. Energy has been cheap and labor has been expensive. In the search for higher profits, the tune has been to scale up operations by rationalizing, streamlining, concentrating, consolidating and slashing jobs - despite the fact that increased concentration also leads to increased vulnerability and longer transports. As energy has been cheap and the supply has been stable for decades, there has been little reason for any afterthoughts... until now.   

Because what will happen if energy becomes more expensive in the future? What if the relationship between labor and energy will change radically (albeit gradually) after peak oil? I do not mean that gasoline prices (or the price of electricity) will go up with 10 – 20 – 50 – 100 percent, but that the relationship between labor and energy will change fundamentally. Human ecologist Folke Günther has made a graph that shows how many seconds a Swedish industrial worker has had to work in order to buy a kilowatt-hour of energy in the form of gasoline at the gas pump:

Two interesting things become apparent in this picture. The first is that "we" (an average Swedish worker) have had to work less than a minute to buy a kilowatt-hour of energy in the form of gasoline since the 1950’s. The second is that the relationship between work and energy changed by a factor of 10 in less than fifty years (between 1920 and 1970) and subsequently has remained at a low and stable level since then. In parallel with this drop in absolute prices, the use of fossil fuels increased by 1000% (a factor of 10) in Sweden during just the second half of these fifty years (from 1945 to 1970) when the welfare state was built. Energy Engineer Bengt Randers has collected the equivalent information regarding the cost of energy in the form of electricity and has a data set that goes back all the way to the 1890s:

   Without violating his figures too much, it is possible to state that the cost of one kilowatt-hour of electricity in terms of time spent working in order to buy it was slashed by half in just one decade from the mid-1890s (from two hours to one hour). And the cost was halved again over the next 10 years (30 minutes in the mid-1910s). And the cost was halved again over the next 10 years (15 minutes in the mid-1920s). And the cost was halved again over the next 10 years (8 minutes in the mid-1930s). And the cost was halved again over the next 10 years (4 minutes in the mid-1940s). And the cost was halved again over the next 10 years (2 minutes in the mid-1950s). And the cost was halved again over the next 10 years (less than 1 minute in the mid-1960s).   

From one kilowatt-hour of electricity “costing” 120 minutes of work in the 1890s, the same amount of electricity has during the last 45 years cost less than a minute of work - a difference of more than a factor of 100! In a picture showing the same trend on a logarithmic scale it is easier to see how the fast drop in prices ended in the 1960’s and how the price has remained exceedingly low since then.    

  
How much then is a kilowatt-hour of energy? A man working hard physically and taxing his muscles can generate 75 Watts (Pimentel and Pimentel, "Food, Energy and Society", 1979) and thus has to provide almost 13 hours of hard physical labor (no breaks) in order to generate a kilowatt-hour of energy. To exchange less than a minute of work for a kilowatt-hour of energy has thus been a very good deal (thank you oil!). To say that energy has been free for half a century is only a marginal exaggeration. In a previously published blog text [not yet translated to English], I refer to studies showing that a tractor can do in one hour what it took 19 days of agricultural/physical work (150 to 225 hours?) to do 200 years ago.   

During the last fifty years, the cost (in time) of energy (gasoline and electricity) has thus been both extremely low and stable - but that will no longer be the case after the effects of peak oil assert themselves. It is probably correct to say that "everything" will change after peak oil. The energy-consuming hubs that I have described above (airports, slaughterhouses etc.) will become difficult to maintain if energy becomes too expensive. They will then shrink in size and be replaced by many smaller local businesses that are built on a business model that requires less energy and less transportation. In an ideal world, we would support such a shift already today:

  "[We should give] support to small, local organic farms where the labor is largely provided by humans and animals, products are marketed to nearby communities, the plants and animals are raised in diverse polycultures that deter pests and preventable diseases, the animals feed the soil with their composted wastes, the soil feeds the plants, and the plants in turn feed the animals in a tight recycling of wastes and nutrients."   

If energy and transportation becomes 2, 5 or 10 times more expensive compared to the costs of labor, then much more work would be done locally solely because of economic pressures in that direction. (A piece of advice for those thinking about post-peak oil careers: in addition to local food production, local small-scale food processing that enhances the value of the raw agricultural produce will become a growth industry in the future!)   

Just as rationalization has mechanized agriculture and depopulated rural areas, so will more labor intensive (food) production methods exert pressure in the opposite direction - away from (especially the largest) cities and towards a more evenly dispersed population living in smaller towns and in the countryside. The population will thus not be so concentrated to a few big cities (power laws), but will be more evenly spread out across the country (normally distributed). If just a fraction of tasks now done by machines will once again be performed by humans, this will require many more people to live in rural areas in order to produce the food we need.

  Up until this point in time, human labor has gradually been replaced by highly efficient machinery, large-scale facilities and long-distance transportation. An underlying driving force has been that people/labor is expensive because energy (and hence production and machinery and capital) has been cheap. In each situation where it has been possible to save money by cutting the workforce, it has been rational to replace yet another person with yet another (energy-consuming and capital-binding) machine. This is obviously true not just for big machinery in industry and agriculture, but also in the service sector. As each and every person has become a "knowledge worker" equipped with a computer, that person has also to a greater extent been forced to handle his/her own administration - because all secretaries have been fired.   

Where rationalization for decades has been equivalent to labor rationalization, we will in the future be forced to rationalize based on entirely different criteria. Labor rationalization will be replaced by energy rationalization in all activities and at all levels. While this text is called "the death of rationalization", the title actually refers only to a specific kind of rationalization - labor rationalization. Where labor was previously rationalized away and replaced by energy-wasting habits, the pendulum will start to swing in the other direction when the costs of energy starts to rise.   

When the consequences of peak oil start to make themselves known, it will become cheaper to hire an extra person if that reduces the energy consumption or the capital tied up in machinery. If not sooner, then it will eventually no longer be profitable to replace a machine that (finally) breaks down with a new machine instead of having an extra person at hand. If I try to think of some oil-powered "luxury machines" that can easily be replaced by strong arms and legs, I for example think of lawn mowers. At Husqvarna's website, a hand-powered lawn mower costs 135 USD, a motorized lawn mower costs between 400 and 800 USD and a lawnmower that you sit in and drive costs between 3400 and 8800 USD (prices and models are from the Swedish market/homepage and may differ elsewhere).   

A perhaps even more challenged gadget is the leaf blower that Americans in particular have a fondness for. It is a (noisy) gasoline-powered "backpack" that acts as an inverted vacuum cleaner that blows away leaves and debris from the sidewalk. At some point in time it will be more sensible to hire an additional (flexible, teachable, versatile) person and "invest" in an extra rake or broom instead of buying a new leaf blower (that needs to be refueled, serviced and repaired regularly). Moreover, it is already now possible to question the efficiency of leaf blowers (see text “Grandmother proves rake and broom as fast as leaf blowers”).

  Some tasks, on the margin, will no longer be sensible to perform at all. At what point will it no longer be possible to direct an armada of vehicles to plow away newly fallen snow from all streets and roads in Sweden? And let's not even talk about gasoline-powered toys such as jet skis, snowmobiles and off-road motorcycles…

  With a shift in the labor/energy equation, other tasks (professions) will be added to the labor pool. I think you can get a glimpse of the future of Sweden/Europe if you look for all the tasks that are (still) performed by people in less affluent countries (elevator boy, doorman, concierge, guardian of parked cars) - but that in Sweden nowadays are performed by a machine (dishwasher, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, car wash) or by yourself (polishing your shoes, sewing up a pair of trousers, cleaning, cooking).   

The author Agatha Christie have summarized both my text above and developments throughout the 20th century when she wrote in her autobiography that "When I was young I never expected to be so poor that I could not afford a servant, or so rich that I could afford a motor car".   

One blog asked what will correspond to Christie’s car and servant 100 years from now. Some took for granted that business-as-usual will continue and that energy and production will become even cheaper relative to labor in the future:

  "I never thought I would be wealthy enough to own a holo-deck [or "a private jet"], nor so poor I could not pay someone to cut my hair [or "to go to a restaurant"]."   

Others (fewer) drew the same conclusions I draw - that the direction will change, that work (services) will become cheaper in relation to gadgets, and that we will see more servants and fewer cars in the future. But there are also those who believe that everyone will own a robot servants of their own in the future ... I do not think we will have any robot servant at all, because there will be an abundance of human servants to choose from in the future - just as when Agatha Christie was young. But since all of these predictions (including my own musings above) are based on more-or-less intelligent guesses about the future, my favorite prediction was this one:

  "I won’t be rich enough to own a varnox. But I will won’t be so poor that I can not afford a glip-thorp."

  Doctor Seuss could not have said it better!

This text is dedicated to Oscar Kjellberg who has thought about issues relating to energy, economics and labor for a long time.    

PS. From one of the largest daily Swedish newspapers, November 17, 2009: "Arla builds record dairy” The dairy group Arla will build the world's largest dairy outside of London. Arla Foods UK's dairy will be four times larger than the largest dairies in Denmark and is planned to have a capacity of one billion liters of milk a year, the group informs. The plans form part of Arla's strategy to significantly expand UK operations. The dairy will be finished by 2012 and will then have about 500 employees "
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Peak Oil Novels

2009-12-20T19:58:00.000+01:00

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To the best of my knowledge, only two “pure” peak oil novels have been published this far. If you know any more, feel free to comment/advise me on this! Only two novels are a bit surprising considering how many non-fiction books there are about peak oil. A search for "peak oil books" on amazon.com will yield more than 200 hits.

The two books I know of are "Last Light" (2007) by Alex Scarrow and "World Made by Hand" (2008) by James Kunstler. If you have only heard of only one of them it will probably be Kunstler’s book because Kunstler is a peak oil "celebrity" who has also written "The Long Emergency". Below I write about each book in turn, and conclude with a brief comparison between the two books.

Last Light
-------------
British author Alex Scarrow has written an adrenaline-filled thriller that takes place during one week – a week in which the world is experiencing a global oil crisis and quickly goes down on its knees. The first day of the week, Monday, is the last normal day on Earth. Simultaneous attacks on several key oil chokepoints around the world immediately paralyzes the entire world's oil production and two thirds of it is down-and-out. Ordinary people do not understand the scale of the crisis and its consequences and believe that everything will be back to normal in no time at all - if they even notice the news. But already on that Monday, the British prime minister's advisors propose no further sale of petroleum products, food rationing, martial law, the total switch-off of all non-military traffic, including buses, trains and planes. The prime minister's immediate reaction is incredulity:

"This is over the top. If I get on breakfast TV tomorrow morning and announce measures like these, There'll be rioting in The Streets by lunch time!"

It is not oil production figures that are the focus of the book, but rather the social consequences of a radical and immediate reduction of available oil. With an apocalyptic tone, the author vividly describes how quickly the thin veneer of civilization dissolves into thin air when electricity is lost, when water no longer comes from the tap, when the food stores are empty and when the police disappears. Many incidents of lawlessness and riots are depicted in the book.

The main characters of the book are a family that consists of:
- Andy - father (a geologist and a somber peak oil proponent)
- Jenny - mother (sincerely tired of her husband's doomsday prophecies and just about to separate from him)
- Leona - daughter (a 20-year-old university student who is also sick of her father's warnings and who is only partially aware of the fact that she knows about a secret of the utmost importance).
- The family also includes the young son Jacob who is 7 years old, but his only role in the book is to be protected and to be taken care of.

Mother Jenny and daughter Leona became tired of Andy's obsession with Peak Oil a long time ago:

"The walls of his study were filled with diagrams, charts, geological maps. He had become one-dimensional over that damned fixation of his. It had eroded the funny, complex, charming personality that he had once been, and now it seemed that anything that he could be bothered to say to [Jenny], in some oblique way, linked back to this self-destructive, doom-laden of his fascination with the end of the world."

The book is an exciting thriller and the story moves forward at a furious pace. This is a book especially for those who “woke up” a few years ago and with horror realized the social consequences of declining availability of oil, but then failed to convince others (including friends and family) about the weight of the issue. There are many places in the book where such readers may beat their chests and exclaim "What did I tell you!". In the end of the book there are also a lot of goodies for conspiracy theorists...

Despite their previous skeptic attitude, Jenny and Leona are one step ahead when it really counts. Years of unwelcome sermons about the (possible) imminent destruction have left their mark. They are therefore faster than the people around them to understand what is happening, and thus think clearer and better about how to (try to) take appropriate action.

"Andy's warning, his advance warning ... the one they should have heeded a little earlier than this, had sort of paid off, kind of. Of course, if [Jenny had] listened to him four or five years ago, they'd be living in some secluded valley in Wales, with an established vegetable garden, a water well, maybe some chickens, a generator and a turbine."

Unfortunately, Jenny went to Manchester on Monday for a job interview and spends most of the book/week trying to get back to London and her children. Tuesday evening, stuck somewhere between Manchester and London, she has to admit to herself that Andy was right all the time:

"If she now, finally, had come round to trusting Andy's prophetic wisdom [...] then she had to concede this wasn’t going to sort itself out in a couple of days. Things were going to get worse. "

Andy is even worse off because he is in Iraq when all hell breaks loose, and spends most of the book/week trying to get out of there. Except for the very exciting story, the main theme of the book is the vulnerability of modern society and how dependent we are on our current energy infrastructure. The Prime Minister's advisor summarizes the core message of the book sentenciously:

"It's a very fragile world [prime minister], very fragile, built on very vulnerable interdependencies. And something like this ... what's been happening today, really could bring the whole lot down. "

World Made by Hand
-----------------------------

The story in Kunstler’s book is set in the small town of Union Grove in the state of New York some time after peak oil. Globalization is dead and buried and the people in the story nowadays know very little about the world around them.

"There were no distant markets to send [things] to because shipping anything was slow at best and often unreliable, and travel was something you just didn’t do anymore.

The few times when electricity temporarily comes back, what can be heard on the radio is mostly crazy religious fundamentalists. Sometime in the past, there have been two nuclear explosions over Washington DC and Los Angeles, but perpetrators and motives are shrouded in mystery. The U.S. has some sort of president and government that may or may not be seated in Minneapolis, but if this is true, they are so distant that they could just as well be sitting on the moon. Beyond globalization, both nations and industrialization have collapsed and society (small scale and with a focus on agriculture and practical crafts) must be built by hand - stone by stone and wooden plank by wooden plank.

”We’d gone from a few people using machines to grow monoculture crops and process them for everybody else, to a society in which at least half the people used tools skillfully with human and animal muscle to feed the other half. […] These days, most anyone who had survived was in good physical condition because life was so relentlessly physical.”

The exact year or how much time has passed since the world embarked on this new course is unclear, but a good guess is that the year is somewhere between 2020 and 2025 and that the point of divergence happened about ten years earlier. The population has been strongly decimated, mainly due to diseases and epidemics which have arrived in waves after the modern world and the modern health care system collapsed.

The main protagonist is Robert Earl, now a skilled carpenter in his wife's hometown, and with a past as a manager in the software industry. His wife, daughter and parents in law have all passed away in diseases, and his son left several years ago as a 19-year-old to "see the world". Robert and the rest of the residents of Union Grove are suffering from a kind of low-level depression, which mainly manifests itself as discouragement and lack of initiative. The book is partly about their way back to hope for a better future.

Besides the small-town residents, three other groups also play important an important role in the book:
- "The Proletarians" who live in a trailer park outside of town. Less respectable than small-town residents, but also more pushy, more active and more tattooed. This group has taken control of the city's old landfill (now a treasure trove) and they make their living on "asset stripping", i.e. traveling around in the countryside and disassembling and recycling everything that has any value whatsoever.
- The plantation owner who lives some distance from the city and "cares for" his workers. This social system is similar to a feudal system or an old cotton plantation in the South. Some people are willing to give up their autonomy and voluntarily settle as "serfs" since the plantation is well ordered and workers are served three meals a day.
- The travelling religious group (cult?) which has fled from racial tensions in the South and makes Union Grove its new home. The group is led by a charismatic preacher who is very driven and forward. The group is well organized but irritates non-members by insistent attempts to convert and recruit new members. Some members ("brothers") are former soldiers with combat experience (that come in handy in the story).

It’s hard to get away from the feeling that Kunstler’s novel is partly an addendum to his previous book “The Long Emergency”. A world made by hand is simply a way of describing the world "on the other side of the tunnel" (peak oil) in the form of a novel. Much of what Kunstler writes about in “The Long Emergency” is exactly what has happened in the world where “World Made by Hand” takes place. The book may be effective as a pedagogical way of depicting a post-peak oil world, but if unfortunately feels less successful as a work of fiction.

The two books differ a lot from each other. Where “Light” is a fast-paced thriller, the story in “Hand” moves forward at a much slower pace. Where “Light” describes the events of the actual collapse, “Hand” only vaguely refers the collapse which took place several years ago. I read “Hand” over the course of several weeks and “Light” in a few days. Although James Kunstler is the more wellknown author, it is Alex Scarrow’s book that I have to recommend. Based on the three books by Kunstler I have read, I think Kunstler is better as a non-fiction writer, and rather than recommending “Hand”, I recommend "The Long Emergency” which concerns the same topics but written in the form of non-fiction.
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The Effects of the Crisis - Part 5

2009-12-10T11:24:00.001+01:00

This is part five in a set of articles about the losers of the American economical crisis. The first article set out to describe the background to the later texts (including the connection to Peak Oil). In the previous text I wrote about those who have been hit by unemployment and evicted from their homes in Suburbia. In this text I go on to those desperately searching for a job on an ever tougher American labor market.

The labor market in the U.S. today is nothing short of a catastrophy. The official numbers indicate that almost 10% are unemployed (15 million people), but these numbers exclude those who want to work more but are underemployed, and those who have given up hope and do not even bother to search for a job any more (for example by retiring prematurely, or becoming unwilling housewives or -husbands. If these groups are included, the unemployment number ends up closer to 17%.

It is hardly surprising that the youngest on the labor market have been hit harder than any other group since they have the least experience, are fired first and are re-employed last. The numbers of teenagers who want a job but can’t find one are the highest in 60 years... and before 1948 no statistics were gathered. Youth unemployment is three times higher than in other groups on the labor market and half of all college graduates under the age of 25 have jobs that do not require college degrees (for example working in a clothing store or at Starbucks). These jobs used to be staffed by less qualified youth, and among young Americans between 16 and 24 that do not study at university or perform their military service, less than 50% have a job. (Youth unemployment has also reached record numbers in a number of European countries - Spain has the questionable honor of topping this list with 39% youth unemployment.) The consequences can be long-lasting, especially for the individual, but also for the American economy:

"the damage to a new career by a recession can last 15 years. And if young Americans are not working and becoming productive members of society, they are less likely to make major purchases -- from cars to homes -- thus putting the US economy further behind"

As I have written earlier, many older Americans fear that they have not saved enough money for their retirement, and therefore postpone it. As a consequence, there are fewer chances to advance within a company, and fewer spots opening up at the bottom of the hierarchy.

As unemployment rises, the U.S. military becomes a more attractive employer for many young Americans. In 2008, the U.S. military reached their recruitment targets figures for the first time since 2004 when the violence in Iraq intensified. A 22-year old man who signed up for eight years of service says that “Hopefully, when I get out, I’ll have all my fingers and toes and arms, and the economy will have turned around”.

Others who are unemployed try to shape up and sharpen their skills in writing CVs and networking and look for support and tips in ”job clubs” that meet in churches, libraries, restaurants and hotels. But the underlying harsh reality is impossible to ignore - the labor market is very difficult in the U.S. right not. The home of the American automotive industry might be worst of as Detroit now is a city that tops all unemployment statistic.

Whatever people did not like about their jobs before, be it the salary, the boss or maybe the work load - now pales in comparison with the prospect of losing it. Where people previously counted on routinely raising their salary with 10-15% when they switched jobs, salary cuts of 20% or more is now the norm. A survey showed that 65% of the unemployed are prepared to accept wage cuts up to 30% and that 7% were prepared to lower their salary demands with up to 40-50%.

The longer you have been unemployed, the bigger the cuts you are prepared to make in your salary, but ”those who do accept lower salaries in order to ride out the recession might find that they've permanently damaged their value in the workplace”. It might thus be the case that the picky Colt Phillips (whom I wrote about in my previous text on the effects of the crisis) is doing the right thing when he is not accepting the first job offer that appears. It is on the other hand more difficult to get a job if you have been unemployed for half a year or more. In the end of September almost 5 out of 15 million (officially) unemployed Americans found themselves in this situation.

For those who accept a lower salary it is a struggle to adapt to a situation with less money, and to be forced to accept a new identity. One example is the pilot and father of five Bryan Lawlor (great article) who lost 50% of his salary when the number of flights decreased and he was ”degraded” from pilot to first officer. For others it is a struggle even to find money to pay for the basics; rent, gas and food on the table. The margins can be very thin, for example for Rainie Uselton who managed to find a new job after she became unemployed, but who lost it when her car broke down and she did not have the money to fix it (since we are talking about the U.S. it goes without saying that you must have a car to get to work). The competition for available jobs harden and this also goes for the worst paid jobs. Beyond accepting a job with a significantly lower salary, many are now also prepared to commute on a daily or weekly basis, and leave their family behind.

“people are starting to move in a makeshift and impermanent fashion. […] There are costs to this strategy. Spouses left at home must do the work of both parents. Children miss out on things. Loneliness is a steady companion for the parent on the road. Researchers have long documented strains on families that are separated.”

The situation is obviously especially difficult for those with (small) children. At the same time as the number of unemployed Americans with unemployment benefits increased from 2.5 to 9.5 millions in two years, years of neglected maintenance have decreased the possibilities of the administrative systems to deal with the high demand and to hand out money to those who are due. Most states have computer systems that are to 30 years old and that use such ancient computer languages that retired programmers have been called back to work on adapting the software.

Hundreds of thousands have therefore had to wait for money they are entitled to for months. For someone without any margins, one week’s delay is enough to make them unable to pay the rent or buy food. For Kenneth Kottowitz, three months of waiting for the unemployment benefits meant that his savings ran dry, and that he lost his flat and was forced to move to a homeless shelter that was so crowded he had to sleep on the floor for the first couple of nights. A former hotel porter, Luis Coronal, had to wait six months for his money. He and his pregnant wife moved back to his mother, but in spite of this, there were periods when they couldn’t even afford to buy food. The worst day in his life was the day when his daughter was born and he had no money to buy her clothes.

Beyond the problems for some to get their unemployment benefits, the biggest cloud on the horizon for many Americans is that there is an end date beyond which the unemployment benefits are terminated. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs since the autumn of 2007 and at the end of the summer no less than 9 million Americans got unemployment benefits. The US Congress extended the period for which you could get support twice last year.

”States typically provide 26 weeks of unemployment benefits, an average of about $350 a week. Last year, Congress tacked on 20 extra weeks of benefits, and later it added 13 additional weeks for people in states hit hardest by unemployment.”

The 59 weeks limit (at the end of 2008) has further been extended twice this year. Citizens in the hardest hit states - with with unemployment numbers above 8% (almost half the states) were eligible for support up to 79 weeks (18 months). In September a decision was taken to further extend the limit with 13 additional weeks of unemployment benefits in severely affected states.

Whiteout this last extension, large groups were expected to fall out of the system from September and on (after more than a whole year of being unemployed). Many have no plans for how to deal with such a situation even if they might formally qualify for food stamps or social security. It is difficult to determine exactly how many people are affected. I have at different times seen estimates ranging from 750 000 to 1 500 000 people losing their benefits this year, but these numbers are now smaller (at least temporarily) after it was decided to extend the benefits.

"increasing numbers of people fall off the far end, beyond the duration of unemployment benefits. The worst hit states […] will have to pony up the most in additional benefits, as an estimated 1.5 million people will have exhausted all resources by Christmas. For some states, this must cause nightmares already. Especially since it won't stop in 2009; not even the most rose colored forecasters see a significant improvement in jobless numbers any time soon. […] we could see millions of long-time, structurally unemployed soon. A true underclass."

My guess is that the problem of individuals losing their unemployment benefits will escalate in the near future, in spite of predictions that the insurance period will be further extended next year (the last extension of 13 weeks lasts until the end of the year, but it does not apply to all states).

Another problem is that employers are usually careful about re-hiring even after a recession has officially ended. After the recessions both in the beginning of the 1990’s and the beginning of the 2000’s, the number of unemployed started to fall a full year after the economic recovery had begun. Except for the fact that no recovery has been sighted, many commentators seem to have the opinion that this time around we will have a ”jobless recovery” - meaning that the economy will eventually recover, but the number of jobs will not. For those who have lost their jobs, this would mean that there is no recovery at all. As always I want to add a brief note that we can not yet even speak with confidence about a recovery:

"I’m starting to wonder how many people there are left who actually believe all the talk about the economic recovery we're supposed to have entered. You know, the one proclaimed by governments, central bankers, institutions such as the IMF and the entire flock of parrots and parakeets that call themselves media [...] Surely many must have realized by now that perhaps that talk about a recovery is just that, talk."

Finally I want to draw the attention to those who have lost their jobs but do not live in the worst affected states, and therefore have not had their insurance period extended. Of the approximately 400 000 who were on the way to fall out of unemployment benefits in September, 300 000 benefitted from the recent extensions, but 100 000 did not. Also send a thought to those who were unlucky enough to lose their jobs right before the big wave of job cuts in the spring 2007 - and who ran out of benefits a long time ago. Where are they today...? We will turn to them next, in the following text about the effects of the crisis.

The topic is tough, but there is no way to avoid mentioning the fact that the number of suicides is expected to rise in the time ahead of us. The baby boom generation (who are between 45 and 60 years old now) have the highest suicide frequency among all age cohorts. Beside the fact that people are more prone to commit suicide as they age, this group has already had a higher frequency of suicide rates than previous generations - a fact explained by higher stress in the form of higher divorce rates, a more mobile lifestyle with more moving around throughout life, and a bigger intake of drugs. The economy is obviously one more stress factor and for sure it is worst for those who are alone, old and with bad or no health insurance. In a summary of the connection between economy, unemployment and suicide from the Suicide Prevention Center, it is stated that:

“Unemployment causes financial strain and can lead to depression and other problems as individuals perceive a loss of personal control. […] We can expect a sharp downturn in the economy to increase suicide risk, especially among working-age adults and older adults whose retirement security is threatened.”

While women attempt to commit suicide more often than men, men are more ”successful” in their attempts. In 2006, one year before the economical crisis hit, more than 33 000 took their own lives in the U.S. (75% of these were men).

This text has been about those fighting by whatever means they have at hand in order to (re)enter the American labor market, and who are prepared to take any job at any salary. In part six of this series I will write about those who are even worse off and need help with the basics - like food.

This text was originally published in Swedish on November 4, 2009.
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Energy footprint of Google Searches

2009-12-03T11:47:00.014+01:00

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I like Google. Slowly, step by step, I have started to use more and more services from Google. It started with searches, then continued with Gmail, Google Earth and a number of other applications and services (including Blogger, which was bought by Google in 2003 and which provides the technical platform for this blog).

I have found almost all the services I have tried useful (for myself or at least for someone else), but it is now time to scrutinize Google through the lenses of my peak oil glasses. Even if I primarily write about Google in the text that follows, “Google” could mean any business competing with Google, or even the entire Internet with all the services it provides to us in our daily lives.

In the beginning of this year, the young Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross claimed that Google searches contribute significantly to CO2 emissions. The angle that the newspaper chose was that two Google searches produce the same amount of CO2 (carbon dioxide emissions) as boiling a kettle of water for a cup of tea, and that Google searches thus have “a definite environmental impact”. More specifically, Wissner-Gross claimed that one Google search generates around 7 grams of CO2 emissions. The carbon dioxide originates from producing electricity to run your computer and to run Google’s data centers. A few grams of CO2 may not sound like much if not for the fact that the number of Google searches each day exceeds two hundred million searches, and may be closer to one billion according to some sources

Wissner-Gross further claimed that the architecture of Google’s search engines was an important factor as each Google search is distributed to several data centers across the world that then compete against each other to find and return the fastest answer. What you gain in speed thus comes at a cost of higher energy consumption caused by all the extra computer capacity (unused, misused or redundant) built into the larger system.

To no one's surprise, Google rejected this interpretation and stated that the company is ”among the most efficient of all internet search providers” because their data centers are relatively energy efficient compared to "average" data centers. Google furthermore claimed that the number 7 grams CO2 per search is ”many times too high” and that the true numbers are 0,0003 kWh of energy and 0,2 grams of CO2 emissions per search. This small amount of energy is in parity with the energy burned by the human body in 10 seconds, and the CO2 emissions are thousands of times lower than the CO2 emissions caused by the average car traveling only a few kilometers. Another powerful formulation from Google is that “In the time it takes to do a Google search, your personal computer will likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query”.

Another comparison is with the numbers from this report (pdf) which claims that each spam mail ending up in your mail box on average generates 0,3 grams of CO2 emissions (the same amount as if you drive your car 1 meter). Since the number of spam e-mails sent during 2008 was approximately 62 000 000 000 000 (62 trillions), the total amount of CO2 emissions caused by spam is not insignificant and more precisely corresponds with the amount of CO2 emitted by a car driving around the world 1,6 million times. If we assume that there are about 800 million cars on Earth, then all the spam sent during 2008 corresponds to the accumulated CO2 emissions from all the world’s cars driving 80 kilometers each. I am not sure whether this is much or little in a big-picture perspective, but I have no problems being judgmental and deeming spam e-mails 100% unnecessary, and now for yet another reason. Where are the technological and social solutions to stop them`

I saw a reference in January 2008 stating that a "bizarre" record was broken one day in October the preceeding year (2007). During that one day, more than 160 000 million spam e-mails - roughly two dozen per man, woman and child on Earth - were sent. Comparing this number with the total number of spam e-mails send during 2008 (see above), we find that the record from 2007 is actually lower than the daily average of spam e-mails sent during 2008...

Other experts who have made claims about the energy use of (Google) searches state that CO2 emissions are between 1 and 10 grams (depending on whether you have to turn on your computer first), or between 7 and 10 grams (if you use your computer for 15 minutes). The Times of London, which published the original article (above), informed its readers a few days later that the newspaper accepted Google's official claim that one (simple) search (taking less than a second) produces only 0.2 grams of CO2, and that the "search" refererred to in the article involved several attempts over a teme period of several minutes. In a clarification by the physicist Wissner- Gross, he states that he never mentioned Google specifically, that the example with the kettle of water was not of his origin, and, between the lines, that the newspaper made a hen out of a feather based on the interview with him.

Maybe the number 7 grams of CO2 emissions per search originally came from this blog (May 2007)? We should anyway probably take Google's numbers with a pinch of salt since the company probably counts only the marginal cost of performing one extra search, and not the nergy cost for temporarily inactive servers, support and maintenance, and the distributet and thus reduntand work being done in several data centers for each search. Also, the idea that badly written inefficient software code wastes electricity and thus has a bigger ecological footpring than neat code is thought-provoking (although I do not mean to imply that this is a problem for Google).

The "news" about Google searches and kettles of water quickly spread to several newspapers, but seem to have been a storm in a teacup when viewed in the read mirror. So let us step back and think about the larger issues that this text touches upon. Using computers has an environmental impact. What we read and look at when we use our computers is stored on many servers that are all connected by computer networks. All of these parts require electricity (personal computers the most, servers and data centers the least, and computer networks in-between).

The electricity that we use for these purposes is generated mainly from fossil fuels like coal and natural gas (85% of the energy consumed on Earth is produced from fossil fuels). when Google states that each search generates 0.2 gram of CO2 emissions, they surely count only the energy costs for their enormous-but-highly-efficient data centers, whereas the big energy thief is right in front of your nose - your own computer at home or at work. The use of a personal computer may cause CO2 emissions of somewhere between 40 and 80 grams of CO2 per hour, and if you include this energy consumption it is easy to reach 7 gram of CO2 for an advanced search that constitutes of several steps.

As I wrote in the beginning of this text, "Google" could in this context represent something much bigger than the company itself and it is somehow difficult to understand why exactly Google was singled out for its energy consumption. In general, Google should be acknowledged for their energy policies and for their lobbying in Washington for cleaner energy sources. A few searches on the Internet (there we go again :-) reveal several examples of interesting and good inititatives from Google, like their report "Clean energy 2030 and their work on RE<C (renewable energy less than coal), where the goal is to produce renewable energy cheaper than electricity generated by coal plants. According to Google, the company's data centers use only half as much energy as the average data centers.

The global IT sector is responsible for 2% of the global CO2 emissions (according to the firm Gartner Inc.). It may not sound much, but it is as much as the global airline industry emits, and in contrast to an airline industry in crisis, the IT sector is growing rapidly on a global basis. Many actors consider numbers about energy use business secrets, and for exampe Google does not want to tell how many or how big their data centers are, or how many servers they own.

Google clims that using their search engine on the larger whole saves money and natural resources, since a Google search replaces more energy demanding activities - we no longer have to use as many car trips, time, paper or ink to have our questions answered. This is a valid argument, but it assumes that we are doing more or less the same things (the same number of searches) as before, but now in a more resource-efficient way. But we obviously did not perform a hundred million searches per day before Google and other search engines existed. Furthermore, we burn energy by doing a lot of new things with our computers which could not be done easily - or at all - before:

We may be obsessive about turning off the lights when we leave a room, but at the same time we may happily spend hours clicking around online, oblivious of the electricity lighting up our screen, heating our chip, and powering ad cooling the data centers we're connected to. (It's true that in some cases Internet use may substitute for other activities, such as travel, that would consume more energy, but let's not kid ourselves: the vast majority of computer and Internet use represents additional energy consumption.) How many Twitterheads think about their electricity use before they tweet? Not many. How many blogger think about it before they blog? Not this one.

More interesting than to examine Google in particular is to think about the energy cost of computer use in general. Alex Wissner-Gross (again) has calculated that each second of watching a web page generates 0.02 grams of CO2 emissions. This applies to "static" website content - if you watch animations or video, that number quickly becomes ten times higher. The rule of thumb is of course that the more you use a computer, the more energy you consume, and some activities (playing computer games, watching movies) are more energy intensive than others (reading a document, working with a word processor). Regarding the energy consumption of avatars, I wrote the following almost one year ago:

It is difficult to determine the benefit (or damage) of using virtual worlds. On the one hand you use considerably less energy (and generate a lot less in terms of CO2 emissions) if you cancel a trip and set up a meeting in a virtual world. A computer on the other hand uses a lot of electricity compared to non-electricity-consuming activites (go for a walk, talk with a friend, help your children with their homework).

To play World of Warcraft several hours a day can hardly be described as an activity which "replaces traveling". It is more probable that playing such a game for a long time increases the chance that you will make new (faraway) friends whom you would later like to visit (sometimes by hopping on an intercontinental flight). I am here walking on a minefield of trying to differentiate between "good" and "bad" uses of computers and the Internet. I prefer to avoid this particular discussion at this particular point in time, but might return to the issue later. We can at least for sure state that computers and galloping use of electricity may be problematic in the long run - a characteristic shared by all types of exponential development: "If not addressed, unlimited, ever-increasing compute performance will ultimately consume all the energy on the planet".

I think it is definitely legitimate to critically investigate the energy consumption and CO2 footprint of using for example YouTube, Twitter and virtual worlds. Even without approaching the issue in a normative manner (making claims about "good" or "bad" use), one may thus find clues as to which activities could become painfully expensive if the electricity and energy prices will rise and keep on rising in the future. According to a vice president at Sun Microsystems, it is totally clear that "We need more data centes, we need more servers. Each server burns more watts than the previous generation and each watt costs more".

Something to further take into account are proportions. A person who uses a computer one hour per day (40 to 80 grams of CO2 emissions per day) generates emissions somewhere in the range of 15 to 30 kilos per year. A hardcore computer user who uses his/her computer 10 hours per day thus generates something between 150 to 300 kilos of CO2 per year. Is this a lot? Driving an average car 1000 km/620 miles (a single round trip between Stockholm and Gothenburg) generates approximately 200 kilos of CO2. This by no means absolves us from caring about the energy use of computers, but it hints at the fact that the potential of reducing CO2 emissions in the computer/IT sector is - for now - limited compared to the potential of reducing our energy use by changing our habits of travelling.

This text was originally published in Swedish on October 18, 2009.
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The Effects of the Crisis - Part 4

2009-11-26T11:58:00.002+01:00

This is part four in a set of articles about the losers of the American economical crisis. The first article described the background to the topic of these texts (including the connection to peak oil). In the previous text I wrote about those who formerly had well-paid jobs, but, who due to the economical crisis, have fallen both quick and far from their former positions in society. In this text I write about those who have lost their jobs, and about "creative" solutions to people's housing problems.

What do you do when you understand that you are financially vulnerable and want to do something about it by lowering your costs and your financial risk? An obvious answer is to move to something smaller. It doesn't sound like a big thing to do, but if you are 50 years old and have a few teenage children who have lived a great part of their lives in the same house, it might well be an emotional challenge to take such a decision. And, you naturally want to sell your old house for a reasonable price. You might be able to live with a lower price if you can buy a new house that has also fallen in price... and if you manage to get your house sold at all.

Only a few years ago, 4 out of 10 houses sold were investments in a second home, a house that was not the seller's main residence. This according to the CEO of "Distressed Property Institute" (what a name!) that organizes courses for real estate agents about how to deal with houses whose owners are about to be evicted. California had the largest number of evictions last year, around 500 000, and Florida was number two with almost 400 000 evictions. Also Las Vegas has seen a lot of evictions, and every 13th house in the city is now owned by a bank (since the original owner has been evicted). In the third quarter 2009 evictions hit a new record as more than 900 000 Americans were evicted from their homes (40 000 more than in the previous quarter). In addition, seven million homes are currently "in the foreclosure process or likely to be seized". These days also people living in more expensive properties are being evicted. In June, the most expensive third of all houses were represented by 30% of all evictions. Then again - what to do if you see the writing on the wall and realize that you you can't bear the costs of keeping on living in your house? With a weaker economy, sinking house prices and high unemployment, ever more people need to find solutions that were difficult to imagine just a few years ago:

“Siblings are moving in with one another to help pay the mortgage. Adult children who've lost homes to foreclosure are moving back home with Mom and Dad. Even spouses in the throes of divorce are putting off separating, living together in awkward cold wars because they can't sell their houses.”

As I wrote in the previous text, not even those who earlier made a lot of money can now feel safe - especially if they have lived over their means. Or in Titus Maccius Plautus' more than 2000 years old words: "I am rich as long as I don't pay my debts"! Take Chris Henning for example who had a six-figure income in the 1990's (guesstimate is between 8000 - 20000 USD/month) and who "invested" her money in gadgets and a second home in Florida - a home that she refinanced three times since 2002 in order to be able to shop, buy, purchase and consume even more.

“During the boom, Henning subscribed to the conventional wisdom that housing prices couldn't slide. "Looking back, I thought, 'How naive could I have been?' “

The answer is that she was naive enough to not once in her 66 years think that the economy, the stock market and the house prices might sometimes fall, instead of always rising. Others have experienced the same nasty surprise, for example Colt Phillips, who after 15 years in the mortgage industry was forced to move home to his parents at the age of 40. After being evicted from their 460 (!) m2 (5000 ft2) big house (that costed almost one million dollars), Colt, his fiancee and their two dogs moved into the parents' 130 m2 (1400 ft2) big house. Now Colt is looking for a new job (he still hopes for employment in the mortgage industry) and his fiancee, formerly a loan processor, nowadays works at Home Depot.

Not only featured in an USA Today article (above), Colt has also had the opportunity to write an article about his own situation in the prestigious New York Times (where his parents' home has suddenly shrunk (?) to 100 m2 (1100 ft2) and felt crowded). In this article you can read the story as seen from Colt's own perspective. I can only with difficulty shake off the feeling that he hasn't learned anything at all yet. He has lived with his parents for one and a half years and complains that he doesn't have enough money to play golf or "do much socially" (go partying, I presume). He feels that he is isolated, "like a monk". But most unrealistic is in my view his hopes for the future.

What he did as a mortgage broker was setting up FHA loans. He has been in contact with some potential employers (real estate) and hopes that he can works with these loans again; “FHA loans have historically allowed lower income Americans to borrow money for the purchase of a home that they would not otherwise be able to afford”.

Other unrealistic dreams are:
- "I’m still hoping that the mortgage business will take off again."
- "Our elected officials are trying to fix this mess, and Congress may come through with some helpful programs."

He further states that he could imagine taking a job that pays 10 USD per hour, but not yet. Such a job would take too much of his time. He wouldn't have the time to look for a better job and he prefers concentrating on hunting for a job with a salary good enough to allow him and his fiancee to move back to a place of their own again - "even if we just rent one". At the same time he says he misses having a job, that a job gives meaning to everyday life and that he misses the opportunity to interact with other people. In an attempt to show how much he has matured and learned he says:

"I never saw this recession coming. I made great money when times were good, but I spent a lot. […] When the economy comes back, I’m going to be a smarter investor."

In spite of already being halfway run over by a metaphorical truck, he has not yet understood that the future might not necessarily look like what he has experienced up until now. How angry won't he be if (or when) he has to bite the bullet and lower his expectations? It is often said that "hope is the last thing to die". In many cases hope is a good thing. But there are also cases when it is not functional or sensible to hope - for example if what you are hoping for is unrealistic or borders on pure fantasies or is delusional. The difficult thing is, of course, to realize what is attainable and what is unrealistic.

Personally I believe that Colt's expectations are way to high when he thinks that he will be able to 1) work with setting up mortgages so that people who can't afford to buy a house can buy a house, and 2) being a better investor "next time". But who knows, he might be lucky and land a job. In spite of it being utterly absurd, the FHA loans still exist (so far) - and there are still more people around who have learned nothing yet.

Other individuals who move back to their parents see more advantages than disadvantages. When Kanessa Tixe's dad had finished building a large house and then lost his job, she, her stepbrother and stepsister all moved to that house to share the costs. They eat their meals together, feel that they have come closer to each other, and think that it is important to stick together when the times are tough.

Also Jeffrey Root, who has moved back to his parents together with his young wife, sees many more advantages than disadvantages. The move seems to have made a big impression on him and has fundamentally altered his priorities:

“Root says people should look for unexpected joy in the struggle. “Reading all these negative stories and stuff, I [...] realized people don't know what it's like to live without an iPod," […] "I'd say we're really spoiled ... We really do need to look at what's important. […] Staying close to your family in times of need, that's the most important thing in the economic crisis," he said.”

In spite of these examples, some "experts" warn in excessively negative terms of moving together and make it sound embarrassing - as if the people who do it have many alternatives to choose between...

“challenges include lifestyle differences, generational differences, depression, money squabbles and other issues when relatives huddle together for economic relief. […] Moving in with relatives can be ‘demoralizing, humbling, dehumanizing […] You lose that sense of independence, privacy and self-esteem, [...] You lose somewhat of your identity’.”

We thereby return to "identity" which I have written about earlier in these texts about the effects of the crisis. The topic fascinates me, and I have a certain understanding for the great obstacle this might constitute to people. "We are not the kind of people who..." surely make some keep doing irrational things and continuing to choose not to see the situation as it is.

In spite of going bankrupt, the Jensens had a hard time selling stuff that carried great symbolical value to them:

“The couple agonized over the decision to sell their grill and riding mower, two signature representations of home ownership for many people. "It was like some big symbol of our failure," says Jensen.”

To lose your status in the eyes of society is both an outer and inner trip. It is easy to fall very quickly (lose one's job, be evicted from one's house) without understanding, realizing, and catching up mentally. How long can you feel as if you are a real estate agent in spite of (soon) two year having passed since you last sold a property? For how long - how many months or years - will you stick to the dream of returning to your old employment, your old salary, your old consumption habits and to your old position in society? When almost half a million Americans have lost their job every month this year and certain businesses (like construction and real estate) fall to pieces like a house of cards, you finally reach a point where it is not longer rational to think that you can get your old job and your old life back. When and how do you build a new identity that is not built on delusional dreams about something that most likely will never materialize?

This text has been about those who have had to give up the American dream about a huge home of their own in the suburbs. In part five of this series I will describe those in an even worse situation and who are prepared to take just about any job.

This text was originally published in Swedish on October 23, 2009.
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Suburbia is unsustainable

2009-11-19T11:55:00.001+01:00

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I recently wrote about James Kunstler's book "The Geography of Nowhere" and about the fact that the car society (“made in the U.S.”) is grossly unsustainable. There is hardly any structure less durable after global oil production peaks than the countless and endless American suburbs. The American way of life epitomizes the wasting of cheap energy. To build and to live in a sprawling suburb and to be so totally dependent on cars is not a good position to be in when heating (or air conditioning) becomes expensive and when driving a car and maintaining a “thinned-out” infrastructure (electricity, water, roads) becomes prohibitively expensive. The fact that detailed zoning laws by default prohibits commercial activities in residential areas (for example neighborhood stores), means that the nearest supermarket is usually located so far away that any options beyond the car are hard to imagine for many Americans.  

 We know that many American suburbs have problems with "subprime loans" and foreclosures today, but I think many people here in Sweden do not understand how bad things really are in some places in the United States. When I wrote about "The Geography of Nowhere", I linked to the 12-minute long film "Foreclosure Alley". I recommend it again as it opens doors and gives shocking glimpses of a total crisis of monumental unpreparedness and desperation. People who are evicted from their large, beautiful (new) houses lose hope and can't pull themselves together together to try to sell their stuff and lack the strength to pack up their stuff (or they do not have anywhere to take them) before they have to leave them.   

The business models that are presented in the film are fascinating in their perversity. Spraying dead lawns green to make them look more attractive is a great example of a Potemkin village and of the fact that surface nowadays is more important than substance. I have not been able to drop the idea and found this article about Nick Terlouw and his Greener Grass Company as well as the accompanying 2 minute long news flash fascinating. Nick works in Stockton, California, "the ground zero of the foreclosure issue," and the paradox is of course that the more people that are evicted, the better the business for the Greener Grass Company.   

A customer says that "it turns the grass green and makes the neighborhood look decent again." The fact that the grass looks fine is important, that it actually still is dead (and the human tragedies that can be imagined behind each dead lawn) becomes a secondary matter. "After the spraying, the grass had a sparkling appearance and looked not only alive but also lush and thriving" - and all this for only 200 dollars! How can someone lose hope and think that there are problems that human inventiveness cannot solve when Greener Grass Company proves how easy it is to far surpass what nature has given us! Further research has led me to the company Tate Turf Painting - "the leader in grass painting" ("We have developed a process that can have a lawn a beautiful, natural looking green within a matter of hours"). Tate Turf can provide you with everything you need to start up your own greenwashing business (equipment, color and training).   

Any change has its winners and its losers. Among the more humorous (?) phenomena are skateboarders who use real estate brokers' sites or satellite imagery from Google Earth to find empty houses with large pools, which they then convert and skate in. At an internet forum, a skateboarder writes 'God bless Greenspan, patron saint of pool skatin' ". Well then, at least one person looks at the current economic situation and likes what’s going on.   

Moving back to "Foreclosure Alley", I think we can agree that it is shocking, but it does not say much about how this situation could occur or what will happen in the future. I therefore went back and read "The next slum?" again. It is written by Christopher Leinberger, a professsor of urban planning at the University of Michigan, and it was published in The Atlantic Monthly in March 2008. I read it last spring, before the subprime crisis had reached hurricane strength, and the article made a deep impression on me. While subprime loans at the time had emerged as a problem, this was before the financial and economic crisis crisis crashed the party (the explosion occured half a year later, in the autumn of 2008).   

What Leinberger’s article describes is how some recently-built suburbs - the furthest away from everything and everyone, therefore most dependent on cars and bought by the financially weakest players on the market – are collapsing. One example is Windy Ridge, 110 kilometers (!) Northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina. In late 2007, 81 of 132 homeowners had been evicted. Thieves had broken into empty homes to steal wires and sell them for the value of copper. In some cases, the walls had been smashed to get at copper pipes, and also brass and aluminum were desirable materials to steal from abandoned houses. The market value of a looted house naturally falls a lot. “a ‘notice of foreclosure’ letter affixed to its door [is] like a big billboard saying 'come and take me'." When do we get "house-sitters" (compare this future profession with babysitters or parking attendants) who may live for free if they guard and manage a bunch of abandoned houses in order to maintain as much as possible of their value?   

The 50 homeowners who still lived in Windy Ridge now had new neighbors; homeless, drug addicts and criminal gangs that slowly entered the area and made it their home. It is easy to imagine that the woman who was interviewed had no further desire to live in Windy Ridge after a stray bullet went through her son's bedroom and into her own. But what are her options? Who in their right mind would like to buy her house at a price that has even a teneous connection to what she paid for it only a few years earlier?   

The sad story of Windy Ridge is repeated a year later in the story of Lehigh Acres, Florida. In early 2009, houses were sold for a fifth of the top prices three years earlier. Besides drugs, marihuana cultivation and scrap thieves, hunger and desperation is becoming a growing concern among those who remain. Houses have started to be sold again, but average price is ony 45 000 $ - one third of the costs of building the houses.   

In Windy Ridge and other areas where (many) homeowners have been evicted, you finally reach a breakpoint or a tipping point; when a sufficient number of houses stand empty the whole area changes, crime increases and those homeowners who remain become trapped in a vise as they can’t get a “decent” price for their houses and move on. Leinberger’s article is based on the premise that even before the subprime crisis exploded, Americans' preferences for housing was slowly changing. After 60 years of migrating to the suburbs (further and further away from the city), the pendulum started to swing back. The consequences are that many suburbs that currently still look nice are "living dead" and face a bitter fate. Their fate is similar to many American inner cities that in the1960s and 1970s declined into becoming slums with high crime rates, poverty and decay. This in turn accelerated the flight away from the inner cities for everyone who could afford to get away.   

The triump of the suburbs began in earnest after World War II. Escape from New York (1981) portrayed the city's low-water mark - the city was in such a state of decay and so unloved that nothing remained but to put up a fence around it and turn it into a prison. Today, the city has instead become hip through TV shows like Seinfeld, Friends and Sex and the City.   

But what will happen with all the scattered "McMansions" that exist today? If we take Desperate Housewives’ upper-middle-class "Wisteria Lane" and downgrade it one or two levels, where does that leave us? It is possible to imagine a suburbian cul-de-sac makover - from a handful of scattered houses to a "real" street with houses and shops that you can walk between without a car. Or perhaps you could tear down a few houses and build a nice park? Neither proposal will become common for a couple of different reasons. First, they are costly. Second, you would have to buy many plots and houses at one sweep, something that is difficult if only a few owners object to the plan. Third, there are currently major political and legal obstacles to implementing such projects. Fourth, the existing infrastructure is not well adapted to denser settlements.   

A more likely scenario is that prices in (certain) neighborhoods continue to fall until they hit rock bottom and the houses are purchased by families with very low incomes - or they might be bought and subdivided so that each house can accommodate multiple tenants. Some might become cheap hotels (flop houses) where you can rent rooms by the day, the week or the month. Still, it is difficult to see how those living in a distant suburb can earn a living when they are stranded far from the city, from jobs and even from the nearest supermarket. Another problem is that today's American suburban houses (even the bigger and nicer houses) are cheaply constructed and will not last that many years without extensive maintenance work.   

The neighborhoods best positioned to survive more or less unscathed from the scenario above are those that are economically prosperous, situated close to the city or along rail tracks or that are near a walking-friendly suburban center.   

In an article from this year, Leinberger points out that the problem is deeper even than the number of foreclosures and that it can take a generation or longer to work through the societal changes that so far have only started in the United States. About half of all Americans want to live in detached houses (in suburbs), but 80% of the U.S. housing stock is currently situated there, while only 20% is situated in cities or city-like environments ("walkable urban arrangements"). Since we replace houses only slowly, it can easily take up three decades for supply and demand to become balanced, and a study shows that there may be more than 20 million empty homes in America's suburbs 15 years from now. Just as Kunstler argued already 15 years ago, Leinberger says the U.S. has built too many houses, to much office and retail space and all of it situationed in the wrong places:

   ”For the owners of that retail or housing space, every dollar that they invest will be money they don’t get back. That is another definition of a slum. There’s no incentive to invest in a slum. So here you are. You buy a 4,000 square foot house [370 m2] 40 miles [65 km] outside town. You think, wow, I got great value. But when the roof begins to go, you just patch it, because if you put a new one on it’ll cost $20,000, you’ll still be at the same selling price. So, why do it?”  

”There will be losers. And, yes, this is junk we’re putting up now. What’s the life expectancy of particle board and plywood under even the best of circumstances? So you have a suburb full of flimsy houses in the middle of nowhere, with no incentive for upkeep. That’s an ugly situation.”

Leinberger's text reflects the main current trends in the United States, but the joker in the deck is of course peak oil. If energy becomes radically more expensive, it is an even worse idea to live far away from everything and everyone, and the painful process of restructuring living arrangements in a whole society will be even faster and cause more harm and suffering. What do the trends above mean for us here in Sweden? Our houses are smaller and are built more densely in our residential suburbs. We also have better public transportation, even in suburbia. I would in any case, personally, for sure not buy a nice house far away and make myself totally dependent on having one or two cars to get to work or the grocery store.

This text was originally published in Swedish on June 11, 2009.
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The Effects of the Crisis - Part 3

2009-11-12T16:57:00.001+01:00

This is the third part in a set of texts about the losers of the American economical crisis. In the first part I described the background to these texts (including the connection to Peak Oil). In the second part I wrote about those that have been forced to cut down on expenses and curtail their consumption. This text is about those that have had to adapt to lower incomes - either because their working hours or wages have been cut, or because of losing their well paid jobs and having had to accept a drastically lower salary.

One of them is Laura Glick, a 29 years old woman who during her best years as a real estate agent made over 100 000 dollars. After seven month of unemployment she applied for one of 150 announced jobs at the department store Kohl's - in competition with 1200 other applicants. When unemployed, she was forced to survive on less than 1 400 dollars a month and had to do away with expensive habits such as cigarettes and visits to the vet for her pets). The open job positions at Kohl's paid between seven and twelve dollars/hour. If she gets a job closer to seven than twelve dollars/hour she will work more than 40 hours a week in order to earn more than the 1 400 dollars she currently gets in unemployment benefits.

Still, her case is nothing compared to Carlos Araya's. As an oil trader at the New York Mercantile Exchange - the world's largest commodity market - he used to earn 200 000 USD a year. He began to work at NYME when he was 23 years old and worked his way up from the floor during the following 15 years. He didn't think twice about ordering lobster, the finest meat and 200 dollar wine bottles at the fashionable Palm Restaurant at Manhattan. He now works at that restaurant. From time to time he meets some of his former colleagues - some give him their support, others belittle and grin at him, and other again are unemployed and ask him if the restaurant is hiring...

Carlos is one of 25 000 persons whose job in New York's financial sector has disappeared in the last two years, and he now has to survive on his new wage of less than 2 000 USD a month (not even 15% of his previous income). He has started to lose hope about ever returning to the financial business. To make ends meet his wife has started working as a secretary again. She leaves home at six in the morning, and Carlos works until one or two at night. They work in shifts looking after their two young daughters, but there are few opportunities for the family to spend time together. Their apartment costed almost one million dollars when they bought it four years ago, and the monthly expenses plus fees and taxes are more than 50% higher than the approximately 4 200 dollars Carlos and his wife earn together every month. Their savings are running out fast and they don't know what to do.

These and other similar stories contain some food for thoughts. Should we pity Carlos? To what extent is his current situation a result of unfavorable circumstances, and to what extent is it the result of bad decisions that he and his family has made? What pity and what sympathy "should" we have for someone who made 200 000 dollars a year and for years on end ordered expensive wines without blinking? Say that you for example compare this with his current colleagues at the restaurant... And why stay in an unsustainable expensive apartment instead of moving to something more reasonable prices as soon as possible? It is not all that easy to find the direction of your moral compass when you read about Carlos or these portraits of former Lehman Brothers employees at the anniversary of the investment bank's bankruptcy.

No matter if you pity or not pity Laura and Carlos above, loss of earlier-wellpaid-now-gone jobs have consequences far beyond the individuals directly affected. When Carlos (and his friends) don't work in Manhattan any longer also Jack Yang's lunch restaurant at the 46th street has a hard time and has to fire staff.

The 25 000 lost jobs in the New York financial sector mentioned above (the number comes from New York State Department of Labor) is completed by Bloomberg's estimate that ten times that number of jobs have been lost in the financial sector (in the entire USA) between the beginning of 2008 and mid-2009. That means decreasing incomes also for many small businesses and service workers like housecleaners, waiters, hair dressers, dry cleaners, beauty salons, gardeners, nannies and jewelers. When the times were good, Jessica Rosa was a waitress at one of New York's hottest bars and earned 50 000 USD a month - despite only working three days per week. According to some calculations, more than three jobs disappear in other sectors for every lost job in the financial sector, and the higher your income is, the more you consume of services provided by other professionals:

”But every step they take toward self-reliance — each shrub they prune themselves, each cupcake they bake from scratch — hurts the people and small businesses that have long provided these services professionally.”

It is a contradiction that those who cut their expenses and start doing things themselves hurt those who make a living from providing these services. As things previously regarded as necessities are redefined as luxuries, these DIY-ers can start to take pride of their own abilities and accomplishments, but at the same time have a bad conscience on the behalf of those whose incomes they take away.

Another story that makes me feel ambivalent is the family Ferrell story that I will describe in some detail here. Mother Sharon is a housewife and the family has four children (two pairs of twins that are 7 years and 20 months respectively). Daddy Jeff works as an "industrial hygienist", evaluates health hazards in the workplace, and has a salary of 6000 USD per month. Because of the disastrous finances of the state of California, he is on furlough and has been forced to work two days less every month with a corresponding (9%) salary cut. When the family have paid their bills, housing expenses and car insurance each month, only 1 200 dollars remain for all other expenses (gas, diapers, food). The loss of 500 dollars per month forces this family to go down on their knees.

On the one hand it is absurd that a family - even with four children - can not survive on an annual income of 72 000 USD (and with considerably lower taxes than here in Sweden). Yet today they live on the margin, and they hardly seem to have been able to save any money even in the best of times. Instead they have obviously - as so many others in the U.S., Sweden and elsewhere - lived from hand to mouth.

A look at the slide show that accompanies the story and a closer read of the text gives us some clues to the reasons behind their current situation. Their enormous and wonderful house is situated in the countryside, in the middle of nowhere (65 km/40 miles outside the city of Sacramento). They of course need two cars and Sharon drives a mini-van. The monthly expenses of 360 dollars for gas are difficult to cut (in spite of the - for me - bargain price of less than one dollar per liter of gas in the U.S.). Instead of repairing the broken air condition in the van, Sharon tries to drives only when the weather is cool or when she knows that she can park in the shadow.

The cuts their expenses, the family have cut their visits to the hair dresser's, plan meals one month in advance, don't vaccinate the family's four cats and dogs, have started to use their baking machine instead of buying sliced bread, and taking fewer photos to avoid spending money on film and on developing photos. They also consider canceling their satellite television (55 dollars per month) and their eldest daughters' ballet lessons (315 dollars per month).

The family Ferrell have put themselves in a situation where they have a difficult time trying to survive on less money than than what they made when the good times were rolling. A single month without income would open up the abyss beneath their feat. The family was very vulnerable even in the best of times, and now is not the best of times. We should remember that the size of houses (and with them the prices and costs of living in them) have swelled in the U.S. during the last decades. Just sixty years ago, a newly built detached house was 90 m2 (980 ft2) on average. Forty years ago that newly built house had increased 50% in size to 140 m2 (1500 ft2). Twenty years ago that house was over 190 m2 (2100 ft2) and five years ago (2005) that house was 220 m2 (2350 ft2) large. And with every square meter/feet, the price and the costs increase.

One could blame the Ferrells' for a lifestyle built on the absence of reflection and long term planning. But if we take a closer look, we are all the Ferrell family - indeed, our entire culture is a family Ferrell-culture. Kurt Cobb quotes the author Thomas Homer-Dixon who pins down our cultural framework (our blinders).

”Collectively we have been behaving like adolescents – believing we're invulnerable, living for today while ignoring tomorrow, and sneering at anything that smacks of prudence.”

What he means in this context is that adolescents are prepared to jump feet first into projects that would make many elder people hesitate and reflect. To realize and understand both in the brain and in the guts that not everything will necessarily end up the way would like them to, is according to Cobb and Homer-Dixon a sign of maturity. The opposite is ”[to] remain in an adolescent state preferring an optimistic gloss on a simple-minded model of the world”.

The financial industry has worked from (and remained in) this immature and childish position, and maybe also all doctrinal neoclassical economists who see growth as the solution to all problems and always see new - eternal - growth just around the corner. And this too is the state that the family Ferrell have been in. And all to often you and I have been there too. What makes everything complicated and what makes me ambivalent is that all Ferrell families out there have simultaneously been victims and willing actors (perpetrators?) in this drama. To see them (us) as only one or the other is to make things too easy. To see them (us) as both victims and actors/perpetrators is what makes it so darn difficult to judge and to decide what is wrong and what is right.

This text has used three portraits to describe those that are directly affected by the economical crisis and that have come upon rough times. In the fourth part of this series, I will describe those that are worse off and have had to move back to their parents after their own living situation has collapsed.

This text was originally published in Swedish on October 13, 2009.
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"The geography of nowhere" by Kunstler (1993)

2009-11-06T01:08:00.001+01:00

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Although James Howard Kunstler’s "Geography of Nowhere: The rise and decline of America's man-made landscape" (1993) is more than 15 years old, there are good reasons to take a look at his book at this particular point in time as it clearly is more relevant today than when it was published. In hindsight, it is possible to see that much of what James wrote was on the spot - almost prophetical - even if it is only now that this is becoming more and more obvious to more and more people.
  
James is a man with an almost sacred mission, and he preaches his doctrines as intensively as a teleevangelist preaches the glory of Jesus. He hammers in his message again and again and repeatedly comes back to two issues that overlap and interact and that penetrate all aspects of Americans’ daily lives; cars and houses. Anyone who wants to get to know James’ very critical views can check out his blog, Clusterfuck Nation, where he writes a new column every Monday.   

There is a whole complex of issues and industries that interact around cars, energy (oil), financing, road construction, (lack of) public transportation, politics, philosophy, etc. Houses (buildings) are really much broader than just the domiciles we live in and comprises both of private homes as well as commercial and public buildings. The way U.S. houses have been built, and cities designed, and the central role of cars all depend on each other, meet and are bound together by the arteries of American Society – its roads.
  
Since I have have lived in the U.S. myself, several questions that I have wondered about are answered by this book. Why are most neigborhoods in the U.S. built so that it is impossible to manage without a car? How is it possible to build roads without sidewalks in residential areas? Why are there are no neighborhood stores and why is the nearest supermarket always so far away? Why are the streets amazingly broad even in quiet residential neighborhoods? Why are so few people taking a stroll through their neighborhood and why are so few places within walking distance that are worth visiting in the first place?
  
The last question is not difficult to answer. The streets are broad, the blocks are huge and the distances are large; it is incredibly monotonous and boring to walk beside a completely straight road for 20 or 30 minutes. The whole environment is constructed so as to be traversed safely by a car traveling at 40-60 km/h and the restless brain of a curious human is just not getting enough stimulation when you are out walking in an American residential neighborhood. It is similarly very boring to walk any longer distances next to a Swedish highway or expressway.
  
Regardless of what the actual speed limits happen to be, the 12 meter wide roads of American suburbia are designed to be ultra-safe (for drivers) so that even a mediocre car driver can whoosh by in 70-80 km/h without risking the destruction of the car. The primary function of those roads is to channel suburban cars to the highways. The big losers of this arrangement are children who can not move freely outside of their homes without risking life and limb (beyond the fact that there are few destinations worth visiting within walking or biking distance).

Since children still need to get to school, many ride school buses to get there - a separate public transport system that "operates at huge expense, is restricted to children, and runs only twice a day". Based on their limited freedom of movement, it is understandable that many young Americans’ highest dream is to have their own car as soon as they reach the age of 16. James notes that it is basically impossible to live in any U.S. neigborhood built since 1950 without having access to a car.
  
Another aspect of the human-built landscape that James dislikes is that it is cheap. Cheap to build, cheap to demolish, and, it looks cheap. Many neighborhoods consist of identical houses on identical lots along identical streets in identical neighborhoods. People travel along identical highways along which there are identical strip malls. Everything looks like everything else and nothing looks like something special. It is this "nowhere" that James refers to in the title of his book:
  
”long-distance car travel on an interstate highway is literally like going nowhere fast”. […] There is little sense of having arrived anywhere because everyplace looks like noplace in particular. […] we chose to live in Noplace, and our dwellings show it. In every corner of the nation we have built places unworthy of love and move on from them without regret.”
 
James writes a lot about the crappy architecture; outside of the cities cookie-cutter houses and shopping barns are erected – buildings of poor quality that do not deserve our love, or even to be taken care of. Little of what is built is meant to last for longer than in a decade or two, which means that as houses have “progressed” from being crafted to becoming a commodity - which are now consumed. In many places in the U.S., the plot is worth much more than the house and it is not uncommon to tear down an old house and build a new, rather than to maintain something that was never meant to withstand the test of time. Over time, the emotionally-charged “home” has moved towards becoming an interchangeable “house”, a place where a family “happens” to reside, eat and sleep at the moment, but which can quickly be “flipped” if something better turns up.  

James was very aware of the importance of oil to the American economy and of America's dependence on (imported) oil already back in 1993 when he wrote the book. He warned aginst continuing on the road taken, but was of course preaching to deaf ears. In addition to (significant) negative social effects of an atomized and dispersed society, and adverse effects on human physical and mental health, James characterizes the built environment of the U.S. as the greatest misallocation of resources ever:   

”America has now squandered its national wealth erecting a human habitat that […] will not be usable very much longer […] suburban sprawl is too expensive to operate, too costly to maintain […]. To lose it is tragic not because America will be deprived of such wonderful conveniences as K-Marts and drive-in churches […] but becuase it was a foolish waste of resources in the first place, and it remains to be seen whether its components can be recycled, converted to other uses, or moved.”
 
Today, 15 years later, we can in hindsight see that instead of changing direction during the 1990s and early 2000s, the course of action was to press the accelerator, borrow more money, build more houses and more suburbs, buy more cars and build more roads. James already at the time predicted that based on the enormous amounts of resources that had already been squandered by building a car society, the course of action would be to continue to "throw good money after bad" rather than attempting to imagine alternatives and ways to change society so as to make it less dependent on cars (and oil).
  
Many different factors now conspire and together indicate that we have reached the end of the road, and that James's 1993 predictions are coming true, "Today's posh suburbs could easily become tomorrow's slums." Very shocking to me was this one year old and 12-minutes long film, "Foreclosure Alley" from Southern California. In the wake of “epidemic” of foreclosured homes, new depressing business opportunities appear; spraying brown dead grass green so as to make the plot and the house look more vibrant and attractive, and, to empty and throw away all that is left behind in a foreclosured house, including furniture, photographs, toys, food and fully functional consumer electronics in the shortest possible period of time. Some of yesterday's brand new suburbs (the most recently built which are furthest away from the cities) are becoming ghost towns where squatters and criminal gangs move in as the previous homeowners move out and leave empty houses behind.
  
Although the U.S. is in the eye of the storm when our current solutions for transportation and and housing are "challenged" after peak oil, we Europeans can not sit back and believe that we will escape the coming changes unharmed. But it is a fact that our position is significantly better. Already in the nascence of “happy motoring”, in the early 1900s, Europe was forced to import the majority of its oil while the U.S. had huge, seemingly endless resources of oil. Even though there are many car-huggers also here in Sweden, our relationship with the car is still a pale copy of the Americans' long love affair. We have smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, higher gasoline prices, more dense settlements, we drive less, build fewer and narrower roads and have better developed public transportation systems. Our starting point is thus in many ways better, but unfortunately also we tend to - even in this late hour - to place headless bets on more airfields and runways and on expanding or building new highways, instead of more cycle paths and better public transport system.

This text was originally published in Swedish on May 25, 2009.
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The Effects of the Crisis - Part 2

2009-10-29T20:30:00.001+01:00

Picture: Our identity as consumers is deeply entrenched. Culture Jamming highlights this by deconstructing, playing with and questioning the things that we usually take for granted.

This is the second part in a set of texts about the losers of the American economical crisis. In the previous text, I laid the foundation to this series of texts and described the connection to oil and peak oil. I also described changing habits among Americans who are not personally hit by the crisis, but who nonetheless have chosen to limit their consumption. In this text I move on to those that do no have the choice to continue consuming as before, but are forced to consume less.

Suddenly they notice that the habit of buying whatever you want whenever you want it - a habit that was taken for granted until recently - is no longer an alternative. In order to be able to give her daughter all the gifts she wanted for Christmas (and these gifts were neither small nor few), the young mother Kristen realized that she had to abstain from the designer jeans she wanted for herself. Personally I struggle to see this as the "sacrifice" it was described as in the article in question. But you get some clues to the perceived importance of belongings when mommy Kristen says: “I want her to be able to look back, and say, ‘Even though they were tough times, my mom was still able to give me stuff.’ ” One can easily get the impression that Kristen confuses "stuff" with "love". Whatever the reasons, this translates into problems for shopping malls and the retail business in the USA.

The tendency that you can no longer get what you want whenever you want it is exemplified on a smaller scale by the coffee franchise Starbucks. They have presented sobering economic results, and have started to close down coffee shops. Where people previously did not think twice about buying a four dollar "Grande Mint Chocolaty Chip Frappuccino® blended creme with Chocolate Whipped Cream", many now abstain from buying at all, or buy their coffee where it is cheaper. Last summer it was announced that 600 of the 12 000 cafés in the US were to be closed (but new coffee shops were opened elsewhere). In the beginning of this year the time had come to close down a further 300 coffee shops (just Manhattan had previously hosted 200 Starbucks coffee shops). In a humorous article in Newsweek, an even closer connection between Starbucks and the global financial crisis is made:

"I propose the Starbucks Theory of International Economics. The higher the concentration of expensive, nautical-themed faux-Italian branded frappuccino joints in a country's financial capital, the more likely the country is to have suffered catastrophic financial losses. [...] My tentative theory: having a significant Starbucks' presence is a pretty significant indicator of the degree of connectedness to the form of highly caffeinated, free-spending capitalism that got us into this mess. [...] The fact that the company [...] felt there was room for dozens of outlets where consumers would pony up lots of euros, liras and rials for expensive drinks, is also a pretty good indicator that excessive financial optimism had entered the bloodstream."

If we move towards the nitty gritty details of everyday life, I already last autumn read about how economically strained families cut down on daycare expenses for their children. If you lose you job, your children might simply have to stay at home until mum or dad finds a new job, and if you involuntarily have your working hours cut down, children might be in daycare for only a few days a week. It is worth mentioning that daycare can be very expensive in the US. According to the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agency, the average cost of daycare is between 3 400 and 10 800 USD per year. I pay around 2000 USD/year for full-time (heavily subsidized) daycare here in Sweden and the cost for the second child is only 500 USD/year. And I pay the maximum amount - if your family income is lower, you get away with paying less...

If you have two or more children in daycare, it's doubtful whether (usually) mum's less well-paid job pays enough to cover the extra expenses that goes with professional work (formal clothes for work, gas, maybe an extra car etc.). ”In every state in the country, the monthly child care bill for two children is higher than median rent payments and as high or higher than a mortgage.” Expensive and pedagogically excellent daycare centers that earlier boasted long waiting lists now see these waiting lists as well as the number of children attending melt away. Some fear that more children will now attend lower-quality daycare that can be described as "parking lots" for children. Also (expensive) private schools have felt the same problems.

We can now also see a trend in the opposite direction, when (highly educated) American women who previously had chosen to stay at home, feel obliged to return to the labor market when their spouses become unemployed, start fearing for unemployment or have their salaries lowered. Alternatively, the value of the family's investments and/or house have now reached a level they don't feel comfortable with. This is to some extent a luxury problem affecting those that earlier had the choice not to work:

"Several studies have found that two different groups of women are likely not to return to work after giving birth: affluent ones and poor ones unable to afford child care."

Americans in the upper middle age (the Baby Boom generation) also start to worry that they don't have enough to live comfortably for 20 years after they retire. According to the Center for Retirement Research, a pensioner needs approximately 75% of his earlier income to continue to live at the same standard of living:

"while lower-income workers face a worrisome retirement reality all their own, middle- and upper-middle class workers likely face the biggest living-standard shock. That's because lower-income people can replace a good chunk of their preretirement income with Social Security, and high-income people generally have enough personal savings. But middle-class workers may see their relatively comfortable life change drastically come retirement."

None of the "traditional" ways to save money for retirement - all of them different models of investments in a growth economy - have managed to withstand the crisis. On average, the investments of the middle class have lost 40% of their value. Those who now have seen almost half their savings disappear feel betrayed by brokers, banks, funds, stock analysts, auditors, the financial authorities, the central bank and CEO's.

In the last two years, the age at which Americans expect to retire has increased with two years, and at a time when they should be free from debt and plan for lower incomes, many find themselves heavily in debt. The wealth that the elderly have is often tied to the house they live in - a house that has lost in value and today is hard to sell. Even elderly who already had retired, now find themselves at work again: "here they are, many in their 60s, 70s and beyond, desperate to find work so they can keep a roof over their heads and food on the table."

The sceptical reader might ask: 'but haven't stocks gained in value this year?'. Shouldn't this compensate for the earlier losses? Unfortunately the answer is 'no', especially for elderly who are currently living on their savings:

"Sure, the S&P 500's almost 35% rebound since March is good news, but it's not enough to make savers whole. From its peak in Oct. 2007 through this March, the S&P 500 lost almost 49%. Shave 49% off a $100,000 investment and you'll need a 96% gain just to get back to even. Younger savers can overcome that hit with time, but it's a lot tougher for people close to retirement, and nigh impossible for retirees forced to pull money out to live on".

I touched upon the new frugality and the changed attitudes towards spending money in the previous text and I return to the topic here. Many people have been letting the things they buy communicate taste, interests and values. Carolyn Baker discusses this in a text about shopping, consumerism and identity:

”buying and consuming have become part of the national culture and offer people an identity - the identity of a consumer, which -many will now be forced to abandon. Additionally […] people have come to believe that they are what they buy, and the more expensive and coveted brand or product makes a statement about who one is. […] for some, the inability to consume may be creating a fundamental existential crisis in terms of losing one's identity. "

The economical crisis undermines a life style built on spending money. To be forced to shed expensive habits and having to buy less is painful for some, and has been compared to drug withdrawal. At the same time, individuals who change their habits and take control over their economy step by step notice that they stand on a new and more stable ground and may feel a new confidence - even if they are on a materially lower level than before. It is also likely that the longer and more lasting the economical crisis, the deeper and more lasting will the (psychological) effects be for years and decades to come

Psychologists have noticed that traumas can cause changes in behavior, and the deeper the trauma, the bigger the changes. A near-death experience often makes people fundamentally change their attitude towards the importance of material success compared to personal development and relations. If you lose your job during a short-span economical downturn, it is easy to regard this as an isolated and random event with little connection to habits, attitudes and values. But to the extent that many now go through "economical near-death experiences", this might lead to a fundamental shift of values in many people. Half of all Americans now feel that they would have economical problems within one month after losing their job, and this is an uncomfortable feeling that is difficult to forget once it has taken root. Especially in combination with knowledge that this has already happened to friends, neighbors or relatives.

Some go one step further and become "economic survivalists". I now make a short diversion and return to the topic of last week; people who voluntarily cut down their expenses and choose a lower economical standard rather than being forced to do it (against their will). Nonetheless, I think the examples below are interesting since some of the proposed measures are still unthinkable for most people, but might very well become necessary for increasing numbers of individuals in the future.

The Wojtowicz family in Michigan “disconnected the satellite TV and radio, ditched their dishwasher and a big truck and started buying clothes at resale shops. ’As long as we can keep decreasing our bills, we can keep making less money’ ” says daddy Wojtowicz. His job as truck driver previously took him away from home for weeks on end, and when the salary started to shrink, the family decided to drastically change their lifestyle. Since then, they have bought pigs and chickens, and they plan to start growing food and to buy a wood stove. They have less money today and live more frugally, but are rewarded with more time together and they feel safer and sleep better at night.

In spite of their frugal lifestyle, they are outperformed by Jim Merkel, author of the book Radical Simplicity and the website radicalsimplicity.org. Since Jim consciously makes sure he earns less than 5000 USD per year, he doesn't have to pay any income tax. In spite of the fact that 400 USD per month sounds like a very moderate amount of money, more than half of the world's population get by on a tenth of that sum, or 40 USD per month...

Merkel lives in a 20 m2 large cottage in Vermont and he eats mostly organic food that he has grown himself. He is no lunatic, but a conscientious person who in his "earlier life" worked as an engineer selling weapon systems, but who step by step and over a longer period chose to live the consequences of his convictions. The article about him is well worth reading. Merkel is rational but extreme and the economical crisis has completely passed him by (since he has voluntarily decoupled from the mainstream global economic system). Merkel is a survivor who surely would survive on eating bark from trees in the forest, but in spite of having gone further than 99.99% of all westerners, there are many interesting thoughts in his life philosophy and in his way of living.

This text has been about those who are forced to change their habits and lower their standard and expenses. In part three of this series of articles, I will write about those who have it worse and who have been hit more directly by the economical crisis.

I almost forgot to mention the queen of simple living, Sharon Astyk. A portrait of her in the New York Times is a good introduction before you take on her blog (which I subscribed to). A quote from NY Times:

"Others may see [her and her family] as colorful eccentrics, people with admirable intentions who have arrived at a way of life close to zealotry [...] Ms. Astyk has heard such talk but says her neighbors’ attitudes have softened as energy prices have risen. “People have moved gradually from ‘Sharon is a fruitcake’ to ‘Sharon is a fruitcake who might make some sense,’ " :-)

This text was originally published in Swedish on October 3, 2009.
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The Effects of the Crisis - Part 1

2009-10-14T11:15:00.002+02:00

Wise men argue whether the present economical crisis is a recession or a depression, and it has earlier been discussed whether the crisis will be V-shaped (with a quick recovery), U-shaped (with a slower recovery) or L-shaped (with no recovery). Some calculate the average losses over the entire population, and find that the effects have not been so hard, and that we in hindsight will remember this crisis as nothing more than a dip in a rising curve. But no matter how you you look at it - massive job cuts and the lack of new jobs can ruin many people's lives. Even so, I can not (from a Swedish perspective) recall reading many articles from this point of view: about (many) single individuals, whose lives have taken a turn for the worse in the wake of the crisis.

Also American reports often remain silent about the millions of newly poor that follow in the wake of the crisis. As we all know, being poor is much worse in the USA than in Europe in general or in Sweden in particular due to the less fine-meshed social security net. Personally I notice this lack of understanding when I speak to intelligent people without crisis awareness, who think everything is pretty OK now "when its so cheap to hire a craftsman".

To raise awareness about the bottomless abyss that has opened below the feet of many Americans, I hereby begin writing a set of texts about the losers of the crisis - a growing underclass - that is all too often dismissed and made invisible. We have the concepts and cultural frameworks to easily accept and understand stories about skillfull "upstarts", who climb the social ladder, working their way from the factory floor to the corporate boardroom, or becoming the first person in their family to achieve a university degree and "become someone". But we don't have the same clear framework to understand downward mobility, and the stories about individuals who due to stupidity, less fortunate choices or pure bad luck find themselves out in the cold, economically and socially.

There are two connections between this subject and peak oil. The first connection is that many say there is a link between the current crisis, the increasing oil price between 2002 and 2007 (from $20 to $100/barrel), and the astronomical peak in the oil price last summer ($147/barrel). According to some, the economical crisis is nothing less than a consequence of this long prelude and its finale when the energy prices hit the roof last year. The second connection is that when we find ourselves in the downward slope beyond the oil peak (which might happen now or any time within ten years), large numbers of the population will suffer materially, and then suffer again. The effects of the current crisis might thus either be the first stage in an enduring and deep(ening) economical crisis, or a full dress rehearsal for a future possible crisis. In the words of the peak oil writer Richard Heinberg from the documentary film "Oil, Smoke & Mirrors":

''...yet people won't be talking about the oil peak. They'll be talking about the unemployment figures. They'll be talking about the high price of food. They'll be talking about the fact that you can't get on an airliner and travel any more because the airline industry has collapsed, there are only a few carriers still in business and tickets are astronomically expensive. They'll be talking about the latest war or terrorist incidents. They will have completely lost sight of the one event that caused all of those effects.''

The US is a predecessor - a country that precedes us - and the situation and the consequences of the economical crisis are at this point many times worse there than here in Sweden. These texts will therefore be strongly America-centric. The ambition is to open up the eyes of those who do not know what is currently happening in "the richest country in the world", and hopefully urge for humble reflection about what this might mean. Could the same thing happen in Sweden? The US is also interesting as there is a great and heartshrieking discrepancy between the current reality and many Americans' view of their own country. Regarding this self-perception Göran Rosenberg writes in the last issue of the Swedish magazine Axess (September 2009):

"The American idea is broadly an idea of a society called America, inhabited by the happiest among people - the Americans, who are convinced that only in America can Man fully realize his innate right to life, freedom and search of happiness. The American idea is the idea of an exceptional society, created on an exceptional place under exceptional circumstances (if not by divine intervention) and with an exceptional role to play in the world."

But various texts and articles from this proud country now indicate that it is slowly crumbling from within. If the foundation is stable enough, and the carrying walls manage to carry the weight, maybe this is not such a big problem? Maybe more people will live in poverty, but this might not necessarily herald any major consequences for the majority population? Even if this is the case I would now like to direct the attention to those who have fallen and might find it difficult to rise even in the most optimistic scenarios of economic recovery. The storytelling technique I use in this set of articles is similar to Dante's descent into the circles of hell, thus I will begin with describing milder effects of the crisis (worsening economy, new patterns of consumption, increased prudence), and step by step move ahead to those worst affected that now are moving toward, or already live in, complete misery.

If we begin with new patterns of behavior that hardly provoke anyone, prudence and a new kind of prudent thinking is currently gaining ground after a 15, or maybe 40 years long shopping spree. It is no secret that uninhibited Americans during a long time have been shopping away, and bought ever bigger homes to make room for new clothes and stuff. Savings have been low, and consumption has been fueled by borrowed money, often with the increasing value of the own house as "security". Household debts have increased from 60% of the household income to 130% in 25 years (between 1982 and 2007). At the same time it is the households' consumption that has maintained the American economy, representing almost 70% of the US GNP:

”This shift back to thrift may seem to be a healthy change for a consumer class known for spending more than it earns, but there is a downside: American businesses have become so dependent on consumer spending that any pullback sends ripples through the economy.”

We all know what has happened since the housing bubble inflated. Today many Americans have been forced to leave their homes when they couldn't pay the mortgages for their loans. Among those who still live in their own homes, 25% live in houses with "underwater mortgages" - houses that are currently worth less than the loans on these houses - after ten straight quarters of sinking house prices. In addition house prices are expected to sink further - approximately half of all American homes may be over-indebted two years from now.

What this means is that many people are "prisoners" in their homes, and can not sell them without losing money or become indebted. The alternative is to walk away from the house, as most American loans, in contrast to Swedish, are tied to the house, not to the person. One must however calculate that the credit score will plummet, and that several "normal" economical transactions thereafter become complicated (renting an apartment, renting or borrowing money to buy a car, getting a mobile phone etc...). The bottom line is: American houses have changed from being piggy banks to albatrosses around the neck of the American house owners, and continued grand scale consumption based on the house as security is out of the question from now on

What to do? Well, the radical (?) act is to not live above one's expenses and to save money instead of spending them. Many Americans who have not been personally been affected by the economical downturn and still have plenty of money, have now started to change their patterns of consumption into less spending.

”With the economy in shambles and so many people losing their jobs and homes, it is no longer considered cool to brag about possessions and purchases. For many during a deepening recession, conspicuous consumption is out and frugality is the new black.”

Others get feelings of guilt from consuming stuff that they don't need: “The shift appears to be driven, at least in part, by a sense that the economic crisis is a long overdue catharsis; it's the jolt we needed to reverse a multitude of bad financial habits and destructive attitudes developed over many years.”

These changed habits are visible in many ways. When the mother of two and secretary Kelly needed new boots, her choice was between buying a new pair for 200 dollars or taking an old pair to the shoemaker. Her first visit ever at the shoemaker's was initially hard to swallow, but was eventually an eye-opener.

”For a fashion-conscious woman, the thought of recycling clothing hurt her pride a bit. "I walked in with my tail between my legs," she says. "It was something, initially, I was not proud of." Then she saw the price: $16. And the work: the boots looked as good as new.”

All of a sudden many Americans "discover" that it is possible to repair the things you already own instead of buying new things. Professionals who repair goods (car and bicycle mechanics, watchmakers, tailors, TV- and white goods repairs) have noticed a hike in demand for their services. Among those who both sell new and repair old goods (for example tailors who sew clothes and repair old ones) the trend is also clear; new sales diminish while repairs increase. To clip (the ubiquitous) coupons in newspapers has also increased in popularity in the last couple of years after having lost popularity during 15 years, and skill full coupon-clippers can lower food costs with up to 50%.

It is also interesting to notice that one of the biggest obstacles to overcome are psychological barriers regarding "what kind of person you are". Once Kelly visits the shoemaker for the first time and is pleased with the results, it might well happen that the habit takes root and remains, even if the country's economical situation later improves. A shoemaker comments and says that two years of recession can create new habits and that it is a vitamin injection that can sustain him for another 10-15 years. Enough people have already seen or felt the effects of the economic downturn themselves, so that habits and fundamental values might be changed profoundly for a long time after a possible economical recovery.

(Comment: I habitually write "a potential economical recovery" where the original article instead simply refers to "the economical recovery" or "once the economy gets rolling again". I think it is fascinating how quickly many instinctively presume that a recovery is automatically waiting around the corner. The thinking seems to be that "the stock market has "always" risen over time before, and it will therefore do it again". The idea is that stocks gaining value over time as some kind of irresistible natural force, or even a natural law similar to the law of gravity. As the sun rises in the east, so will stocks increase their value over time.)

An area where great cuts in spending could be made is clothes. Both "thrift stores" that sell used ("pre-owned" :-) clothes, and more fashionable second hand stores that might sell a month-old blouse at the third of the prize are increasingly popular in the US. Regarding clothes, there are obviously a lot of excesses to cut from. Have you ever seen how big an American "walk-in-closet" can be? You can easily fit your home office in there. Or your visiting relatives. According to a UK survey, half of all clothes, shoes and accessories that British women bought the previous year had never been used. Every British woman used on average almost £500 on buying clothes that had never been used, and every tenth piece of clothing went straight into the dustbin. Fascinating but also slightly scary is the fact that 90 millions mobile phones are laying unused in British drawers. (That is 1,5 mobile phones for each man, woman and child in the UK.)

This text has been about habits among those that are not really pressed to save money, but who today do so anyway. In part two of this set of articles I will write about those who have bigger problems and are simply forced to change their habits and cut expenses.

While starting to write about the effects of the crisis I have realized that this will be my tour de force so far in my blogging career. Earlier sets have consisted of two or three interlinked texts, this set will be at least six articles long. This is the first example of what will for sure happen many times again, since I have now kept my eyes open and gathered clues and links about specific peak oil-related topics during weeks or even months.

This text was originally published in Swedish on September 27, 2009.
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Transportation free of charge

2009-10-08T09:51:00.000+02:00

.Picture: Ryanair ad, offering to sell us 1 million airline tickts for 79 SEK or less (10 dollars or less) from Stockholm to a variety of European cities. The price corresponds to the cost of two (so-called) meals at McDonalds.

In the previous text I wrote, I suggested that we could - at least from a historical perspective - for all practical purposes regard energy as free or charge in today's society. As a special case of this it thus follows that also transportation is free of charge. That is the topic of this text, but it is written from a completely different perspective compared to the previous text, because the inspiration comes from a book about designing virtual worlds!

In medieval times, it was expensive to transport goods around Europe. Wine was a drink for peasants in France, but if you transported the wine to Scotland, it suddenly became a drink only for wealthy nobles. The cost of transporting wine the - to us - fairly modest distance from France to Scotland was so high that wine after such a trip immediately became a drink for only the very richest of persons. In medieval times, most products were simply not worth transporting for any longer distances and were instead produced and consumed locally. Also moving you own self (to travel) was "expensive" in terms of time, money and effort. It is not a coincidence that the French word for work, "travailler" has the same root as the English word "travel". To travel was time consuming, laborious and expensive.

In a virtual world (such as Second Life or World of Warcraft), there are no logical obstacles that stops you from immediately transporting goods or yourself from one end of the (virtual) world to the other. Actually, there is no physical "world" there in the first place, but rather just a large database that keeps track graphics and points of view, of where everything is and what is behind the next (virtual) hill. In some virtual worlds it is thus possible to immediately teleport yourself (and your possessions) from and to wherever, but most worlds are designed in such a way so as to impose artificial restrictions that make travel a little bit more time-consuming and laborious. Without distances that take (some) time to overcome, the geography of the virtual world would "collapse" and everything would be next-door to everything else. It then becomes rather pointless for the designers of the virtual world to spend time designing roads that will never be traversed and stunning vistas that will never be admired by anyone. There are also other (predominantly negative) implications of absence of (virtual) distances and geography that most desingers choose to avoid or restrict when designing virtual worlds. My point here though is that teleportation is technically feasible and argubly the most "natural" way to move in a virtual world, and that all travel and transportation could be free in such a world (immediate and at no cost).

Let us assume that these two models represent two extremes. At one end we have Europe in medieval times (very expensive transportation and travel) and at the other end we have a creation of imagination, a thought experiment that we call virtual worlds (free transportation and travel). The question is if travel and transportation today is more similar to medieval Europe or to virtual worlds? The answer is obviously that we are a lot closer to virtual worlds where travel and transportation could be completely free but for various game design reasons happens to instead cost (some).

Today we ship goods around the globe in staggering volumes without this increasing the price of the product to any significant degree. Where a factory is located on Earth in the era of globalization has little to do with transportation costs. The actual transportation of a barrel of oil from the Middle East to Europe or the United States contributes only with a price increase of a single dollars per barrel (and last year the price of that barrel fluctuated roughly between 50 and 150 dollars).

Furthermore, Ryaniar (see picture above) will fly me to 35 destinations from Stockholm and the ticket to almost two thirds of these destinations (in a dozen different European countries) costed 10 dollars or less last Christmas (including taxes and charges)! Is it physically possible to push prices lower? Have transportation and travel ever been as cheap as today? The answer to both questions is “no”, simply for the reason that 10 dollars for an airline ticket is so close to free that it makes no difference compared to a price of 5 or 3 dollars. Will transportation and travel continue to be this cheap in days to come? Well, no, of course not.

If we raise our eyes and adopt a historical perspective that extends a few hundred years back in time (before we found oil, before we started using large quantities of coal and before the industrial revolution began) we can again conclude that energy in modern society for all practical purposes has been, and still is free of charge. It thus follows that also transportation and travel is free today (at least from a historical perspective).

In what other society or era has it been possible for the least affluent members of a society to spend an evening babysitting or to rake leaves from someone’s lawn and use (part of) the proceeds to jump on a plane from Stockholm to Prague or Dublin? A one-way trip with Ryanair to these and some other destinations had a price tag of less than 3 dollars (30 SEK) last year before Christmas! Isn’t the world upside down when what I need in order to cook a dinner at home costs more than a flight to Berlin? The 16-year-old girl next door put a note in our mailbox the other day offering her services as a babysitter for an hourly rate of 8.50 dollars during weekends...

It’s not that I begrudge "poor" Swedes the opportunity to travel abroad, it's just that I think the situation is not stable or sustainable in the long run. If oil (and thus fuel and thus transportation) is no longer free, but instead begins to Cost Big Time - say, “only” three or four times more than today - the airline industry would crash and burn in every way possible except literally.

As more than 80% of the energy we use on Earth comes from non-renewable fossil fuels, what will happen when we during this century will have to gradually adapt step by step to making do with the energy that is created and re-created each year with the sun as the source (sun, waves, wind, hydro, biofuels)? The reasoning above and in the previous text give some clues as to the type of changes that lie ahead of us this century, and that will most probably start to reshape our lives already during the next decade...

PS. Should I take the opportunity to travel now while it is still inexpensive or should I refrain?

This text was originally published in Swedish on December 6, 2008.
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Energy free of charge

2009-10-07T09:31:00.000+02:00

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A little more than 50 years ago, Lewis Strauss, chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, proclaimed that the promise that nuclear power brings is that "It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter". The phrase "too cheap to meter" occasionally pops up when an accusing finger points at that phrase as proof that nuclear power has not fulfilled what it promised, or more generally, that new technology is always hyped and that the hopes of techo-optimists are not to be trusted. The idea I explore here is instead that energy for all practical purposes has been and still is free of charge (but that this of course will change radically when peak oil becomes apparent to everyone).

By some calculations based on local Swedish conditions (Flygare and Isacson, 1999), 19 days of manual harvesting - hard physical work 200 years ago - has been replaced by an hour of driving a tractor today. We have in similar ways replaced the vast majority of physical labor by humans or animals - days of toil and sweat moving rocks, logs or merchandise - with the energy contained in one gallon of petrol or diesel. The most common use of petrol today is of course to quickly move hundreds of millions of big heavy metal containers - with (usually) one person inside each - back and forth, back and forth. The average Swedish car weighed more than 1 400 kilos in 2007 according to statistics from the Swedish Institute for Transport and Communications, SIKA.

The term "energy slave" represents the amount of energy needed to replace the work of a manual laborer. The energy content of a gallon of gasoline is roughly equivalent to the force a person can develop during one month of hard physical work. The implication is that in the western world we all can be said to have many energy slaves working for us 24 hours a day in order to maintain our current high-energy lifestyles.

The average American has according to some estimates a three-digit number of energy slaves and even though we Swedes may not have as many slaves, we still play in the same league. Exact estimates of the number of energy slaves varies widely, but the point of using the concept is to convey an understanding in more human terms of the fact that each one of us - unconsciously and perhaps feeling that we are entitled to - make use of large amounts of energy in order to maintain our modern western lifestyles. In ancient Egypt, 95% of the population was directly employed in agriculture and they managed to (only) generate a surplus of energy (food) that was sufficient for feeding the remaining 5% of the population who were slaves and built the pyramids. In "the bad old times" energy was thus Expensive.

The next step here is to show not only that we today use energy in abundance, but also that this energy is very very cheap. I here borrow from Richard Heinberg who argues that it has been sufficient to work for 20 minutes with a statutory minimum wage in the U.S. in order to afford a gallon of gasoline. Twenty minutes of (probably not very physically demanding) work thus gives us access to energy equivalent to up to 200 hours of hard physical work. Exchanging 20 minutes for 200 hours gives us an exchange ratio of a factor of 600 (and far higher if you have a higher salary)!

It is thus impossible to deny that energy is very cheap today. With a longer historical perspective, energy is so incredibly cheap that it can for all practical purposes be regarded as free in our modern society. It might not feel that way when you pay at the pump or when you get the electricity bill, but it is very much so in a longer historical sense. The only reason the electricity bill hurts is because we use so insanely much of that product. A traditional light bulb of 100 Watts uses as much energy in an hour as (or is on par with what) a man performing hard physical labor (an energy slave) can develop during the same amount of time! If electricity was generated by bodily work, we would need an extra man working for us for each lightbulb we wanted to have lit. Low-energy lightbulbs are of course preferable, but we have at this point not even begun to talk about the costs of keeping the fridge, stove, washing machine or our consumer electronics running, or the costs for heating water for a shower.

Perhaps it is possible to push this argument a little bit further and claim that as long as we as a society can afford to maintain our current lifestyle, energy for all practical purposes remains free. When then would energy start to cost? Well, maybe when:

- we as a society must make difficult choices that may seem radical today.
- we discover that the amount of energy (electricity, gasoline, heating) we can purchase with 25% of our disposable income has shrunk considerably, forcing us to make some hard choices.
- most individuals can no longer afford to own/drive cars
- we no longer can afford a summer cottage or to go on vacation (forget abroad)
- we can not afford to heat or cool our McMansions (and forget the pool)

Living conditions is a hidden “energy thief” that many might not think about even though it costs significant amounts of energy to build, heat and maintain our housing. The average Swede has access to 44 m2 (475 ft2) of dwelling per person - an increase of over 60% since the late 70's. Other more authoritave sources such as Statistics Sweden report figures as high as 55 m2 (600 ft2) per person which would mean that we Swedes have doubled our living space per person in as little as 30 years.

According to Jonas Frycklund, an economist at the pro-industry lobby group Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, the average living space per person in the U.S. is 70 m2 (750 ft2) per person. That figure might be correct but as it so happens, Jonas also thinks that we will live in larger houses and consume more in the future and he confidently looks forward to when "the children of our grandchildren will relax in their pools and with good conscience reflect on the fact that that they do not exert any pressure on the environment."

Sweden has the largest number of single households in the world and Stockholm is the top single-household capital of the world. It is obviously more expensive (and more energy consuming) per person to live by yourself rather than to share a household with others. No less than 47% of all households in Sweden are single households and a further 28% consists of two persons. In one part of central Stockholm, Kungsholmen, 80% (!) of all households are single households (I do not know if a single parent qualifies a "single household"). Is it sustainable to have so many refrigerators and stoves and TVs in so many relatively large and sparsely inhabited apartments? Not in a world where energy is no longer free, because in that world we will have to crowd together and share the cost...

Some of the figures presented above can be contested and discussed. There are several factors that you could examine further, for example:

- Exactly how does one define an "energy slave"? Input (energy in terms of food) or output (work you get)? What force can a human being sustainably exert during 8 or 10 or 12 hours of hard physical work?
- How many hours does one month's work consist of? 160 hours (40 hours/week x 4 weeks/month + some holidays) or 320 hours (12 hours/day x 6 days/week)?
- What is the minimum wage (and the average wage) in the US and elsewhere in relation to the price of gasoline (or electricity).

None of this however changes the basic argument proposed above. Energy is from a historical perspective incredibly cheap – for all practical purposes free - and in the long term (beyond the oil peak) practices that we very much take for granted will by necessity be reshaped and altered or altogether disappear. Our challenge is to ensure that “different” does not necessarily and unilaterally mean "worse", but that we can rather find good solutions that can work in a sustainable low-energy society.

After I started to play around with the idea that energy today is free of charge (this text) and that transportation therefore is free or charge too (the following text), I have acquired new conceptual glasses that allow me to see the world in new ways. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan noted that we do not know who discovered water, but we do know that it was not a fish. The point is that it is difficult to see what we swim in, is surrounded by, and take for granted. It is easier to become aware of your own culture and the things taken for granted when you are abroad, when you discover that things work differently there and gain the opportunity to reflect on the differences between here and there.

The same is true for energy and transportation. Our society takes the stable supply of cheap energy for granted to the extent that we are not aware of this fact and have a hard time imagining any alternatives. Only with a provocative claim that "energy is free of charge" - which of course is not true in the literal sense - can we start to think about and recognize the full scope and the implications of what will happen - in all areas - when energy no longer is free, but instead will Cost Big Time.

When I went to IKEA at two p.m. in mid-November last year, I all of a sudden opened my eyes to the fact that there were thousands of lamps along the highway that were already starting to light up. And when I one hour later sat in IKEA's autumn-decorated restaurant, I noticed that I was surrounded by yet more lights in all the windows. It is at times like these that you lean back and ponder. … for example on the fact that the gasoline for driving 25 kilometers back and forth to IKEA only costs a few dollars and that the late lunch at IKEA therefore still was much cheaper than if we would have stayed at home and gone around the corner for a lunch at the neighborhood pub...

Who is today thinking about electricity consumption and the cost of power when we buy a food processor or a DVD player? You and me both, for all practical purposes, treat energy as if it was free of charge. Try to argue against it!

This text was originally published in Swedish on December 2, 2008.

Reference
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Flygare, Iréne and Isacson, Maths (1999). "Jordbruket i välfärdssamhället: 1945-2000" [Agriculture in Welfare Society: 1945-2000]. Stockholm: Natur & Kultur. (Book 5 in the series "History of Swedish Agriculture").
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Welcome to a life after oil

2009-10-02T00:33:00.004+02:00

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Oil is a finite resource. All the oil that we pump up was formed during two periods 90 and 150 million years ago. Despite this, we burn oil right and left and the global consumption has increased with an average of 2% per year during the last 50 years. But the day will come when we cannot increase production, but will rather see it flatten out or decrease. Some propose that we already are at that point or at the least very near it. Others suggest that we still have decades and trust that "the market" and new technological breakthroughs will solve the energy problem when it starts to get painful.

What is perfectly clear though is that we today pump up and consume oil at 4-6 times the pace we find new, unexploited findings, so sooner or later something has to give. Something else that is perfectly clear is that the price of oil had increased by 700% at last year's peak compared to the price at the beginning of this decade. Today - in the midst of a global economic crisis - the price of oil is "only" 350% higher than at the beginning of the decade. That does not bode good for the future.

It might be the case that our time with oil is a relatively short chapter in the history of mankind. That chapter is 150 years long at this point in time. Perhaps we are at the peak and the decline will be another 150 years long, but in a world that is "addicted to oil", each decrease in production will have unproportionally large consequences in terms of the price of oil. You might just as well get used to the idea of a life after oil. It is exactly that thought this blog explores.

The intention is to write a new blog post (at least) once per week. The texts will be based on articles, books and other sources - including reflections on my own situation and the choices that me and my family make - based on the conviction that the party could soon be over. The texts were not originally written for this blog, but are rather translated (and slightly adapted) from the Swedish-language version of this blog. That blog has been up and running since August 1, 2008, and more than 70 texts have been published there at this point.

Welcome to the blog and to the idea of a life after oil!
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