Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization
By Jeff Rubin
286 pp., hardcover. Random House – May 2009. $26.00.

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

It is a well-known tenet of the peak oil discourse that economists, at large, just don’t get peak oil. According to classical economic theory, oil scarcity should cause prices to increase, thus stimulating exploration, replenishing reserves and bringing prices back down. The reason why this cycle hasn’t played itself out fully in recent years, of course, is that we’ve passed the all-time peak in world oil production. After this, production can no longer grow, period, regardless of how high prices go or how earnest oil companies are in their intentions of finding more oil. In short, it seems that classical economic theory no longer applies in a world of hard ecological limits, no matter how tightly economists may cling to their antiquated notions.

Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, is not your typical economist. He gets peak oil. As far back as 2000, when public awareness of the issue was essentially nil, he was among the first economists to accurately predict the surge in crude prices that would ensue several years later. And now, in his bestselling book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, he argues that oil prices, temporarily dampened by the deepest post-war recession on record, will soon be vaulted to new highs as the economy begins to recover, which in turn will thrust the world into yet another recession right on the heels of this one. Rubin believes that peak oil, not subprime mortgages, caused the current economic slump. And he forecasts that crude oil will reach $200 per barrel, and gasoline $7 per gallon, within the next few years, spelling death for the global economy and forcing people across the developed world to dramatically reengineer their lives in adjusting to the new reality of scarce energy. Views like these are common among peak oil advocates, but a refreshing departure for an economist.

It may come as a surprise, then, that I can’t wholeheartedly recommend Rubin’s book. I wish I could. But the truth is that it contains little in the way of new information for peak oil followers—and for those uninitiated into peak oil, it hardly provides the best primer on the subject. Rubin spends in excess of the book’s first half explaining why oil is peaking, why industrial economies require an ever-increasing supply of it in order to keep growing, why oil shocks have always caused recessions, how oil underlies every aspect of our modern lives and why alternatives won’t save us. The trouble is, a who’s who of peak oil thinkers and writers (including Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler, Dale Allen Pfeiffer and others) has done a better job of this already; and those new to peak oil would be better off reading one of their books.

Rubin’s writing is filled with trite statements like “you will soon be spending much more time talking to your neighbor and much less time flying around the world” and “[m]any of us may finally come to understand how a toaster works” (both with regard to what he thinks daily life will resemble in our oil-scarce future). He also steps on the toes of peak oil icons by paraphrasing their words without attribution. For example, he superficially changes Matt Simmons’ catchphrase “super straws” to “one big straw” (in reference to technological advancements that only deplete wells more quickly) without crediting Simmons at all. And he goes off on long-winded tangents (nearly five pages on the increasing frequency of severe storms in the Gulf of Mexico, where much of our oil infrastructure is precariously located) as though looking for enough fill to stretch the book out to 300 pages.

The one edge that Rubin’s account has over his predecessors’ is that it was written with the benefit of more up-to-date information. Rubin explores a number of emerging trends on the oil scene that were not yet readily apparent at the time that those earlier books were written. For example, he explains how oil exports from OPEC nations are declining not just because of depletion, but also as a result soaring domestic consumption within those countries, as their citizens take advantage of cheap, government-subsidized gasoline in trying to emulate Western lifestyles. He also reports that world oil production—as of the book’s writing, last year—was declining at a rate of 6.7 percent annually. He obtained this information from the International Energy Agency (IEA)’s 2008 World Energy Outlook, a document that obviously wasn’t available to authors who were writing about oil depletion four or five years ago, when the several-year peak oil “plateau” was just beginning.

For serious peak oil followers, the book begins to get interesting only after around page 160, where Rubin starts to describe what he believes the new economic landscape will look like in the wake of peak oil, and to propose some economic policies that he believes would help humanity to curtail both its fossil fuel usage and its greenhouse gas emissions. Chief among these economic policies would be a tariff on carbon emissions. Rubin points out that the world’s developing nations, which have been responsible for the lion’s share of total increases in carbon emissions over the past decade, are exempted under Kyoto from paying any economic price for their carbon emissions. And as long as oil has remained cheap and carbon emissions free, the only variable dictating where to move manufacturing jobs has been the cost of labor—hence the exodus of manufacturing from advanced nations to China, India and other low-wage countries. But if the developed nations charged carbon tariffs on goods that they imported from these developing countries, they would regain comparative economic advantage, and emissions would also increasingly shift from countries that are inefficient at managing them to those that can manage them the most efficiently. In short, the dirty emissions from factories in the developing world would be so expensive that it would no longer be profitable to have manufacturing jobs in those countries.

Rubin argues that the implementation of a carbon tariff, together with the inevitable rise in the cost of bunker fuel needed to transport goods across the globe—which in itself would effectively constitute a tariff on transport fuel, or a “bunker tariff”—could revive the manufacturing industries that were once so important to the economies of America and other industrialized nations. “Who would have dreamt,” he beams, “that triple-digit oil prices would breathe new life into America’s rust belt or the British steel industry?”

The book unfortunately slips right back into the realm of cliché following this seemingly promising discussion of tariffs and the return of long-lost manufacturing jobs. Like every other peak oiler, Rubin predicts that industrialized nations will of necessity start to “downsize the role of oil” in their economies, so that economic growth is no longer dependent on ever-increasing levels of oil consumption. Also in keeping with conventional peak oil wisdom, he believes that this process will be achieved by way of “micro” decisions made daily by ordinary people and households, rather than by way of “macro” monetary or fiscal policy decisions. Our lives, Rubin says, will become profoundly local, meaning that our food and goods will come from close to where we live; farming will replace the service sector as the dominant part of the economy, and will supplant the crass suburban developments that were built en masse under the illusion of a perpetual supply of cheap oil; and overall there will be a lot fewer people on the roads and more people passing their days with honest, hard physical labor—there’s not one original prediction in the list.

In sum, this book consists mostly of an up-to-date, but ponderous and thoroughly shopworn, outline of the peak oil predicament. The brief section detailing Rubin’s notion of a carbon tariff and what the economic climate of a de-globalizing world will look like could doubtless generate some productive discussions about the future shape of economics in a post-peak-oil age, but aside from that the book has little new to contribute to the peak oil debate. Nevertheless, one surely must take heart whenever any book carries the peak oil message onto bookstores’ bestseller shelves, where it at least has some chance of swaying public opinion.

The American West at Risk: Science, Myths and Politics of Land Abuse and Recovery
By Howard G. Wilshire, Jane E. Nielson and Richard W. Hazlett
619 pp., hardcover. Oxford University Press – Jun. 2008. $35.00.

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

Several weeks back, while reading this important, prodigiously researched book from Oxford University Press on America’s endangered Western lands, I caught part of an interview on NPR that caused me to shake my head with chagrin. The interviewee was one of those “transhumanist” apostles; and, without a trace of irony, he described future technologies that he believes will allow us to save our minds like computer files and download them into new bodies—thus making ourselves exempt from mortality, the indignity of aging and other pesky earthly inconveniences. This unapologetic über-techno-optimism couldn’t possibly have been more at odds with the sober, sensible views expressed in The American West at Risk.

West at Risk’s authors, three trained geologists who also happen to be profoundly lettered and skilled in the methods of investigative journalism, would no doubt call this exuberant futurist a “Crazy Eddie”—a term that they borrow from Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s classic novel The Mote in God’s Eye. That novel’s main characters, the Moties, are an alien race that has become resigned to its recurrent cycles of resource exploitation/population boom, followed by overshoot and societal collapse. Any Motie who suggests a scheme for resisting this inevitable state of affairs, or who embraces human optimism in any way, is dismissed as a Crazy Eddie. Given the critical environmental state of America’s Western lands—which West at Risk’s authors unassailably show to be in danger of losing their very capacity as a life support system—we would do well to heed these scientists’ wise Motie sensibility, rather than the rarefied transhumanist claims recently aired by NPR.

This book’s 13 chapters examine some of the major human-caused environmental problems now threatening the 11 contiguous Western states. The first chapter focuses on Western woodlands and their steady decline due to logging, agricultural clearing and shifts in our approach to fighting forest fires. Another chapter describes the immense harm that modern agriculture, with its profligate use of harmful industrial chemicals, causes to croplands, groundwater and the health of those who eat the crops. Topics covered in other chapters include livestock grazing, metals mining, road-building, off-road recreational vehicle (ORV) use, toxic landfill waste, water depletion, nuclear bomb testing and military training activities. The authors also wrote chapters on genetically modified (GM) crops and the destruction of sand dunes at the hands of ORV recreation (admittedly a bit of a redundancy of the existing ORV chapter), but these were omitted from the final draft and now appear only on the book’s Web site, http://www.theamericanwestatrisk.com/.

A good many readers will already be familiar with most of these human-caused environmental problems. However, until they’ve read the book, few will have come to fully appreciate just how serious and pervasive they are, or how they’ve all been directly subsidized by our tax dollars. The authors have said, in interviews since, that they were themselves surprised by these things during their research. What especially surprised Nielson, for one, is the way in which our own government has deliberately jeopardized its citizens’ and service members’ lives by exposing them to nuclear/biological substances, as part of tests intended to learn about these chemicals’ health effects.* With regard to the atomic bomb tests of several decades ago, the authors’ continual refrain is that they “ma[de] downwinders of all Americans.” And natural processes have spread the radiation across and beyond our nation—with the result that land and marine sediments the world over have now been found to contain atomic radiation that is destined to creep into drinking water, soils and food for many thousands of years to come.

The way that natural forces, such as erosion and groundwater infiltration, have of dramatically worsening the initial harm caused by human activities is one of the book’s most terrifying themes. For example, the natural process of “biomagnification,” by which toxic chemicals reach greater and greater concentrations the higher they move up the food chain, explains why the insecticide DDT poisoned bird populations as well as the insect pests at which it was targeted. Also, natural erosional processes continue to spread the damage that 1940s tank maneuvers and present-day motorized recreation have done to desert wildlife habitat and biodiversity—and while nobody knows how one might go about reversing this desolation, the evidence suggests that full recovery may well take millennia.

West at Risk has every claim for credibility. The authors cite trustworthy, peer-reviewed studies in support of their arguments, and they have long been themselves directly involved in a good deal of the research. Howard G. Wilshire and Jane E. Nielson are former U.S. Geological Survey research geologists, and Richard W. Hazlett is a professor of geology at Pomona College. Wilshire has done many previous studies on the environmental impacts of military training exercises and ORVs on arid Western lands, and his research forms the backbone of many of the book’s discussions. And the book is also important for bringing light to appalling instances of government cover-ups, suppression, hypocrisy and lies.

Peak oil advocates will be pleased to learn that the book’s authors are fellow believers. Like most peak oilers, they realize that fossil fuel depletion is going to severely limit our ability to mitigate a whole host of problems that our society has created for itself, including the environmental woes of the West. They also concur with the conventional peak oil wisdom that our inability to access ever-increasing quantities of energy will prevent much additional damage from taking place, by forcing us to curtail our current lifestyles of consumption and excess. Indeed, one of their parting thoughts on the hideous “Tragedy of the Playground” represented by ORV recreation is, “The question is—how much more damage will the environment sustain before petroleum becomes too expensive for towing several ATVs or motorcycles out to the country and back behind a huge mobile home?”

One of the authors’ aims in writing this book was to dispel some of the popular myths that surround the American West mystique. For example, the modern-day cattle ranchers who are complicit in the destruction of millions of acres of U.S. public lands often identify with the “cowboy” myth, no matter that true cowboys (or vaqueros) existed for only about 20 years of U.S. history. The authors show how the cowboy myth was “born from sensational nineteenth-century journalism, nurtured in Zane Grey novels and distorted by Hollywood movies”—and persists today because of “[a] strong alliance of graziers and western congressional representatives.” Another prevalent myth is that the West was “won” by rugged individualists operating on their own gumption and grit. In truth, the West was won at the public trough, and “never has left it.” From the beginning, the federal government has footed massive subsidies for homesteading lands, road and railroad routes, military forts, interstate highways and colleges and universities. The authors contend that in order to face up to the grave human-caused environmental problems currently threatening the West, it is critical to understand these myths and how they drive the land abuses of the present.

This book is the result of 10 years of collaborative effort, and it is so encyclopedic and comprehensive that no one review could possibly do more than highlight a few of its more penetrating points and passages. In many places, it resembles an environmental science textbook, defining key terms and illustrating concepts with figures and graphs (and the companion Web site directs readers to yet more resources that couldn’t be incorporated into the book itself). In addition to its obvious utility as a textbook, it will also doubtless be an invaluable resource for fellow researchers, journalists, decision-makers, environmental lawyers and ordinary citizens with environmental problems in their neighborhoods—as was the authors’ intent. But the book’s appeal is not limited to these groups; it is an enlightening and gripping read for anyone. Regardless of readership, one of the most important points that the authors want the book to convey is that protecting the environment is not merely a moral cause, but also one that is backed by hard science. The scientific data show that the “natural capital” contained in our Western lands is essential for our economic well-being.

Given the tenor of this review so far, it may come as a surprise that the authors do hold out hope for the future. “There is still a lot to save,” they write, “and much of the damage can be reversed.” To this end, they offer numerous practical suggestions for addressing this damage while at the same time adapting to the resource limitations now closing in around us. Let’s fervently hope that their prescience is as reliable as their expertise in environmental matters past and present.

_{* Samantha Campos, “Going Green: How the West could be lost: Sonoma geologists spent a decade examining the effects of 20th-century American land abuse,” Pacific Sun, June 6, 2008, www.pacificsun.com/story.php?story_id=2057 (accessed Dec. 30, 2009).}

The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World
By John Michael Greer
271 pp. New Society Publishers – Oct. 2009. $18.95.

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

John Michael Greer has officially established himself as an institution within the peak oil community. Truly one of the finest minds working on the predicament of modern-day industrial civilization, he is so well-read in so many fields that he regularly gains access to insights that utterly elude his contemporaries. For this he is treasured by a growing number of loyal readers—and, I suspect, hated by equally many fellow bloggers who wish that they could be half as good.

Greer is also perhaps peak oil’s most cherishable contrarian, always pointing out the various ways in which people on all sides of the debate are woefully off-base. For example, his previous book on peak oil, The Long Descent, showed how believers in perpetual progress and prophets of imminent doom alike are sadly off the mark in their notions about the future. That book’s central thesis is that while our modern “developed” world can’t possibly be sustained into the indefinite future, we’re hardly in for the sort of sudden, utter collapse of civilization that typically forms the basis of a Roland Emmerich movie. Instead, our society will likely decline slowly and unevenly over many decades, the way that the Maya, the Roman Empire and other past civilizations have done before ours. The take-home point is that it’s a waste of time to start preparing now for either a survivalist future of mass death and marauding hordes, or whatever sustainable utopia happens to be your particular ideal, because neither one of these reflects the future that we’re actually liable to end up with—and, in any case, no one living today will still be around to see what that future might resemble.

Greer’s newest book, The Ecotechnic Future, builds on The Long Descent by sketching out some of the likely dimensions of the future that Greer believes lies on the other side of our descent. It doesn’t devote much space to explaining why our civilization is headed for collapse, or describing how people can prepare on the individual and community levels, since these were covered in his earlier book. Instead, in a series of chapters with straightforward titles like “Food,” “Home,” “Community” and “Culture,” it takes an in-depth look at the kinds of changes that we can expect in these and other aspects of our lives as industrial civilization winds down.

What, exactly, is the “ecotechnic future” to which the title refers? Well, to begin with, it’s a play on the phrase “technic society,” a term coined to describe the modern world that came into being following the Industrial Revolution. Greer’s conception of the technic society is that it’s the first human society powered primarily by nonfood energy, rather than by the food energy that has sustained, for example, the far-more-stable hunter-gatherer societies that have existed throughout history. The phase of the technic society coming to an end with the advent of peak oil is one that Greer refers to as “abundance industrialism,” in which humanity has used the immense energy contained in cheap, abundant fossil fuels to maximize the production of goods and services at the expense of gross inefficiency. In contrast, the ecotechnic society that Greer sees as the inevitable successor to abundance industrialism is one that relies wholly on renewable energy resources, and that places a premium on using them as efficiently as possible at the expense of reduced access to goods and services.

A transition away from our current economy of plunder and waste to a sustainable ecotechnic society is necessary and will happen eventually, since the resources that we’re plundering are finite, as is our planet’s ability to absorb the waste products. But Greer regards efforts to establish an ecotechnic society right in the here and now as misguided. In his view, such efforts are doomed to failure because the conditions that would allow an ecotechnic society to flourish aren’t yet in place, and we don’t have even the faintest clue what such a society would resemble.

Before we can set about creating an ecotechnic society, we must first spend several decades muddling through what Greer terms “scarcity industrialism,” in which we liquidate the second half of the planet’s oil endowment, the other remaining fossil fuels and other essential nonrenewable resources. This, in turn, will give way to a one-to-three-century “salvage society” phase, in which, having depleted these non-renewables, we scavenge the ruins of long-abandoned man-made structures for their iron, steel and other raw materials. Then, once scarcity industrialism and the salvage society have played themselves out, an ecotechnic society can slowly begin to take root. In short, to quote Greer, “[t]hose who try to plan an ecotechnic society today are in the position of a hapless engineer tasked in 1947 with drafting a plan to produce software for computers that did not exist yet.” One of the many things that you come to admire about Greer is his knack for drawing apt analogies.

In The Ecotechnic Future, Greer appropriates terminology from a variety of disciplines, including ecology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, the history of ideas and the 1970s appropriate technology movement. He persuasively argues for the need to respond adaptively to the changes ahead, and to encourage people to pursue as many different ideas as possible, rather than formulating a detailed plan of action on which everyone can agree. He reasons that the greater the number of possibilities being investigated at any one time, the more likely someone is to stumble upon something that works. He borrows the postmodern term “dissensus”—meaning “a deliberate avoidance of consensus”—in describing this adaptive approach. And he humbly admits that no plans (including his own) are infallible, and invites readers to dissent from his ideas in favor of pursuing some of their own.

Like The Long Descent, Greer’s new book incorporates a series of shorter writings that he originally published online—and, once again, their arrival in print is a happy occasion. The typical Greer essay is thoughtful, profoundly insightful, well-supported and impeccably argued; and Greer’s prose style is nothing if not elegant. His new book delivers on all of these levels in spades, the various shorter writings having simmered to great effect by the time they’re reaching us in book form. The only faint complaint I have is that I feel that the book could have been a tad longer, with the extra length being added to the chapters on various aspects of our ecotechnic future. Not that there’s anything obviously missing on which I can easily place my finger. It’s just that, at barely 20 pages, and some of them not even that long, the chapters do seem a bit skimpy. And Greer is such an engaging writer with so much to say that one looks forward to each new entry with the excitement of the proverbial giddy schoolboy (or schoolgirl, as the case may be). One can never have too much Greer, I say.

Those who are already aware of the long, bumpy decline ahead for our civilization, and who want a clearer picture of what to expect, as well as some real, practical responses, will be well-served by reading both The Ecotechnic Future and The Long Descent. But I’m happy to believe that a significant number of casual bookstore browsers who are environmentally conscious, but not yet fully in the know, also will pick up these books, will be captivated by them and will join the ranks of the converted.

Sadly, however (and as Greer would be the first to admit), these books’ ideas are doomed to be dismissed as kooky and offensive by the public at large for a long time to come. Still, Greer gets credit for being one of the precious few writers today to have undertaken the task of putting modern industrial civilization in its proper historical context—and to truly be gifted enough to do the task justice.

Power from the Sun: Achieving Energy Independence
By Dan Chiras, with Robert Aram and Kurt Nelson
257 pp. New Society Publishers – Aug. 2009. $26.95.

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

For the average home- or small business-owner looking to purchase a solar PV array, there is much homework to be done—and truly good textbooks, amid the cacophony of voices on the subject, are a real find. Thankfully, Power from the Sun, the latest offering from green building guru Dan Chiras, is just such a book.

In eminently readable, informative, accessible prose, Power from the Sun describes the components and workings of a solar electric system, how to go about having one installed and some basic things to know in order to be an informed consumer and avoid common pitfalls. Solar PV buyers will still have a bit of legwork to do after reading the book, including finding local solar contractors and obtaining quotes. But once these steps are done, their learning curve will no doubt be greatly reduced.
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Phinney Neighborhood Center

6532 Phinney Avenue North (map)

A list of buses that serve the area is available here.

All,

This Thursday, October 1st, will be our last “regularly scheduled” meeting at the Phinney Center. We’re sad to close up shop, but the interest in peak oil has waned with last year’s supposed end to the commodity “bubble”, and few people have been coming to our meetings.

On top of that, few viable, useful projects have come out of our work here, so there is little need for a large room and a constant schedule. Despite our efforts to become something else, somehow we’re still mostly an esoteric study group — for now.

So, onward we’ll go: toward free-form meetings at local coffee shops and other smaller spaces, until we see the sort of groundswell of interest and real projects that demand a larger meeting location again.

As before, people who are contributing members of this blog can make a meeting post and fill out the “events” section to set it up as an “upcoming event” on the upper right side of the screen. So, if y’all are interested in organizing your own meetings, you may do so. I hope to see that happening.

Meanwhile, this site will be maintained indefinitely. I’d imagine that the products of an esoteric study group could be shared here online much more frequently than we’ve chosen to share in the past. If anyone would like to increase their contributions to the blog, please let me know and I’ll get you started. So long as what you want to write fits our context and most basic outlook, we’d be happy to host your material here.

I’ll see your Thursday and we’ll have a few beers after.

Cheers,
-Robert