City of the Future

Give Me a Fact, Any Fact

In his most recent column, New York Times op-ed writer John Tierney reviews Joel Garreau’s new book, Radical Evolution.  In the book, Garreau argues that the intersection of new genetic understanding with advances in information technology, robotics and nano-technology is, for good or ill, about to speed up human evolution unimaginably.  For some reason, Tierney, who says he has “for decades” been “debunking prophesies of doom as either imaginary or wildly exaggerated,” finds the bizarre notion that scientists might accidentally create “nanobots” that will dissolve all matter on the earth more compelling that the threat of global warming or energy depletion.  (In a recent column he dismissed the idea of peak oil despite admitting that he knows nothing about it).

Keep in mind that Tierney is not a climatologist, biologist, physicist, geologist or computer programmer.  Like most pundits today, the strength of his arguments about what we should and shouldn’t worry about rest only on the strength of his opinion, and the strength of his opinion rests squarely on the fact that it is his own. 

Tierney says the downside of the “post-human” hypothesis gives him pause because its promoters “aren’t just the usual technophobes.”  Why he thinks that the retired CEO of Sun Microsystems paints a more believable doomsday scenario than vast majority of climatologists who believe that global warming is real, or the petroleum geologists, energy bankers and physicists who warn of energy depletion, is not entirely clear.  Maybe issues of energy are too last century for him, or maybe he finds environmentalists annoying.  Maybe the idea that we will be destroyed by our runaway genius rather than by our hubris and stupidity is comforting; it aggrandizes human achievement even as it pretends to fear it.

What is clear is that there are no facts in Tierney’s columns, and precious little argument, for that matter—just assertions.  But these days, facts don’t matter, especially among libertarian or right-leaning opinion makers; their positions are positions of faith, the content of which is made up on the fly.  It hardly matters whether that content is fundamentalist Christianity, “free market” greedism or some blasphemous Frankenstein hybrid of the two.  We make our own reality now, and truth doesn’t stand in the way. 

The day after Tierney’s piece was published, there was a story in the Times about new satellite observations showing that Arctic ice is melting faster and the water is warmer; scientists fear that we may have set off a warming feedback loop.  Too bad Tierney’s “debunked” stories keep coming back. 

On the same day, the Arts section of the paper reported that author Michael Crichton, whose most recent novel is about evil environmentalists using terrorism to convince the world of the truth of climate change, will testify before Congress on the subject of global warming. 

Crichton is not a climatologist, but we should probably listen to him; he’s very famous and has strong opinions on the matter. 

The Travesty of Amtrak

Amtrak yesterday announced that it would be going forward with plans to raise fares across the board and cut its discount for monthly passes along the northeast corridor.  By February, a monthly unlimited pass from Philadelphia to Manhattan will rise from $622 to $1,008.  Amtrak officials cited rising fuel costs as one reason for the increase in fares. 

So at a time when the country desperately needs to not only conserve fuel in the short-term but also to build medium- and long-term alternatives to automobile use, our national train service is actually making it more affordable to drive.

Amtrak’s problems are a long and sordid.  But the central reason passenger train service is so terrible in this country is that for the last fifty years we have chosen to subsidize road-building at the expense of any other kind of mass-transit, and we continue to do so.  Consider that a first class, 1-month unlimited Eurail pass, which allows travel in seventeen European countries costs only $946, not counting special promotions (of which there are many). 

On the whole, Europeans use more public transportation and drive less than Americans.  And, as Daniel Gross has noted, because of high taxation, Europe is less sensitive to increases in gas prices—most of what they pay at the pump is taxes.  He doesn’t go into it, but that’s another way of saying that Europeans have already adjusted to high prices—in large part by taking public transportation.

If we want to survive the oil depletion era, hybrid cars are not going to be enough.  We’re going to have to drive a lot less.  Raising Amtrak monthly passes by 40 percent is not a good way to begin.

Review: The End of Suburbia

Written and Directed by Gregory Greene

At the closing of the documentary film, The End of Suburbia, author James Howard Kunstler offers some final thoughts on the future of America: “Irony was the ethos of the late twentieth century,” he says,

“but as we move into the twenty-first century, we’re going to discover that irony is a luxury we can’t afford anymore. Our lives are going to depend on whether we have an environment that . . . can actually support the project of civilization. We’re not going to be able to sit back and make fun of it and enjoy it ironically. That part of our history is over. It’s time to get serious.”

Of course, if our energy-depleted future unfolds as Kunslter and the other subjects of the film predict, the result will be ironic—though more in the manner of Greek tragedy than of the Simpsons.

Nontheless, Kunslter’s point is well taken. As he points out in the film, even many people who live in the suburbs these days find it easy to mock them—which itself says something about what we have all been conditioned to accept from our physical environments and culture, and which makes the film’s final scene, a 1950s film clip celebrating consumerism and suburban life, especially jarring. Directly juxtaposed with Kunslter’s comment, and coming after much similar footage, the intended message of yet another campy scene is on a first take unclear. Does Kunstler’s point indict the film? Or does the film indict its viewers?

It is easy, after all, to watch a film like The End of Suburbia—especially the first half, which makes liberal use of earnest 1950s film clips to lay out the history of the suburbs—with mild, perhaps even affectionate amusement. Today we pretend to be removed from that bygone era—more sophisticated, more knowing, but we have been trained to look back with at least some nostalgia at that time of lost innocence.

What the old footage really illustrates, though, is that suburbia itself is the product of the immense, top-down conformity of the era in which it was started, and inasmuch as we perpetuate that model today, we are still living in the 1950s. The fact that our physical environments have failed almost entirely to evolve beyond the sterile conformism of that time would seem itself to be a sign of a serious cultural stagnation. No matter how hip or liberated we pretend to be, we still live someplace, and the kind of place that is matters—energy issues aside.

Most of the narration in the first half of The End of Suburbia comes from interviews with Kunstler (our most famous and most caustic suburban critic) and Peter Calthorpe (who is, with Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, one of the three most influential New Urbanist neighborhood planners), with some other commentary Richard Heinberg and others.

In the second half of the film, The End of Suburbia delves into the facts of peak oil and how energy depletion will soon bring our current way of life to an end. Casting the suburbs as both villain and soon-to-be victim in the peak oil grand narrative may seem like an obvious choice for anyone who has been introduced to the subject through the work of Kunstler; but there are certainly other ways to approach it.

In fact, other than Kunstler, none of the energy commentators in the movie (Deffeyes, Campbell, Ruppert, Heinberg, Simmons, Darley, Klare, Bakhtiari—to the director’s credit, almost all the famous peak oil experts make appearances) is particularly focused on the issue of suburbia per se, though most would probably agree that the suburban project as it stands is doomed. None of their comments will surprise anyone who is already versed in the issue of energy depletion; but The End of Suburbia does an excellent job of making the concise, powerful case for peak oil. To have that case presented not by one but by many experts, including petroleum geologists and an energy investment banker, gives weight to the film. It is hard to visually dramatize the threat of energy depletion, but Green manages to do it.

If there is one weakness in the film it is that Green presents no peak oil skeptics—even to refute them. Many people who watch the film will therefore come away unconvinced, clinging to the common (if fallacious) arguments that the market and high technology will save us.

One also occasionally gets the impression that Green is quoting his experts selectively to emphasize his own point: not just that we about to hit an energy crisis, but that that crisis is best understood in the context of the suburbs. It is a point somewhat undermined by his own experts; Calthorpe, for instance, while eminently knowledgeable about the history of suburban development, comes off as less than convinced about the significance of peak oil, saying at one point that there are many reasons to retool the suburbs in addition to energy depletion and that we shouldn’t just focus on one. Kunstler—long an advocate of New Urbanism—is pessimistic about the feasibility of rebuilding our society in time.

In another way though, Green’s choice to focus on suburbia is a bold one. The connection between the design of human habitats and the use of energy may not be the only frame for the peak oil story, but it is one of the most convincing. Figuring out how to make use of oil and gas has allowed our civilization to do things in the last hundred years that would have been be utterly unimaginable to previous generations. Explaining in the starkest terms how those things (particularly the car culture and the affluence it created) are threatened is perhaps the best way to make the point that energy depletion is more than just a serious issue, it is a crisis. That we squandered our fossil fuel inheritance building a shallow culture of consumerism and cheap sprawl is almost beside the point now. The question now is, how do we learn to live without it?

The Earth Does Not Respond to Incentives

It would be easier to discount the reality or significance of peak oil if its critics made a better case against it. But in spite of their often smug overconfidence, the arguments of many peak oil detractors are superficial at best and completely nonsensical at worst.

A recent post by Steven Levitt, one of the authors of the best selling book Freakonomics, highlights the point.

Levitt actually admits that he knows nothing about world oil reserves, and is willing to accept that output from existing oil fields may be about to decline; in that sense one might call him a peak oil agnostic. But, he confidently writes,

“What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies that make it figure out how to make more of it, and everyone tries to figure out how to produce substitutes for it. Add to that the march of technological innovation (like the green revolution, birth control, etc.). The end result: markets figure out how to deal with problems of supply and demand.”

Certainly, people respond to incentives. But you can’t threaten to fire the Earth if it doesn’t cough up more oil, and you can’t bribe God into changing the laws of physics. There are natural limits that no amount of incentive will change. Just because a person has the will to do something doesn’t mean he will succeed in doing it, or—more to the point—succeed within the necessary timeframe.

Changes in supply, Levitt argues, are slow and gradual, only a few percent a year—giving us plenty of time to cut consumption and come up with alternatives. But if we assume a depletion rate of 5% a year (the IEA assumes between 4 and 6% in existing fields), that means that within five years after peak the world would have to make do with 77% of the oil it had been using. And 5% is a conservative depletion number—many Norwegian oil fields have been declining at 10–30%. Saudi Arabian data on reserves are a state secret, but in his book Twilight in the Dessert, Matthew Simmons makes a strong case (based on an exhaustive review of published technical papers) that not only is Saudi production probably peaking, but that previous overproduction of oil fields will likely bring on much faster rates of decline.

About believers in Peak Oil theory, Levitt writes: “One might think that doomsday proponents would be chastened by the long history of people of their ilk being wrong: Nostradamus, Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, etc. Clearly they are not.”

One might think that Levitt would be chastened by the long history of people who ignored or minimized brewing crises—big and small—until it was too late: from those who said “peace is at hand” in 1939 to those in the late 90s who thought the tech boom had repealed the business cycle. One might think that Levitt would also be chastened by the long history of great civilizations that have declined or collapsed. Clearly, he is not.

Anyone who thinks that the world can lose a quarter or more of its daily supply of oil in five years and not suffer serious consequences hasn’t really thought through the situation. Refusing to take an argument seriously is not refutation.

To Begin With . . .

Sitting in a Starbuck’s on Park and 47^th street on a bright, early-September day, I look around at businessmen reading their newspapers, clicking their laptops, chattering in groups around little wooden tables as sunlight streams in through giant picture windows, dilating their pupils. I come here almost every day, and nothing is different. Everything goes on as it always has, never mind that thirteen hundred miles away New Orleans is gone, drowned in the sea.

Across the street, the flags of government and commerce are flying at half-mast, as they have been all week, and I am not sure if I detect a somber note in the air. We have all seen it, felt it, but through a television screen, darkly, and when it is too much we can still change the channel, for now.

Are more terrible things coming?

In New Orleans, incompetence reigns, makes a mockery of “self-marketing,” self-confidence, networking and good presentation. How can this happen in America? people ask, and sometimes this means: How can the richest country in the world so thoroughly fail its citizens? and sometimes it means: What is this, knocking at the door? I thought we had outsourced reality long ago. I thought we paid other countries to suffer for us. Mother nature went off-script, where are all the good editors, from Survivor and Joe Millionaire?

Never mind; never mind New Orleans, never mind the relentless, grinding war, six thousand miles away. Never mind that gas is $3/gallon, $70/barrel, that people will freeze in their homes this winter. Never mind the anniversary of another bright, perfect September day. For now, here in the heart of everything, the old rules still apply: Sell yourself. Have confidence. Dream big. Brains, competence and foresight are less important than you think.

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In 1956, Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert was ridiculed when he predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s, and decline forever after, but he was right—after 1970 production began declining and never reached its former levels. Much later, Hubbert and his followers tried to predict when world oil production would peak. Using various methods, most put the date somewhere in the middle of this decade.

The peaking of U.S. oil production had dramatic implications for our country, transforming domestic and international politics, changing us from the world provider of energy to one dependent on others. The peaking of global production will have much worse consequences.

By definition, when global production peaks, there will be no more Saudi Arabias or North Seas to make up the shortfall. Within a few decades, all the recoverable oil in the world will be gone. If Hubbert and his followers are right, we all will be forced to live without oil much, much sooner than we think. Production has, for all intents and purposes, been flat for several years, according to former oil geologist Kenneth Deffeyes. The next step is decline.

Are we at Peak? The signs are ominous. As Hurricane Katrina showed, there is no more slack in the energy system. Only Saudi Arabia has any excess production capacity, and many now question that. Periodically the Saudis promise more oil, fail to deliver and then blame our lack of refining capacity for our problems—a fact often repeated in the media. No one, however, has a good explanation for why no new refineries have been built in 25 years, other than the obvious one: that the oil companies know they will never be producing more oil than they are now.

What will happen after the peak?

Pessimists speak of collapse: The world doesn’t have to actually run out of oil before the complex economic and social systems which are utterly dependent on it start to fail; what’s more, some say, at a population of 6 billion, the Earth has far exceeded the “carrying capacity” for human beings. Without oil or gas to pump wells and irrigate fields, make pesticides and fertilizer, power tractors and combines, process and deliver food—how will so many people eat?

Optimists speak of alternatives: but alternatives are far from ready to replace the vast amount of oil energy we now use. If we had 50 years, there might be more hope. But we almost certainly do not have 50 years. Waiting until now has, as James Howard Kunstler puts it, put “the human race into a jam, cramming for a final exam it can’t afford to fail.”

What is to be done? In his book Powerdown, Richard Heinberg advocates twin approaches: On the one hand, a global agreement among nations to reduce fossil fuel usage together, so as to avoid ultimately futile resource wars; and on the other the building of “lifeboats”—small, self-sustaining communities which will attempt to preserve the remnants of civilization. The ecovillage movement is one example of this approach.

I am starting this journal, however, from a different premise: the belief that abandoning urban life for the countryside may be the worst thing we could do in a lower energy future. I take my cue from Jane Jacobs, who has spent a lifetime arguing for the primal importance of cities. Cities, she once argued, pre-date even agriculture— notwithstanding conventional wisdom to the contrary. Throughout history, cities have been the engines of all development—economic, scientific, artistic. To be certain, city life in the future may be very different in nature and scale. But to abandon cities altogether would be to abandon civilization itself.