City of the Future

Moon Rockets and the Decay of the Nation

Forty-five years ago this week, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. In the decade that followed his historic mission, the United States spent $6.5 billion dollars and an enormous amount of energy and manpower to develop the Saturn V and Apollo missions to reach the moon.

In an op-ed in Tuesday’s New York Times, Carolyn Porco, a NASA planetary scientist and one of the a leaders of the unmanned Cassini mission, argued that the Nixon administration’s decision to cancel—“largely for political reasons”—the Saturn V program, “was a gargantuan mistake” from the point of view of the space-exploration community.

Porco doesn’t go into what those political reasons were; instead she makes the case that in terms of lost investment and time, it would have made far more sense to continue the large-payload Saturn V program than switch to the space shuttle and “retreat to low Earth orbit, where we’ve spent the last 25 years going around in circles.” She concludes the op-ed by celebrating the fact that after this long hiatus, NASA now has plans to return to the moon and build a permanent space-station there.

Missing from her argument is any serious reflection on what the real “political” reason for the Saturn V’s cancellation was: it’s overwhelming cost. At the time the program was cancelled, the United States was in the midst of a decade of inflation and mailase, and was trying to extricate itself from an unwinnable foreign war. A few years earlier, the country had taken on large new entitlement programs even as it saw its domestic oil production peak and begin to decline; in 1974 (the same year the Saturn V program was cancelled) we saw the decade’s first world oil shock. In 1971, President Nixon effectively ended the Bretton Woods international finance system, ending convertibility of the dollar to gold and, in the view of many economists, setting in motion the increasingly dangerous cycles of debt and inflation that persist to this day. Clearly, there were many reasons to wonder if continuing the Saturn V program was the best way for the nation to spend its money.

Is there any indication that the nation can afford the extravagance of manned space-flight any more now than it did then—at a time of deep energy insecurity and un-winnable foreign wars, when we have a trade deficit that would have caused a currency crisis in any other nation? If there is, Porco doesn’t offer it.

The point is not simply that investing billions in manned space-flight is not a good idea, but that our entire collective apparatus for assessing and allocating our wealth and resources is broken. From the war in Iraq, to the $2.5 billion freedom tower, to the more mundane pattern of mindless sprawl and highway building, America seems determined to behave as if we lived in a world of no economic, environmental or energy constraints, spending our social and intellectual capital on frivolous expenditures even as the country rots away from underneath us.

In the words of a 2005 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers, “America’s Crumbing Infrastructure [is] Eroding [the] Quality of Life” in our country. The report assigns the country a D as a cumulative grade for the state of its roads, bridges, dams, drinking water, energy, rail, public parks, schools and other categories. But there is no public movement to repair our infrastructure or rebuild our railroad system, or for that matter engage in a real, sustained build-up of alternative energy. A recent study indicated that the offshore wind potential of the Mid-Atlantic alone could supply the entire energy needs of nine states, from Massachussets to North Carolina. Given the severe insecurity of our oil and natural gas supplies, nothing would make more sense than engage in a rapid build-up of this resource. Instead we seem bent on “burn[ing] up the Midwest's last six inches of topsoil in our gas-tanks.”

For someone conditioned to a certain mindset, these are hard facts to accept. I myself grew up loving skyscrapers and the dream of universal space-travel; of being a part of the tallest, fastest, biggest endeavors of mankind. But if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that symbolic gestures of gigantism cannot substitute for the basic functions of society.

Sadly the nation seem less able than ever to distinguish between the symbolic and the real. Like the main character in the forthcoming movie, The Astronaut Farmer, who sets out to prove that even a lone farmer can whip up a space rocket, as long as he believes in himself (“Somewhere along the line, we stopped believing that we can do anything,” he says), we persist with an unshakable collective belief that with sufficient faith and a high enough credit score, anything we wish for can be ours.

It scacely makes a difference anymore whether our achievements are real or fictional; after all, for the average person, The Astronaut Farmer is as likely to have as great an impact on his life as another real trip to the moon. It hardly seems like an accident that the peak of the space age was shortly superseded by a new age of special effects, inaugurated by Star Wars and actualized in countless movies driven less by scripts and stories than by CGI effects. Over the last several decades, exponential growth in real speed and power has been replaced by an explosion of the virtual, and we have accepted the switch without protest.

The Bush administration has raised the substitution of reality with “reality” to an art form. As a senior administration aide explained to New York Times reporter Ron Suskind in 2004, Suskind was “in what we call the reality-based community,” which the aide defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” But according to the aide, “That's not the way the world really works anymore . . . we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The result: a stage-managed “reality” television war, the apparent view that the drowning of New Orleans was first and foremost a public relations problem, and an energy policy which promotes ethanol even while cutting funding for rail. If there is an increasing unease in this country, it is because reality has a nasty habit of breaking through our imaginary world, no matter how much we “believe”.

Peak Oil vs. Climate Change

Last week, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued what was probably the most important climate change report to date. In the report, the panel presented the strongest evidence yet for human-caused global warming. After 20 years of debate, it seems that even long-time skeptics are finally being forced to acknowledge the undeniable facts. Even Exxon Mobil has done a climate turnaround, admitting that human-caused warming is real and pledging to stop astroturfing the issue; and President Bush actually mentioned global warming in his State of the Union address.

But global warming wasn’t the week’s only important energy-related story. On the peak oil front came the less-noticed but highly significant news that production from Mexico’s supergiant Cantarell—the world’s second largest oil field—had declined by a stunning half million barrels per day last year, a “virtual collapse” according to The Wall Street Journal. To put this news in perspective, consider that out of some 4,000 actively producing oilfields in the world, the fourteen largest account for over 20 percent of total world production, and that the average age of those fields is 43.5 years. Last year Kuwait announced that its Burgan field (which is either the second or third largest field in the world, competing with Cantarell) is also in decline. Combined with equally-stunning declines in North Sea oil production last year, Cantarell’s news led Matthew Simmons to say last week (more definitively than I’ve heard before) that the world had indeed passed peak oil.

In short, the race is on between the two most serious threats to industrial civilization; one which threatens to destroy the world economy and render most of our technology useless, and the other which threatens to make the planet uninhabitable for human life itself. Because the two issues stem from the same problem—the modern world’s utter dependence on fossil fuels—it would follow that activists in both camps should coordinate their efforts.

But as Richard Heinberg pointed out in his most recent newsletter, climate change and peak oil activists “often talk past each other.” Climate change activists, Heinberg wrote, tend to feel that peak oil is “a trivial concern by comparison” to the potential catastrophe of runaway global warming. On the other hand, peak oilers tend to believe that “the economic and geopolitical chaos that may be triggered by declining global fuel supplies pose the more timely threat.”

Despite the fact that Heinberg’s essay is intended to be “exploratory and descriptive rather than polemic,” one can’t escape the fact that Heinberg is one of the highest profile peak oil activists. His descriptive approach is admirable, but if it is true that peak oil and global climate change are in competition as the most serious threats we face, it is also the case that there is no parity between the two when it comes to public awareness. The fact that Heinberg even feels compelled to address the issue is evidence of that fact—I have seen no comparable discussions from the global warming “side” of the issue. (Al Gore, for instance, has mentioned peak oil, but never really explained it).

Ignoring or downplaying the threat of oil depletion in favor of focusing on climate change may be a major mistake, however, because there no question that depending on how it plays out, the reality of depletion changes the dimensions of the climate change issue dramatically.

Up to now, the IPCC has based its projections on the same official, business-as-usual models which show oil consumption continuing to rise exponentially into the middle of the century—a projection that the peak oil camp sees as flatly absurd. If oil peaks in the near term, as many peak oil activists expect, then the climate change problem will not be determined by our rate of oil consumption, but by how we attempt to replace it.

It is a tragic accident of geologic history that of the three major fossil fuels, coal, the dirtiest and most carbon intense, is also the only one which remains abundant. As oil declines, will a panicked world attempt to burn (or convert to liquid fuel) as much coal as possible to keep its industrial machine running? Or will a global economic depression triggered by peak oil choke off the current massive growth in coal consumption, as Chris Vernon at the Oildrum suggests?

Coal isn’t the only problem. Will the push for biofuels in the first world cause the rapid deforestation of the third? Or will declining oil and natural gas supplies force even the first world to chop its own forests just to keep warm?

It has been said that from a climate change perspective, the only thing worse than peak oil is no peak oil. But depending on how things play out, the reverse may in fact be true. Whatever happens, one thing is sure: from here on, we cannot count on business-as-usual.

Toby Hemenway and the Urban vs. Rural Sustainability Debate

One of the most common reactions people have upon internalizing the implications of oil depletion is an impulse to escape. “Return to the land” has become an uncontested mantra for many in the peak oil world; if there is a debate, it often centers around the question of what form a return to rural life should take—with “powerdowners” advocating a reconstruction of village life, and “survivalists” arguing for full-scale, individual retreat.

Last year, well-known Permaculture activist Toby Hemenway added another dimension to the debate with two articles exploring the contrast between urban and rural sustainability. His views upset a lot of people in the peak oil community by throwing into question some fundamental assumptions. Peak oil activists are used to having their convictions questioned, of course, but in this case, the questioner was not a high-paid think-tank, but a well-respected Permaculture activist and writer whose book, Gaia’s Garden is a classic manual of home-scale Permaculture gardening.

Last Saturday I attended a talk and discussion with Hemenway at the Inwood Nature Center in New York City. Though brief, the talk and group discussion provided some much-needed nuance to the superficial, black-and-white debate over urban vs. rural sustainability.

Hemenway began his career in Seattle, as a genetics researcher for a small drug company. At some point, he and his wife (who worked for Microsoft) began to feel that their work was not in accordance with their values. After a stint outside of the city, they bought land and moved to a very rural area of southern Oregon.

But after several years, Hemenway began to have doubts about the sustainability of his new lifestyle. For one thing, he was burning a lot more gas—simply going to the store for groceries (despite his gardening skills, he was not an entirely self-sufficient farmer) took 40 minutes for a round trip. And as far a sustainability and self-sufficiency went, his neighbors were far worse—putting up floodlights on their houses, or planting three acres of grass which they mowed on a riding mower. Rural life, at least as the people of that community were living it, was anything but sustainable.

Eventually, Hemenway and his wife decided to move to Portland, where he has worked on urban sustainability. For his talk, he focused on the importance of recreating networks of local communities; in his slideshow, he showed numerous examples of the community-building work of a group called City Repair, a volunteer organization which works on reclaiming the public realm in cities. According to its website, the group was

“born out of a successful grassroots neighborhood initiative that converted a residential street intersection into a neighborhood public square, City Repair began its work with the idea that localization (of culture, of economy, of decision-making) is a necessary foundation of sustainability. By reclaiming urban spaces to create community-oriented places, we plant the seeds for greater neighborhood communication, empower our communities and nurture our local culture.”

Can cities be sustainable in a lower-energy world? Hemenway pointed to the example of Shanghai, China, which for a long time has produced a high percentage of its own food. On the other hand, “New York City might be too big,” he said, and pointed out that New Jersey is called the Garden State, because not so many years ago it was comprised of farms that were the food source for New York. Overall though, those of us who are living in cities “are doing as well as anyone else.”

So is rural or urban life more sustainable? The question itself is probably misleading. Just as it is apparent that cities will have major difficulties in the coming years, it is also obvious that striking out for the wilderness on one’s own alone is naïve; very few people are actually able to be completely self-sufficient, even if they are able to tolerate living that way. Even the ecovillage model, if conceived of as separate from regional sustainability, is unlikely to succeed as a self-contained unit.

Whether we like it or not, it seems that responding wisely the coming energy crisis will require engaging with government and society, even if only on a local level—a conclusion that will either be hopeful or utterly disheartening, depending on one’s point of view.