From the SynEARTH ARCHIVES originally posted in July 2002.

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Why America Is Failing?

Timothy Wilken, MD

The American political economic system is is classified by synergic science as a neutral system. Neutral systems require unlimited resources to grow and thrive.

Neutrality means you don’t need help from others. You are so rich that you can survive all by yourself. And, we Americans have been very rich for the last 100 years. Now I know some of you will scream, RICH! I am not rich. But really you are. You see we Americans have so much cheap energy we don’t even notice it. We modern humans have been sucking petroleum out of the ground as hard as we can for those 100 years. We don’t pay for it. We do pay for the straw, but not for the oil.

In 1981, Buckminster Fuller calculated the real cost of that oil, if we were paying for the oil itself and not the cost of sucking it out of the ground.

The real cost of one gallon of gasoline was $1000, 000. Correcting for inflation to 2001, that would be $2,000,000 a gallon of gasoline. How many gallons of gas did you use this month? Then consider the fact that most of our electricity is generated by burning petroleum, so how many gallons did you use to heat your home, or cool your home, or run your electric appliances and cook your food, and pump and heat the water for your bathrooms and laundrys?

I expect if you add it up, you would discover most Americans are billionaires.

Now we humans can only continue to waste such great wealth, if wealth is unlimited.

Guess what? Santa Clause is dead. We are running out of oil. The earth itself, and certainly the oil reserves of earth are finite. That means they are limited.

Lets take a moment to understand, how we got here.

There are three classes of life on Earth–Plants, Animals and Humans. The plants are an independent form our life. They can directly convert the unlimited sunlight into matter and energy for growth and reproduction. They have a neutral relationship.

The animals are a dependent form of life. They depend on ingesting the bodies of other plants or animals to obtain the matter and energy they need for survival. Good space is limited for the animals. They must compete. They have an adversary relationship with each other.

We humans are an interdependent form of life. We share our body with the animals and like them we depend on plants and animal food for our basic survival. But our human minds can learn and invent without limit and we can discover new tools and new ways to work together to solve our problems. We have the potential to develop a synergic relationship with each other. Synergy means we can work together. Sometimes you depend on me, sometimes I depend on you. The synergic way is the only way that will work for humans.

But along the pathway to synergic relationship, we humans got lost. Jesus of Nazareth told us 2000 years ago we should be synergists. We should love and help each other. But then humantiy got seduced by the the market place and what seemed like an unlimited world.

When America was founded in 1776, the North American continent provided relatively unlimited resources.  The early colonists were in the right place at the right time. The right place was the nearly empty continent of North America. Millions of acres of arable land and forests, filled with abundant water in millions of steams, rivers, and lakes and stocked with uncountable numbers of wildlife. This was further enriched with enormous reserves of iron, coal, copper, aluminum, zinc, lead, gold, silver, oil, and much more – all available for the taking.

The right time was 1776, by then the collective power of humanity’s time-binding had discovered, invented, and developed the tools and knowhow that created the mechanism of the Agricultural, Industrial, and Transportational Revolutions. The level of knowledge and technology available to the American colonists coupled with enormous North American reserves, provided them with cheap food, cheap power, and cheap transportation. And, the greatest gift was oil. It began in 1859, when Edwin L. Drake drilled America’s first oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania.

Thus, conditions were perfect for the success of human Neutrality. America would have the equivalent of unlimited resources for the next 150 years.

However, today things have changed. The North American continent is getting full. In 1776, there were less than a billion humans on the planet, today we are over 6 billion. We no longer have a limitless abundance of natural resources available for the taking. Our world of plenty is being reduced to a world of scarcity. In fact, petroleum already peaked in America in 1971. The world peak is estimated to occur somewhere between 2007 to 2012 (Oops! 2005).

Recently (during the summer of 2001 ), the electrical power crisis in California has drawn national and world attention to a shortage of crude oil and natural gas. These fossil fuels are currently the primary source of the cheap energy that powers our modern Industrial Civilization. If we are running out of crude oil and natural gas, as some of the best scientists and engineers in the Energy field are telling us,  we have big problems. 

Think back for a moment to the year 1801, only two hundred years ago, that was a time when there was no gasoline, no refined oil, no natural gas, and no electrical power derived from oil and gas. As a thought experiment, try to  imagine what life was like at the beginning of the 19th century. If you were transported back two hundred years, how would the lack of petroleum affect your lifestyle?

While we might accurately imagine the loss of cheap energy from petroleum, most of us would overlook the 70,000 products that are manufactured using petroleum as a raw feedstock. This includes plastics, acrylics, cosmetics, paints, varnishes, asphalts, fertilizers, medications, etc., etc., etc.. Now, in addition to our loss of cheap energy and the 70,000 products that you and I have come to depend on, imagine our sharing that impoverished Earth with over six billion other humans?

When the price of oil reaches $2,000,000 a gallon. How much oil will you use? Listen at the sounds as your automobiles sit in the driveway without gas, listen as all your appliances and electrical pumps all go silent. Not even the sound of running water. Nice and quiet, huh.

Now think of the physical work you will have to do to suvive. Think you might need help? Perhaps you really aren’t independent.

As things start to get scarce, the humans lose their option for Neutrality. Soon they have to learn to do without. They go without owning their own homes. They go without higher education for their children. They go without free time for recreation as they are forced to get a second job. Or, they sidestep back into the adversary world – they steal, embezzle, or defraud.

Today, within the United States, the very center of human Neutrality, we see declining quality of life, declining compensation for all workers, deteriorating nuclear families, and declining numbers of humans able to own their own homes. We see increasing mental illness and child abuse; ever escalating health care costs, and more humans without access to medical care. Examining today’s youth, we see declining numbers of college graduates, mixed with increasing drug and alcohol use; increasing suicide; casual sexuality and unwanted pregnancy.

And there are even bigger problems facing Americans and the rest of humanity.

Acid rain, ozone depletion, water and air pollution, toxic buildup, strip mining, deforestation, erosion & topsoil depletion; greenhouse effect, ice age, nuclear winter, el nino, and even asteroids threatening the planet. These big problems are invisible to indifferent governments and ignoring citizens. Whose problems are these anyway? In Neutrality, they belong to no one. They are certainly not mine. Something is wrong in Paradise When we humans institutionalized Neutrality over two hundred years ago, it was a great advance over Adversity, it dramatically reduced the pain and suffering for humanity.

 In the 18th century, Neutrality was a major advance for humankind. The neutral system gave individuals opportunities for great economic success. The birth of capitalistic economics greatly enriched the human condition. Neutral organization was more powerful than adversary organization. Neutrality did work well in the free world for many humans who inhabited it two hundred years ago. But that was then. …

Today, it is up to us. You and me. Our governments can’t help us. They don’t understand the problem. Our corporations can’t help us they don’t understand the problem. We can only rely on ourselves. Individuals of integrity will need to join together to build a new model of society that depends on co-Operation and abundance. And, by abundance I am referring to an abundance of integrity, intelligence  and responsibility. Then we can begin restructuring our society in ways that will lead to a relative abundance even within the finite world we inhabit.

Wake up America!

Wake up Humanity! We must learn to work together, or we will die separately.

 

You may have noticed that the price of oil is going up. That is because more and more humans are waking up to the reality of the Fossil Fuel Depletion Crisis. Here is an important essay reposted from Rolling Stone Magazine by way of the Energy Bulletin.

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WAKE UP Humanity!!

James Howard Kunstler

A few weeks ago, the price of oil ratcheted above fifty-five dollars a barrel, which is about twenty dollars a barrel more than a year ago. The next day, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York Times business section. Apparently, the price of oil is not considered significant news, even when it goes up five bucks a barrel in the span of ten days. That same day, the stock market shot up more than a hundred points because, CNN said, government data showed no signs of inflation. Note to clueless nation: Call planet Earth.

Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that
“people cannot stand too much reality.” What you’re about to read may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.

It has been very hard for Americans — lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring — to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency.

Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life — not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense — you name it.

The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don’t have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.

The term “global oil-production peak” means that a turning point will come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given year and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline. It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the top of the curve, the halfway point of the world’s all-time total endowment, meaning half the world’s oil will be left. That seems like a lot of oil, and it is, but there’s a big catch: It’s the half that is much more difficult to extract, far more costly to get, of much poorer quality and located mostly in places where the people hate us. A substantial amount of it will never be extracted.

The United States passed its own oil peak — about 11 million barrels a day — in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will continue to worsen.

The U.S. peak in 1970 brought on a portentous change in geoeconomic power. Within a few years, foreign producers, chiefly OPEC, were setting the price of oil, and this in turn led to the oil crises of the 1970s. In response, frantic development of non-OPEC oil, especially the North Sea fields of England and Norway, essentially saved the West’s ass for about two decades. Since 1999, these fields have entered depletion. Meanwhile, worldwide discovery of new oil has steadily declined to insignificant levels in 2003 and 2004.

Some “cornucopians” claim that the Earth has something like a creamy nougat center of “abiotic” oil that will naturally replenish the great oil fields of the world. The facts speak differently. There has been no replacement whatsoever of oil already extracted from the fields of America or any other place.

Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.

It will change everything about how we live.

To aggravate matters, American natural-gas production is also declining, at five percent a year, despite frenetic new drilling, and with the potential of much steeper declines ahead. Because of the oil crises of the 1970s, the nuclear-plant disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the acid-rain problem, the U.S. chose to make gas its first choice for electric-power generation. The result was that just about every power plant built after 1980 has to run on gas. Half the homes in America are heated with gas. To further complicate matters, gas isn’t easy to import. Here in North America, it is distributed through a vast pipeline network. Gas imported from overseas would have to be compressed at minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker ships and unloaded (re-gasified) at special terminals, of which few exist in America. Moreover, the first attempts to site new terminals have met furious opposition because they are such ripe targets for terrorism.

Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly understood by the public and even our leaders. This is going to be a permanent energy crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with the disruptions of climate change, epidemic disease and population overshoot to produce higher orders of trouble.

We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed conditions.

No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements.

The widely touted “hydrogen economy” is a particularly cruel hoax. We are not going to replace the U.S. automobile and truck fleet with vehicles run on fuel cells. For one thing, the current generation of fuel cells is largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural gas. The other way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would be electrolysis of water using power from hundreds of nuclear plants. Apart from the dim prospect of our building that many nuclear plants soon enough, there are also numerous severe problems with hydrogen’s nature as an element that present forbidding obstacles to its use as a replacement for oil and gas, especially in storage and transport.

Wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with “renewables” are also unrealistic. Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face not only the enormous problem of scale but the fact that the components require substantial amounts of energy to manufacture and the probability that they can’t be manufactured at all without the underlying support platform of a fossil-fuel economy. We will surely use solar and wind technology to generate some electricity for a period ahead but probably at a very local and small scale.

Virtually all “biomass” schemes for using plants to create liquid fuels cannot be scaled up to even a fraction of the level at which things are currently run. What’s more, these schemes are predicated on using oil and gas “inputs” (fertilizers, weed-killers) to grow the biomass crops that would be converted into ethanol or bio-diesel fuels. This is a net energy loser — you might as well just burn the inputs and not bother with the biomass products. Proposals to distill trash and waste into oil by means of thermal depolymerization depend on the huge waste stream produced by a cheap oil and gas economy in the first place.

Coal is far less versatile than oil and gas, extant in less abundant supplies than many people assume and fraught with huge ecological drawbacks — as a contributor to greenhouse Global Warming gases and many health and toxicity issues ranging from widespread mercury poisoning to acid rain. You can make synthetic oil from coal, but the only time this was tried on a large scale was by the Nazis under wartime conditions, using impressive amounts of slave labor.

If we wish to keep the lights on in America after 2020, we may indeed have to resort to nuclear power, with all its practical problems and eco-conundrums. Under optimal conditions, it could take ten years to get a new generation of nuclear power plants into operation, and the price may be beyond our means. Uranium is also a resource in finite supply. We are no closer to the more difficult project of atomic fusion, by the way, than we were in the 1970s.

The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world’s richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more international military conflict. Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world’s remaining oil supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to secure Iraq’s oil but to modify and influence the behavior of neighboring states around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. The results have been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in that part of the world are not something we can feel altogether confident about.

And then there is the issue of China, which, in 2004, became the world’s second-greatest consumer of oil, surpassing Japan. China’s surging industrial growth has made it increasingly dependent on the imports we are counting on. If China wanted to, it could easily walk into some of these places — the Middle East, former Soviet republics in central Asia — and extend its hegemony by force. Is America prepared to contest for this oil in an Asian land war with the Chinese army? I doubt it. Nor can the U.S. military occupy regions of the Eastern Hemisphere indefinitely, or hope to secure either the terrain or the oil infrastructure of one distant, unfriendly country after another. A likely scenario is that the U.S. could exhaust and bankrupt itself trying to do this, and be forced to withdraw back into our own hemisphere, having lost access to most of the world’s remaining oil in the process.

We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this predicament. President George W. Bush has been briefed on the dangers of the oil-peak situation as long ago as before the 2000 election and repeatedly since then. In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real and states plainly that “the world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary.”

Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other arrangements for the way we live in the United States. America is in a special predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a society in the twentieth century. Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot away and to replace them with suburbia, which had the additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.

Before long, the suburbs will fail us in practical terms. We made the ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway strips, fried-food shacks and shopping malls the basis of our economy, and when we have to stop making more of those things, the bottom will fall out.

The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high tech, not “services” like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming. This is no doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work. The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. Food production will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for decades. We can anticipate the re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring class. It will be composed largely of the aforementioned economic losers who had to relinquish their grip on the American dream. These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.

The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not survive far into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart’s “warehouse on wheels”won’t be such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The national chain stores’ 12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily be interrupted by military contests over oil and by internal conflict in the nations that have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods, because they, too, will be struggling with similar issues of energy famine and all the disorders that go with it.

As these things occur, America will have to make other arrangements for the manufacture, distribution and sale of ordinary goods. They will probably be made on a “cottage industry” basis rather than the factory system we once had, since the scale of available energy will be much lower — and we are not going to replay the twentieth century. Tens of thousands of the common products we enjoy today, from paints to pharmaceuticals, are made out of oil. They will become increasingly scarce or unavailable. The selling of things will have to be reorganized at the local scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter distances. It is almost certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy and far fewer choices.

The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the public realizes. If the “level of service” (as traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.

America today has a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of. Neither of the two major presidential candidates in 2004 mentioned railroads, but if we don’t refurbish our rail system, then there may be no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few decades from now. The commercial aviation industry, already on its knees financially, is likely to vanish. The sheer cost of maintaining gigantic airports may not justify the operation of a much-reduced air-travel fleet. Railroads are far more energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes, and they can be run on anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also far more economical to maintain than our highway network.

The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful and tumultuous. In many American cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis, that process is already well advanced. Others have further to fall. New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being oversupplied with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of declining energy supplies. Their former agricultural hinterlands have long been paved over. They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of necrotic suburbia that will only amplify and reinforce the cities’ problems. Still, our cities occupy important sites. Some kind of urban entities will exist where they are in the future, but probably not the colossi of twentieth-century industrialism.

Some regions of the country will do better than others in the Long Emergency. The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that it prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late twentieth century. I predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.

I’m not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for different reasons. I think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded behavior of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of individualism and the belief that firearms ought to be used in the defense of it. This is a poor recipe for civic cohesion.

The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems, from poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss. The Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them in operation at some level.

These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope — that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom. Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts.

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Visit James Howard Kunstler’s website

You may have noticed that the price of oil is going up. That is because more and more humans are waking up to the reality of the Fossil Fuel Depletion Crisis. Here is another essay reposted from the Energy Bulletin.

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Back to the Farm

Dan Crawford

When demand for energy exceeds what the world can supply, everything will begin unwinding, sending us back to local communities – or perpetual war

The word ìenergy” conjures up old memories of science class. But that’s only until the true value of energy to our daily lives is keenly felt. It’s easy to feel with a simple exercise: think of how to supply one’s own energy requirements.

When you do this, the word takes on much more than a new meaning; it embodies a mind-set focusing on efficiency and sustainability. The irony of this is striking, for energy is currently the world’s most wasted resource.

To understand, first see life for what it is: Life is simple. This may be difficult to comprehend at first. For many, life is very complicated by the roles played by materialism, debt and status, among other things. When simplicity is the focus, life is about survival only. Three needs are required for survival and they are: water, food and shelter.

The delusional world employs abstraction to meet these needs. Water comes from a tap. Food from grocery stores. Homes from mortgages. This abstraction allows society to focus on the extracurricular, like careers and consumption. The underlying significance of energy goes unnoticed until one takes a deeper look.

Magnifying past the abstract reveals a chain of dependencies. At every level, for every need, the common entity of energy is apparent. Without it, water cannot be pumped, filtered or treated. Food cannot be grown and its transport to the store is not possible. Cooking and heating would not exist.

For a person to supply all this energy themselves would be impossible. The amount of energy used day-in and day-out is staggering. The only way that society currently meets its total energy needs is through the harnessing of energy stored within fossil-fuels.

Without using this accumulated and stored source, the world would be a much different place. Imagine that world, where each individual must supply for their own needs, using their own hands to provide for their own water, food and shelter, their only source of energy coming from the digestion of food. The importance of careers would be lost, and materialism would have no place. Globalisation would not exist. Instead, belonging to a local community would become very important.

This of course is how communities once were, when modern technology did not exist–people lived within their energy means and energy was not something that was wasted indiscriminately. Planning and critical thinking were employed first before any actions were taken. Maximum efficiency was always the goal.

In today’s world, it is much different. All forms of energy are assumed to be both readily available and guaranteed. The only limiting factor is cost, which leads to the conclusion that unlimited money must mean unlimited energy. 

But interestingly enough, no government or private body has ever guaranteed energy. Society has made the assumption of a guarantee simply because the availability has been there for such a long time. Having gone unquestioned for so long, it is now so ingrained and accepted, the world has become completely dependent on technology, technology that only works if energy is available. When technology stops working, homes become non-functional and needs can no longer be met. The value of energy then becomes clear.

The law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed but only transformed. Most of the stored energy on this planet originally came from the sun. Some of these resources are non-renewable and finite. This is the case for fossil fuels. Continued use of fossil fuels eventually leads to depletion of that resource. A responsible society would make energy its top-priority and would maintain a stable source by prudently identifying limitations and addressing depletion issues before catastrophic problems can occur.

Looking at today’s world, a pattern of irresponsible energy management comes into clear view. Oil exploration peaked during the 1960s then steadily declined year-after-year thereafter. The consumption of oil, on the other hand, has steadily increased year-after-year from the beginnings of the Industrial Age. A study done by British Petroleum in 2004 revealed that, of 54 oil producing countries, 22 are already in decline and 14 others are entering decline, leaving only 18 to follow.

The world has passed a major milestone and is now setting out to explore the last remaining areas for this resource: Off-shore, polar-regions and protected reserves.

Logically, with the looming end of exploration, the end of new supplies follows. The issue, though, is not about running completely out. The problem occurs much earlier, when demand first surpasses supply.

At that point, a percentage of society will have to do without. As the demand grows and the supply declines further, the proportion doing without will only increase. The phenomenon is known as ìHubberts Peak” named after the geophysicist Marion King Hubbert who first documented its existence during the 1950s. The exact date when peak production of world oil will be passed is of little concern. The fact that needs will not be met and survival will be in question is a colossal one.

When one realizes that the fundamentals of the world are not based on reason makes for a very tough pill to swallow. The attractiveness of denial provides for an easy way out. To protect against this, society must be well aware of what denial is–an unconscious defence mechanism characterized by refusal to acknowledge painful realities, thoughts, or feelings. 

Even still, the true significance of energy will be lost on many: Energy is life, after all.

You may have noticed that the price of oil is going up. That is because more and more humans are waking up to the reality of the Fossil Fuel Depletion Crisis. The following essay was written by someone who currently works for a multi-national oil company, and wishes to remain anonymous. It is reposted from the Energy Bulletin.

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Life without Petroleum

Anonymous

If you are like most of the world, you believe that oil and gas are in neat little caves buried deep in the earth, just like the drawing in your 6th grade science textbook. Being rather sensible, you guess that oil companies drill and sink a pipe into the cave to suck out the black gold. It´s quite probable in your mind that when each well ìcomes in”, it spews oil all across the countryside; like James Dean in ‘Giant” or Jed Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies.

The average oil or gas well is drilled so deep that if we did not use thick drilling fluid to hold back the earth´s pressure, it would easily collapse and crush our drilling pipe. The typical well today has between 2,500 and 15,000 pounds of pressure in it, and is drilled with 3-4000psi fluid pressure. Did you know that 2,500psi of fluid pressure can cut through a piece of steel 1” thick in a few seconds? Did you know that the petroleum industry builds the worlds largest movable structures regularly? That these structures are so big they can routinely be seen from orbit on the ISS?

The technological achievements of the oil and gas industry have been tremendous. But as yet we cannot manufacture oil from raw materials to replace what is in the earth. We can extract it, but we cannot make it as economically as Mother Nature. Thus it is a NON-RENEWABLE resource; once gone, it cannot be replaced at similar cost and volume. It is literally like gold or diamonds; there is only so much of it available on our planet.

Now, assuming you have grasped this, let´s try and see if you can fathom the world situation. Currently, the big debate is whether the world is at the halfway point in oil and gas consumption, or ìPeak Oil Production” as it has come to be termed. Everyone agrees that in the early 1970´s, the United States hit national ìPeak Oil”, and we have been importing oil ever since. The debate now raging is whether the entire world has hit ìPeak Oil” already, or if it will hit in the next 2 to 5 years.

In the scheme of things, this debate is pointless. By the time we agree on the date, it will be upon us or have passed. What that means is that it will forever cost more and more for oil and gas. It will become scarcer and more valuable with every gallon or barrel we burn or use. To give you an idea of what this truly means, let´s build an example and have a look at the true reach of petroleum into someone´s life.

John D. is a lawyer in a large firm in Boston. He owns 3 cars; his wife drives a nice Lexus SUV, he owns a snappy Porsche and his baby girl drives a BMW to Brown University. John is conscientious – he takes public transportation and uses the firms´ limousine service whenever possible. But when in doubt, he motors into town in the Porsche. His wife drives to and from her aerobics and tennis classes, does the shopping, picks up and drops off the maid, the laundry and whatever else she needs to do in the Lexus. Baby girl basically uses her BMW to scoot home on weekends to see Mom, Dad and the boyfriend. All in all, this is the basic all-American family in 2005. You may be a bit below this economic model, but bear with me, as it will all equalize very rapidly.

To truly grasp how much petroleum impacts our lives, let´s put John D. in his driveway, dressed for work and standing next to his dear Porsche 911 Turbo.

John is wearing a nice suit and tie. Unfortunately, the suit is wool and polyester, the buttons are plastic as well as the zipper in the pants. Remove 25% of the material from his suit, all elastic and plastic stays, the buttons and the zipper. Why? Polyester, dacron, rayon, orlon – these are all petroleum based, man made fibers. All plastic is petroleum based, as is elastic. Better get rid of the waistband on his under shorts too while we are at it. Abruptly, our friend John is rather chilly, as what is left of his suit, pants, shirt and under shorts have fallen around his ankles.

John wears glasses with polycarbonate lenses when he reads, and plastic contacts when he is doing anything active. These also require petroleum for manufacture, and will have to be replaced with real glasses made from glass. Oops – the frames are unbreakable plastic – those will need to go as well. While we are subtracting, let´s toss out his credit cards (plastic), the heels from his shoes (polyethylene-based rubber), and his all-weather watchband (faux-leather that is actually plastic). And we better get rid of that driver´s license too – the lamination is made from petroleum, as is the ink. And let´s not forget the ink that his money is printed with – yes, the ink which most currency is printed with is also a petroleum based product. As John stands with what used to be a suit around his ankles, the only thing he has left that hasn´t disappeared or fallen to the ground is his cotton undershirt, and he is completely broke.

Embarrassed, John spins his nakedness around and reaches for the door of his carÖ..and now we can do an even more rapid deconstruction. Empty the gas tank of gas, remove all the oil from the crankcase of the engine, remove all the transmission fluid, dump the heavy weight gear oil from the differential, and bleed all the fluid from the brake system. Each of these fluids and lubricants is derived 100% from oil.

Oh! Let´s not forget to remove every smidgeon of grease from every wheel bearing, every U-joint and any other petroleum lubricant from the vehicle. Now we can move forward a bit more, and peel the paint off. Automotive paint uses petroleum (tolulene, xylene, etc.) as base material. We can remove the tires, the rubber bushings from underneath every piece of the car, the steering wheel cover, the dash cover, the seat covers, the carpet, the seat padding and any foam insulation, the dashboard and all the A/C vents, and each and every rubber gasket. The jute-based carpet padding can remain – it is all natural. The safety glass (remember that layer of plastic in safety glass?), the seat padding, all the undercoating, all the CD´s, and the radio can go too. But the radio too, you might ask?

Every single wire in every single electronic device relies on petroleum-based coating as insulation around the wiring. Remove this insulation, and all you have is a mass of silicon and copper wires shorting out in a pileÖÖso not only the radio, but every single wire in the car is coated by a petroleum product!

We are left with a pile of iron and copper, resting on a bed of jute padding. But if we just think a little more, we can reduce these as well. How is steel made? Iron ore is mined in Australia or other countries using massive vehicles BUILT and FUELED by petroleum products. The raw iron ore is then shipped by trains or trucks (BUILT and FUELED by petroleum products) to a ship (BUILT and FUELED by petroleum), which transports them to another country to be made into steel.

Once it arrives, the ore is unloaded by a bulk belt conveyer (BUILT and FUELED by petroleum), shipped from the dock to the ore processing mill by trucks (BUILT and FUELED by petroleum) where it is placed into a very hot furnace (which is fired by natural gas, a petroleum product) and smelted into pig iron. This pig iron is then shipped again by train or truck (BUILT and FUELED by petroleum) to a steel plant. Here, it is again melted in a special electric furnace, (electricity, generated by clean natural gas, a petroleum product) and made into various steel products which are then shipped to various destinations (using petroleum as FUEL).

If we truly want to account for the petroleum factor, steel cannot be made the way it is today. Aluminum is even more energy intensive, and that leaves us with a wad of copper wire sitting in the driveway, resting on our jute ‘rug´. John, now completely discombobulated, runs for the door of his home.

Unfortunately, the steel hinges and doorknobs are missing. When he touches the door it falls inward; his carpeting has disappeared, and the house is really hot and dark. It seems air conditioners are made from aluminum and steel, as are most appliances. Johns´ local Power Company uses clean, non-polluting natural gas to generate their electricity, so let´s kill all the power to the house. He is relieved to see his toilet still sitting there, but everything electronic and electrical has become a tangled mass of copper wires and circuit boards.

Water is spraying out of the ground, because John´s house was plumbed with POLY VINYL CHLORIDE (PVC) pipe, which is a 100% petroleum product. His furniture has turned into skeleton-like wooden frames, as the materials and padding used to make couches and chairs are long lasting, man-made fibers derived from petroleum. Rancid goop is oozing out of every cabinet in the kitchen, and everything that was in his refrigerator is slumped into a pile only a garbologist could be proud of. It seems that 90% of the packaging materials we use today are made from (you guessed it) petroleum.

His fresh vegetables and many of his canned goods are gone. John suddenly remembers reading an article about fertilizer and pesticide shortages. It seems these are also made almost exclusively from petroleum, and without them, modern mass-farming techniques are not viable. Crop yields are down, and the cost of trucking lettuce from California and Washington to other places is just too high.

And if you think this hurts, imagine everything you ever bought from a department store vanishing – because they were ALL IMPORTED from cheap-labor ìelsewheres” using petroleum as fuel.

Forget all plastic – it is 100% petroleum.

Toss out computers and electronics as we know them today – we don´t have the insulating materials to build them without petroleum. We don´t have the massive electrical capacity to build anything really high tech – the cost of oil or natural gas to fuel the power grid has become too high.

Space travel? Forget it – the hydrogen used to power the shuttle is derived from petroleum, and it will not fly without the electronics and guidance system. And all the aluminum and titanium and other special alloys each require extremely energy intensive manufacturing processes, which use too much electricity that comes from gas and oil fired power plants.

I hope this makes you think just a little about the true effects of declining petroleum.

I am not telling you that this will suddenly happen overnight. It might take 50 years, or it might take a century. I doubt it takes longer, because it only took North America, Europe and Australia a century to use the first half of the world´s oil and gas.

When you finally realize how pervasive it is in our everyday lives, you will begin to understand exactly how much the human race must change in order to do without it. The Mad Max scenario is not going to happen overnight, but if we do not begin to think about and actually plan our future, it may suddenly become a possible yet unwanted reality.

Hopefully, you have now removed your head from the sand and begun to think for yourself about the real magnitude of the crisis our children are facing.

As I have mentioned, we are currently working on a prototype help exchange system that will use the principle of GIFTegrity. One feature of that help exchange system will be ample opportunities for organized co-Operative sharing. This idea of co-Operative sharing was first described five years ago. From the SynEARTH Archives:

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Making the World Work

Timothy Wilken, MD

Today, most humans solve their problems as individuals or at best as nuclear families. They meet their individual needs with  individual actions. At best they may meet the needs of their nuclear family through family actions, but this is rarely more than a husband and wife both working. The extended family is an organizational pattern rarely seen in modern society.

This focus on individuality results in a massive loss of opportunity to co-Operative strategies that could result in greater efficiency and economy.

Individual Actions

Even though we humans are an interdependent class of life, we choose our actions based not on what we are, but on what we think we are. Today, modern humans are convinced they are an independent form of life. This deep belief in human independence means that most modern humans seek to meet their needs as individuals and make their choices independently of their fellow humans.

In our present culture humans meet their needs by purchasing products and services as independent individuals. In today’s fair market there are providers of products and services and there are consumers. Both the providers and the consumers for the most part think of themselves as independent and make their choices without great awareness of what others are doing.

In today´s marketplace, the providers and consumers meet only in the retail space. They have little or no direct relationship with each other. In this ignorance, both are, for all extent and purposes, blind and ignorant. The provider doesn´t know his consumers, let alone what they might need or when they might need it. And often the consumer don´t know the providers.

Bird’s Eye View

Let us imagine an aerial view of our community on an average evening at 10:00pm. Looking down we notice that within one square mile there are several small convenience stores open from seven to eleven. These small stores are all competing with each other as well as with larger supermarkets now staying open 24 hours in order to compete with them. At this hour of night there are only a few available customers to be divided up among all these providers.

Each store is paying one or more clerks to staff the store, plus the costs for lighting and heating each store. From our view above our community, it is obvious that most of the clerks could be sent home and most of the stores closed and still allow every customer seeking products and services at that hour to get what they needed. This would also produce enormous savings for this group of providers. To all stay open, the providers must pass the costs of doing business on to their customers, so this means that the prices in all of these stores is higher to subsidize this inefficiency.

Why is this happening? In today´s world we mostly ignore each other. After all, we are all independent. Each individual is supposed to look out for himself. So there is little communication between provider and consumer. The providers are keeping the stores open in hopes that someone will need something. If they were communicating with their customers, they would know when to be open and when they could close. They could then operate much more efficiently.

Now imagine that this same inefficient process is going on with many different kinds of products in every community in our nation and you start to sense the enormous amount of wasted time and energy.

Let’s return for a moment to our bird´s eye view of our community. Only this time let us imagine a time lapse video camera above our neighborhood. Imagine a family of four, two adults and two older teenagers in local college, having four automobiles. If we focus the video camera on the garage and parking area next to their home we would discover that there are times when there are no cars at home. This means that the family has four cars in use. Sometimes there is one car parked, so three cars are in use. Sometimes there are two cars parked, so two cars are in use. Sometimes there are three cars parked so only one car is in use. And sometimes we will find all four cars parked, so on these occasions this family has no cars in use.

Now careful analysis of our time lapse photography will reveal that this family is, on average, making use of only only 1.8 cars. This means that on average 2.2 cars are parked and not in use. Yet this family is making payments on four cars, paying insurance and taxes on four cars, and experiencing depreciation on the value of four cars whether the cars are in use or not. And, this is without considering the expense of operating the cars. Since most modern humans solve all their problems as individuals, they have chosen the most expensive solution possible.

Now if we move our time lapse camera higher, we discovery that this same phenomenon is occurring at every home in the neighborhood. If we examine all the homes within just a few blocks we discover that there are always cars in the neighborhood that are not in use.

Now, as we continue to watch from above, we see that often times the members of this neighborhood are going to the same place. They all go to the same supermarket. They all rent from the same video store. They use the same post office and drug store. As we watch we discover that often one individual will make the same trip to the same place maybe only a few minutes earlier or later than a neighbor. Again, we see that solving our problems individually means that we have chosen the most expensive option. We are doing this because in our neutral culture we don´t even know our neighbors let alone what their transportation needs are.

Now, if we move our aerial time lapse camera high enough to see the entire community, we can now see the parking lots at stores, supermarkets, shopping centers, places of work and schools. And again at any one time most of the cars are parked.

We also discover that one individual living at the north edge of the community is driving to the south edge of the community to his work in a retail store, while another individual is passes him going in the opposite direction, this individual lives on the south edge of the community and is driving to work on the north edge of the community to a similar job. Of course neither individual knows the other, or even how similar and paradoxical their situation is.

We could also analyze these same neighborhoods and discover that each garage contains a lawn mower and numerous tools that are only being used once every two weeks and all of these tools are expensive and require maintenance. I would imagine that in the neighborhood I live in, that on any given moment, ninety five percent of the tools in our garages are not in use.

Individual Actions are Expensive

Our current reality requires that we meet our needs as individuals. This guarantees that we will pay the highest prices for the products and services we need, and with the greatest waste of time and energy.

In any average week, if we total the time and expense involved in making multiple trips to the grocery store, pharmacy, hardware store, nursery, dry cleaners, video shop, post office, etc. etc. etc…, remembering to include the cost of individual transportation with each of us acquiring, maintaining, insuring, and operating our own cars, it would be hard to imagine a system that could be more expensive and inconvenient than our present reality.

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Co-OPERATION

While limited forms of cooperation are and have been used in the production of both products and services. Co-Operation is almost non-existent in product and service consumption. Almost all of us consume as individuals.

This has several effects. It insures that the prices we pay for products and services are much higher than they have to be. It further insures that the hidden costs we pay in time and expense related to simply acquiring needed products and services is also much higher.

Synergic relationship is the win-win relationship. We first discover synergic relationship in the microscopic universe. It is the basis of human cellular organization. Each of us has approximately 40 trillion cells organized within our bodies. These cells are related synergically, each acting in a highly co-Operative way.

Synergic relationship becomes available to human individuals because of our human intelligence. Our ability to invent and to understand new ways of doing things creates a new possibility for co-Operation which does not exist in the world of the plants and animals.

Co-OPERATION  -def-> Operating together to insure that both parties win and that neither party loses. The negotiation to insure that both parties are helped and that neither party is hurt.

Here are some examples of how co-Operative actions might be used in the future to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Co-Operative Videotape Rentals

The provider of videotape rentals operates much as do all small stores in our communities. The provider must select those available tapes which he feels will be popular and then make them available for rental. He keeps his store open long hours for the convenience of his customers, which travel on a regular basis to pick-up and drop-off tapes. This of course, results in lots of travel time and expense for the consumer, and when the consumer fails to find time to view the tape before the rental period expires, they are charged significant late fees.

Now imagine this alternative scenario: Instead of going to the video store you connect to the store via a web page on the internet. The available video tapes are listed with images from the movies, a list of actors, and even reviews.  You select the tapes you want to rent. And they are delivered to your home.

You have a locked delivery box outside your home in which you can retrieve new tapes when you order, and return for pick up when you are finished.

Co-Operative Consumption means that in addition to this scale of convenience, the provider and consumer now have a synergic and intelligent relationship. Using the same internet web page technology, the provider would query their customers as to which of the new releases of tapes they would be interested in renting. These choices could again be provided to the customer along with images from the videos, lists of actors, and reviews.

You could select one of three choices: Yes, Maybe or No.

This information would allow the provider to order an appropriate number of new tapes to fill the expected needs of their customers. Also, if your choices were popular and these tapes would be viewed many times, you could realize a rental at much lower cost. But, if your selection was unpopular, i.e. you were the only one wanting to see a particular tape, then the cost of rental would rise to could equal the full cost of purchasing the tape itself.

This is what is meant by an intelligent relationship with the provider.

The implications of this alternative are great in reducing the cost of rentals, increasing the likelihood that those tapes you are interested in are available, and with all the loss in time and inconvenience, let alone cost of picking up and dropping off tapes eliminated.

If this becomes the primary mechanism of videotape rental, the provider can close the retail Video Store in the high rent district and operate out of a low cost warehouse with delivery vans reducing the costs even more. Now imagine, how this same process could be be applied to many other products or groups of products. 

See a recent development: Netflix 

Co-Operative Neighborhood Garages

Imagine purchasing a membership in a modern community garage within easy walking distance of your home. This garage could have a variety of automobiles that would be available for your use anytime day or night. The garage would be clean, well lighted, and safe. It would be staffed 24 hours a day, the automobiles would always be clean, serviced and full of gas.

Using either computer or telephone you could reserve a car for your own personal use. The garage could easily have many different types of vehicles available to serve your particular needs. You could reserve a station wagon, sports car, utility vehicle, or limousine. The garage could also run shuttle services to those destinations that were commonly and frequently requested.

The number of automobiles needed to meet the needs of the members co-Operatively would be much fewer than the number needed for the same members individually. Total costs would be much reduced and the secondary advantages would be tremendous.

On those occasions when all the cars happened to be in use, transportation needs could be supplemented by taxies or rental cars arranged by the garage.

What would the cost of such a service be. Well first, realize that ìattached garage” now a part of almost every home could be eliminated or turned into additional living space. Your cost of membership would be reflective of you use of automobiles. I would expect most families would experience major savings. Those very heavy needs for an automobile would find the costs to approach the same costs as owning their own automobile.

Now there is no reason the Co-Operative Garage should just offer automobiles. It could also provide garden tractors, lawn mowers, and tools of all kinds. The extent and value of co-Operative action is limited only by your imagination.

See a recent development: City Car Share

Co-Operative grocery shopping

There are some existing prototypes for what I am recommending.

One is Peapod which is an online virtual grocery store now available on the internet. You connect to a web page on the internet where you select and purchase items you would like delivered to your home.

Peapod uses professional shoppers to go out to major supermarkets and drug stores in your community, and then delivers those items right to your door. You can experience Peapod for yourself. 

Now Peapod is an step in the right direction, but they are only going part of the way. They are just a typical business seeking to make money, but they have stumbled in the right direction. As their customer base stabilizes, they should soon be able to know exactly what their customers need and begin realizing more significant savings by purchasing scale. They could even dispense with the retail stores altogether and begin purchasing only wholesale. Most of these savings could be passed onto the consumers with the elimination of retail stores and expensive parking lots in high rent areas etc. etc. etc..

Also see: Albertsons Online Grocery

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What is the size of your Biosphere?

Science defines the term biosphere as that environmental zone wherein a living organism can meet its needs and act to survive.

How large is your current biosphere?

How far do you have to travel to meet your needs. If you get out a map and place your home in the center and draw a circle with a radius large enough to enclose all of the stores and businesses you visit to meet your needs. This is your biosphere. The larger your biosphere the greater your expences in time and energy will be to meet your needs. 

If you are seeking to save time and energy, then reduce the size of your biosphere.

Co-Operative actions are powerful methods to reduce the size of your biosphere. The savings individually and collectively are enormous. This will quickly translate into a major increase in the quality of one´s life and with an enormous savings in time and energy.

Time is the most valuable commodity that any human being can have.

By this I mean time spend doing what you want do do. This does not include time spent working to accomplish the goals of others, nor time spent transporting yourself or your family, nor the time spent physically acquiring the products and services you need to survive and enjoy life.

Integrated Communities

Another prototype for future living that takes advantage of co-Operative actions is the emergence of integrated communities. Integrated communities defined as those unitary environments structured so that the residents there can live, work, and recreate in one safe and pleasant place with all activities within easy walking distance. Integrated communites will offer their residents the greatest savings of time and expense. As integrated communities becomes available, I predict they will be so attractive that humans will move almost anywhere to live in them.