City of the Future

The Beginnings of Our New Energy Reality

Changes are afoot that presage a radical restructuring of U.S. energy policy. Given that energy touches every aspect of our lives, it's also fair to say that these changes will have dramatic impacts on virtually everyone. Whether their impacts will be entirely salutary, or even effective, given the enormous scale of the problem, remains to be seen.

A couple of weeks ago, Al Gore wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which he laid out his vision for the "emergency rescue of civilization" from "the imminent and rapidly growing threat of climate change." Interestingly, in addition to the "apocalyptic warnings from the planet" on climate change, Gore also mentioned the other crisis that until recently dared not speak its name: peak oil.

Investing in renewable energy infrastructure to combat climate change, Gore argued, would also be a key strategy in reviving our tanking economy and confronting the challenges of energy security.

"Here is the good news: the bold steps that are needed to solve the climate crisis are exactly the same steps that ought to be taken in order to solve the economic crisis and the energy security crisis."

Given his political stature, and the fact that his proposals closely resemble those that Obama himself has put forward, it seems highly likely that a large increase in renewable energy investments are a fait accompli in the coming years. Gore's proposals, however, are likely to be only a first step. Proposing to build massive solar thermal plants in the Southwest and wind farms Texas to the Dakotas while rebuilding the national grid may sound radical; and in the context of business as usual over the last 30 years, it is.

But given the rate of depletion and the pressure of economic growth from developing countries like China and India, even a radical increase in renewable energy production will not be enough. Americans (and everyone else) will have to cut consumption. Plug-in hybrid electrics might help, but like many others, I doubt that we will be able to switch our auto fleet fast enough to mitigate massive energy shortfalls.

A more pointed proposal on this front (also published in The New York Times) comes from Robert Goodman, a professor of environmental design at Hampshire College. Given that the big three automakers are now unlikely to survive without a federal takeover, Goodman argues, the government should take the opportunity to not only force them to build more fuel efficient, plug-in hybrid cars, but to wholly remake themselves into companies that build urban mass transit and high-speed intercity rail.

It's an outrageous idea--and one that might have been wildly unrealistic only a year or two ago. But we may soon find that the traditional political forces that would have screamed in opposition to such a plan (say, think-tanks funded by car companies) have lost their leverage.

To be sure, oil prices have fallen recently. But imagine how such a proposal might play a year from now, when a collapsing dollar and accelerating depletion combine to drive prices back to the $150 to $200 per barrel range, even as the big three automakers have gone into receivership, and Americans can no longer afford to by Honda Civics much less Priuses.

By the time we get to that point, there will be few people who have enough energy to shout about how public transportation is communism--and we will be living in a very different country.

Who's Crazy?

Last night I had trouble sleeping.

Having lost my day-job months ago (I worked as a desktop publisher at Bear Stearns), and having written since 2005 about peak oil (and the related cluster of social and financial disasters it would bring) anxiety about where the world is going is not new for me.But these days the news just keeps getting worse and worse. If there was any consolation it was in the fact that I couldn't be the only person whose nerves were keeping him awake that night.

General Motors is now saying it may run out of cash by the end of the year; its stock price is now at something like World War II levels. If one considers the downstream companies that depend on GM business, a collapse of the company puts literally millions of jobs at stake; given the company's symbolic role as a symbol of American affluence and might in the 20th century it's hard to overstate how psychologically devastating a bankruptcy might be for the nation.

More alarming (if something could be more alarming) was the just-released report from the International Energy Agency, which was by far the most dire in tone they have published in the last several years. "Current global trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable — environmentally, economically, socially," it read, "What is needed is nothing short of an energy revolution."

According to recent reports, agency experts are now saying that existing oil fields are depleting at around 9 percent per year--much faster than previously reported. As the economic analyst Puru Saxena recently put in on the Financial Sense Newshour:

"They said that the depletion rate would be 9.1 percent per annum. If we have urgent investments in the energy industry, then the depletion rate could be reduced to 6.4 percent . . . Now lets assume that demand grows modestly by, say, 1 percent per annum over the next five years, which is quite conservative, then . . . we need to find three Saudi Arabias within the next five years to meet demand. It has taken us 150 years to find one Saudi Arabia. I don't know if we're going to find three in five years."

It was in this context that I started thinking again about an article by Joanne Kaufman that ran in the New York Times Style section a few weeks ago. The piece was about a new breed of environmentalists--a breed analysts at P.R. company Porter/Novelli, (a firm that specializes in greenwashing) are calling "dark green."

"The company conducted a poll of 12,000 people, examining their commitment to various environmental practices — reducing energy use at home, buying energy-efficient appliances, boycotting companies with bad environmental records. Seven percent earned the top designation."

Among those profiled were, of course, Colin Beaven (aka, "No Impact Man") and Sharon Astyk (the author and well-known peak-oil and climate change activist).

At the heart of the Times piece was the implication that that while being environmentally conscious was a good thing, "dark greens" were taking matters too far. "To some mental health professionals, the compulsion to live green in the extreme can suggest a kind of disorder," writes Kaufman. This disorder she labels "carborexia." Chief among her exhibits were the privations Astyk imposes on her family, such as refusing to drive her son many miles to a baseball league and finding ways to do without refrigeration.

(Several peak oil activists had a good responses to the piece, including an incisive reply by Kathy McMahon, the author of the Peak Oil Blues blog, and Astyk herself). It is, of course, telling that a piece like this would run not as a feature in the main section of the paper but in Style, because up to this point modern American society has had the "luxury" of viewing environmentalism as a "lifestyle choice." As McMahon rightly points out, there's been big money for businesses in "going green", as long as people see their role as buying new "environmentally correct" products and not doing crazy things like reducing consumption or growing their own food.

Nonetheless, there is something particularly dissonant and frankly insulting about choosing now, of all times, to pathologize people who are trying to cut back. Did no one point out to the author or the editors at New York Times Style that we are in the midst of a once-in-lifetime credit crisis--a crisis brought on in large part by excessive consumption and debt at all levels of society? That unemployment is now at a generational high, that people are losing their homes across the country? Who, exactly, in such an atmosphere is crazy? The person who voluntarily cuts his consumption or someone who decides to do more shopping, "green" or otherwise?

More importantly, what is the point of psychology in a world gone mad? Is it just a tool for arm-chair pathologizing by one-off journalists--a patronizing cudgel to reassure upper middle-class "consumers" that their lifestyles are "normal"?

The great psychologist and holocaust surviver Viktor Frankl once described the purpose of his method as helping patients "grasp life's unconditional meaningfulness" even in spite of the most terrible events. Lets hope that psychology can re-embrace that lost spirit in the trying times ahead.

Obama

After 20 months of vicious drama and wild spectacle, Americans at long last entered the voting booth last Tuesday and, for one fateful moment,were given a tiny say in how their lives should be governed for the next four years.

In many ways presidential elections in the United States embody everything that's wrong not only with the modern political process, but in how citizens of liberal democracies have been taught to conceive of public life itself. Much is made of how important it is to vote, but I believe that for many the process feels profoundly disempowering--a reminder of just how little control each one of us has over his own destiny in a world where our cultural, economic and political environments are overwhelmingly shaped and directed by Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Washington D.C.

In such a system, the office of the presidency takes on a totemic significance which in turn diminishes (in both perception and reality) the importance of public life at all other levels. As someone who believes that the world faces challenges that will force it to re-engage with the regional, the local and the small-scale, I feel ambivalent at best about any process that encourages people to project all of their fears, hopes and aspirations onto a distant figurehead.

That said, it was impossible to not be moved by the stunning victory of Barack Obama on Tuesday night.For several weeks polls had suggested --the possibility of massive voter fraud aside--that he would win. But when the moment finally came, many Americans (along with observers around the world) could scarcely believe it. Could this be the same country that elected George W. Bush--twice? More importantly, could this be the same country that a mere half a century ago was shot through with institutionalized racism--a country that a century and a half ago was almost torn in half by over the issue of slavery?

But as moving as it was, Obama's victory had also a bittersweet flavor for anyone who has been paying attention to the long-building global crises that are only beginning to manifest themselves. It seems all but certain that in its first term the Obama administration will confront some of the greatest challenges our nation has ever faced--including, but not limited to, the continued unwinding of the biggest debt bubble in history, the decline (and possible sudden devaluation) of the U.S. dollar, and, most critically, the mother of all energy shocks. No President, no matter how intelligent or wise, will be able to magically make these problems go away.

Or as Matt Savinar of Life After the Oil Crash puts it (somewhat more harshly),

"Given the size and speed of the unraveling, Barack is unlikely to be able to do anything more than attempt to manage the dismantling of the country in an orderly fashion, assuming there is anything left to dismantle once the Bush Cabal is finished with their last frenzy of pillaging."

Perhaps the most important thing about Obama's victory is that it denies continued power to the neo-conservatives who have been running the country for the last eight years. The self-destructive temptation of those in power to seize resources through force only grows in times of scarcity; and nothing is more frightening in times of crisis than leaders with authoritarian impulses. Obama appears to possesses far more wisdom on both counts than either his predecessor or his former opponent.

But to me, Obama's achievement signifies something else as well--a repudiation of determinism. If, after all, someone from as humble a beginning as his can seize such an unexpected victory, maybe the fate of human beings overall is not as tightly sealed as some in the peak oil world would have us believe; maybe human beings, individually and collectively, do have the ability to transcend their personal limitations, to make choices, to become inspired to action, to sacrifice for a greater cause.

The fact that this victory was achieved (for the most part) not through traditional power-brokering but with direct appeals to scores of individuals--individuals of modest means who gave not only money but time and incredible enthusiasm--marks a political sea-change that is as significant as any particular proposal Obama may have articulated.

If, in the end, that means only that we will have a "more orderly dismantling," well, that's better than the alternative.