Reposted from the Saturday, September 13, 2003 edition of The Nation

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More Than an Entertainer

John Nichols

Later this year, Rick Rubin’s American Recordings label will release a collection of Johnny Cash songs including a collaboration between the legendary country singer and one of his greatest fans, the Clash’s Joe Strummer. The pair’s version of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” will serve as a poignant reminder of why Cash, who died Friday at age 71, was so revered by his fellow musicians — if not always by a music industry that had a hard time figuring him out.

“In a garden full of weeds,” explained U2′s Bono, Cash was “the oak tree.”

Cash loved playing with younger artists who shared his recognition that a song ought to come with an edge — and maybe even a little politics. His collaborations with Bob Dylan, U2 and Strummer, and the delight with which he covered songs by Nine Inch Nails, Nick Cave, Beck, Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen, made it impossible to slot Cash into the narrow categories where contemporary radio programmers consign artists. “He’s an outsider, never been part of a trend,” Rubin said of Cash.

In his remarkable 1997 autobiography, Cash reflected on a career that began with hit singles but eventually saw him searching for a proper record label — a search that ended only when Rubin, a groundbreaking rock and rap producer, signed him to American Recordings and produced four starkly brilliant albums. When people wondered why a country singer was on his label, Rubin said, “A rock star is a musical outlaw and that’s Johnny.”

Cash embraced that outlaw image, singing in his signature song, “Man in Black“:

Well you wonder why I always dress in black/Why you never see bright colors on my back/And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone/Well there’s a reason for the things that I have on/I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down/Livin’ in the hopeless hungry side of town/I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime

Cash took sides in his own songs, and in the songs he chose to sing. And he preferred the side of those imprisoned by the law — and by economics. Cash’s obituaries are quick to quote the lines at the start of his classic song, “Folsom Prison Blues,” which go:

When I was just a baby my mama told me son/Always be a good boy don’t ever play with guns/But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die…

Later in the song about a prisoner listening to a passing train, however, Cash sings:

I bet there’s rich folks eatin’ in some fancy dining car/They’re probably drinkin’ coffee and smokin’ big cigars/Well I know I had it comin’ I know I can’t be free/But those people keep a movin’ and that’s what tortures me

Though he was not known as an expressly political artist, Cash waded into the controversies of his times with a passion. Like the US troops in Vietnam who idolized him, he questioned the wisdom of that war. And in the mid-1960s, at the height of his success, he released an album that challenged his country’s treatment of Native Americans. That album, Bitter Tears, featured an powerful version of Peter LaFarge’s “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow,” a sad, angry rumination on the mistreatment of the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois nation, and of how the US government “broke the ancient treaty with a politician’s grin.”

Years later, Cash would remember that, as he prepared Bitter Tears, “I dove into primary and secondary sources, immersing myself in the tragic stories of the Cherokee and the Apache, among others, until I was almost as raw as Peter. By the time I actually recorded the album I carried a heavy load of sadness and outrage; I felt every word of those songs, particularly ‘Apache Tears’ and ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes.’ I meant every word, too. I was long past pulling my punches.”

The Bitter Tears project inspired one of Cash’s many disputes with a music industry that wanted him to entertain rather than educate.

“I expected there to be trouble with that album, and there was,” Cash wrote in his autobiography. “I got a lot of flak from the Columbia Records bosses while I was recording it — though Frank Jones, my producer, had the sense and courage to let me go ahead and do what I wanted — and when it was released, many radio stations wouldn’t play it. My reaction was to write the disc jockeys a letter and pay to have it published as a full-page ad in Billboard. It talked about them wanting to ‘wallow in meaninglessness’ and noted their ‘lack of vision for our music.’ Predictably enough, it got me off the air in more places than it got me on.”

Even in the 1960s, Cash said, “craven worship of the almighty dollar” was interfering with the ability of artists to get good music heard.

Thirty years later, as Clear Channel and other radio conglomerates sucked what life there was out of radio, Cash would argue, “The very idea of unconventional or even original ideas ending up on ‘country’ radio in the late 1990s is absurd.”

In 1998, after Cash won the Grammy award for best country album, American Recordings purchased a full-page ad in Billboard that was addressed to country radio programmers who had failed to play his music. The ad featured a picture of a much younger Cash with his middle finger held high in a fierce gesture of defiance.

Even as Cash was widely honored in his last years, his music was seldom played on mainstream country radio. And, yet, Johnny Cash kept being heard, singing the last track of a U2 album, appearing in a haunting video that somehow found a place on MTV and joining in that one last “Redemption Song” with a late British punk named Strummer who recognized that no one rocked like the Man in Black.

Copyright © 2003 The Nation

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View Johnny Cash’s last music video: ”Hurt“

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Reposted from the Earth Policy Institute. 

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Living Beyond the Earth’s Means

“We are creating a bubble economy–an economy whose output is artificially inflated by drawing down the earth’s natural capital,” says Lester R. Brown in his new book, Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble.

“Each year the bubble grows larger as our demands on the earth expand. The challenge for our generation is to deflate the global economic bubble before it bursts,” says Brown, President and Founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based independent environmental research organization.

Throughout most of human history, we lived on the earth’s sustainable yield–the interest from its natural endowment. But now we are consuming the endowment itself. Our existing economic output is based in part on cutting trees faster than they grow, overgrazing rangelands and converting them into desert, overpumping aquifers, and draining rivers dry. On much of our cropland, soil erosion exceeds new soil formation–slowly depriving the land of its inherent fertility. We are taking fish from the ocean faster than they can reproduce.

“We are releasing carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere faster than the earth can absorb it, creating a greenhouse effect. Rising atmospheric CO2 levels promise a temperature rise during this century that could match that between the last Ice Age and the present,” notes Brown in Plan B, which was funded by the U.N. Population Fund.

Bubble economies are not new. American investors got an up-close view of one when the bubble in high-tech stocks burst in 2000 and the NASDAQ, an indicator of the value of these stocks, declined by some 75 percent. The Japanese had a similar experience in 1989 when the real estate bubble burst, depreciating stock and real estate assets by 60 percent. As a result of the bad-debt fallout and other effects of this collapse, the once dynamic Japanese economy has been dead in the water ever since.

The bursting of these two bubbles most directly affected people living in the industrial West and Japan. But if the bubble that is based on the overconsumption of the earth’s natural capital bursts, it will affect the entire world.

Thus far the consequences of most excessive natural capital consumption, such as aquifer depletion, collapsing fisheries, and deforestation, have been local. But in sheer number and scale these events are now reaching a point where they may soon have a global effect.

Food appears to be the economic sector most vulnerable to setbacks, largely because the impressive production gains of recent decades were partly based on overpumping and overplowing. Overpumping is historically recent because powerful diesel and electrically driven pumps have become widely available only during the last half-century or so. Aquifers are being overpumped in scores of countries, including China, India, and the United States, which together account for nearly half of the world grain harvest.

Overpumping creates a dangerous illusion of food security because it is a way of expanding current food production that virtually ensures a future drop in food production when the aquifer is depleted. In the past, the effects of aquifer depletion on food production were confined to less-populated countries, like Saudi Arabia, but now they are becoming visible in China.

After a remarkable expansion from 90 million tons in 1950 to its historical peak of 390 million tons in 1998, China’s grain harvest dropped to 330 million tons in 2003. This drop of 60 million tons exceeds the grain harvest of Canada. Thus far China has offset the downturn by drawing on its vast stocks of grain. It can do this for perhaps another year or two, but then it will be forced to import massive quantities of grain.

Turning to the world market means turning to the United States, the world’s largest grain exporter, presenting a potentially delicate geopolitical situation in which 1.3 billion Chinese consumers, with a $100-billion trade surplus with the United States, will be competing with U.S. consumers for U.S. grain, driving up food prices.

Water shortages, such as those in China, are becoming global, crossing national boundaries via the international grain trade. Countries facing water shortages often import water in the form of grain. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain, this is the most efficient way to import water. Grain has become the currency with which countries balance their water books. Trading in grain futures is now in a sense trading in water futures.

Farmers may now also face higher temperatures than any generation since agriculture began. The 16 warmest years since recordkeeping began in 1880 have all occurred since 1980. With the three warmest years on record–1998, 2001, and 2002–coming in the last five years, crops are facing record heat stresses. Crop ecologists at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines and at the U.S. Department of Agriculture have developed a rule of thumb that each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature during the growing season reduces grain yields by 10 percent.

Falling water tables and rising temperatures help explain why the world grain harvest has fallen short of consumption in each of the past four years, dropping world grain stocks to their lowest level in a generation. If grain shortfalls continue, they will lead to price rises that could destabilize governments and impoverish more people than any event in history.

“Plan A–business as usual–is not working. It is creating a bubble economy. Plan B describes how to deflate the economic bubble before it bursts,” says Brown. “This involves, for example, reducing the demand for water to the sustainable yield of aquifers by quickly raising water productivity and accelerating the shift to smaller families. With most of the nearly 3 billion people to be added by 2050 to be born in countries already facing water shortages, pressure on water supplies will mount. If population is not stabilized soon, the water situation in some countries could become unmanageable.”

Accelerating the shift to small families and population stability means providing women with reproductive health care, filling the family planning gap, and investing heavily in education to ensure that the U.N. goal of universal primary education by 2015 is reached. The more education women have, the more options they have and the fewer children they bear. We now have the wealth and knowledge to eradicate the poverty that fuels rapid population growth.

“Avoiding the damaging effects of higher temperatures on crop yields means moving quickly to stabilize climate. In Plan B,” says Brown, “I suggest cutting global carbon emissions in half by 2015. This is entirely doable, as a number of recent studies have suggested. If higher temperatures shrink harvests, public pressure to replace coal and oil with natural gas, wind power, and hydrogen will intensify worldwide.”

A simple measure, such as replacing old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs with highly efficient compact fluorescent bulbs would enable the world to close hundreds of coal-fired power plants. Replacing nonrefillable beverage containers, such as aluminum cans, with refillable bottles can cut energy use by up to 90 percent. If all U.S. motorists shifted from their current vehicles with internal combustion engines to cars with hybrid engines, like the Toyota Prius or the Honda Insight, gasoline use could be cut in half. Cutting carbon emissions in half is less a matter of technology and more a matter of political leadership.

“Not only do we need to stabilize population, raise water productivity, and stabilize climate, but we need to do it at wartime speed. The key to quickly shifting from a carbon-based energy economy to a hydrogen-based one is to incorporate the costs of climate change, including crop-damaging temperatures, more destructive storms, and rising sea level, in the prices of fossil fuels. We need to get the market to tell the ecological truth.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has calculated the costs to society of smoking a pack of cigarettes, including both the costs of treating smoking-related illnesses and losses in employee productivity, at $7.18 a pack. Is the cost to society of burning a gallon of gasoline more or less than that of smoking a pack of cigarettes?

“Unfortunately,” says Brown, “since September 11, 2001, political leaders and the media worldwide have been preoccupied with terrorism and, more recently, the invasion of Iraq. Terrorism is certainly a matter of concern, but if Osama Bin Laden and his followers succeed in diverting our attention from the environmental trends that are undermining our future until it is too late to reverse them, they will have achieved their goal in a way they have not imagined.”

One of the keys to deflating the bubble is redefining security–recognizing that military threats to our future are being eclipsed by environmental threats such as falling water tables and rising temperatures. Redefining the threat means redefining priorities, shifting resources from the military to population and climate stabilization. Unfortunately, the United States continues to invest heavily in an ever-stronger military as though that were somehow responsive to the new threats that are shaping our future.

The $343-billion defense budget in the United States dwarfs the defense budgets of other countries–allies and others alike. U.S. allies spend $205 billion a year; Russia spends $60 billion; China, $42 billion; and Iran, Iraq, and North Korea combined spend $12 billion. As the late U.S. Admiral Eugene Carroll astutely observed, “For 45 years of the cold war, we were in an arms race with the Soviet Union; now it appears we are in an arms race with ourselves.”

The urgency facing the world today is at least as great as that which faced the United States as it mobilized for war during the early 1940s. Not only was the economy restructured within a year or so at that time, but the automobile industry–then the largest concentration of industrial power in the world, producing 3 million cars a year–was closed down and converted to the production of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and aircraft.

Today the stakes for the entire world are even higher. We study the archeological sites of earlier civilizations that were based on the overconsumption of natural capital.

“Advances in technology and the accumulation of wealth enable us to build a new world,” says Brown, “one far more stable and secure than the one we now have. We can lead a richer, more satisfying life today without jeopardizing the prospects for future generations.”

“We can stay with business as usual and be the generation that presides over a global bubble economy that keeps expanding until it bursts,” concludes Brown. “Or we can be the generation that stabilizes population, eradicates poverty, and stabilizes climate. Historians will record the choice, but it is ours to make.”

Copyright © 2003 Earth Policy Institute

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Lester R. Brown is Founder and President of Earth Policy Institute. The Washington Post has called him “one of the world’s most influential thinkers.”

Visit  the Earth Policy Institute. 

Reposted from The New Farm.

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How did an agricultural movement develop in Japan that is defined less by commercial success than by close harmony with nature? To tell that story, you have to understand the history of farming in Japan. In this first installment of a three-part series, Lisa Hamilton describes the geographic and religious realities that first shaped farming in Japan.

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What is Shumei Natural Agriculture?

Lisa M. Hamilton

In retrospect they are called pioneers, but in the actual moments that the world´s innovators seize history in their hands, the titles are less glamorous: loon, fool, heretic. Yet both sets of names grow from the same idea, that the person in question has proposed a reality different from what we find familiar and comfortable. When J.I. Rodale introduced non-chemical agriculture into North America´s burgeoning agribusiness system, there simply was no room for it. The prevailing definition of what was true–that agricultural wealth requires chemical additives–by default made organic methods false.

What I would have given for this insight on my first day in Japan. I was visiting farms that practice Natural Agriculture (N.A.), a nascent movement promoted by the Shumei faith, mainly in Asia. I was sent there to unravel the mystery of how it works, meant to return home with practicable techniques and hard facts and numbers. But after hours of dead-end questions and answers as solid as smoke, I sat down and wrote this: ìMaybe it is because I am a foreigner and they don´t want to get that personal. Maybe it´s because I´m not asking the right questions, either because I don´t understand the culture or because I don´t understand N.A. But here is what I really think: I think N.A. doesn´t work that well.”

In a way, I was correct. When evaluated using conventional Western definitions of what farming is and does, Natural Agriculture doesn´t score very high. But it doesn´t try to. That´s because it´s not simply a different method of organic cultivation, like dry-farming or Grow Bio-intensive. In fact, its proponents will plead with you to understand that it´s not a method at all; it´s a philosophy

In abstract it sounds like organics in this country: no chemicals; reliance on the strength of plant and soil; working with nature, not against it. Yet the guiding principle behind these tangible directives is more slippery. The ultimate goal is to create a heaven on earth, and so Natural Agriculture aims to create systems as close as possible to what nature would make on its own.

As practiced by the Shumei Natural Agriculture Network, this means no additives, not even plant-based sprays or fertilizer. The only thing laid on the soil is plant matter, and that only to regulate soil temperature and moisture; manure is verboten. Each farmer takes stock of the tools available to him naturally–be they insects, rainfall, tractors, soil fluffy or dense. Playing the role of steward/facilitator, the farmer configures those tools into the system that produces as much food as possible without causing damage that nature can´t easily repair itself.

Each farmer´s technique is vastly different, but one thing is the same: yields are equal to or — more often — lower than those on organic or chemical farms. One could close the book there, pronounce the concept a bust, and move on. But remember the lesson of J.I. Rodale: Natural Agriculture doesn´t make sense when judged by our priorities, but does that make it wrong?

What if the thing that´s wrong is the questions we are asking of it?

The Western perspective on what makes good farming is rooted in the age-old tradition of trade. As devoted and conscious as we might be, our definition assumes farming to be a commerce-based activity: grow food, exchange it for money. Natural Agriculture, on the other hand, grew out of the teachings of Mokichi Okada, a mid-20th-century spiritual leader and pioneer of Japanese organic farming. He redefined agriculture as a faith-based pursuit, in which the philosophy is the motivation, the technique, and the measure of success.

It follows that Western farming and Natural Agriculture have different definitions of success. In simple terms, our minds judge an agriculture by its ability to make money. Those with ecological consciousness judge it equally by its respect for the Earth. We evaluate a technique in terms of productivity, resultant fertility, and its product´s quality; the pinnacle marked by deep color, fine texture, complex flavor, and optimal size–usually the bigger the better.

Measured with this ruler, Natural Agriculture comes up lacking. Its independent farmers are not competitive in an anonymous marketplace, their production is generally less, and, by our definitions, their soil fertility and crop quality are generally lower.

A different yardstick

But what if the goal of quantity were replaced with the goal of building a system close to nature? What if financial gain took a back seat while we concentrated on increasing harmony among the natural elements of the world? What if ultimate success were defined as the creation of an agriculture closer to heaven on earth? What if the goal were to concoct not the most complexly mediated production techniques, but rather the most simple and minimal interventions? Natural Agriculture would be the most effective approach, and organics just a step along the way. (In a fitting twist, chemical agriculture would simply not be an option.)

	“The Japanese foothills amble toward all coastlines, leaving cities and people and farms to perch on the edge of the water. It is an undeniable geography, one that resists manipulation and instead insists that you play by its rules.”

It´s easy to respond that redefining success in these ways is unrealistic. Heaven on earth is inherently intangible, and what´s more, farmers need and deserve to make a living. It´s all true. Nobody said Natural Agriculture could work within the familiar structure of Money for Food. But then, Shumei is defining its own structures to replace convention. This radical moving of goalposts resembles the new economics of the local food and organic food movements in the U.S. It´s just that Natural Agriculture takes its quest to the next level.

Instead of working within the existing food production system, its proponents aim to create an entirely new system in which spirit is the priority–and finance as much of an afterthought as possible.

In this material world, there is one big difference that makes it possible: Japan´s 1,290 practicing Natural Agriculture farmers are rarely alone at the market or in the field. That´s because the consumers are also members of Shumei; equally devoted to agriculture as a spiritual pursuit, they break out of their ordinary vocational roles to practice their version of CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). Being a customer means not just buying the food, but organizing a CSA, helping to weed the rice paddies, and sometimes becoming farmers themselves.

Shumei consumers could be seen as a captive market, but really it´s the very concept of a market turned on its head; the lines that traditionally separate consumer from producer all but dissolve.

What happens when modern food production becomes a community-wide effort? This series of profiles explains how it actually works. But first, to understand the paradigm shift behind Natural Agriculture, one must understand the world in which it exists, the world it intends to create, and how it aims to do so.

The Land

ìThe essence of Japan´s culture is its closeness to nature. Cooking Ö is simply the result of an acute awareness of the seasons.”

–Shizuo Tsuji, Japanese Cooking, A Simple Art (1980)

There has been no greater influence on Japanese food and agriculture than the land itself. This chain of islands stretches 2,000 miles between north and south tips. Like a zipper up the center lie unbudging mountains, some capped with icy peaks, others spreading into rolling plains just below the tree line. Their foothills amble toward all coastlines, leaving cities and people and farms to perch on the edge of the water. It is an undeniable geography, one that resists manipulation and instead insists that you play by its rules.

The first settlers arrived in Japan from the harsh, dry steppes of Northern Asia. This temperate climate´s lush hills were abundant by comparison, a change that inspired gratefulness that later formalized to become the Shinto religion. This worship of nature laid the groundwork for the profound reverence of food that defines traditional Japanese cuisine.

“In food and beyond, Buddhism´s values of purity and austerity became part of the national identity.”

Yet as the people multiplied, the limitation of the land showed itself. Because of the mountains only 29 percent of the tiny island nation is inhabitable, only about 16 percent arable. Further, that 16 percent seldom occurs in the stretches we know in California and the Midwest. In the beginning there were more wide open spaces, but increasingly land was tilled up the sides of hills and finite valleys–wherever possible. Instead of our flat fields stretching to the horizon, the Japanese vision of a farm starts with plots of roughly one-quarter acre. Even today, a full-time farmer might have only 3 acres total, and those split among various properties perhaps miles apart.

From these small plots of land grew a distinctive kind of agriculture that continues today. Labor is done largely by the proprietor and often by hand and small machinery–if not the weeding itself, then the spraying of herbicides. Animals have never made much sense, either as laborers or meat, since land is too precious to grow the grains to feed them. The nation´s diet was built on rice, which produces the most food energy per acre of any grain. (Some attribute Japan´s group-oriented culture to the predominance of rice: early on, its labor-intensive cultivation required that communities work together to raise the crop on which all life depended; an individual would not survive alone.)

Insularity over imports

In climates where weather allows, Japan´s precious fields might have to support two or three crops a year without rest. And yet they have never produced a surplus of food. Other countries in similar circumstances have traditionally relied on imports, but Japan´s island culture chose insularity over other nations´ goods.

It´s hard for Americans to understand what happens in the inherent absence of plenty. As MFK Fisher wrote in the introduction to Shizuo Tsjui´s book, ìWe have never been taught to make a little look like much, make much out of little, in a mystical combination of ascetic and aesthetic as well as animal satisfaction.”

But in Japan, food has always been truly precious. ìEven noblemen were expected to leave their bowls and plates absolutely clean,” Rafael Steinberg wrote in The Cooking of Japan, ìto the extent of tucking fruit pits and fish bones into the sleeves of their kimono.” That scarcity has translated into a deep, sensual appreciation of food. The Japanese diet is light and simple, with the spotlight on individual ingredients rather than complex concoctions made from them. In fact, a complete dish in a traditional meal might be no more than two black beans and a sliver of radish, or a bowl of broth with one tiny potato afloat.

This natural proclivity for simplicity was enhanced by Buddhism, which arrived from China in the Sixth Century. Its vegetarianism stripped rich animal fat from the diet, but temperate Japan could not replace it with what Shizuo Tsjui calls the ìtropical largesse” from the countries where Buddhism originated. In food and beyond, its values of purity and austerity became part of the national identity.

The Formative Periods

Buddhism was only one of the lasting influences of Japan´s early relationship with its powerful neighbor. Culinarily, the most obvious were tea and soybeans, but perhaps more influential was China´s cultural sophistication. When the T´ang dynasty collapsed and the age of Heian-kyo (now Kyoto) rose, Japan shut itself off from the world. Behind closed doors for centuries, this adopted refinement was the guiding principle of cultural development.

It translated into food in the forms of decoration and elegance. Kyoto court cuisine´s ingredients were still simple and largely the same as that of the peasant´s larder, but presentation became paramount. Here came the snow-white octopus sliced to accentuate its smoky purple edges, the garnish of three delicate radish threads or the curl of a fiddlehead presented like sculpture. For four hundred years, these aesthetics were fashioned into an art.

Eventually the Kyoto Empire was usurped by the samurai, but that only served to proliferate the sensual worship of food. Because samurai armies were comprised of both noblemen and commoners, the ideal moved across ranks and then to the masses.

European traders and missionaries arrived in the mid-16th Century, and their ways were (not surprisingly) interpreted as barbaric. But it wasn´t sloppy eating that had them ejected less than a century later, it was their politics. They were seen as a threat to the feudal system, which had harnessed the country´s agricultural wealth and was the key to the ruling class´s power. With their deportation the doors to Japan were closed again in 1638. This time not only could foreigners not enter, but the citizens could rarely leave.

When Emperor Meiji came to power in 1868, he opened the country´s doors to a world that was vastly different from what they had left two centuries earlier. Whereas the tide of international influence had elsewhere been gradual, here it swept in like a wave. For the first time in Japan´s history, red meat became a status symbol. Western clothes, Western food, Western thought–it was the beginning of the process that many now credit with the increasingly rapid death of the sophisticated but delicate indigenous culture.

©2003 The Rodale Institute 

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The biggest problem facing modern humanity is the Fossil Fuel Depletion Crisis. The following article is reposted from the August 30, 2003 edition of the Australian Financial Review. 

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Problems in the Saudi Oil Patch

Andrew Main

About three years ago, the Saudi national oil company, Saudia Aramco, decided to crank up production from a well in the middle of the Ghawar field, the biggest onshore oilfield in the world. The well, one of more than 200 in the field, was turning out 20,000 barrels of oil a day and the plan was to pump 40,000.

The wellhead pumps were quickly able to double their output, but engineers were startled to discover they were now getting a 50-50 mix of oil and water. So there was no increase in oil output at all.

Worse, the excess pumping caused the water table to rise and push the oil to one side, a problem known as coning.

Result: one largely useless well in the biggest onshore field in the world.

The news travelled fast even in Arabia Deserta, the Empty Quarter. Although one cone of water does not a busted oilfield make, it showed that water was rising more quickly to replace extracted oil than most experts had expected.

Ghawar’s porosity will allow an eventual extraction of about 60 per cent, or 69 billion barrels. Which means that with 45 billion extracted, the field is long past its peak, and at present production will last only another 16 to 17 years. But production in old wells is a bit like getting the last out of the tomato sauce bottle: you never quite get there, and it is bound to thin out.

So is the world running out of oil? Yes, although no one can accurately predict when it will. Is it the end of the world? No. Or it won’t be if the world’s scientists can arrange for us to switch our allegiance to renewable forms of energy.

After all, William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet by candlelight; the Duke of Wellington won the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 without the benefit of anything fancier than saltpetre and whale oil.

The first major use of crude oil for anything more than liniment was in the mid-19th century in Texas, and it was not even discovered in Saudi Arabia until 1938.

On any long-term perspective, oil production is a very recent innovation, but its life is expected to form a bell curve and we are very close to the top. Geophysicist M. King Hubbert put forward the bell curve idea in 1956, predicting that oil production in the main American states would peak around 1969. It did, and today the United States imports more than 80 per cent of its oil. In 1974, Hubbert predicted that worldwide oil production would reach its maximum in 1995, based on his estimate that the amount of ultimately recoverable oil was about 2000 billion barrels.

Oil industry futurologists are still divided over whether we have passed the “roll over” point, mostly because the Western world sharply moderated its oil consumption in the years following 1974.

There is a growing industry in discussing that issue, and two of the best-known players are retired geophysicists Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere.

Campbell, who lives in Ireland, and his French colleague share the concern that wherever we are on the curve, reserves are hard to calculate because producing countries play political games.

Campbell has noted that between 1985 and 1990, six members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries increased their total reserves by 300 billion barrels of oil without having found any significant new oilfields, to ensure bigger production quotas for themselves. That represents roughly 11 years’ global production at present levels.

According to Campbell’s calculations, by 1997 the world had used more than 800 billion barrels of oil. Oil use today is on a “bumpy plateau” at 24 billion barrels a year, so cumulative consumption had probably taken that number up to about 950 billion by late 2002.

So what about remaining reserves? They are somewhere between 1000 billion and 2000 billion barrels, depending on a range of factors, including what is classed as “regular oil”, rather than potential oil.

Industry bible the Oil & Gas Journal has calculated that at the end of 2002, global reserves of regular oil were 1212 billion barrels, which are being used up at about 66 million barrels a day. BP’s equivalent numbers are more pessimistic, seeing 1047 billion barrels of reserves and an exploitation rate of just under 74 million barrels a day.

The major tar sand and shale oil deposits around the world are sometimes classed as reserves but, as Campbell points out, “the cost of oil produced by these as yet uninvented technologies is likely to be astronomical by today’s standards”.

In other words, there are reserves between the two numbers, but their extraction cost is going to push the oil price sharply higher, and the safer number to go for is the lower one.

Laherrere told Weekend AFR from Paris last week that increases in non-oil energy use had pushed the “peak” of the curve out past 2015, a more optimistic picture than many recent estimates which put the top of the curve at 2005. But that does not alter Laherrere’s long-term pessimism about what he sees as a lack of desire among developed countries to constrain demand.

“The hard part is to predict demand and I don’t think I’m qualified to say what it will be, because it’s all about human behaviour, such as the love of [four-wheel-drives],” he says. “It’s about man’s irrationality, his egotism and his stupidity.”

The only policy that will prevent an early exhaustion of cheap oil is energy saving, Laherrere says. “The US Department of Energy sings the praises of improved technology to improve extraction rates from existing fields. But the fishing industry used to sing the praises of their new trawling methods, the result being that cod has all but disappeared from the North Atlantic.”

Like most energy Cassandras, Laherrere finds himself pointing a finger at the US, the biggest per capita oil user in the world. US citizens consume 24 barrels a year, compared with two in Asia (though the latter figure looks set to soar).

However, Laherrere believes the US will get a jolt from diminishing natural gas supply before oil becomes a serious worry. “Their problem will not be the top of the oil curve but the top of the natural gas curve in North America,” he says, referring to the fact that the US has to have natural gas pumped in from Canada and Mexico. “That problem is purely local and OPEC cannot be blamed, as it usually is, for oil problems.”

Coincidentally, a report from US energy commentator Tobin Smith last week notes that heavy American gas usage in the early months of 2003 (the northern winter) has left US underground storage levels 13 per cent below the five-year average, and there isn’t time to replenish them before the coming winter. (The US stores gas in old natural gas reservoir caverns.)

“For storage to reach the necessary 3 trillion cubic feet level by winter, producers need to pump about 13 billion cubic feet of gas daily between now and November,” Smith writes.

Even at peak times, he notes, the US can pump only 11 billion cubic feet a day: “We’re 2 billion cubic feet of gas SHORT [Smith's emphasis] per day at least, with production at declining levels.”

Smith predicts that US natural gas prices will jump from about $US6 per thousand cubic feet at present to between $US10 and $US15.

His report concludes that the national strategy for dealing with the emergency appears to be “pray for a mild summer and a completely abnormal winter”.

Reposted from The Nation. 

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The Importance of Losing

Jonathan Schell

The basic mistake of American policy in Iraq is not that the Pentagon-believing the fairy tales told it by Iraqi exile groups and overriding State Department advice-forgot, when planning “regime change,” to bring along a spare government to replace the one it was smashing; not that, once embarked on running the place, the Administration did not send enough troops to do the job; not that a civilian contingent to aid the soldiers was lacking; not that the Baghdad museum, the Jordanian Embassy, the United Nations and Imam Ali mosque, among other places, were left unguarded; not that no adequate police force, whether American or Iraqi, was provided to keep order generally; not that the United States, seeking to make good that lack, then began to recruit men from the most hated and brutal of Saddam’s agencies, the Mukhabarat; not that, in an unaccountable and unparalleled lapse in America’s once sure-fire technical know-how, Iraq’s electrical, water and fuel systems remain dysfunctional; not that the Administration has erected a powerless shadow government composed in large measure of the same clueless exiles that misled the Administration in the first place; not that the Administration has decided to privatize substantial portions of the Iraqi economy before the will of the Iraqi people in this matter is known; not that the occupation forces have launched search-and-destroy operations that estrange and embitter a population that increasingly despises the United States; not that, throughout, a bullying diplomacy has driven away America’s traditional allies. All these blunders and omissions are indeed mistakes of American policy, and grievous ones, but they are secondary mistakes. The main mistake of American policy in Iraq was waging the war at all. That is not a conclusion that anyone should have to labor to arrive at. Something like the whole world, including most of its governments and tens of millions of demonstrators, plus the UN Security Council, Representative Dennis Kucinich, Governor Howard Dean and this magazine, made the point most vocally before the fact. They variously pointed out that the Iraqi regime gave no support to Al Qaeda, predicted that the United States would be unable to establish democracy in Iraq by force-and that therefore no such democracy could serve as a splendid model for the rest of the Middle East-warned that “regime change” for purposes of disarmament was likely to encourage other countries to build weapons of mass destruction, and argued that the allegations that Iraq already had weapons of mass destruction and was ready to use them at any moment (within forty-five minutes after the order was delivered, it was said) were unproven. All these justifications for the war are now on history’s ash heap, never to be retrieved-adding a few largish piles to the mountains of ideological claptrap (of the left, the right and what have you) that were the habitual accompaniment of the assorted horrors of the twentieth century.

Recognition of this mistake — one that may prove as great as the decision to embark on the Vietnam War — is essential if the best (or at any rate the least disastrous) path out of the mess is to be charted. Otherwise, the mistake may be compounded, and such indeed is the direction in which a substantial new body of opinion now pushes the United States. In this company are Democrats in Congress who credulously accepted the Bush Administration’s arguments for the war or simply caved in to Administration pressure, hawkish liberal commentators in the same position and a growing minority of right-wing critics.

They now recommend increasing American troop strength in Iraq. Some supported the war and still do. “We must win,” says Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, who went on Good Morning America to recommend dispatching more troops. His colleague Republican John McCain agrees. The right-wing Weekly Standard is of like mind. Others were doubtful about the war at the beginning but think the United States must “win” now that the war has been launched. The New York Times, which opposed an invasion without UN Security Council support, has declared in an editorial that “establishing a free and peaceful Iraq as a linchpin for progress throughout the Middle East is a goal worth struggling for, even at great costs.” And, voicing a view often now heard, it adds, “We are there now, and it is essential to stay the course.” Joe Klein, of Time, states, “Retreat is not an option.”

“Winning,” evidently, now consists not in finding the weapons of mass destruction that once were the designated reason for fighting the war but in creating a democratic government in Iraq-the one that will serve as a model for the entire Middle East. Condoleezza Rice has called that task the “moral mission of our time.” Stanford professor Michael McFaul has even proposed a new Cabinet department whose job would be “the creation of new states.” The Pentagon’s job will be restricted to “regime destruction”; the job of the new outfit, pursuing a “grand strategy on democratic regime change,” will be, Houdini-like, to pull new regimes out of its hat. On the other hand, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which recently produced a report on the situation in Iraq, thinks a big part of the problem is bad public relations and counsels “an intense communications and marketing campaign to help facilitate a profound change in the Iraqi national frame of mind.”

These plans to mass-produce democracies and transform the mentalities of whole peoples have the look of desperate attempts-as grandiose as they are unhinged from reality-to overlook the obvious: First, that people, not excluding Iraqis, do not like to be conquered and occupied by foreign powers and are ready and able to resist; and, second, that disarmament, which is indeed an essential goal for the new century, can only, except in the rarest of circumstances, be achieved not through war but through the common voluntary will of nations. It is not the character of the occupation, it is occupation itself that the Iraqis are, in a multitude of ways, rejecting.

The practical problem of Iraq’s future remains. The Iraqi state has been forcibly removed. That state was a horrible one; yet a nation needs a state. The children must go to school; the trains must run; the museums must open; murderers must be put in jail. But the United States, precisely because it is a single foreign state, which like all states has a highly self-interested agenda of its own, is incapable of providing Iraq with a government that serves its own people. The United States therefore must, to begin with, surrender control of the operation to an international force. It will not suffice to provide “UN cover” for an American operation, as the Administration now seems to propose. The United States should announce a staged withdrawal of its forces in favor of and in conjunction with whatever international forces can be cobbled together. It should also (but surely will not) provide that force with about a hundred billion or so dollars to do its work-a low estimate of what is needed to rebuild Iraq.

Biden says we must win the war. This is precisely wrong. The United States must learn to lose this war-a harder task, in many ways, than winning, for it requires admitting mistakes and relinquishing attractive fantasies. This is the true moral mission of our time (well, of the next few years, anyway). The cost of leaving will certainly be high, just not anywhere near as high as trying to “stay the course,” which can only magnify and postpone the disaster. And yet-regrettable to say-even if this difficult step is taken, no one should imagine that democracy will be achieved by this means. The great likelihood is something else-something worse: perhaps a recrudescence of dictatorship or civil war, or both. An interim period-probably very brief-of international trusteeship is the best solution, yet it is unlikely to be a good solution. It is merely better than any other recourse. The good options have probably passed us by. They may never have existed. If the people of Iraq are given back their country, there isn’t the slightest guarantee that they will use the privilege to create a liberal democracy. The creation of democracy is an organic process that must proceed from the will of the local people. Sometimes that will is present, more often it is not. Vietnam provides an example. Vietnam today enjoys the self-determination it battled to achieve for so long; but it has not become a democracy.

On the other hand, just because Iraq’s future remains to be decided by its talented people, it would also be wrong to categorically rule out the possibility that they will escape tyranny and create democratic government for themselves. The United States and other countries might even find ways of offering modest assistance in the project. It’s just that it is beyond the power of the United States to create democracy for them.

The matter is not in our hands. It never was.