Casaubon’s Book

Sharon July 16th, 2008

Crunchy Chicken is talking about peak oil.  I can’t wait to see what she has to say - the truth is that we need more voices, particularly smart, funny, honest ones.   And she was kind enough to send some of her enormous readership over here - that was nice.  Now many of the people who read Crunchy may already read me.  But some don’t - and quite a few of the people who took her poll are pretty nervous about what they are going to learn if they do figure out what peak oil is.

So I thought it might be good to do a post not so much on what peak oil is (if you scroll down there’s some resources in the sidebar that can help there) but on why it is better to know what’s going on than it is to not, even when it is scary and overwhelming.  And it can be.  But there are a lot of resources out there to help you.  And the truth is that we need people to screw up their courage and look hard at difficult stuff - because the problems caused by Peak oil, and the related crises (yup, they all go together) of climate change and the financial collapse are not something any of us can afford to ignore.

My guess is that most people reading this have some investment in the future - maybe in their own personal future, maybe in the future of their children or grandchildren, or the children of someone they know and care about, maybe in their dedication to the good of humanity.  The truth is that you are needed, right now, to safeguard your own future, and the future of our posterity - that’s not campaign rhetoric, or storytelling - that’s simple truth.  If you don’t participate in creating a decent future, we won’t have one.  We need you, and you need you to take as hard edged a look as you can.

A lot of what you read about Climate Change, Peak Oil or economic crisis focuses on the future. Their goal is to motivate you to action by describing what may happen. I do some of that, but over the last year or so, more and more I’ve found myself replacing the future tense with the present, describing not what might happen, but what is. Unfortunately, the hard times I’m talking about do not lie in the conveniently distant future but have begun already. The only question is whether you or I have felt them yet. 

By this I mean to say that though we do not know the exact shape of the long-term crisis we face from energy depletion or environmental degradation, we miss the point if we focus only on models and hypotheses. Right now we are in the midst of an environmental disaster, at present experiencing the high personal costs of energy depletion, at present losing economic ground to policies designed to increase inequity. I know that many of the people who read this blog won’t necessarily see the makings of a crisis — yet. Others will already be caught up in the early stages of the problem, experiencing job losses, foreclosures or the struggle to keep afloat economically as prices rise. So while we  speak of the future, my case that the world is about to change, irrevocably and deeply, rests primarily on the painful fact that it already has begun to do so.

And is there really any doubt that this is true? Is it possible to imagine any other time in American history when we would have consented to see an entire major city laid waste, without ever rebuilding even its most basic infrastructure? Is it possible to imagine another time when we would have shrugged and accepted the knowledge that our basic infrastructure, things like highways, sewers and subways, are simply falling apart and that we have no intention of fixing them? Is it possible to imagine another time when we knew we were in danger of handing our children a future of hunger, poverty and drought, and sat around debating whether congress might want to consider raising fuel efficiency standards? Has there ever been a time in history when citizens felt so powerless to stop the forces that were driving them to disaster?
If, in the face of all the evidence, we find we doubt that things really are falling apart, we might listen to the respected voices issuing the same opinions. There are some out there — despite the overwhelming lack of responsiveness of our government. For example, in the summer of 2007, David Walker, comptroller general of the US General Accounting Office said,

The US government is on a “burning platform” of unsustainable [ad1] policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country’s top government inspector has warned … there were “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government.” (http://www.newstarget.com/020930.html)[ad2] 

Few of us have put all the pieces together, but when we failed to rebuild New Orleans, when we accepted that we can’t afford the tax base to keep bridges from falling on motorists and sewers from backing up, when we accepted that electric grid failure will kill people in the inevitable heat waves, we implicitly acknowledged what we have not yet faced up to consciously — that things have changed, and many of our problems are going to continue getting worse because we either lack the will or the money or the energy or the time to fix them

When I realized that everything was going to change, I was at first afraid. Because, I thought, if my government or public policy or other choices weren’t going to fix everything, what could I possibly do? What hope was there, if I had to take care of myself, if my community had to take care of itself?

But when I began looking for solutions that could be applied on the level of ordinary human lives, that involved changes in perspectives and pulling together, the reclamation of abandoned ideas and the restoration of strong communities, I began to feel hopeful, even excited. Because I realized that when large institutions cease to be powerful, sometimes that means that people start being powerful again.

And that’s the other reason you should look, even when your instinct is to look away, why you should learn even when it is hard, and frightening to learn these things - because simply learning that we’re in the midst of something very difficult is not the end point.  Learning about peak oil doesn’t stop with “we’re doomed.”  We’re not doomed - we’re facing very difficult times, and the way we face them will determine whether they are just hard, or disastrous for us.  There is an enormous amount of mitigation we can do - personally, on the community level and at the political level.  It probably won’t be enough for your life to stay the way you want it to be - I feel like I have to say this upfront.  We’ve been told enough lies - we need to know the truth, and the truth is that we waited far too long to fix the energy crisis.

But this is when I remind people of the story of Sleeping Beauty.  You see, a King and Queen wanted something desperately.  And finally, bounty was showered down upon them, gifts beyond their wildest dreams - a wonderful daughter, one they named Beauty.  And in their delight and joy, the forgot something important.  They forgot that with gifts come responsibilities - and when they were planning a vast celebration of their good fortune, they forgot to do the unpleasant responsibility of inviting the fairy no one liked very much to the Christening.

Well, the fairy, the embodiment of what we have left undone, what we neglected, she noticed that we’d left it undone.  And she came to the Christening, after almost all the fairies invited had given wonderful gifts,  and took from the King and Queen what mattered most to them - their posterity.  At just the moment that Beauty was coming into her full potential, at just the moment her parents were most proud, she would prick her finger on a spinning wheel, and die.

Well her parents began to keen their grief, and all the guests did too - it was so terribly unfair, they had never intended this consequence, it was all just a mistake.  The King, in denial, began to order all the spinning wheels in the kingdom burned, believing that he could control the situation - even one so obviously out of his control.

But over the cries of grief, up spoke one voice.  It was the very last fairy godmother, the one who had not yet given her gift.  She said, “I cannot break the curse, but I can soften it a little.  I can make it so that you don’t lose everything.  Instead of dying, Beauty will fall asleep for a 100 years.”

I think this story is remarkably analagous - we received this enormous bounty of fossil fuels, and while we did not mean or intend it, while we did not know what the consequences were, we face consequences for what we have left undone.  We can’t make the curse go away.

But each of us a little like that last Fairy Godmother - we can soften the curse a little, we can make it possible, if we have strength and courage, that we in this generation, we who are now adults, can take on the burden of changing our society and our lives, and give our children and grandchildren, if not a perfect happy ending, a great deal more hope.

How often do you get to be the Fairy Godmother?  How often do you get to do so much, for something most of us value so deeply?

That’s why you need to know.

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Sharon July 14th, 2008

Ok, you all know that I’ve had my differences, some polite, some not so much with James Kunstler.  But I have to tell you that for sheer ferocious, delicious prose, there is no one like him.  There’s nobody out there in the peak oil movement, and precious few anywhere who can write like this - http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/.

“There’s a particular moment known to all Baby Boomers when Wile E. Coyote, in a rapture of over-reaching, has run past the edge of the mesa and, still licking his chops and rubbing his front paws in anticipation of fricasseed roadrunner, discovers that he is suspended in thin air by nothing more than momentum. Grin becomes chagrin. He turns a nauseating shade of green, and drops, whistling, back to earth thousands of feet below, with a distant, dismal, barely audible thud at the end of his journey. We are Wile E. Coyote Nation.
Is there anyone in the known universe who thinks that the US financial system is not fifty feet beyond the edge of the mesa of credibility?

 Nothing will avail now. Not even if Sirhan Sirhan were paroled at noon today and transported directly to the West Wing with a .44 magnum in each hand (and a taxi driven by the Devil waiting outside to take him to the US Treasury and the offices of the Federal Reserve).”

Kunstler is almost certainly right - the markets aren’t buying the bailout - so you get to have your pocket picked, your children impoverished and you get your Depression anyway.  Check the news out at www.theautomaticearth.blogspot.com.   But more importantly, reading about your doom should always be fun.  As you hear the bad news, it is always good to be thinking “Shit, this guy can write” rather than “Well, I guess Mom will have move in with us and we’ll be giving up luxuries like meat and more than 1 pair of shoes each.”  And hey, we’ve got to take what pleasures are available to us.

Sharon

• economy , peak oil
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Sharon June 26th, 2008

I don’t think there are a lot of people who, except in their most facetious tones, refer to me as anything along the lines of “Little Sharon-Sunshine.”  And yet I actually consider myself a strong optimist, and by the standards of the peak oil movement, I certainly am.  I believe that a way of life is very much on its way out, that the transition will be painful - more painful than it had to be, but that’s just the reality of the world. I think we are currently in a deep and horrible disaster, being visited on the world’s poorest and the tentacles are gradually crawling up the anchor to take down the rest of the ship.  But I also think that there is a good deal of reason for hope - we have vast capacities, vast resources and vast imagination.  Peak oil and climate change could, if we work really hard at it, be pretty much the end of the world.  But there’s no reason to believe that we will, in fact ,work quite that hard - we’re lazy and the odds are good that the edifice that allows us to destroy ourselves may preceed most of our lives to the grave.  That thought alone gives me hope.

And because I am an optimist, because I take joy in being a ray of light ;-),  I generally dissent from the final prognostications of the Olduvai Hypothesis, while agreeing that we are on the downswing of a certain kind of industrial civilization.  I differ from Richard Duncan in several respects, while giving him credit for articulating the danger of peak oil long before most of us had ever heard of it.   I differ most of all on his conclusion, rearticulated here in this article by James Leigh, that it is necessarily the case that,

“The permanent blackout of electricity is crippling. Without oil to continue to fire up our industrial society we will be without: public electricity, transport, industry’s processed products (food, clothing, packaging, and machinery), communication and computer services. A little bit of brainstorming shows that the society and its systems would come eventually to a standstill. A totally paralyzing set of circumstances with hunger and deprivation on an unprecedented worldwide scale.”

I don’t honestly know whether, as the Olduvai Hypothesis postulates, after 2012 we’ll experience widespread, permanent blackouts.  I suppose it is possible, and for the purposes of this article, we’ll assume that that’s the case that electricity could be the marker point for our collapse.  As Duncan argues in this paper, electricity is more defining than transport:

“As we have emphasized, Industrial Civilization is beholden to electricity. Namely: In 1999, electricity supplied 42% (and counting) of the world’s end-use energy versus 39% for oil (the leading fossil fuel). Yet the small difference of 3% obscures the real magnitude of the problem because it omits the quality of the different forms of end-use energy. With apologies to George Orwell and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics — “All joules (J) of energy are equal. But some joules are more equal than others.” Thus, if you just want to heat your coffee, then 1 J of oil energy works just as well as 1 J of electrical energy. However, if you want to power up your computer, then 1 J of electricity is worth 3 J of oil. Therefore, the ratio of the importance of electricity versus oil to Industrial Civilization is not 42:39, but more like 99:1. Similar ratios apply to electricity versus gas and electricity versus coal.”

My own intuition (and I’ve given it fairly little thought so that’s all it is) is that Duncan is right about the weighted importance of electricity to our present model of society, but wrong in his extrapolation of the long term consequences of short term adaptation to living without electricity.  And I think because Duncan was prescient in peak oil circles, his conclusion (which comes down to “we’re all doomed” has had disproportionate weight in the debate - in fact, there are a number of peak oil writers who have spent a lot of time arguing that “we’re all doomed” is the majority opinion in the peak oil world, and spend a great deal of time debunking this perspective - and inadvertantly giving Duncan’s conclusions far more emphasis than they actually merit among a range of far more nuanced and complex range of thought.

Part of the problem is Duncan’s timeline for industrial civilization.  He imagines that it began in 1930 - but, of course, the beginnings of industrial society existed in the US for at least 100 years before that, and of course, in Britain for quite some time before that.  I lived for a few years in a building converted to apartments from the old Lowell Massachusetts textile Mills, and I can attest that the structures, and the city of Lowell in the 19th century were indeed industrial.  It is true that a majority of people didn’t live in “industrial society” in the US until the 1930s - but of course, Duncan is speaking of the world as a whole, and a slight majority of people in the world only began living in industrial society last year - that’s when the urban population worldwide finally exceeded the rural one. 

Industrial society long preceeds electricity - even if we imagine that we will rapidly run out of the capacity to produce electricity, we have to recognize that Industrialization itself did not depend on electric power.  On the other hand, nor would I be the first to argue that life without industrialization sucked - parts of it undoubtedly did - I’m very fond of cloth making machines, for example, and have no particular desire to spin every thread my family wears.  On the other hand I could, given the urgent necessity of doing so, and I could teach others.  I could even make a primitive (not as nice as mine) spinning wheel (a huge jump in speed over the drop spindle, which I can make with three sticks) out of an old bicycle rim.  And if low tech little old me, who flunked birdhouse building in woodshop,  could do that, how long before the spinning jenny and the massive industrial looms of the 19th century get recreated by some bright chick who likes to tinker? 

There’s a tendency, I think, when talk about going to a lower energy society to imagine that we then become a lower-knowledge people, that we rapidly lose the germ theory of disease, the ability to do algebra and the capacity to build bicycles - and maybe that’s true - John Michael Greer has argued that a long term collapse may drop our knowledge base back further than we think.  But at a minimum, returning to illiteracy is going to take a couple of generations of huddling in our caves banging rocks together so we can forget all that other stuff, like how to build an efficient stove and an arch or two.  We’re going to have to work at it.

But let us assume that Duncan is, in fact, correct - that we’re going to fall off an energy cliff.  That we are facing a world without electricity - I’m not sure I think it likely, but I’m willing to accept the hypothesis.  Does that lead immediately to Duncan’s envisioned conclusion?  Leigh plainly thinks that the results would be catastrophic, from the construction of the below sentence:

“Pause for a moment – just imagine the catastrophic consequences of no electricity: no phones or computers, no industry which is electricity based, no dairy products or processed foods, no refrigeration, no water as the water pumps won’t work, no cars or transport because the petrol pumps won’t work, no schools or universities, no banks which can’t electronically process transactions, no employment, no income – dwindling stocks of everything as society collapses to unprecedented levels of chaos and deprivation.”

It is certainly the case that if we go in a single step from air conditioning and cold beer today to total blackout tomorrow, the transition will be extremely difficult, and the period of reorganization and the scaling up of other technologies will be stressful.  It is, however, unlikely to happen overnight.  But let’s take a look at these assumptions.  Would, in fact, we be thrown, as Duncan has argued, back to the Stone Age?

Let’s see…no phones or computers.  Check!  That means communication would have to rely on…mail?  Wow, that’s just horrible, because after all, we’ve had phones for thousands of years, and there’s no evidence at all that we can live without them…oh, wait, maybe there is.  No computers - well, that means no math, right, because we didn’t invent calculus until…oh wait.  No industry which is electricity based - well, that means we’re back to banging rocks together, because we never built or produced anything before electricity, right? No dairy products?  You mean cows run on electricity?  Woah, you learn something new every day.  Or perhaps he means no fridges, which means…we’d have to eat cheese.  Dear G-d…not that!!!  No processed food.  Well this one is true - I can’t think of a single means to produce a Hostess Sno-ball without fossil fuels.  Do not ask for whom the bell tolls…it tolls for thee and they Sno-balls.

 No refrigeration…yup, that means we’re going to have to cook differently and eat differently.  Of course, billions of people do that now because they don’t have refrigerators, but who’d want to be them?  No water - now that will be a tough nut to crack, unless, say we have any time between now and 2012 to deal with it…after all, it isn’t like water falls from the sky or something.  No cars or transport.  That’s right, before cars, everyone just sat on their asses where they were born until they were up to their knees in their own feces.  No schools or universities.  Yup, no one had literacy before electricity - those ancient Greeks, they were writing in 1935.  That’s why we call them ancient, right?  No banks which can electronically proces transactions - true, and I’m sure that means there will be no currency, since money and markets were invented in 1985 by the folks who brought us the TSR-80, right?  No employment - of course, there’ll be nothing to do but sit around drooling and waiting for death.  And no income - didn’t you know Henry Ford invented work? 

Now I’m being sarcastic here, and it would be an easy accusation to say I’m minimizing the difficulties of making a transition from an industrial society to a less industrial one, and that’s fair - sarcasm is never the most nuanced of genres.  But this stuff really toasts my buns, because it is so damned ignorant. 

I’m reminded of an essay by Chuck Trapkus in _The Plain Reader_, he tells the story of doing an demonstration of spinning, and a woman telling her children “This is how they used to make clothes, long, long ago.”  Trapkus responds with,

“She’s right, of course,” I’m thinking. “But this is how I make clothes.  Today.” 

He goes on to add:

“But lest we in our ignorance make the same assumptions the woman made while watching me spin, let’s be clear on one thing: Not everyone makes bread in an electric breadmaker.  Not everyone has access to a phone.  Not everyone has a refrigerator, a car, a toaster, a chainsaw.  Billions of humans right now, sharing this same Mother Earth, get by with far fewer electric/atomic/petroleum-powered gadgets and appliances that we United States citizens.  They may not all grind their own flour or weave their own cloth, but then, millions of them do.  So when w ask how they ever did anything then, we should ask how they still do it now, and acknowledge our profound collective ignorance in so many basic matters of human sustenance”

Let us not bullshit ourselves - if we had to suddenly, rapidly transition to no fossil energies at all (very, very unlikely for most of us), it would suck and be destructive.  But it would not send us back to Olduvai Gorge.  Many people would probably die in an overnight transition (also wildly unlikely) but most people probably wouldn’t.  Some people would curl up, unable to bear this world they lived in, but the rest would get to work reorganizing into something else, bringing back and recreating older technologies, using human and animal power, changing their work, building new economies and markets.  And not only could we survive, but we might not think that our lives were suddenly without meaning - electricity is not the defining characteristic of our beings, merely of our economy.  And economies are remade all the time.

The part of this that I find most troubling is the offensive notion that living without all the above-listed goodies makes life completely untenable.  Because that implies that the lives of our great-grandparents, and the billions of lives that don’t have electricity are an unmitigated hell, a place we wouldn’t even be willing to visit, that all that is “civilized” about our lives began in 19-freakin’-30.   If our past, and the lives of the world’s ordinary poor are utter doom, we are doomed.  But what if they aren’t? Let us acknowledge a vast and difficult transition, and a great deal of potential and probably real trouble and misery a’coming.  But let us not start with the assumption that “modern industrial civilization” is equivalent to “civilization” itself.  And let us not seperate ourselves from everything that came before us and everyone now who lacks what we have as though some barrier keeps us from reaching out to them.

Can we kill ourselves off in the coming decades?  Sure, I never wish to underestimate the stupidity of our collective humanity.  Is that a likely and inevitable consequence of even sudden, extreme depletion and shortage - no.  Only if we choose the worst possible forms of mismanagement (and grant you, there’s some good bit of evidence for this), only if we race headlong towards doom in a concerted effort can we create the consequences that Duncan and Leigh imagine are the simple results of the loss of electricty and other energies.  Electricity is a goodie, a sugar coating. It makes a few lives possible - lives that would be lost in a world without it, and that is at tragedy.  But mostly, it makes lives easy and convenient, and grows the economy - and that’s pretty much it.  It is not our life or our blood.

Sharon

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Sharon June 20th, 2008

John Feffer has a really, really good article over at Asia Times Online.  It points out the deep danger we’re in - how teetery both the world and America’s food and energy systems are.  It is well worth a read, particularly because of its clear articulation of the bind we’re in - the strategies we’ve used in the past to get out of disaster will only accellerate collapse in the very slightly longer term. 

 The analogy that I’ve been using for some time is to the seawater used to extract oil in the Ghawar and other aging giant oilfields.  Matt Simmons, the world’s expert on this subject, argues that you can make the oil production levels look good for a while - but the seawater you pump in only accellerates the day that disaster strikes.  And that’s true of our agriculture - at this point, we’re in a losing race between expanding food production and climate change - all the conventional strategies for growing more food push us faster and faster towards the day that the planet can produce much, much less food.  Every bite of food we eat now through conventional means takes food out of the mouths of our children.

I think many people, deep in their hearts, think that ecological disasters apply mostly to other people.  But, of course, as Midwesterners are finding out right now, that’s not true. And it isn’t over - every image of floodwaters we see is brown - washing precious topsoil away, and pushing artificial fertilizers into water tables.  And the rest of us will be thoroughly schooled in that lesson as well, most likely. 

So how do we avoid becoming North Korea - are there personal or policy approaches that can fix this?  Could you have guessed that I have some suggestions, some obvious, some perhaps not.

The first one is obvious - we need to get the oil and gas out of agriculture - and rapidly.  Farmers are already struggling to afford the fossil fueled inputs that are required for conventional agriculture, and industrial organic agriculture is almost as dependent on fossil fuels as conventional.  And all the fossil fuels, especially artificial nitrogen,  that we use are preventing future generations from eating.  Heck, it won’t take until future generations grow up - most of us under 50 will probably live to see it.

We’re seeing now just how oil and natural gas costs reverbate through the food system, and while it is possible to use wise forms of management to reduce those reverbations, the only possible way to stabilize the food supply and seperate it from volatile energy prices is to end the dependency of the food supply on fossil fuels.  We know that this is possible - besides the study mentioned in the paper above, other studies, including one last year at University of Michigan and a host of others have shown that organic agriculture can match and exceed yields.  Moreover, organic practices that match yields in optimal seasons often exceed conventional yields in times of plant stress - that is organic soils rich in matter hold up better to drought, heavy rains and other difficult conditions.  It isn’t a panacea, but in a world where drought and flooding are inevitable, we need the best cultural practices possible.

 But doing this involves replacing the oil and gas with *people* - that is, when Cuba moved to organic agriculture, it matched and exceeded agricultural yields on small farms.  But the large collective farms owned by the state never could match up yields - one of the agronomists concluded that “farms of this scale are not easily compatible with organic production.”  And that’s the problem - we can get our need for fossil fuels in agriculture down quite low, but we can’t do it without paying more people a living wage to grow food.  And no, this isn’t just me, the UNESCO report made essentially the same claims.

Which brings me to the second conclusion - gardens are even more essential in the fossil transition than they may be overall.  Think about it - food prices are already high - a shift in our economy towards more agricultural labor, and paying farmers better will keep food prices reasonably high, and involve large scale economic changes. That means the cheapest food out there is going to be food grown by those who are not depending on it to make a living - who grow food for subsistence or for very small scale sales on their own land or on community land.  And because they are less dependent on either hired labor or fossil fuels, gardens are the future of affordable food in the US.  Will they meet every need?  No.  But they can make the difference between getting by and widespread hunger. 

The next point is perhaps a bit less obvious.  A few years ago, in my paper “The Ethics of Biofuels” almost no one noticed that one of my principles was that we had to shift our “biofuel’ priorities from corn and soybeans for ethanol and biodiesel to…trees.  For wood.  And perhaps even more importantly, for climate stabilization and for erosion control and soil repair. The home heating crisis I’ve been discussing for years is beginning.  And there is the real danger that the US will deforest itself nearly as badly trying to keep warm as North Korea did trying to grow food.  The long term consequences of that would be horrifying. 

Thus, instead of pushing to grow food on marginal land, moving Crop Protected soils into production (which we’re seeing now), we need to use hilly and marginal lands to grow forests, ideally forests at least partly composed of edible protein, oil and other crops.   We will need the wood, as home heating moves back to biofuels. We will also need the erosion control - midwestern fields once had hedgerows, that could stop the flow of soil, provide space for wildlife, and wood for stoves.  Bringing back the hedgerows might be a beginning strategy.

In already forested areas, the struggle is going to be for management.  And that’s going to have to be a big, big focus of our energies.  The thing is, it gets bloody cold up here ,and most of us have gotten used to “room temperature” being a heck of a lot warmer than it was in any other period of human history during northern winters.  The temptation to burn just a little more is going to be vast.  But we can’t - the pollution will be a disaster, and the deforestation worse.

So we’re going to have to strictly self-regulate our forests - and plant new ones as fast as we can.  And since this is not likely to make it on to the public agenda anytime soon, we’re going to have to do it on our own, on the small pieces of soil we tend.

It wouldn’t be easy for us to turn into North Korea - it would take a lot of bad management.  But it wouldn’t be so hard we couldn’t do it, either.  We’ve got to do better.

 Sharon

• agriculture , global warming , peak oil
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Sharon June 12th, 2008

Yikes - cheery news all around, no?  Let’s see, Spain and Portugal are  essentially shut down, half a dozen countries are experiencing massive fuel or food riots.  The race for most appalling dramatic gesture by a desperately poor person struggling to survive is being run between the farmers in Karnataka who rioted and demanded either fertilizer so they could grow food or poison so they could kill themselves, and the Thai fishermen who are setting their own boats on fire, because they have no hope of ever surviving. 

This is peak oil, people.  Yes, it is muddied up with other things - but it is peak oil, and it looks, kinda horribly like what all the peak oil people have been talking about for all these years.  It sucks big green donkey dicks. It is sad and lousy.

Meanwhile, I, who could be keeping you up to date on all of the world’s doom, or at least finalizing the list of post apocalyptic novels so that we can get really cheerful, am abandoning you and the world stage for a while.  You see a whole bunch of my family is coming for the weekend, and, well, I don’t think anyone’s going to buy the argument that I couldn’t clean the house or weed the garden because of the situation in Karnataka.  I’m taking a break to discover what horrors lurk under the couch.  Four children plus 2 dogs, plus 4 cats plus 2 indifferent housekeepers means that something horrible, often several somethings, always do show up.

If you are wondering where I am, maybe because you tried to register for one of the courses, I promise I’m not ignoring you.  Or rather, I am, but only because there are drifts of dog hair the size of snowdrifts in my living room, not because I don’t care.  I promise I’ll email everyone after a few days of quiet denial and frantic scrubbing.

Wishing everyone a doom-free weekend.

 Sharon 

• peak oil
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