City of the Future

Energize America and the Meaning of Happiness

A couple of years ago, a handful of progressive bloggers associated with the DailyKos website undertook a project to revolutionize U.S. energy policy. The result was Energize America—a wide ranging set of legislative proposals designed to achieve “energy security” for America by 2020. The plan included initiatives to greatly increase the fuel efficiency of cars and trucks, to increase renewable energy use and to build a high-speed passenger rail system. According to its authors, Energize America was recently presented to members of Congress; an achievement for which they should certainly be commended.

But as several commentators pointed out during a recent debate on The Oildrum, Energize America as it stands is seriously flawed. In the comment thread, transit engineer Alan Drake was critical of the feasibility of several of the plan’s technical goals; in particular, he thought the idea of doubling the energy efficiency of long-haul trucking and air travel by 2020 was highly unrealistic, and a diversion from the far more practical and critical goal of shifting as much freight as possible to rail.

But unrealistic technical goals are only symptomatic of Energize America’s deeper flaw: the failure to address the systemic nature of the crisis that faces us. Many of the early discussions about Energize America on DailyKos were dominated not by debates on the feasibility or merits of individual proposals, but by the question of how to “frame” the issues to make them most palatable for mass consumption. The unspoken premise, therefore, was that to truly address the severity of imminent peak oil would be to render the topic politically untouchable.

The result is that for all its breadth, the Energize America never mentions mixed use development, light-rail, the localization and downscaling of food production and other businesses—or anything, for that matter, that might challenge the current mode of American life.

Trying to build consensus and be politically savvy is wise in most cases. But to approach energy depletion in that manner is to fail to grasp its true magnitude and inexorable reality. A decline in world oil production means that the world will be using less oil—possibly much less oil, much sooner than we think. Once the process begins, it will no longer be a question about convincing people to take the problem seriously, but about finding appropriate collective responses to an unfolding crisis.

As Richard Heinberg put it in a recent essay:

“Whatever response society eventually arrives at to fossil fuel shortages will consist of a cobbled-together mix of the available alternative energy sources plus a heaping helping of energy conservation (efficiency and curtailment). I use the word response rather than solution because the latter term implies an outcome in which present societal patterns of industrial production and consumption are maintained. But this may not be possible. Planned, strategic curtailment of energy use will of necessity be the primary adaptation strategy. This has enormous implications for every aspect of modern economies.”

It could be argued that accomplishing even small, incremental goals is better than doing nothing. But in the current environment, the most politically achievable goals are precisely those that in no way challenge the current socio-political economic system—pursing long-haul truck efficiency, for instance, with the assumption that anything like the current Interstate Highway System will be in operation in 2020, much less 2040—and are thus are at once the most technically challenging and least beneficial.

To put it another way: implicit in Energize America’s approach to the energy crisis is an unarticulated, yet deeply held belief that it is easier to achieve any technological miracle imaginable than to alter the “non-negotiable” American way of life.

It would be one thing if that way of life made us happy; but if we are to believe a recent World Health Organization study, Americans are actually the most depressed people in the world. In that context, futile attempts to maintain the status quo—from industrial food to suburban sprawl to a globalized economic system which, as James Howard Kunstler would put it, destroys local economies and civic life for the sake of paying a few dollars less for a hair dryer—seems not just counterproductive but pathological.

One way or another, we have to come to terms with the fact that the world as we know it is about to change dramatically. Energy availability will be the major, driving force behind that change, but its effects will be felt in absolutely every arena of life—social, cultural, economic and political.

As long as the culture has not come to terms with that fact, it is likely that efforts to mitigate or respond to peak oil will be ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst (as in the case of corn-based ethanol). Maybe a better political and legislative goal is to demand, as Matthew Simmons often advocates, a complete, transparent accounting of what the actual state of our energy situation is. That means pressuring governments to open up their resources for independent, third-party audits. Once the world has the appropriate data, countries could begin pursuing some form of the Oil Depletion Protocol, as advocated by Heinberg and Colin Campbell. Only then will the nation and the world be able to really plan for the new energy era.

Tipping Points and "Financial Armageddon"

In his best selling book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell describes how a counter-intuitive observation about the progression of disease epidemics can be applied to understanding social trends—everything from the sudden rise in popularity of Hush Puppy shoes in the mid 90s to the decade’s rapid drop in crime.

The idea of a “tipping point” is counter-intuitive because it flies in the face of the common assumption that effects are relatively proportional to their causes. “To appreciate the power of epidemics,” he writes, “we need to abandon this expectation about proportionality. We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events, and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly.”

Such changes can, of course, be either positive or negative. But either way it is a crucial idea in understanding and preparing for the coming impending economic and social crises.

Without even mentioning peak oil, author Michael J. Panzner gives a chilling outline of these coming crises in his recent book Financial Armageddon. Panzner is only one of a string of recent authors who have made the case that our country is in deep trouble (other recent books include America’s Financial Apocalypse, by Mike Stathis, The Coming Economic Collapse by Stephen Leeb, Crash Proof, by Peter D. Schiff and America’s Bubble Economy, a collection of essays by several authors).

Panzner’s case? That the American economy is faced with four enormous threats: soaring, out-of-control debt (personal, governmental and institutional), a failing retirement system (not just Social Security, but also Medicare and a bankrupt pension system), unsupportable government guarantees (by which he is not referring to entitlement programs, but to deposit insurance and implicit and explicit promises by the government to bail out failing institutions, states and municipalities in a time of ever-greater risk), and the astronomical rise of derivatives (complex financial instruments that often rely on massive debt-leverage and which Warren Buffet has called “financial weapons of mass destruction”).

Taken together, these threats (among others which Panzner doesn’t mention) make it virtually impossible to see how we can avoid “Financial Armageddon”. None of what he says is new, but where he book is useful is in the way it describes what the grim social effects of this crisis as it unfolds; first with economic malaise, then systemic crisis, depression, and finally hyperinflation—all coupled with skyrocketing unemployment, bankruptcy, crime and social unrest. The sheer magnitude of this crisis is likely to shock a country which hasn’t felt a real, consumer-led recession since the early 1990s, and which is very far removed from the historical struggles of the Great Depression.

Why is it so difficult for people to imagine or accept the possibility of this coming catastrophe, even when the evidence is staring them in the face? The answer, I think, is our collective failure to truly appreciate Gladwell’s “tipping point”: the idea that small changes can have big effects—that a few misplaced bets in the derivatives market during an economic downturn could cause a wholesale rout of the stock market or a collapse of the U.S. dollar; that the decline of a only a few percent of global oil production could lead to unimaginable price spikes, hording behavior and a vicious circle of geopolitical instability that in turn takes much more oil off of the market, etc.

Or maybe we are just unwilling to face bad news. Last week the Government Accountability Office finally finished its long-awaited report on peak oil. By law it will be released to the public within 30 days, but at the moment it is being reviewed by the members of Congress who requested it; according to preliminary comments by Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, however, it says that while the date of peak oil is hard to determine, “the largest number of [experts] believe that it has occurred, that conventional supplies have peaked.”

But that didn’t stop the New York Times from yesterday rehashing the oft-refuted claim that production declines can be reversed by “technology” and secondary recovery techniques and arguing that peak oil theory “has been fading”— this, even as the ordinarily circumspect Stuart Stanford from The Oil Drum points out that despite a flurry of drilling, Saudi Arabian oil production is down 8 percent over the last year—leading him to write “overall, I feel this data is clear enough that I’m willing to go out on a limb and conclude . . . [that] Saudi Arabian oil production is now in decline.”

If there is a good side to the idea of a tipping point, it is that public opinion can be changed very rapidly. Let’s hope that this happens soon enough to mitigate, rather than exacerbate, the coming crises.