Closure of the Strait of Hormuz?

Michael T. Klare

Ever since December 27th, war clouds have been gathering over the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow body of water connecting the Persian Gulf with the Indian Ocean and the seas beyond.  On that day, Iranian Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi warned that Tehran would block the strait and create havoc in international oil markets if the West placed new economic sanctions on his country.

“If they impose sanctions on Iran’s oil exports,” Rahimi declared, “then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz.”  Claiming that such a move would constitute an assault on America’s vital interests, President Obama reportedly informed Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that Washington would use force to keep the strait open.  To back up their threats, both sides have been bolstering their forces in the area and each has conducted a series of provocative military exercises.

All of a sudden, the Strait of Hormuz has become the most combustible spot on the planet, the most likely place to witness a major conflict between well-armed adversaries.  Why, of all locales, has it become so explosive?

Oil, of course, is a major part of the answer, but — and this may surprise you — only a part.

Petroleum remains the world’s most crucial source of energy, and about one-fifth of the planet’s oil supply travels by tanker through the strait.  “Hormuz is the world’s most important oil chokepoint due to its daily oil flow of almost 17 million barrels in 2011,” the U.S. Department of Energy noted as last year ended.  Because no other area is capable of replacing these 17 million barrels, any extended closure would produce a global shortage of oil, a price spike, and undoubtedly attendant economic panic and disorder.

No one knows just how high oil prices would go under such circumstances, but many energy analysts believe that the price of a barrel might immediately leap by $50 or more.  “You would get an international reaction that would not only be high, but irrationally high,” says Lawrence J. Goldstein, a director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation.  Even though military experts assume the U.S. will use its overwhelming might to clear the strait of Iranian mines and obstructions in a few days or weeks, the chaos to follow in the region might not end quickly, keeping oil prices elevated for a long time.  Indeed, some analysts fear that oil prices, already hovering around $100 per barrel, would quickly double to more than $200, erasing any prospect of economic recovery in the United States and Western Europe, and possibly plunging the planet into a renewed Great Recession.

The Iranians are well aware of all this, and it is with such a nightmare scenario that they seek to deter Western leaders from further economic sanctions and other more covert acts when they threaten to close the strait.  To calm such fears, U.S. officials have been equally adamant in stressing their determination to keep the strait open.  In such circumstances of heightened tension, one misstep by either side might prove calamitous and turn mutual rhetorical belligerence into actual conflict.

Military Overlord of the Persian Gulf

In other words, oil, which makes the global economy hum, is the most obvious factor in the eruption of war talk, if not war.  Of at least equal significance are allied political factors, which may have their roots in the geopolitics of oil but have acquired a life of their own.

Because so much of the world’s most accessible oil is concentrated in the Persian Gulf region, and because a steady stream of oil is absolutely essential to the well-being of the U.S. and the global economy, it has long been American policy to prevent potentially hostile powers from acquiring the capacity to dominate the Gulf or block the Strait of Hormuz.  President Jimmy Carter first articulated this position in January 1980, following the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  “Any attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America,” he told a joint session of Congress, “and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

In accordance with this precept, Washington designated itself the military overlord of the Persian Gulf, equipped with the military might to overpower any potential challenger.  At the time, however, the U.S. military was not well organized to implement the president’s initiative, known ever since as the Carter Doctrine.  In response, the Pentagon created a new organization, the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), and quickly endowed it with the wherewithal to crush any rival power or powers in the region and keep the sea lanes under American control.

CENTCOM first went into action in 1987-1988, when Iranian forces attacked Kuwaiti and Saudi oil tankers during the Iran-Iraq War, threatening the flow of oil supplies through the strait.  To protect the tankers, President Reagan ordered that they be “reflagged” as American vessels and escorted by U.S. warships, putting the Navy into potential conflict with the Iranians for the first time.  Out of this action came the disaster of Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian airliner carrying 290 passengers and crew members, all of whom died when the plane was hit by a missile from the USS Vincennes, which mistook it for a hostile fighter plane — a tragedy long forgotten in the United States, but still deeply resented in Iran.

Iraq was America’s de facto ally in the Iran-Iraq war, but when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 — posing a direct threat to Washington’s dominance of the Gulf — the first President Bush ordered CENTCOM to protect Saudi Arabia and drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.  And when Saddam rebuilt his forces, and his very existence again came to pose a latent threat to America’s dominance in the region, the second President Bush ordered CENTCOM to invade Iraq and eliminate his regime altogether (which, as no one is likely to forget, resulted in a string of disasters).

If oil lay at the root of Washington’s domineering role in the Gulf, over time that role evolved into something else: a powerful expression of America’s status as a global superpower.  By becoming the military overlord of the Gulf and the self-appointed guardian of oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, Washington said to the world: “We, and we alone, are the ones who can ensure the safety of your daily oil supply and thereby prevent global economic collapse.”  Indeed, when the Cold War ended — and with it an American sense of pride and identity as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism in Europe and Asia — protection of the flow of Persian Gulf oil became America’s greatest claim to superpowerdom, and it remains so today.

Every Option on Every Table

With the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the one potential threat to U.S. domination of the Persian Gulf was, of course, Iran.  Even under the U.S.-backed Shah, long Washington’s man in the Gulf, the Iranians had sought to be the paramount power in the region.  Now, under a militant Shiite Islamic regime, they have proven no less determined and — call it irony — thanks to Saddam’s overthrow and the rise of a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, they have managed to extend their political reach in the region.  With Saddam’s fate in mind, they have also built up their defensive military capabilities and — in the view of many Western analysts — embarked on a uranium-enrichment program with the potential to supply fissile material for a nuclear weapon, should the Iranian leadership choose someday to take such a fateful step.

Iran thus poses a double challenge to Washington’s professed status in the Gulf.  It is not only a reasonably well-armed country with significant influence in Iraq and elsewhere, but by promoting its nuclear program, it threatens to vastly complicate America’s future capacity to pull off punishing attacks like those launched against Iraqi forces in 1991 and 2003.

While Iran’s military budget is modest-sized at best and its conventional military capabilities will never come close to matching CENTCOM’s superior forces in a direct confrontation, its potential pursuit of nuclear-arms capabilities greatly complicates the strategic calculus in the region.  Even without taking the final steps of manufacturing actual bomb components — and no evidence has yet surfaced that the Iranians have proceeded to this critical stage — the Iranian nuclear effort has greatly alarmed other countries in the Middle East and called into question the continued robustness of America’s regional dominance.  From Washington’s perspective, an Iranian bomb — whether real or not — poses an existential threat to America’s continued superpower status.

How to prevent Iran not just from going nuclear but from maintaining the threat to go nuclear has, in recent years, become an obsessional focus of American foreign and military policy.  Over and over again, U.S. leaders have considered plans for using military force to cripple the Iranian program though air and missile strikes on known and suspected nuclear facilities.  Presidents Bush and Obama have both refused to take such action “off the table,” as Obama made clear most recently in his State of the Union address.  (The Israelis have also repeatedly indicated their desire to take such action, possibly as a prod to Washington to get the job done.)

Most serious analysts have concluded that military action would prove extremely risky, probably causing numerous civilian casualties and inviting fierce Iranian retaliation.  It might not even achieve the intended goal of halting the Iranian nuclear program, much of which is now being conducted deep underground.  Hence, the consensus view among American and European leaders has been that economic sanctions should instead be employed to force the Iranians to the negotiating table, where they could be induced to abandon their nuclear ambitions in return for various economic benefits.  But those escalating sanctions, which appear to be causing increasing economic pain for ordinary Iranians, have been described by that country’s leaders as an “act of war,” justifying their threats to block the Strait of Hormuz.

To add to tensions, the leaders of both countries are under extreme pressure to vigorously counter the threats of the opposing side.  President Obama, up for re-election, has come under fierce, even hair-raising, attack from the contending Republican presidential candidates (except, of course, Ron Paul) for failing to halt the Iranian nuclear program, though none of them have a credible plan to do so.  He, in turn, has been taking an ever-harsher stance on the issue.  Iranian leaders, for their part, appear increasingly concerned over the deteriorating economic conditions in their country and, no doubt fearing an Arab Spring-like popular upheaval, are becoming more bellicose in their rhetoric.

So oil, the prestige of global dominance, Iran’s urge to be a regional power, and domestic political factors are all converging in a combustible mix to make the Strait of Hormuz the most dangerous place on the planet. For both Tehran and Washington, events seem to be moving inexorably toward a situation in which mistakes and miscalculations could become inevitable.  Neither side can appear to give ground without losing prestige and possibly even their jobs.  In other words, an existential test of wills is now under way over geopolitical dominance in a critical part of the globe, and on both sides there seem to be ever fewer doors marked “EXIT.”

As a result, the Strait of Hormuz will undoubtedly remain the ground zero of potential global conflict in the months ahead.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. His newest book, The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources (Metropolitan Books), will be published in March. 

Copyright 2012 Michael T. Klare

2012 Forecast: Bang and Whimper

There’s a lot to be nervous about, even if you don’t subscribe to the undercooked Mayan apocalypse lore moving through the gut of the Internet like a Staphylococcus-infected tamale. The casual observer might say that nothing seemed to give on the world scene in 2011 despite the Fukushima meltdown, the Arab Spring uproars, the train wreck of European finance, the disappearing act at MF Global, and the assorted injuries done to the Kardashian brand by the giant walking dildo Kris Humphries.

I demur. On close examination, the industrial world underwent complete zombification in 2011. Its member states and their institutions are now lurching across the stage of history like so many walking dead. Whole European nations are dead, their citizens squirming around the ruined bones of failed speculative condo projects, housing estates, and luxury hotels like botfly larvae. The USA lies in complete moral ruin despite the exertions of ten thousand evangelical preachers in dusty back-road tilt-up chapels from Texas to Carolina, several new museums of Creation Science, and the shining example of former Senator Rick Santorum. Just look at how we behave, from the cloakrooms of Congress to the piercing parlors of West Hollywood to the 7-Elevens of suburban Maryland: a nation of thieves, racketeers, reality TV sluts, wannabe road warriors, light-fingered gangsta-boyz, and crybabies living in an anomie-drenched decrepitating demolition derby landscape of failure. When everybody is a zombie, whose brains are left to eat? Echo answers…. On to the predictions for 2012 then.

The biggest political shock awaiting us is the massive disruption of the major party nominating conventions next summer, when thousands of angry citizens descend on Tampa and Charlotte demanding a reality test. The parties will attempt to go about their ritual business, ignoring the mischief outside the convention centers, and both parties will make the mistake of siccing the cops on the protestors. The result will be a much bigger mess than the one I personally witnessed on the streets of Chicago, 1968, when the party hacks anointed the grinning sell-out Hubert Humphrey to run against Ole Debbil Nixie. Just before getting tear-gassed on Michigan Avenue that night, I saw some kid hoisting a sign that depicted the nominee with a Hitler mustache over the epithet: Mein Humph! It made my night, despite the subsequent retching in the gutter.

The two major parties are completely bankrupt zombie organizations and this election may be their last stand – if they even survive the conventions. Neither of them can come to grips with the reality-based issues of the day: epochal financial and economic contraction, peak energy (and many other resources), climate change, the absence of the rule of law in banking, and generational grievance – or, perhaps more to the point, the manifestations of these giant trends as presented in unemployment, debt slavery, foreclosure, bankruptcy, homelessness, hunger, and X-million family tragedies. Both parties can only promise the return to a bygone status quo that is largely mythical.

President Obama, the putative “progressive” – spokesman of the Ivy League, Silicon Valley, Lower Manhattan, and all the other precincts where “folks” imagine themselves to be advanced thinkers – can’t even wrap his mind around the simple fact that we will never be “energy independent” if we think that means running 260 million cars and trucks, no matter how many algae farms we pretend to invest in. Here is man who ought to know better and either doesn’t, or is lying about it. He has other failures to answer for, too. Why, following the Citizens United decision in the Supreme Court, did Mr. Obama not prompt his party to sponsor federal legislation (or a constitutional amendment) that would redefine a corporation as not identical in “personhood” to a human being? Why does he still employ an Attorney General who has not started one prosecution for financial misconduct amid a panorama of arrant swindling and fraud? (Ditto: heads of the SEC, CFTC, etc.) And why did he not object loudly to the provision in the latest defense appropriations bill that allows for the capricious arrests and indefinite detention of anyone in the USA on suspicion of “terrorism?” Does this graduate of Harvard Law remember what habeas corpusmeans?

A lot of voters projected on Mr. Obama some notion of supernatural brilliance – our Hollywood fantasies are rife with wishes to be saved, and therefore redeemed, by our former victims – but he turned out to have a pedestrian mind. Could he possibly believe we have “a hundred years of natural gas” in the ground? Or that we’re in a position to ramp up another cycle of industrial economic “growth?” Or that we can continue the web of cruel rackets that passes for medical care in this country? When the Democratic Party re-nominates Obama, it will be sealing its death warrant, and it will be on its way to the same cosmic vacuum where the memory of the Whigs lingers on.

Meanwhile, the Republicans labor to convert themselves into the party of corn-pone Nazism with all their unconcealed lust to push everybody around under the plastic eagle rubrics of “Freedom” and “Liberty.” Look at the dismal lineup of morons, hypocrites, and religious fanatics arrayed for the Iowa caucus: a doctor who is also a creationist!? A leveraged buyout artist! A grifter fresh from K Street! A lady Christian theocrat wholly owned by the “dominionist” New Apostolic Reformation cult! A George W. Bush imitator showing symptoms of early onset senility! The whole posse is preoccupied with things supernatural. And being so dedicated to things unreal, they’re the prime representatives of the suburban clusterfuck, who will do anything to keep that obsolete machine running, even if it means national suicide, because they lack the brains to understand where history is taking us and what the mandates of reality are shouting at us about the urgent need to reorganize American life. They are also the vassals of corporate despotism – where the Democrats are mere footservants. They masquerade as “job creators,” but they promote the off-shoring of every activity that corporate America can shed in its quest for ever-greater executive compensation. The lip-service they pay to “freedom” is belied by their intent to control everybody’s personal life, commoditize the public interest, and sell out their grandchildren’s future for a few extra rounds of golf.

I think this gang, too, will be sent packing by the mobs of 2012. I have a nagging intimation that some third party candidate will emerge. The two personalities I keep seeing in that role are Howard Dean and Michael Bloomberg. Both of them are imperfect, but both of them are clear-headed and action-oriented, and I have a feeling that both of them are stewing in the background over the spectacle of idiocy, inertia, and dithering they see at every political compass point. Maybe somebody else will crawl out of the woodwork. I’ve said before in the weekly blog that conditions could deteriorate so badly that a Pentagon general might have to step into national leadership just to keep the grocery stores supplied with basic rations – but that is an outcome in my personal asteroid belt of  probabilities.

Whatever party ends up running things, and whomever fronts it, is going to be in for a helluva wild ride. The USA is diving into an economic depression that will make the 1930s look like a Busby Berkeley production number. Compressive contraction will have its way with us, whatever Ben Bernanke thinks. There will simply be less activity of the kinds we’re used to – Big Box shopping sprees, hamburger sales, theme park visits, house closings, you name it – than our hypertrophic system requires to keep its own destructive momentum going. Instead, the whole thing will just topple over, inert, like a 99-cent gyroscope giving into the forces of entropy. There will be a lot of bewildered, angry, dispossessed people from sea to shining sea. Not a few of them will “act out,” that is, start breaking things, stealing things, targeting easy prey, hurting bystanders, and even tangling with police. Personally, I don’t believe in the internment camp meme so popular among the doomer paranoiacs, but surely a lot of people will be cooling their heels in some slammer – while many other miscreants will just get away with crimes against persons and property.

The global banking system was on death-watch all through 2011. Somehow the various doctors in the central banks and finance ministries were able to muster enough accounting legerdemain to give the appearance of a system still showing a pulse. But in a compressive debt deflation, there are only so many accounting tricks you can pull off as money (and wealth) literally disappears down a cosmic worm-hole. In Europe, the process has moved from the margins toward the center. The people of Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Belgium will have less income, fewer government services, lost wages and pensions, less comfort than they have had for a couple of generations. Meanwhile, France is drowning in bad paper and the German banks are choking on it. There is really only one plausible outcome and that is default. The reckoning of the bondholders is at hand. Everybody will get poorer simultaneously – and if not, there will be not just regime change but civil war and revolution. The fantasy of a fiscal union in Europe is impossible because it means two things: that Germany will have to issue orders to everybody else; and that Germany would have to pick up the tab for everybody else while telling them what to do. Both are intolerable and implausible. Let’s just think of the Euro experiment as an interesting side effect of the peak energy era… now drawing to a close.

These professional economists with their jabber about QEs and “financial repression” and bond-term “twists” and debt-to-GDP ratios are missing the point. The advanced industrial nations will not be re-jiggered onto any “growth” runway. Rather, we’re entering the rutted wagon-road of de-industrializing and un-advancing. What awaits us in a “time-out” from hyperbolic technological progress. Forget about Ray Kurzweil’s nanobot nirvana. That is not in the cards. Instead, wrap your mind around life in an economy organized around farming, with a much sparser distribution of big urban centers, and far fewer people overall. Don’t imagine for a moment that your grandchildren will be zinging across the landscape in electric cars sampling one theme park after another while “networking” with “friends” on cyborg social networks implanted in their brain jellies. Think of them grooming their mules in the summer twilight. Anyway, you get the picture: everything that the finance ministries and treasuries and central banks are affecting to do is mere shadow theater performed in support of wishful thinking.

The question, then, is what kind of hardship and disorder will attend our journey out of the industrial era into post-technological age we are entering. Will we just turn the world into a Michael Bay movie and blow everything up? Or will we make some graceful descent and retain what is really best about the human spirit?

2012 will be the year of internal strife in these “advanced” nations, of people fighting over the table scraps of modernity among their own, in their own backyards, a desperate sorting out of the remnants. I don’t think we’ll see fighting between the European nations until the internal conflicts are resolved and that will take a few years.

The hot-spots for 2012 are very likely to be in the Middle East. You already know that. What could be more obvious than the tinderbox character of that region? Islamic extremism is poised to take over governments (and armies) in Egypt, Syria, Libya, possibly Algeria, and probably Pakistan.  Iran lost its mind decades ago and seems determined to dominate the region by means of a strategy that can only get it into trouble (and perhaps the whole world if it goes really badly). Saber-rattling is one thing; making an actual move something else. Block the Straits of Hormuz? Not if you don’t want Teheran to turn into an ashtray. That may happen anyway if Iran rattles a nuclear saber. Germany, France, Britain, and Italy, all struggling with terrible problems at home, would breathe a sigh of relief if the mullahs were chastened. The chatter around the Web about an Israeli preemptive attack never ceases.

But it is a possibility.

Oh, and don’t forget Turkey. Formerly the “sick man” of Europe, Turkey has become strangely resurgent, prompting some recollections that the Ottoman Empire actually administered over much of the Middle East until 1914, and not with complete incompetence, either. They just sort of imploded from empire fatigue, which is not the worst way to go down, if history is taking you there anyway. But empires come back, too, and what passes for Turkey today is a polity that in one incarnation or another has been around since the ancient Greek days, and was, for quite a long while, Rome Release 2.0.

Don’t be surprised if some hostilities break out between Turkey and Iran, since a battleground named Iraq lies between them. Iraq is a basket-case despite an immense reserve of oil under its sands, and having had the US military babysit it for eight years. The last American combat units left Iraq this fall, but there are still plenty of US soldiers there, maintaining our garrisons and keeping an eye on things. The question is: can they control what the Kurds do in the north, and whatever meddling Iran engages in around the Basra oil region in the South? These American support troops remaining in Iraq could find themselves looking like a ham-and-cheese sandwich between a lot of crusty mischief north-and-south. The Turks have already had a dustup or two with Syria lately – Syria occupies a big wedge between Turkey, Iraq and the Mediterranean Sea – and Turkey will take a dim view of that nation falling into the hands of Islamic extremists if Assad gets booted.

All bets are off in Egypt. Anything can happen there.

The dangerous position of Israel vis-à-vis all these quarreling players is probably as bad as it has been in two generations. An attack by a neighbor or getting caught in a crossfire between neighbors would stimulate a lusty response, and perhaps World War Three. As if the world needed this added aggravation. It makes my kishkas ache just to think about it. Sometimes I wonder why the whole Israeli nation doesn’t just pack up and move to Nebraska.

2012 is the year that China proves to be a mortal nation and rolls over with a very bad case of the vapors. Their banking system is a sham. Their property bubble is a fiasco. Their government has no formal legitimacy and will install a new leadership group this year, while exports crash and mass factory layoffs happen. There will be a lot of pissed off people in China, and they may express themselves politically in ways that have seemed unthinkable for decades. The aura of social control looms large in China, but an aura is a light garment not recommended for stormy political weather. 2012 could be the year that China begins its journey into a “Balkanized” collection of smaller autonomous parts, which is the big fat trendline for all the nations of the world, including the USA.

It is hard to think about the bizarre case of India, a nation with one foot in the modern age and the other in a colorful hallucinatory dreamtime. Their climate-change related problems are doing heavy damage to the food supply. Their groundwater is almost gone. The troubles of the wobbling global economy will take a lot pep out of their burgeoning tech and manufacturing sectors. It wouldn’t be surprising if these travails prompted distracting hostilities with its failed-state neighbor, Pakistan. Pakistan, with its inexhaustible supply of Islamic maniacs could easily start a rumble with some crazy caper like the Mumbai hotel assault of two years ago, but this time India would answer with a heavy cudgel, perhaps even a nuclear sortie designed to neutralize Pakistan’s dangerous toys at a stroke. And that would be that. Like cleaning out an annoying neighborhood crack house. It’s not a very appetizing scenario, but what else can you do about failed states with nuclear bombs?

Turning to Japan….That sore beset kingdom is suffering all the blowback of modern times at once: the Godzilla syndrome up in Fukushima; a demographic collapse; an imminent bond crisis; the collapse of export market partners; and a long, agonizing death spiral of its banks. I stick by a prediction I tendered back in March, after the deadly tsunami: Japan will decisively opt for a return to pre-industrial civilization. Why not? The rest of the world will be dragged kicking and screaming to the same place. Let Japan get there first and enjoy the advantage of the early adapter – back to an economy of local, hand-made stuff, rigid social hierarchy, folkloric hijinks in whispering bamboo groves, silk robes, and frequent time outs for the tea ceremony.

Russia? The big bear might have just sat out another decade and enjoyed its remaining fossil fuel supply, but the temptation to project power is a demanding habit, so they make all sorts of noises about watching Iran’s back – though mutual hatred abounds – and generally rushing into the power vacuum occupied by a US with dwindling mojo. There were stirrings of political discontent just  few weeks ago, after the rigged early rounds of national elections, and who knows where that will lead. Vlad Putin has held things together there impressively after the meltdown of the 1990s, but apparently the tranquil veneer is thin. Except for two big cities, the sprawling nation is broke and decrepitating, with little to offer the world but oil and gas – not an inconsiderable offering, but one with certain limits especially as they drain their oil fields for export cash. The rule of law is also pretty sketchy there. The government, as ever, is a kind of gangster affair, only this time one that allows some people to get really rich, not just connected. Their 70-year experiment with Marxian dogma has probably put them off ideology for a few centuries to come, which means less money spent on prisons for people with independent thoughts and more for call girls and home furnishings. I imagine that Putin will maintain his grip through the year. The Russians will appreciate relative order more when they see a few other countries devolve into internal conflict.

I don’t see much action around South America this year. Some Americans are already fleeing to Argentina. Perhaps they’ll enjoy it, but there is always the menace of property confiscation, and worse. Brazil will continue to appear vibrant while it grows more population, shoving it toward eventual ruin. They will see setbacks in the development of their deep-sea oil due to an international shortage of investment capital.

Mexico’s fortunes depend on its oil industry, Pemex, which faces remorseless depletion. Revenue from oil production and (dwindling) exports can’t hope to keep up with continuing population growth (and ever more poverty). These trends suggest a continued loss of control for the central government and more territorial fighting among the drug gangs and other criminal mafias. As long as all those loose heads roll on the south side of the Rio Grande the US will just tut-tut off to the side. But if the gangs get bold and start venturing cross border to make mischief we will make like Woodrow Wilson did and send the regular army down to spank them. It would be a satisfying diversion for that portion of the US demographic that enjoys Ultimate Fighting on TV, though it won’t get them their job back at the Pontiac plant.

The global oil picture is not so reassuring. The fragility of our supply is simply unnoticed by commuters enjoying Lady Gaga on their iPods. Meanwhile, our politicians retail fantasies of endless domestic reserves, which is total horse shit. Global exports are in remorseless decline, apart from geopolitical fissures and strains that could just paralyze allocation cold. If a hot war breaks out in the Middle East, you’ll see the American supermarket shelves empty in three days. Won’t that be fun. Note, too: the manias over shale oil and shale gas will reveal themselves as just more bubbles in a long cavalcade of bubbles, and both will begin to founder on a shortage of investment capital. The shale plays will prove to have been a national self-esteem-building program, not any part of an energy policy.

The abiding question as we turn the corner into the New Year is: how come Jon Corzine is still at large? (Not to mention Angelo Mozilo, plus the entire executive floor of Goldman Sachs, and about 5000 other assorted Wall Street grifters still on the loose.) There is plenty of dire talk that the collapse of MF Global, and the shenanigans around its demise involving the evaporation of segregated accounts, has gravely and permanently damaged the entire investment industry, but especially the commodities funds, who can no longer depend on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to honestly clear trades and regulate behavior. The whole affair, and the thundering silence from the oval office, makes Barack Obama seem not just inept but somehow complicit in the looting of America. As if he needs another mark of discredit in his record of consistent fumbling. There are signs that a lot of people who still have something resembling money invested in various funds will go to cash in the weeks ahead, including under-the-mattress style. The distrust and paranoia is palpable now, with the frenzies of Yuletide bygone for another year. After all, why trust banks, especially the TBTF monsters. Such a mass move could take the starch even out of highly manipulated equity markets.

Nemesis may have her day, though. Jamie Dimon might have just gone a swindle too far for the fates to ignore him another year. JP Morgan looks to be in a peck of trouble for its role in the confiscation of MF Global accounts, not to mention its hijinks in the precious metals markets. The impudence of these rascals! In a nation when all sorts of people are murdered every day for little more reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, is it not a wonder that some poor swindled Grampa with nothing left to live for has not tossed a Molotov cocktail through the window of a Wall Street watering hole known to be frequented by banking poobahs? Perhaps this sort of action awaits us in 2012.

Longtime readers of this blog know how much I love predicting the Dow Jones Industrial Average to crash down to 4000 every year. I never disappoint – though I am often disappointed. In 2011, the SP index managed the delightful trick of finishing a fraction below its previous January kickoff. The stock markets have churned in range-bound purgatory for a decade while the price of a jar of pickles has multiplied four-fold. Applying the calculus, and given the pickle-DOW differential, I’d say my call was actually pretty good. In any case, this year I change the tune slightly: I predict the DJIA will go to 4000, with the catch that the number is only a way-station to 1000, which it will hit in 2014. We may be short of snow here in the Northeastern US – thanks to La Nina – yet not short of confidence that the mills of the Gods grind slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.

Finally, look for the publication of my next book round July 2012, a non-fiction work titled Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation… from The Atlantic Monthly Press. In a week, I begin work on World Made By Hand3.

Good luck to you in 2012, and report any suspicious characters adorned with ear-plugs, quetzel feathers, and carrying obsidian knives to your nearest office of Homeland Security.

Why We Must Make Peace

Timothy Wilken, MD

Capitalism and the Great Market are features of Neutrality. Neutrality requires unlimited resources. Humanity has had unlimited resources in our endless supply of fossil fuels.

Our present economic crash, which is now being compared to the Great Depression, is the result of approaching end of fossil fuels. As of August 2001, 23 out of 44 nations [representing 99% of world oil production in 2000] have passed their production peaks.

Most of humanity is unaware of this approaching crisis, but the governments of the world are aware and are now acting to control the last of the fossil fuel on the planet. This of course is the real purpose of America’s coming war with Iraq. Our leaders are trying to secure control of the Iraqi oil.

Saddam Hussein has threatened to set the Iraqi oil fields on fire if pressed too hard in the coming war. During the Persian Gulf War from the fall of late 1990 to early 1991, Iraq embarked on a systematic destruction of Kuwait’s oil industry, and Iraqi forces set fire to 789 individual Kuwaiti oil wells. It took Red Adair, hundreds of millions of dollars, and over 11 months to put out the fires. How many million barrels of oil were burned is unknown. The attendant results of the fires were catastrophic both from an economic and ecological standpoint.

Recently the workers of Venezuelan oil industry have gone on strike. Prior to the strike Venezuela was exporting 3 million barrels of oil a day to the United States. Now they are exporting none. They have even started to import gasoline because the autos and trucks of their nation are running dry.

This past friday oil closed at $32.72 a barrel. If things don’t go well in the new Gulf war, and Hussein does successfully torch the oil fields, the price of oil could triple.

This would mean gasoline at the pump could rise to over $5 a gallon and the cost of energy four powering our homes and businesses could triple.What would the effect of such a tripling have on the economy and our personal lives?

As I said at the top of this essay. Neutrality is obsolete. We humans need to move on the next stage of our evolution. We need to reorganize synergically.  We all need air, water, food, shelter, security, love and meaning. We humans are all the same. We are the same species.

We need to make peace. If we humans won’t work together to solve our mutual problems, then we will perish separately fighting like animals.

What’s wrong with wishing others a Merry Christmas?

Timothy Wilken MD

Recently it has become politically incorrect to wish your fellow humans a Merry Christmas. We are supposed to use the generic term Happy Holidays to avoid religious discrimination and hurting the feelings of others.

The term Christmas comes from a contraction of two words Christ and Mass. It is believed that the first Christmas was celebrated in the 4th century AD. The term Christ refers to the coming of a messiah to save the Jewish people as foretold in the Old Testament of the Bible. The term Mass referred to a special religious ceremony of the newly created Catholic Church based on the belief that the man known as Jesus of Nazareth was this foretold Christ. The Mass ceremony centers around the sharing of bread and wine of Communion (the Eucharist) which represents the body and blood of Jesus (transubstantiation), and Christ is sacrificed (offered up) again at each mass.

Like all new religions, the early Catholic Church began accommodating the pagan practices of that time. The merrymaking and exchanging of gifts came from the festival of Saturnalia (a festival to the god, Saturn) and the date, December 25, was an adaptation of the birthday of Mithra (the sun god). The actual birth date for Jesus of Nazareth is unknown. Christmas trees, mistletoe, candles, carols and gift giving rituals – all of these Christmas traditions are of pagan or non Christian origin.

So who are we offending by wishing someone a Merry Christmas?

There are those Christian religions that are purists. They believe in Christ and Jesus of Nazareth, but are offended by the pagan contamination surrounding Christmas. This includes the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And while the Jews believe in the Old Testament chapters of the Bible, and even in the coming of Christ, they do not accept that Jesus of Nazareth was that foretold messiah so Christmas is out for them. And then there are the many religions who do not accept the Bible so the Old Testament’s foretold Christ has no meaning to them. This includes the Hindu’s, Buddhists, and Muslims. And, don’t forget the Agnostics (the existence of God is unknowable) and Atheists (God does not exist) who naturally don’t believe in Christ, and so therefore might be offended when wished a Merry Christmas. And, I am sure the reader can think of many others who may be offended that I have left out.

I find all of this rather sad.

Probably for two reasons, first I remember growing up when Christmas was a positive event–A time to celebrate family, friendship and community–A time for Peace on Earth and Good Will to All. From that perspective, I can’t see how wishing anyone a Merry Christmas can be insulting.

But secondly, and more importantly, I very much want to celebrate the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. I don’t care whether he was the Christ foretold in the Old Testament or not. I don’t care if there is a mixing of pagan and christian tradition in celebrating his birth. I don’t care whether December 25th is his real birth-date or not. I just want to celebrate Jesus of Nazareth, the human being.

Jesus of Nazareth was a good and decent man. He was a synergist. He taught that we should love one another, and that we should help each other. So (Merry Christmas) and …

Happy Jesus of Nazareth Day!

Read the essay: Happy Jesus of Nazareth Day

SOCIOCRACY: Democracy As It Might Be

Kees Boeke
(1884-1966)

We are so accustomed to majority rule as a necessary part of democracy that it is difficult to imagine any democratic system working without it. It is true that it is better to count heads than to break them, and democracy, even as it is today, has much to recommend it as compared with former practices. But the party system has proved very far from providing the ideal democracy of people’s dreams. Its weaknesses have become clear enough: endless debates in Parliament, mass meetings in which the most primitive passions are aroused, the overruling by the majority of all independent views, capricious and unreliable election results, government action rendered inefficient by the minority’s persistent opposition. Strange abuses also creep in. Not only can a party obtain votes by deplorably underhand methods, but, as we all know, a dictator can win an election with an “astonishing” majority by intimidation.

Political parties out, more democracy in

The fact is that we have taken the present system for granted for so long that many people do not realise that the party system and majority rule are not an essential part of democracy. If we really wish to see the whole population united, like a big family, in which the members care for each other’s welfare as much as for their own, we must set aside the quantitative principle of the right of the greatest number and find another way of organising ourselves. This solution must be really democratic in the sense that it must enable each one of us to share in organising the community. But this kind of democracy will not depend on power, not even the power of the majority. It will have to be a real community-democracy, an organisation of the community by the community itself.

For this concept I shall use the word “sociocracy”. Such a concept would be of little value if it had never been tried out in practice. But its validity has been successfully demonstrated over the years. Anyone who knows England or America will have heard of the Quakers, the Society of Friends. They have had much influence in these countries and are well-known for their practical social work. For more than three hundred years the Quakers have used a method of self-government that rejects majority voting, group action being possible only when unanimity has been reached. I too have found by trying out this method in my school that it really does work, provided there is a recognition that the interests of others are as real and as important as one’s own. If we start with this fundamental idea, a spirit of goodwill is engendered which can bind together people from all levels of society and with the most varied points of view. This, my school, with its three to four hundred members, has clearly shown.

As a result of these two experiences I have come to believe that it should be possible some day for people to govern themselves in this way in a much wider field. Many will be highly sceptical about this possibility. They are so accustomed to a social order in which decisions are made by the majority or by a single person, that they do not realise that, if a group provides its own leadership and everyone knows that only when common agreement is reached can any action be taken, quite a different atmosphere is created from that arising from majority rule. These are two examples of sociocracy in practice; let us hope that its principles may be applied on a national, and finally an international scale.

Before describing how the system could be made to work, we must first see what the problem really is. We want a group of persons to establish a common arrangement of their affairs which all will respect and obey. There will be no executive committee chosen by the majority, having the power to command the individual. The group itself must reach a decision and enter into an agreement on the understanding that every individual in the group will act on this decision and honour this agreement. I have called this the self-discipline of the group. It can be compared to the self-discipline of the individual who has learnt to set certain demands for himself which he obeys.

There are three fundamental rules underlying the system. The first is that the interests of all members must be considered, the individual bowing to the interests of the whole. Secondly, solutions must be sought which everyone can accept: otherwise no action can be taken. Thirdly, all members must be ready to act according to these decisions when unanimously made.

The spirit which underlies the first rule is really nothing else but concern for one’s neighbour, and where this exists, where there is sympathy for other people’s interests, where love is, there will be a spirit in which real harmony is possible.

The second point must be considered in more detail. If a group in any particular instance is unable to decide upon a plan of action acceptable to every member, it is condemned to inactivity; it can do nothing. This may happen even today where the majority is so small that efficient action is not possible. But in the case of sociocracy there is a way out, since such a situation stimulates its members to seek for a solution, that everyone can accept, perhaps ending in a new proposal, which had not occurred to anyone before. While under the party system disagreement accentuates the differences and the division becomes sharper than ever, under a sociocratic system, so long as it is realised that agreement must be reached, it activates a common search that brings the whole group nearer together. Something must be added here. If no agreement is possible, this usually means that the present situation must continue for the time being. It might seem that in this way conservatism and reaction would reign, and no progress would be possible. But experience has shown that the contrary is true. The mutual trust that is accepted as the basis of a sociocratic society leads inevitably to progress, and this is noticeably greater when all go forward together with something everyone has agreed to. Again it is clear that there will have to be “higher-level” meetings of chosen representatives, and if a group is to be represented in such a meeting, it will have to be by someone in whom everyone has confidence. If this does not prove possible, then the group will not be represented at all in the higher-level meeting, and its interests will have to be cared for by the representatives of other groups. But experience has shown that where representation is not a question of power but of trust, the choice of a suitable person can be made fairly easily and without unpleasantness.

The third principle means that when agreement is reached the decision is binding on all who have made it. This also holds of the higher-level meeting for all who have sent representatives to it. There is a danger in the fact that each must keep decisions made in a meeting over which he has only an indirect influence. This danger is common to all such decisions, not least in the party system. But it is much less dangerous where the representatives are chosen by common consent and are therefore much more likely to be trusted.

A group that works in this way should be of particular size. It must be big enough for personal matters to give way to an objective approach to the subject under discussion, but small enough not to be unwieldy, so that the quiet atmosphere needed can be secured. For meetings concerned with general aims and methods a group of about forty has been found the most suitable. But when detailed decisions have to be made, a small committee will be needed of three to six persons or so. This kind of committee is not new. If we could have a look at the countless committees in existence, we should probably find that those which are doing the best work do so without voting. They decide on a basis of common consent. If a vote were to be taken in such a small group, it would usually mean that the atmosphere is wrong.

Of special importance in exercising sociocratic government is the leadership. Without a proper leader unanimity cannot easily be reached. This concerns a certain technique which has to be learnt. Here Quaker experience is of the greatest value. Let me describe a Quaker business meeting. The group comes together in silence. In front sits the Clerk, the leader of the meeting. Beside him sits the Assistant Clerk; who writes down what is agreed upon. The Clerk reads out each subject in turn, after which all members present, men and women, old and young, may speak to the subject. They address themselves to the meeting and not to a chairman, each one making a contribution to the developing train of thought. It is the Clerk’s duty, when he thinks the right moment has come, to read aloud a draft minute reflecting the feeling of the meeting. It is a difficult job, and it needs much experience and tact to formulate the sense of the meeting in a way that is acceptable to all. It often happens that the Clerk feels the need for a time of quiet. Then the whole gathering will remain silent for a while, and often out of the silence will come a new thought, a reconciling solution, acceptable to everyone. It may seem unbelievable to many that a meeting of up to a thousand people can be held in this way. And yet I have been present at a Yearly Meeting of the Quakers in London, held during war-time (the first world war), at which the much vexed problem of the Quaker attitude to war was discussed in such a manner, no vote being taken. So I believe that if we once set ourselves the task of learning thismethod of co-operation, beginning with very simple matters, we shall be able to learn this art and acquire a tradition which will make possible the handling of more difficult questions.

This has been confirmed by my experience at Bilthoven in building up the school which I called the Children’s Community Workshop. Very early on I suggested that we should talk over how we should organise our community life. At first the children objected, saying they wanted me to take the decisions for them. But I insisted, and the idea of the ‘Talkover”, or weekly meeting, was accepted. Later I suggested that one of the children help me with the leadership of the meeting; and from that time on it has become an institution, led by the children, which we should not like to lose.

When I began to hold these talkovers, I was aware that I was using the procedure of the Quaker business meeting, and I saw in the distance, as it were, the great problem of the government of humanity. It was also curious to discover whether the art of living together, understood as obeying the rule we had all agreed upon, would be simple enough to be learnt by children. An experience of some 20 years bas shown me that it certainly is.

But something more is necessary before this method can be applied to adult society. When we are concerned, not with a group of a few hundred people, but with thousands, even millions, whose lives we wish to organise in this way, we must accept the principle of some sort of representation. There will have to be higher level meetings, and these will have to deal with matters concerning a wider area. Higher-level meetings will also have to send representatives to another higher body, which will be responsible for a still wider area, and so on.

After my hopes for the success of school meetings had been confirmed by practice, I was very curious to know if a meeting of representatives would work also in the school. One day when the number of children had grown too large for one general meeting at which all could be present, I suggested the setting up of a meeting of representatives. At first the children did not like the idea; children are conservative. But, as often happens, six months later they suggested the same plan themselves, and since then this institution has become a regular part of the life of the school.

Of course such meetings, if ever they are to be used by adults for the organisation of society as a whole, will have a very different character from those of our children’s community. But how in practice could such methods be introduced? First of all, a Neighbourhood Meeting, made up of perhaps forty families, might be set up in a particular district, uniting those who live near enough to one another. so that they could easily meet. In a town it very often happens that people do not even know their neighbours, and it will be an advantage if they are forced to take an interest in those who live close by. The Neighbourhood Meeting might embrace about 150 people, including children. About 40 of these Neighbourhood Meetings might send representatives to a Ward Meeting, acting for something like 6000 people. In general it will be true to say that the wider the area the Meeting governs the less often it will need to meet. The representatives of about 40 Ward Meetings could come together in a District Meeting, acting for about 240,000 people.

In approximately 40 or 50 District Meetings the whole population of a small country might be covered. To a Central Meeting the interests of all the Districts would be brought by their representatives. It is an essential condition that representatives have the confidence of the whole group: if they have that, business can usually be carried on quickly and effectively.

As the whole sociocratic method depends on trust, there will be no disadvantage if, alongside the geographical representation of Neighbourhood, Ward, District and Central Meetings, a second set of functional groupings be established. It seems reasonable that all industries and professions send representatives to primary, secondary and, where necessary, tertiary meetings, and that the trusted representatives of the “workers” in every field should be available to give their professional advice to the government. I have here used the word “government”. It is not my intention to put forward a plan according to which the government itself could one day be formed on sociocratic lines. We must start from the present situation, and the only possibility is that, with the government’s consent, we make a beginning of the sociocratic method from the bottom upwards; that is, for the present, with the formation of Neighbourhood groups. We, ordinary people, must just learn to talk over our common interests and to reach agreement after quiet consideration, and this can be done best in the place where we live. Only after we have seen how difficult this is, and after, most probably, making many mistakes, will it be possible to set up meetings on a higher level. If leaders should emerge in the Neighbourhood Meetings, their advice would gradually be seen to be useful in the existing Local Councils. Later, in the same way, the advice of leaders of Ward Meetings would be of increasing value.

The sociocratic method must recommend itself by the efficiency with which it works. When the governing power has learnt to trust it enough so as to allow, perhaps even to encourage, the setting up of Neighbourhood Meetings, the system will be able to show what possibilities it has, and then the confidence of the governing bodies and of people at large will have a chance to grow. I can well believe that trusted leaders and representatives of Neighbourhood Meetings may be allowed, or even invited, to attend Local Meetings. These men and women will of course take no part in the voting, for sociocracy does not believe in voting; but they might be allowed a place in the centre between the “left” and the “right”. After a time it may even be deemed desirable to ask them for advice about the matter in hand, since it would previously have been discussed in their Neighbourhood Meetings, and a solution sought acceptable to all. It is conceivable that, as confidence grows, certain matters might be handed over to the Neighbourhood Meetings with the necessary funds to carry them out. Only when the value of the new system is realised, could the higher-level meetings be begun.

Is such a development as this a fantasy? When we consider the possible success of government on the sociocratic principle, one thing is certain; it is unthinkable unless it is accompanied and supported by the conscious education of old and young in the sociocratic method. The right kind of education is essential, and here a revolution is needed in our schools. Only latterly have attempts been made in them to further the spontaneous development of the child and encourage his initiative. Partly because the stated aim of the school is to impart knowledge and skills, and partly because people regard obedience as a virtue in itself, children have been trained to obey. We are only beginning to realise the dangers of this practice. If children are not taught to judge for themselves, they will in later life become an easy prey for the dictator. But if we really want to prepare youth to think and act for themselves, we must alter our attitude to education. The children should not be sitting passively in rows, while the schoolmaster drills a lesson into their heads. They should be able to develop freely in children’s communities, guided and helped by those who are older acting as their comrades. Initiative should be fostered in every possible way. They should learn from the beginning to do things for themselves, and to make things necessary in their school life. But above all they should learn how to run their own community in some such way as has already been described.

Finally we must return to the question of representation. We have not gone further than the government of our own country. But the great problem of the government of mankind can never be solved on a national basis. Every country is dependent for raw materials and products on other countries. It is therefore inevitable that the system of representation should be extended over a whole continent and representatives of continents join in a World Meeting to govern and order the whole world. Our technical skill in the fields of transport and organisation make something of this kind possible. Finally a World Meeting should invite representatives of all the continents to arrange a reasonable distribution of all raw materials and products, making them available for all mankind. So long as we are ruled by fear and distrust, it is impossible to solve the problems of the world. The more trust grows and the more fear diminishes, the more the problem will shrink.

Everything depends on a new spirit breaking through among men. May it be that, after the many centuries of fear, suspicion and hate, more and more a spirit of reconciliation and mutual trust will spread abroad. The constant practice of the art of sociocracy and of the education necessary for it seem to be the best way in which to further this spirit, upon which the real solution of all world problems depends.

This article was made available by Beatrice C. Boeke
Holland

The above animation was created by Judy Wilken at StarChild Science. The following article is reposted from The Huffington Post’s Healthy Living section.

Food Fight: Pizza and Spuds Win, School Kids Lose

Walter Willett, M.D., DrPH, MPH
Sari Kalin, MS, RD, LDN

French fries and pizza don’t make a healthy meal, especially not for America’s school children, one out of three of whom are overweight or obese. Yet Congress chose to save these junk foods on school lunch menus — in effect, putting profits of a narrow part of the food industry ahead of our country’s future health.

Congress’ final version of a major spending bill has undermined a long-awaited U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) plan for improving school food. The USDA’s original plan was rooted firmly in nutrition science — the first update that our school lunch guidelines have had in 15 years — and it could have helped this country fight the twin epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Congress’ meddling, however, was rooted purely in food politics: Frozen pizza makers, potato growers and other food industry players spent millions of dollars lobbying legislators about the school lunch changes.

The USDA’s plan would have limited the amount of potatoes and starchy vegetables that school lunch rooms could serve to one cup a week. Schools would replace potatoes and fries with a variety of health-promoting vegetables, especially the dark green and orange types that most of our kids don’t eat often enough — broccoli, spinach, carrots and the like. The plan would also have closed a loophole that allowed a scant 2 tablespoon serving of tomato paste to “count” toward the school lunch vegetable requirements. Bumping the tomato paste serving from 2 tablespoons to 1/2 cup would have meant that a pizza slice, with its dab of tomato sauce, could no longer be called a vegetable. These changes were part of a broad revamp of federally-funded school meal programs, based on recommendations from a year-long review by a committee of nutrition experts convened by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

Congress’s support of unlimited feeding of potatoes to children is particularly damaging to their health. At present, potatoes make up about 30 percent of the vegetables that kids eat each day, but unlike other vegetables they undermine rather than promote health. Potatoes are very high in carbohydrate — specifically, the type of carbohydrate that is rapidly digested by the body. Eating large quantities of potatoes and similar “fast” carbohydrates leads to spikes and dips in blood sugar and insulin, which in turn can lead people to feel hungry again shortly after finishing a meal — a perfect recipe for overeating. Long term, people who eat diets high in potatoes and other fast-digested, carbohydrate-rich foods have a higher risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

Potatoes, of course, do contain vitamin C and potassium, among other nutrients. But potatoes aren’t the only way for our children to get these important nutrients, and they’re hardly the best: A cup of broccoli has nearly nine times as much vitamin C as a cup of potato, and white beans have about twice as much potassium. Yet a cup of potatoes has a similar effect on blood sugar as a 12-oz can of Coca Cola. Clearly, there’s no reason for children to pay this steep metabolic price for vitamins and minerals that can easily get from other foods.

Given the high amounts of rapidly-absorbed carbohydrate in potatoes, it should be no surprise that they increase the risk of weight gain, obesity and diabetes. In recent analyses conducted at Harvard School of Public Health, we tracked 120,000 men and women in three large studies for up to 20 years to evaluate the relation of small changes in food choices to weight gain. In all three studies, people who increased their potato consumption gained more weight. French fries were a particular culprit for weight gain, linked to a gain of an extra 3.4 pounds every four years. But even baked or mashed potatoes were associated with extra weight gain. People who cut back on these foods gained less weight, as did people who ate more of other vegetables. In an earlier report, we found that greater consumption of potatoes was associated with an elevated incidence of type 2 diabetes; replacing one serving of whole grains per day with potatoes was associated with a 30 percent increase in risk. These are all reasons why potatoes should be considered an undesirable form of starch in diets and why we don’t count them as vegetables on Harvard’s new Healthy Eating Plate. There were very sound reasons for the Institute of Medicine to recommend limiting consumption of potatoes and replacing these with healthy vegetables on school menus.

In addition to ensuring that school menus continue to fatten up our children and add to their future risk of diabetes, Congress added language that forces the USDA to keep the current portion sizes on tomato products so that pizza slices remain a vegetable. By comparison, the Reagan administration’s infamous (and ultimately, unsuccessful) move to have ketchup counted as a vegetable seems like minor tinkering. Congress also stalled the USDA’s plans to reduce sodium in school lunch until the USDA reviews more research on “the relationship of sodium reductions to human health.”

However, there is no reason for delay, because the vast literature on sodium and health has already been reviewed recently by the American Heart Association and the Institute of Medicine. Despite what the salt industry would have you believe, there is no reason to hold back on reducing the high amounts of sodium in kids’ meals: More than 90 percent of school children are getting more than recommended amounts of sodium each day. Strong evidence documents that diets high in sodium increase the risk of high blood pressure, even in youth, and thus increase the risk of heart disease later in life.

Unfortunately, Congress imbedded their changes to the school lunch plan in a broad spending bill that President Obama could not veto. This is a short term victory for potato growers and narrow parts of the food industry, but the losers are our children who will pay in shortened lives and suffering. In the debate about foods in schools, Senator Collins from potato-growing Maine argued that our country could not afford the cost of approximately one billion dollars a year to feed children healthy vegetables instead high-starch foods. This is amazingly short-sighted, because the costs of the obesity epidemic already raging in our children’s generation will be many hundreds of billions of dollars over the coming decades. In reality, we can’t afford a society burdened with disability at what should be productive ages and ever escalating medical costs.

Dr. Willett is Chairman and Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition, Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

Erasing/Seizing the Wealth of “The 1%”

Cannot Create a Viable Middle Class or

Solve the Sustainability Crisis

 Jan Lundberg

There may well be a revolution, peaceful or otherwise, based on the outrageous income disparity perpetrated by greedy, non-civic minded capitalists. However, even if their vast monetary wealth were turned over to “the 99%,” divided equally and put to good uses for future generations, the problem is that today’s wealth is almost entirely artificial. It has become digital and is little else.Of useful, lasting value is the land that can grow food, retain water, and withstand climate chaos on the rise. One can only hope that the Occupy movement will hit upon this and recognize that whether reforms or a revolution upset the apple cart — allowing the common people to get their share of apples — today’s astronomical sums of funny money is not edible. Today it can buy a lot, true, but there is no future for a financially based economy propped up by inflated home values, loans, debts, and deficit spending. The cheap oil that built everything physical is now past its halfway depletion point globally, and oil’s high price is hugely subsidized.Think of it this way: if there are 100 people in a community, and one person owns several times as much wealth as the average person among the other 99 based on the industrial, material and financial system, what happens if the community is faced with a permanent cessation of key resources and most output? Before the cessation there could be redistribution, but an unsustainable economy based on endless growth — when resource constraint has terminated growth — will sustain no middle class splendor for the other 99 (or 72 or 35, what have you). You can picture the wealth running out for everyone — even if it were not the digital, inflated money that formed Wall Street fortunes based on “financial instruments” that compounded and multiplied bundles of debt down to the local and individual level.

So the timing of the Occupy revolution — whatever it becomes, if it succeeds somehow in redistributing today’s material and digital wealth — happens to come not only when income disparity is at an all time extreme, but when population size is at an all time high, and the unusustainable economy is teetering. It is not teetering because “the 1%” took more than their share (although the greed aggravated symptoms of unsustainability), but rather because the natural wealth of healthy land, clean water, stable climate, rich biodiversity, have been severely depleted.

Global greenhouse gas emissions are unabated, and climate scientists are now saying that turning the warming trend around is probably not possible. So, how can redistributing the pie of consumption solve anything, unless an accompanying lifestyle change and massive tree planting take over?

The New York City greater metropolitan area has over 25 million people. Their ecological footprint is about 19 times the area of the land they occupy. So where are the resources, such as food, energy, materials, water and air coming from? Answer: from healthier land far removed. The idea of a transition to a sustainable, steady state economy is beautiful and sensible. But with such high numbers, and almost no effort happening on a large scale to conserve or restore nature for local food production, for example, even a wildly successful Occupy movement or Transition Town program cannot care for 25 million people depending on a huge footprint. Today only 5 out of 6 people in the U.S. are not going hungry, but it is accomplished through expensive and subsidized petroleum, dwindling clean water, and food imported from afar. Money from the super rich would not change the big picture long into the future.

Given all of the above, one must conclude that the Occupy movement should recognize that economic and ecological collapse are in the pipeline, and that redistribution of land is more important than stripping the super rich of most of their money. Because, that money won’t do much to sustain people in today’s damaged, overpopulated and depleted world. Even if “the 1%” let go of most of their wealth voluntarily, and saw to it that there was even redistribution, today’s modern world cannot keep up the massive consumption going on and on with no end in sight.

One could crunch numbers to arrive at various levels of sharing or redistributing wealth in order to bolster or refute the thesis that shutting down greed will not change much. If wealth redistribution were to happen before petrocollapse and climate collapse, the redistribution itself could bring on socioeconomic collapse or financial chaos. Regardless, there is no disputing that the consumer economy and our population size are unsustainable. No matter how you slice it, the vast wealth today generated for the enjoyment of the few, even if re-routed, is not going to allow for a happy, enlarged middle class who could be indefinitely satisfied with one nice car, one spacious or comfortable home, etc. An apt comparison is that Western Europeans consume half the energy that North Americans do, per capita — that’s admirable and superior, but also unsustainable.

So it is too late for mass exuberance, as Overshoot author William Catton termed our modern lifestyle and economy. To demand, as some Occupiers do, “our economy back” or to criticize the banksters for “wrecking our economy” is to cling to the American Dream, as if it were obtainable by everyone forever. Similarly, to imagine that the U.S. corporate state was a democracy working just fine until perhaps 1980 or 2001, the basis of the nation’s power structure is forgotten or never learned. These delusions merely glorify the prior decades up to now that were unacceptable then, too, and assuredly were leading to the more aggravated class distinction we see today.

A non-exuberant lifestyle and a common set of realistic, nature-loving, cooperative aspirations need to take the place of the dominant paradigm that has been faulty and unfair from the start. Expansion was able to take care of much potential discontent for many decades, and with no more expansion or bona fide “recovery” it’s no wonder that discontent is rising now in the streets when the curtain has come down on growth.

* * * * *

“Occupy the Land” goes into the issues of global land reform and the chances for the Occupy movement’s evolution: How The Occupy Movement May Be Off-Base, and How It Can Evolve

Catton, William R., 1980, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press

Greenhouse gases soar; scientists see little chance of arresting global warming this century – The Washington Post

Level of Heat-Trapping CO2 Reaches New High, Growth Rate Speeds Up, Methane Levels Are Rising Again – ThinkProgress

Prior articles by Jan Lundberg on the Occupy movement:

Update from DC: Occupy, pepperspray, peak oil, sail power, CongressNov. 23, 2011The Occupiers’ dream: an easy revolution?
Also in this report on the global Occupy movement:
- Community-healing
- What is the goal of Occupy, given the root problems?
Oct. 16, 2011

What’s up with the Occupy protests – for a sustainable culture? Oct. 5, 2011

The Return to Feudalism

Donald B. Halcom

Foreword

The recent history of the United States of America has indicated a propensity for economic “bubbles”. The “.com” bubble of the 1990’s, the “housing bubble” of the 2000’s and indeed the current National Debt crisis of the USA are all manifestations of bubbles.

The belief in bubbles is inherently tied to a false belief in the infinite. This is a false belief because there is nothing on the earth that is infinite. Infinite growth of money, property values, debt, the stock market or any other earthly resource is physically impossible. We all live on a finite planet with finite resources. There are those who will claim that the National Debt is not a bubble. This is profoundly not true. The payment of the National Debt is based upon the false assumption of continuous and unrelenting growth of the US economy. These false assumptions based upon infinite growth will produce monumental tragedies eventually.

This is being written with the intent of educating as many people as possible about a future that may be absolutely devastating or, if we execute well, a new dawn for mankind.

Short Synopsis of the Intent

1)     Fossil fuels are finite resources.

2)     Sunshine is a finite resource.

3)     Fossil fuels stored the sun’s energy over millions of years.

4)     We are about to consume all this energy over about 300 years.

5)     Once this stored energy is consumed, the energy party is over.

6)     Fossil fuels are also the sources for many chemicals.

7)     When fossil fuels are gone, our chemical party is also over.

8)     The infrastructure of the world will change post fossil fuels.

9)     A new infrastructure must replace the old before the old dies.

10)   Failure to do so will produce devastation.

History

The history of the world has always been about the exploitation of resources in one form or another. Before the year 1800, these exploitation’s were mainly about agricultural resources. Agriculture requires arable land and a consistent supply of water. Wild trees and grasses are also agricultural resources. Countless wars were fought over these resources. Resource wars over minerals such as precious metals and iron were also important. About the only exceptions to these resource wars were religious wars.

Using the year 1800 as a reference, mankind’s resources began to change. The exploitation of coal began and this initiated the Industrial Revolution. The invention of the steam engine led to larger scales of farming and locomotives plus much more. Mankind cannot exploit what he does not know exists.

Somewhere around 1860 the exploitation of oil began.  Fossil fuel exploitation, including natural gas, really began to grow. Internal combustion engines were invented, without which the airplane would not exist. People like Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and James Clerk Maxwell came along. These people, among others, led to the exploitation of hydroelectric power as well as fossil fuel fired electrical plants. About the year 1900 the exploitations of fossil fuels were in full bloom.

Fossil fuels lay in the ground for at least a million years before mankind discovered them. Before DNA created plant life on the earth there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. There were no life forms that used oxygen to live. There was no coal, oil or methane. The plant life took light from the sun, carbon dioxide and nitrogen from the atmosphere and water from rain to form hydrocarbons. The growth and death cycles of these plants repeated over millions of years and their residues were covered by dirt. Eventually the residues were under enough pressure to form coal, oil and methane down in the bowels of the earth.

The unique properties of the DNA that formed these fossil fuels are:

1) They genetically reproduced themselves.

2) They stored energy from the sun over vast time periods.

3) There is no infrastructure like this anywhere else in our solar system.

The key points here are that fossil fuels are irreplaceable and that they are an ideal storage system for energy. By default, there were finite amounts of them in the earth in 1800. Once they are gone, the party will be over. This is a fact that is irrefutable.

The only fresh hydrocarbon energy that we on earth are going to get is the yearly supply made by the green plants. This amount may be problematic with respect to the amount of energy we consume in the 21^st century.

Growth

Two main problems that the people of the earth will face in the next fifty years are population growth and energy consumption. Table I gives the population of the earth for different years of our history.

Table I

Year                   Population (Billion)

1800                   0.9

1850                   1.3

1900                   1.7

1950                   2.5

2000                  6.2

2010                   7.0

An estimate of the population of the earth for 2050 is about 9.0 billion people. It becomes evident from Table I that since the beginning of the exploitation of fossil fuels, the population of the earth has shown explosive growth. The reasons for this growth must surely have something to do with the increase in the consumption of fossil fuels. The use of high efficiency farming equipment, mass production, fertilizers and other uses for fossil fuel consumption were instrumental in this growth. The population of the earth before the year 1800 took literally thousands of years to reach the level of 0.9 billion.

The yearly rate of consumption of fossil fuel energy, nuclear energy, hydroelectric energy, solar energy, geothermal energy and wind energy have been measured over the same time period as that shown in Table I. These data can be used to estimate the total yearly energy consumption for these same time periods.

Some of the people reading this have no real “feeling” for the meaning of energy units. A metric unit of energy is the “joule”. It is hard to grasp what this means for many people. Another way of expressing energy is “power”. Power is the measurement of energy per unit time. One joule per second is a watt. The watt may be more useful for most of us in that practically all of us grew up using filament light bulbs that were rated in watts. We all have some feel for a 25 watt light bulb or a 100 watt light bulb or a 1000 watt light bulb and can somewhat visualize their power outputs in a way that we can intuitively “feel”.

It is time for a little game. Imagine a 100 watt filament light bulb. Turn it on at midnight Dec 31. Let it run continuously every second of every hour of every day until midnight of the next Dec 31. Shut it off. You have just consumed 3,155,730,000 joules of energy. That is about 3.15 billion joules.

Now it is time for a serious game. Add up all of the energy consumed on the earth in a year. Use all the energy from coal, oil, methane, nuclear, geothermal, solar, wind and fuels made from biomass. Make sure that all of the units for each are in joules. Divide the sum that you get by the number of seconds in one year. The answer you get is the yearly average power consumption for the planet in watts for the year’s data that you just used. This answer is a very large number. It is in the order of trillions of watts. For the year 2010 all of the people on earth consumed about a yearly average of 15 terawatts of energy (a terawatt is one trillion watts).

In order to personalize the world’s yearly average power consumption number that you have just calculated, divide this number by the population of the earth for that year. You have just calculated the yearly average power consumption per person for the entire planet.

Table II shows the results of such calculations starting in the year 1800 to 2010. If you wish, you can equate each year’s value to a light bulb of that power being held in one hand of every man, woman and child on the planet burning continuously for one year.

Table II

Year          Yearly Average Watts per Person

1800              350

1850              440

1900              860

1950              1230

2000             2300

2010              2460

These data show without equivocation that the consumption of energy grows faster than the population of the earth. This should not surprise anyone. Did the year 1800 have any trains, cars, trucks, airplanes, televisions, cell phones, industrial agriculture, etc. and the infrastructure to support all of these? The answer is obviously no. What happens when we run completely out of fossil fuels? We are living in a “Population Bubble” that is being fed by an “Energy Bubble”. If we do nothing before the “Energy Bubble” pops, say goodbye to most of the population. A reasonable estimate for the energy consumption in 2050 is about 3,500 yearly average watts per person with a population of about 9 billon people. Both growth curves are not linear but exponential in form.

The Future

My sainted mother use to say “Son, life is about only one thing. It is about choosing. The choices are what you will do and what you will not do. Either way, you have to live with the consequences. Choose wisely.”

The entire world is at a fork in the road. What it chooses now will determine its entire future, be it good or bad. The choices are to do nothing (preserving the status quo is also the equivalent of doing nothing) or do something really radical. In this case, the radical choice is definitely the preferred one.

The current signs all point to the fact that we are in the twilight of the collapse of the fossil fuel powered world. Oil, coal and methane prices will continuously rise as we proceed to their extinctions. As a consequence of these price rises, the entire economy of the world will continue to inflate and it will take more and more money to buy the essentials of life. The scramble to convert to coal will only lead to the eventual extinction of coal. The same thing goes for methane. We must create an entirely new infrastructure not based upon finite fossil fuels but upon “stuff” that nature supplies us that is not subject to near term exhaustion.

Not only do fossil fuels supply energy to run the world, they are the building blocks for the chemical processes that create most of the materials that we use every day. These chemical processes will have to be discarded and a whole new “chemistry” infrastructure built to supply the needs of mankind.

Proposed Solutions

Americans have almost an absolute faith in science. They falsely believe that science can solve anything. Finite resources are forced upon scientist just like everyone else. It happens that sunshine is a finite resource too.

There are basically only three energy sources on this planet. They are solar, nuclear fission and geothermal. Wind power, hydroelectric and electric solar panels are all manifestations of solar power. The sun evaporates water which eventually falls as rain to power hydroelectric dams. Temperature gradients in the atmosphere produce the winds.

Nuclear fission is limited by a finite and rather small amount of fissionable material. Some people have a great hope for sustained nuclear fusion but this is not realistic. Nuclear fusion requires a very large gravitational field. If you look out at all the “burning” stars in the universe you will quickly discover that they all require a minimum amount of mass to sustain a fusion reaction. The earth does not have the mass required to produce a gravitational field strong enough to hold together a sustained fusion reactor.

The logistics of geothermal power are only possible at a small number of places on the earth. We come back to wind power, solar panels and hydroelectric. I have left out focused light that creates steam for a boiler used to drive a generator. These devices must have direct sunshine without clouds. One cannot easily focus diffuse light.

The sun is the master of our solar system. It appears omnipotent and has been worshiped by many cultures. Even the sun is fettered by finiteness.

In our modern times we are capable of flying above all of the clouds covering our planet. At those altitudes we can measure that the sun shines on our planet with a radiance of about 1000 watts per square meter of area. This is called a “flux” of energy. No matter what we do we can never obtain a figure higher than this number and in fact it will always be lower than this due to physical factors that make our planet what it is.

The earth is blessed with rain. Clouds cover parts of the earth virtually every day. We have days and nights. We have seasons. We have mountains, deserts, productive land, fresh water rivers, fresh water lakes and salt water oceans. All of these things are very important for they provide the system that supports life of all forms on this planet.

A typical time averaged solar panel capacity (over every second of every day of a year) is about 150 watts per square meter. This value reflects cloud cover, seasons and night/day averaging.

Wind turbines and hydroelectric are not nearly as “area” efficient as a solar panel. Most of these energies come from the ocean’s surface.

Hydroelectric dams must use the water falling on many square miles of land to mechanically convert the potential energy of elevated water to electric energy as it falls through a water turbine. The very act of raining wastes most of the solar energy of evaporation contained in the water vapor. This condensation energy alone is a large heat loss. We have all seen rain storms.

Enormous wind turbines must be built to capture wind energy.

Wind power is even less “area” efficient with respect to its solar source of energy than hydroelectric.

At this time, except for green plant based solar conversion    to hydrocarbons, manmade solar energy is entirely electric. Solar panels, wind turbines and hydro produce electricity which cannot be stored. The manmade capture of solar power does not have the infrastructure that green plants have to store the energy in its chemical form. The chemical form of energy is by far the most desirable form of energy. This form of energy powers our own bodies. Batteries are also a form of chemical energy.

The infrastructure required to convert electric energy into chemical energy would be enormous. If the entire world ran on electricity alone, there would be no aircraft or ocean shipping of cargo or passengers as currently practiced. Large portions of our land based world could be run directly off of electricity. Vehicles like farm tractors, trucks etc. would have to be run off of some sort of chemical energy.

Let’s do some more calculations. The entire land area of the earth is 13 billion hectares. A hectare is 10,000 square meters. A hectare is also about 2.471 acres. Taking a figure of 150 watts per square meter for the yearly average value of a solar panel, this is 1.5 million watts per hectare. These solar panels would have to be continuous with no space between them. Physically that would not be possible. Assume about 1 million watts per hectare for spaced solar panels as a yearly average power output. This computes to about 13,000 terawatts as the average yearly power from solar panels covering the entire land area of the earth.

The consumption of power for the entire world in 2010 was 15 terawatts. This looks like things are just fine. Not so, green plants cannot be grown underneath solar panels. The result is no food and very little oxygen in the atmosphere of the earth. Except for the oceans and lakes there would be very little plant life on the planet to make oxygen.

At first glance the above calculation looks absurd; it is not.  Now 13,000 terawatts is a number that shows the absolute limit of our future exploitation unlike the unknown amount of fossil fuels present in the earth around 1800. 15 terawatts versus 13,000 terawatts says we have room to play. Science uses numbers called “orders of magnitude”. An order of magnitude is a factor of ten.

10X10X10 = 1,000 = 3 orders of magnitude

Our current consumption of energy is “about” 3 orders of magnitude away from an absolute ecological disaster using solar panels covering the entire land area of the earth. This has nothing to do with global warming but with asphyxiation from lack of oxygen. How much solar panel energy capture is too much? There is no way of knowing exactly. A suggestion is that we stay away from total disaster by at least 2 orders of magnitude. This means we should “never” produce more than about 130 terawatts from solar panel energy. This would consume about 130 million hectares of land. This is about one percent of the world’s total land area.

Solar panels should be set up in areas that are essentially devoid of plant life. Obviously one percent of the world’s total land area is still a very large chunk of real estate. A maximum of one acre per 100 acres of total world land area could be dedicated for solar panel electric generation. This is a practical upper limit for solar panel power. This could generate about eight times the world’s current demands.

Putting solar panels in barren areas has its problems. Such areas are very susceptible to wind and rain erosion. They are usually quite isolated from where the electricity is needed.

Back in the early days of electrical exploitation, Thomas Alva Edison hired an employee named Nikola Tesla.

Nikola was a very smart man from Serbia. Nikola knew more about electricity than Tom and developed some electric motors for Tom with the promise that Tom would pay him about $60,000 if they were successful. The motors were successful but Tom refused to pay him. Nikola quit working for Tom. Nikola understood AC (alternating current) very well. Mr. Edison only wanted to exploit DC (direct current) electricity.

Tom wanted to electrify New York City using his DC current technology. The problem was that DC currents could not be transmitted very far without very large power losses due to heating of the wires. After quitting Tom, Nikola later figured out that AC (alternating current) was the way to go for electrification in that it could be transformed to high voltage AC and transferred over very large distances with substantially smaller power losses. This made Tom very angry. Tom initiated a massive propaganda campaign trying to stop the company that Nikola worked for (Westinghouse) from implementing his AC technology. Tom let business overcome science.

Nikola then went on to build the world’s first AC power plant at Niagara Falls Ontario. Nikola Tesla won the power transmission war and Thomas Edison came in dead last. The rich man is not always the smartest man. Well, you can’t win all the time.

Back in the days of yore, there was always a favorite question that college chemistry professors used to ask. Starting with coal, fire and water how would you make “Compound X”? This was used to test the ingenuity of the student. In the future the question will change. Starting with biomass, electricity and water how would you make “Compound X”? Our entire infrastructure is set up for the days of yore, not the future.

New Infrastructure

Getting solar panel power from barren areas to where it is needed is no small feat. First we have to convert DC to AC (94% efficient), then increase the voltage of the AC to very high voltages (98% efficient) and then transfer large amounts of power over very long distances (93% efficient). At the end use points, the high voltage AC will have to be converted back down to useable voltages (98% efficient). The overall efficiency is about 84%. We will start with a maximum of 130 terawatts at the solar panels but when it reaches its use points we will only have about 109 terawatts. Some of the same restrictions apply to hydroelectric and wind power. This is about 7.3 times the worlds current consumption.

If we are going to maintain current forms of air, sea and land transportation, we will have to find forms of chemical energy storage to run them. Portable chemical energy solves a lot of problems.

If we choose to do what we have always done, then we will let “economics” decide how to proceed. That would be the greatest mistake ever committed by mankind. As fossil fuel amounts decrease, the amount of money to buy them grows faster than we can manage. The price of literally everything necessary to live also grows faster than we can manage. This is called hyper-inflation. The economies of the entire world will collapse. The subsequent struggles for survival will lead to nothing less than a return to feudalism with about one billion people surviving. Existence from that point forward will be exactly like we returned to pre-1800 societies. We will not have built the infrastructure to do otherwise. We are already seeing signs of proceeding down this path. We must do something about altering this trip to feudalism.

One of the signs of marching down the path to feudalism is the current mantra of “Drill Baby Drill”. This is mindless and only shortens the time until we run completely out of fossil fuels. There are things that can be done to lengthen the time to fossil fuel extinction. Some of these are higher fuel efficiency requirements for automobiles, more use of electrified railroads for public transportation and the list goes on. Increasing the efficiencies of fossil fuel consumption does lengthen the time to extinction.

The challenge is to change our entire way of life while losing a minimum number of lives. Even then, we may not be able to save everything.

One of our challenges is replacing fossil fuels with other portable fuels. Coal was moved by trains and ships; petroleum moved by pipe lines, ships, trains and trucks; methane moved by pipe line, ships, trains and trucks. If we still want to have aviation, ships, construction equipment and farm equipment to do the essential things, we must have new portable fuels. Automobiles were left out for in the end they may have to be abandoned.

Mass transportation may be the only kind that survives. On land, electric power should be sufficient for heating, cooling, manufacturing, mass transportation, electronics etc. Aviation and sea shipping speak for themselves.

The trick is to produce a fuel that does not consume DNA produced hydrocarbons. We will have trouble enough feeding people without compounding the felony by burning up DNA produced material for fuel. A guiding principle here is that nature always uses what is at hand to perform its duties. Mankind should do the same.

The plant portion of the DNA system uses the earth’s atmosphere and sunlight to work its magic. The atmosphere contains nitrogen, oxygen, water (in the form of clouds which produce rain) and some carbon dioxide. Magnesium ions along with other minerals found in the earth are crucial for the formation of chlorophyll which is the magic wand in DNA’s capture of solar energy. Except for some rare exceptions, all the life on this planet is dependent upon this system. It will surprise some to learn that nitrogen is by far the largest component of the earth’s atmosphere. The second largest component is oxygen. Oxygen is in fact a “waste” component from the DNA system’s manufacture of hydrocarbons. Carbon dioxide is a relatively small component of air. Without the plant life waste component oxygen, animal life would not exist.

The nitrogen in the atmosphere is just as important as the other components (excluding oxygen) for the production of DNA that produces life on this planet. The atmospheric nitrogen gets into the soil by what is called the “nitrogen cycle” A picture best describes what happens. Study Figure I to better understand the processes.

Figure I

The trick is to get the nitrogen into the soil so that the plants can absorb it through their root systems. The primary mechanisms for these are from lightning in the air, nitrogen-fixation bacteria and modern fertilizers like ammonium nitrate. It all starts with nitrogen in the air.

In 1909 a chemist named Fritz Haber invented a process that took nitrogen and hydrogen to form the compound ammonia.

The Haber process uses the following chemistry:

N₂ + 3H₂  –>  2NH₃

Ammonia is the starting material used to form ammonium nitrate. This process is one of the most important industrial chemical processes in the world in that modern crop yields would not be possible without it. The first industrial production of ammonia began in 1913.

The hydrogen used in the formation of ammonia does not usually occur free in nature. It has to be manufactured. The current methods of making hydrogen are to “hydrocrack” portions of petroleum in an oil refinery or to use methane and water to form carbon dioxide and hydrogen. In the future these sources will no longer be available as we will be totally out of fossil fuels.

Another source of hydrogen is the electrolysis of ordinary water.

2H₂O  –>  2H₂ + O₂

An electrolysis cell is used to make hydrogen and oxygen. Since we will essentially be running on an almost totally electric world, this should be easy to do. This process is about 85% energy efficient. Electrolysis is not as simple as written in the above equation but is developed to a high degree.

There are many that would like to use hydrogen as a replacement fuel for all types of applications. This has its problems. The properties of hydrogen make it very difficult for it to be used as a portable fuel. You either have to move it around in very high pressure gas cylinders or in cryogenic tanks. Liquid hydrogen has a boiling point of 20.3 degrees Kelvin. This is a temperature approaching absolute zero. 20.3 deg K is equal to -423.2 deg F or   -252.4 deg C. Something better should be found for a portable fuel.

An excellent candidate for a portable fuel is liquid ammonia. It has some interesting properties. Some of these are:

Temp (deg C)      Vapor Pressure (Atmospheres)    VP (Psig)

4.7                           5                                                          59

25.7                        10                                                         132

50.1                       20.5                                                      282

Liquid ammonia can be transported around in relatively low pressure tanks. Ammonia can also be burned according to the following equation:

4NH₃ + 3O₂  -->  2N₂ + 6H₂O

The density of liquid ammonia is 681.9 Kg per cubic meter. This is about the same density as gasoline. The energy content of about three gallons of liquid ammonia is equivalent to about one gallon of gasoline.

The burning of ammonia can be complicated by the unwanted side reactions of forming nitrogen oxides (NOX). The engines of the future will have to be developed around the problems of preventing these unwanted NOX side reactions. The problems with the creation of SMOG for the large cities will have to be addressed again on an even larger scale then the past. Fuel cells would also constitute new types of “engines” that could exploit the portable fuel ammonia. A great deal of research and development would have to be performed to make these concept engines viable in the future.

It is easy to forget that two different internal combustion engines were developed to run on fossil fuels. They use gasoline and diesel fuel respectively. These engines cannot interchange fuels. The development of an internal combustion engine that uses ammonia would probably have to start from scratch. This engine may be of a radically new design. The jet engine may have to be altered radically to allow it to run on ammonia. Aircraft could revert back to the ammonia burning internal combustion engine.

The development of a fuel cell that converts liquid ammonia and air back to nitrogen and water in order to generate electricity would also be time consuming but feasible.

Conclusions

The consumption of fossil fuels took about 200 years to go through the first half of the supply. The second half will disappear much faster because the energy consumption per person keeps increasing. Market forces keep driving this consumption continuously upward.

The fossil fuels not only supplied our energy, they supplied most of the raw materials for the production of goods for our society. Imagine a world without our current plastics, many of our drugs, current construction materials (like asphalt and paint), clothing material and the list goes on. Virtually the entire chemical production system will have to be reinvented to cope with these changes. This new system is likely to be based upon biochemistry.

The transformation of the infrastructure to satisfy future needs will be even larger than the infrastructure created from 1800 to the present. It took 200 years for our old system to evolve. We do not have that much time for the future reconstruction. A realistic estimate is about 50-100 years.

There is another lesson from history. This lesson is that the more complicated that governments or societies become, the greater is the strain upon the resources available to that ruling body. All of the ancient empires fell because of this problem. The Egyptian, Sumerian, Greek and Roman empires are examples. They all became larger or more complicated than their resources could sustain. This problem is now facing the entire world not just a single government.

Cooperation

In order to transform the infrastructure of the world, the governments of the world (at least the major governments) are going to be forced into scientific cooperation as never before. There may be healthy competition between the scientists of various countries but the “best” work must be shared by all the countries. To do otherwise is to invite more wars. The monopolization of resources and new technology must be avoided at all cost. There are no “free market” entities that can accomplish projects of these magnitudes. Research and development must be conducted on a “wartime” basis like the Manhattan Project. Time is the enemy.

Whatever the new infrastructure is going to be, it must stay in balance with nature. The systems proposed here attempt to sustain carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and water “neutrality”. This should help prevent us from killing ourselves. Doing nothing to create a new infrastructure will guarantee that most of humanity will die in a struggle for survival.

The route to overcoming the loss of fossil fuels will eventually involve the politics of many countries. It is sad to say that this may be the greatest impediment to success. Programs enormously larger than the space programs and the Manhattan Project will be involved. Research and development will require worldwide cooperation. Financing these endeavors is beyond the scope of private enterprise or a single government. Mankind may not be capable of such cooperation. Nationalism may destroy success.

The outline presented here for creating an exhausted fossil fuel world infrastructure is certainly not the only one possible. More ingenious solutions may exist. The route to these solutions must not be decided upon by political or economic methods but by scientific ones. Politicians are not likely to accept these restrictions of their power. Business leaders are also not good choices for directors of such projects. Military leaders would be problematic also.

The time allowed to complete a restructure of our old infrastructure will be measured in decades and not centuries. An overarching program of this magnitude has never been attempted. Such things are accomplished in Science Fiction but not in the real world. The end result of doing nothing is to return to the feudalism of the past. Living in a new world based upon the old paradigm of “one man, one mule, one plow, one gun” is not a happy consideration.

It is hoped that mankind will begin to take action now to replace our entire fossil fuel based system. This not only decreases global warming, it actually preserves some of our irreplaceable resources. Population control will also have to be initiated. Population expansion is limited by the resources from the sun.

Don Halcom has a Ph.D in Chemical Engineering. He is 73 years old and retired. He wrote the above epistle about fossil fuels exhaustion with some indication about what has to be done to replace the infrastructure currently supported by fossil fuels. He tried to divorce himself from the economic and political problems involved with fossil fuels exhaustion as much as possible, but does touch upon them toward the end. He is available to respond to any follow up questions you may have.

You can reach him here: drdon (dot) halcom (at) verizon (dot) net

Also see: Ammonia as Fuel,  Welcome to NH3 Car

Later in this essay, he describes a new alternative form of government which he calls sociocracy — rule by society.

The Dangers of Plutocracy

Lester Frank Ward (1841-1913)

The world, having passed through the stages of autocracy and aristocracy into the stage of democracy, has, by a natural reaction against personal power, so far minimized the governmental influence that the same spirit which formerly used government to advance self is now ushering in a fifth stage, viz., that of plutocracy, which thrives well in connection with a weak democracy or physiocracy, and aims to supersede it entirely. Its strongest hold is the wide-spread distrust of all government, and it leaves no stone unturned to fan the flame of misarchy. Instead of demanding more and stronger government it demands less and feebler. Shrewdly clamoring for individual liberty, it perpetually holds up the outrages committed by governments in their autocratic and aristocratic stages, and falsely insists that there is imminent danger of their reenactment. Laissez faire and the most extreme individualism, bordering on practical anarchy in all except the enforcement of existing proprietary rights, are loudly advocated, and the public mind is thus blinded to the real condition of things. … Thus firmly intrenched, it will require a titanic effort on the part of society to dislodge this baseless prejudice, and rescue itself once more from the rapacious jaws of human egoism under the crafty leadership of a developed and instructed rational faculty.

Under the system as it now exists the wealth of the world, however created, and irrespective of the claims of the producer, is made to flow toward certain centers of accumulation, to be enjoyed by those holding the keys to such situations. The world appears to be approaching a stage at which those who labor, no matter how skilled, how industrious, or how frugal, will receive, according to the “iron law” formulated by Ricardo, only so much for their services as will enable them “to subsist and to perpetuate their race.” The rest finds its way into the hands of a comparatively few, usually non-producing, individuals, whom the usages and laws of all countries permit to claim that they own the very sources of all wealth and the right to allow or forbid its production.

These are great and serious evils, compared with which all the crimes, recognized as such, that would be committed if no government existed, would be as trifles. The underpaid labor, the prolonged and groveling drudgery, the wasted strength, the misery and squalor, the diseases resulting, and the premature deaths that would be prevented by a just distribution of the products of labor, would in a single year outweigh all the so-called crime of a century, for the prevention of which, it is said, government alone exists. This vast theater of woe is regarded as wholly outside the jurisdiction of government, while the most strenuous efforts are put forth to detect and punish the perpetrators of the least of the ordinary recognized crimes. This ignoring of great evils while so violently striking at small ones is the mark of an effete civilization, and warns us of the approaching dotage of the race.

Against the legitimate action of government in the protection of society from these worst of its evils, the instinctive hostility to government, or misarchy, above described, powerfully militates. In the face of it the government hesitates to take action, however clear the right or the method. But, as already remarked, this groundless over-caution against an impossible occurrence would not, in and of itself, have sufficed to prevent government from redressing such palpable wrongs. It has been nursed and kept alive for a specific purpose. It has formed the chief argument of those whose interests require the maintenance of the existing social order in relation to the distribution of wealth. Indeed, it is doubtful whether, without the incessant reiteration given to it by this class, it could have persisted to the present time. This inequitable economic system has itself been the product of centuries of astute management on the part of the shrewdest heads, with a view to securing by legal devices that undue share of the world’s products which was formerly the reward of superior physical strength. It is clear to this class that their interests require a policy of strict non-interference on the part of government in what they call the natural laws of political economy, and they are quick to see that the old odium that still lingers among the people can be made a bulwark of strength for their position. They therefore never lose an opportunity to appeal to it in the most effective manner. Through the constant use of this argumentum ad populum the anti-government sentiment, which would naturally have smoldered and died out after its cause ceased to exist, is kept perpetually alive.

The great evils under which society now labors have grown up during the progress of intellectual supremacy. They have crept in stealthily during the gradual encroachment of organized cunning upon the domain of brute force. Over that vanishing domain, government retains its power, but it is still powerless in the expanding and now all-embracing field of psychic influence. No one ever claimed that in the trial of physical strength the booty should fall to the strongest. In all such cases the arm of government is stretched out and justice is enforced. But in those manifold, and far more unequal struggles now going on between mind and mind, or rather between the individual and an organized system, the product of ages of thought, it is customary to say that such matters must be left to regulate themselves, and that the fittest must be allowed to survive. Yet, to anyone who will candidly consider the matter, it must be clear that the first and principal acts of government openly and avowedly prevented, through forcible interference, the natural results of all trials of physical strength. These much-talked-of laws of nature are violated every time the highway robber is arrested and sent to jail.

Primitive government, when only brute force was employed, was strong enough to secure the just and equitable distribution of wealth. Today, when mental force is everything, and physical force is nothing, it is powerless to accomplish this. This alone proves that government needs to be strengthened in its primary quality—the protection of society. There is no reasoning that applies to one kind of protection that does not apply equally to the other. It is utterly illogical to say that aggrandizement by physical force should be forbidden while aggrandizement by mental force or legal fiction should be permitted. It is absurd to claim that injustice committed by muscle should be regulated, while that committed by brain should be unrestrained.

While the modern plutocracy is not a form of government in the same sense that the other forms mentioned are, it is, nevertheless, easy to see that its power is as great as any government has ever wielded. The test of governmental power is usually the manner in which it taxes the people, and the strongest indictments ever drawn up against the worst forms of tyranny have been those which recited their oppressive methods of extorting tribute. But tithes are regarded as oppressive, and a fourth part of the yield of any industry would justify a revolt. Yet to-day there are many commodities for which the people pay two and three times as much as would cover the cost of production, transportation, and exchange at fair wages and fair profits. The monopolies in many lines actually tax the consumer from 25 to 75 per cent of the real value of the goods. Imagine an excise tax that should approach these figures! It was shown in an earlier chapter (XXXIII) that under the operation of either monopoly or aggressive competition the price of everything is pushed up to the maximum limit that will be paid for the commodity in profitable quantities, and this wholly irrespective of the cost of production. No government in the world has now, or ever had, the power to enforce such an extortion as this. It is a governing power in the interest of favored individuals, which exceeds that of the most powerful monarch or despot that ever wielded a scepter.

What then is the remedy? How can society escape this last conquest of power by the egoistic intellect? It has overthrown the rule of brute force by the establishment of government.  It has supplanted autocracy by aristocracy and this by democracy, and now it finds itself in the coils of plutocracy. Can it escape? Must it go back to autocracy for a power sufficient to cope with plutocracy? No autocrat ever had a tithe of that power. Shall it then let itself be crushed? It need not.  There is one power and only one that is greater than that which now chiefly rules society. That power is society itself. There is one form of government that is stronger than autocracy or aristocracy or democracy, or even plutocracy, and that is sociocracy.

The individual has reigned long enough. The day has come for society to take its affairs into its own hands and shape its own destinies. The individual has acted as best he could. He has acted in the only way he could. With a consciousness, will, and intellect of his own he could do nothing else than pursue his natural ends. He should not be denounced nor called any names. He should not even be blamed. Nay, he should be praised, and even imitated. Society should learn its great lesson from him, should follow the path he has so clearly laid out that leads to success. It should imagine itself an individual, with all the interests of an individual, and becoming fully conscious of these interests it should pursue them with the same indomitable will with which the individual pursues his interests. Not only this, it must be guided, as he is guided, by the social intellect, armed with all the knowledge that all individuals combined, with so great labor, zeal, and talent  have placed in its possession, constituting the social intelligence.

Sociocracy will differ from all other forms of government that have been devised, and yet that difference will not be so radical as to require a revolution. Just as absolute monarchy passed imperceptibly into limited monarchy, and this, in many states without even a change of name has passed into more or less pure democracy, so democracy is capable of passing as smoothly into sociocracy, and without taking on this unfamiliar name or changing that by which it is now known. For, though paradoxical, democracy, which is now the weakest of all forms of government, at least in the control of its own internal elements, sociocracy is capable of becoming the strongest. Indeed, none of the other forms of government would be capable of passing directly into a government by society. Democracy is a phase through which they must first pass on any route that leads to the ultimate social stage, which all governments must eventually attain if they persist.

How then, it may be asked, do democracy and sociocracy differ? How does society differ from the people? If the phrase “the people” really meant the people, the difference would be less. But that shibboleth of democratic states, where it means anything at all that can be described or defined, stands simply for the majority of qualified electors, no matter how small that majority may be. There is a sense in which the action of a majority may be looked upon as the action of society. At least, there is no denying the right of the majority to act for society, for to do this would involve either the denial   of the right of government to act at all, or the admission of the right of a minority to act for society. But a majority acting for society is a different thing from society acting for itself, even though, as must always be the case, it acts through an agency chosen by its members. All democratic governments are largely party governments. The electors range themselves on one side or the other of some party line, the winning side considers itself the state as much as Louis the Fourteenth did. The losing party usually then regards the government as something alien to it and hostile, like an invader, and thinks of nothing but to gain strength enough to overthrow it at the next opportunity. While various issues are always brought forward and defended or attacked, it is obvious to the looker-on that the contestants care nothing for these, and merely use them to gain an advantage and win an election.

From the standpoint of society this is child’s play. A very slight awakening of the social consciousness will banish it and substitute something more businesslike. Once [we] get rid of this puerile gaming spirit and have attention drawn to the real interests of society, and it will be seen that upon nearly all important questions all parties and all citizens are agreed, and that there is no need of this partisan strain upon the public energies. This is clearly shown at every change in the party complexion of the government. The victorious party which has been denouncing the government merely because it was in the hands of its political opponents boasts that it is going to revolutionize the country in the interest of good government, but the moment it comes into power and feels the weight of national responsibility it finds that it has little to do but carry out the laws in the same way that its predecessors had been doing.

There is a vast difference between all this outward show of partisanship and advocacy of so-called principles, and attention to the real interests and necessary business of the nation, which latter is what the government must do. It is a social duty. The pressure, which is brought to enforce it, is the power of the social will. But in the factitious excitement of partisan struggles where professional politicians and demagogues on the one hand, and the agents of plutocracy on the other, are shouting discordantly in the ears of the people, the real interests of society are, temporarily at least, lost sight of, clouded and obscured, and men lose their grasp on the real issues, forget even their own best interests, which, however selfish, would be a far safer guide, and the general result usually is that these are neglected and nations continue in the hands of mere politicians who are easily managed by the shrewd representatives of wealth.

Sociocracy will change all this. Irrelevant issues will be laid aside. The important objects upon which all but an interested few are agreed will receive their proper degree of attention, and measures will be considered in a non-partisan spirit with the sole purpose of securing these objects. Take as an illustration the postal telegraph question. No one not a stockholder in an existing telegraph company would prefer to pay twenty-five cents for a message if he could send it for ten cents. Where is the room for discussing a question of this nature? What society wants is the cheapest possible system.  It wants to know with certainty whether a national postal telegraph system would secure this universally desired object. It is to be expected that the agents of the present telegraph companies would try to show that it would not succeed. … But why be influenced by the interests of such a small number of persons, however worthy, when all the rest of mankind are interested in the opposite solution? The investigation should be a disinterested and strictly scientific one, and should actually settle the question in one way or the other.  If it was found to be a real benefit, the system should be adopted. There are today a great number of these strictly social questions before the American people, questions which concern every citizen in the country, and whose solution would doubtless profoundly affect the state of civilization attainable on this continent. Not only is it impossible to secure this, but it is impossible to secure an investigation of them on their real merits. The same is true of other countries, and in general the prevailing democracies of the world are incompetent to deal with problems of social welfare.

The more extreme and important case referred to a few pages back may make the distinction still more clear. It was shown, and is known to all political economists, that the prices of most of the staple commodities consumed by mankind have no necessary relation to the cost of producing them and placing them in the hands of the consumer. It is always the highest price that the consumer will pay rather than do without. Let us suppose that price to be on an average double what it would cost to produce, transport, exchange, and deliver the goods, allowing in each of these transactions a fair compensation for all services rendered. Is there any member of society who would prefer to pay two dollars for what is thus fairly worth only one? Is there any sane ground for arguing such a question? Certainly not. The individual cannot correct this state of things. No democracy can correct it. But a government that really represented the interests of society would no more tolerate it than an individual would tolerate a continual extortion of money on the part of another without an equivalent.

And so it would be throughout. Society would inquire in a business way without fear, favor, or bias, into everything that concerned its welfare, and if it found obstacles it would remove them, and if it found opportunities it would improve them.  In a word, society would do under the same circumstances just what an intelligent individual would do. It would further, in all possible ways, its own interests.

I anticipate the objection that this is an ideal state of things, and that it has never been attained by any people, and to all appearances never can be. No fair-minded critic will, however, add the customary objection that is raised, not wholly without truth, to all socialistic schemes, that they presuppose a change in “human nature.” Because in the transformation here foreshadowed the permanence of all the mental attributes is postulated, and I have not only refrained from dwelling upon the moral progress of the world, but have not even enumerated among the social forces the power of sympathy as a factor in civilization. I recognize this factor as one of the derivative ones, destined to perform an important part, but I have preferred to rest the case upon the primary and original egoistic influences, believing that neither meliorism nor sociocracy is dependent upon any sentiment, or upon altruistic props for its support. At least the proofs will be stronger if none of these aids are called in, and if they can be shown to have a legitimate influence, this is only so much added to the weight of evidence.

To the other charge the answer is that ideals are necessary, and also that no ideal is ever fully realized. If it can be shown that society is actually moving toward any ideal the ultimate substantial realization of that ideal is as good as proved. The proofs of such a movement in society to-day are abundant. In many countries the encroachments of egoistic individualism have been checked at a number of important points. In this country alarm has been taken in good earnest at the march of plutocracy under the protection of democracy. Party lines are giving way and there are unmistakable indications that a large proportion of the people are becoming seriously interested in the social progress of the country. For the first time in the history of political parties there has been formed a distinctively industrial party which possesses all the elements of permanence and may soon be a controlling factor in American politics.

Though this may not as yet presage a great social revolution, still it is precisely the way in which a reform in the direction indicated should be expected to originate. But whether the present movement prove enduring or ephemeral, the seeds of reform have been sown broadcast throughout the land, and sooner or later they must spring up, grow, and bear their fruit.

For a long time to come social action must be chiefly negative and “be confined to the removal of evils that exist, such as have been pointed out in these pages, but a positive stage will ultimately be reached in which society will consider and adopt measures for its own advancement. The question of the respective provinces of social action and individual action cannot be entered into here at length, but it is certain that the former will continue to encroach upon the latter so long as such encroachment is a public benefit. There is one large field in which there is no question on this point, viz., the field covered by what, in modern economic parlance, is called  “ natural monopoly.” The arguments are too familiar to demand restatement here, and the movement is already so well under way that there is little need of further argument. As to what lies beyond this, however, there is room for much discussion and honest difference of opinion. This is because there has been so little induction. It is the special characteristic of the form of government that I have called sociocracy, resting as it does, directly upon the science of sociology, to investigate the facts bearing on every subject, not for the purpose of depriving any class of citizens of the opportunity to benefit themselves, but purely and solely for the purpose of ascertaining what is for the best interests of society at large.

The socialistic arguments in favor of society taking upon itself the entire industrial operations of the world have never seemed to me conclusive, chiefly because they have consisted so largely of pure theory and a priori deductions. Any one who has become imbued by the pursuit of some special branch of science with the nature of scientific evidence requires the presentation of such evidence before he can accept conclusions in any other department. And this should be the attitude of all in relation to these broader questions of social phenomena.  The true economist can scarcely go farther than to say that a given question is an open one, and that he will be ready to accept the logic of facts when these are brought forward. I do not mean that we must not go into the water until we have learned to swim. This, however, suggests the true method of solving such questions. One learns to swim by a series of trials, and society can well afford to try experiments in certain directions and note the results. There are, however, other methods, such as careful estimates of the costs and accurate calculations of the effect based on the uniform laws of social phenomena. Trial is the ultimate test of scientific theory thus formed, and may, in social as in physical science, either establish or overthrow hypotheses. But in social science, no less than in other branches of science, the working hypothesis must always be the chief instrument of successful research.

Until the scientific stage is reached, and as a necessary introduction to it, social problems may properly be clearly stated and such general considerations brought forward as have a direct bearing upon them. I know of no attempts of this nature which I can more warmly recommend than those made by John Stuart Mill in his little work On Liberty, and in his Chapters on Socialism, of which the latter appeared posthumously. They are in marked contrast, by their all-sided wisdom, with the intensely one-sided writings of Herbert Spencer on substantially the same subject ; and yet the two authors are obviously at one on the main points discussed.  This candid statement of the true claims of the laissez faire school is perfectly legitimate. Equally so are like candid presentations of the opposite side of the question. The more  light that can be shed on all sides the better, but in order really to elucidate social problems it must be the dry light of  science, as little influenced by feeling as though it were the  inhabitants of Jupiter’s moons, instead of those of this planet, that were under the field of the intellectual telescope.

The concept of Sociocracy has recently (2007) been reviewed and updated in a new book We The People by John Buck and Sharon Villines. It is a wonderfully complete resource, as well as my source for this essay.

More about Lester Frank Ward    More about Sociocracy

Occupy Wall Street: No Demand is Big Enough

Charles Eisenstein

Looking out upon the withered American Dream, many of us feel a deep sense of betrayal. Unemployment, financial insecurity, and lifelong enslavement to debt are just the tip of the iceberg. We don’t want to merely fix the growth machine and bring profit and product to every corner of the earth. We want to fundamentally change the course of civilization. For the American Dream betrayed even those who achieved it, lonely in their overtime careers and their McMansions, narcotized to the ongoing ruination of nature and culture but aching because of it, endlessly consuming and accumulating to quell the insistent voice, “I wasn’t put here on earth to sell product.” “I wasn’t put here on earth to increase market share.” “I wasn’t put here on earth to make numbers grow.”

We protest not only at our exclusion from the American Dream; we protest at its bleakness. If it cannot include everyone on earth, every ecosystem and bioregion, every people and culture in its richness; if the wealth of one must be the debt of another; if it entails sweatshops and underclasses and fracking and all the rest of the ugliness our system has created, then we want none of it.

No one deserves to live in a world built upon the degradation of human beings, forests, waters, and the rest of our living planet. Speaking to our brethren on Wall Street, no one deserves to spend their lives playing with numbers while the world burns. Ultimately, we are protesting not only on behalf of the 99% left behind, but on behalf of the 1% as well. We have no enemies. We want everyone to wake up to the beauty of what we can create.

Occupy Wall Street has been criticized for its lack of clear demands, but how do we issue demands, when what we really want is nothing less than the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible? No demand is big enough. We could make lists of demands for new public policies: tax the wealthy, raise the minimum wage, protect the environment, end the wars, regulate the banks. While we know these are positive steps, they aren’t quite what motivated people to occupy Wall Street. What needs attention is something deeper: the power structures, ideologies, and institutions that prevented these steps from being taken years ago; indeed, that made these steps even necessary. Our leaders are beholden to impersonal forces, such as that of money, that compel them to do what no sane human being would choose. Disconnected from the actual effects of their policies, they live in a world of insincerity and pretense. It is time to bring a countervailing force to bear, and not just a force but a call. Our message is, “Stop pretending. You know what to do. Start doing it.” Occupy Wall Street is about exposing the truth. We can trust its power. When a policeman pepper sprays helpless women, we don’t beat him up and scare him into not doing it again; we show the world. Much worse than pepper spray is being perpetrated on our planet in service of money. Let us allow nothing happening on earth to be hidden.

If politicians are disconnected from the real world of human suffering and ecosystem collapse, all the more disconnected are the financial wizards of Wall Street. Behind their computer screens, they occupy a world of pure symbol, manipulating numbers and computer bits. Occupy Wall Street punctures their bubble of pretense as well, reconnects them with the human consequences of the god they serve, and perhaps with their own consciences and humanity too. Only in a hallucination could someone imagine that the unsustainable can last forever; in puncturing their bubble, we remind them that the money game is nearing its end. It can be perpetuated for a while longer, perhaps, but only at great and growing cost. We, the 99%, are paying that cost right now, and as the environment and the social fabric decay, the 1% will soon feel it too. We want those who operate and serve the financial system to wake up and see before it is too late.

We can also point out to them that they sooner or later they will have no choice. The god they serve, the financial system, is a dying god. Reading various insider financial websites, I perceive that the authorities are flailing, panicking, desperately implementing solutions they themselves know are temporary just to kick the problem down the road a few years or a few months. The strategy of lending even more money to a debtor who cannot pay his debts is doomed, its eventual failure a mathematical certainty. Like all our institutions of exponential growth, it is unsustainable. Once you have stripped the debtor of all assets – home equity, savings, pension – and turned every last dollar of his or her disposable income toward debt service, once you have forced the debtor into austerity and laid claim even to his future income (or in the case of nations, tax revenues), then there is nothing left to take. We are nearing that point, the point of peak debt. The money machine, ever hungry, seeks to liquidate whatever scraps remain of the natural commons and social equity to reignite economic growth. If GDP rises, so does our ability to service debt. But is growth really what we want? Can we really cheer an increase in housing starts, when there are 19 million vacant housing units on the market already? Can we really applaud a new oil field, when the atmosphere is past the limit of how much waste it can absorb? Is more stuff really what the world needs right now? Or can we envision a world instead with more play and less work, more sharing and less buying, more public space and less indoors, more nature and less product?

So far, government policy has been to try somehow to keep the debts on the books, but every debt bubble in history ultimately collapses; ours is no different. The question is, how much misery will we endure, and how much will we inflict, before we succumb to the inevitable? And secondly, how can we make a gentle, non-violent transition to a steady-state or degrowth world? Too many revolutions before us have succeeded only to institute a different but more horrible version of the very thing they overthrew. We look to a different kind of revolution. At risk of revealing the stars in my eyes, let me call it a revolution of love.

What else but love would motivate any person to abandon the quest to maximize rational self-interest? Love, the felt experience of connection to other beings, contradicts the laws of economics as we know them. Ultimately, we want to create a money system, and an economy, that is the ally not the enemy of love. We don’t want to forever fight the money power to create good in the world; we want to change the money power so that we don’t need to fight it. I will not in this essay describe my vision – one of many – of a money system aligned with the good in all of us. I will only say that such a shift can only happen atop an even deeper shift, a transformation of human consciousness. Happily, just such a transformation is underway today. We see it in anyone who had dedicated their lives to serving, healing, and protecting other beings: people, cultures, whales, children, ecosystems, the waters, the forests, the planet.

In the ecological age, we are beginning to understand that we are connected beings, that the welfare of any species or people is aligned with our own. Our money system is inconsistent with this understanding, which is dawning among all 100 percent of us, each in a different way. I think the ultimate purpose of Occupy Wall Street, or the great archetype it taps into, is the revolution of love. If the 99% defeat the 1%, they will like the Bolsheviks ultimately create a new 1% in their place. So let us not defeat them; let us open them and invite them to join us.

If Occupy Wall Street has a demand, it should be this: wake up! The game is nearly over. Jump ship while there is still time. In my work I meet many people of wealth who have done that, exiting the money game and devoting their time to giving away money as beautifully as they can. And I meet many more people who have the skills and good fortune to earn wealth if they wanted to, but who likewise refuse to participate in the money game. So if I sound idealistic, keep in mind that many people have had a change of heart already.

Some might call these ideas impractical (though I think that nothing other than a change of heart is practical), and seek to issue concrete demands. Unfortunately, though no demand is big enough, yet equally any demand we would care to make is also too big. Everything we want is on the very margin of mainstream political discourse, or outside it altogether. For example, it might be within the range of respectable policy options to tighten standards on industrial-scale confinement meat operations; but how about ending the practice completely? Congress wrangles about whether or not to reduce troop levels by a few thousand here and there, but what about ending the garrisoning of the planet? Any demand that we could make that is within the realm of political reality is too small. Any demand we could make that reflects what we truly want is politically unrealistic.

Shall we fight hard for something we don’t even want? It is fine to make demands, but the movement cannot get hung up on them, much less on practicality, because any remotely achievable demand is far less than what our planet needs. “Practical” is not an option. We must seek the extraordinary.

We might come up with a list of demands, something we can all stand behind, albeit each with a secret reservation in his or her heart that says, “I wanted more than that.” I encourage those in the movement to recognize such demands as stepping stones, or landmarks, perhaps, on the road to an economy of love. Let us never mortgage a greater to a lesser. The means of the movement, more than the ends, will be the genesis of what comes after the debt pyramid collapses. Occupy Wall Street is practicing new forms of non-hierarchical collaboration, peer-to-peer organization, and playful action that someday, maybe, we can build a world on.

We must learn the lessons of Egypt, where a people’s movement started with the amorphous demand to end intolerable conditions, and, as it discovered its power, soon turned to demand the ouster of the president. That demand would have been too big at the outset, too impossible; yet at the end it proved to be too small. The dictator left, the protestors went home without creating any lasting structures of people power, and, while some things changed, the basic political and economic infrastructure of Egypt did not.

Occupy Wall Street should not be content with half-measures, even as it encourages and applauds the tiny hundredth-measures that might come first. It should not let such concessions sap the strength of the movement or seduce it into neglecting to foster its organizational network. Occupy Wall Street is the first manifestation in a long time of “people power” in America. For too long, democracy has, for most people, meant meaningless choices in a box. The Wall Street occupation is stepping out of the box.

Our job is to take a stand for a world that is truly beautiful, fair, and just, a planet and a civilization that is healing. For a politician or a financier, even a small step in this direction takes courage, for it goes against the gradient of money and all that is attached to it. I think that the task of Occupy Wall Street is to provide a context for that courage, and a call to that courage. With each step taken, the necessity of far larger steps will become apparent, along with the courage to take them.

To those holding the reins of power, let us say, We will be your witnesses and your truthtellers. We will not allow you to live in a bubble. We will not go away. We will show you who you are hurting and how. We will make it awkward to do business, until your conscience cannot stand it any longer. We know, in the beginning, many of you will try to escape us; perhaps you will leave Wall Street for suburban corporate offices on private land where there is no “street” for us to hit. You might also retreat further into your ideologies of globalism and growth that deny the obvious. But nothing will stop us, because our tactics will constantly shift. In one way or another, we will speak the truth and we will speak it loudly. Where speaking the truth becomes illegal, we will break the law. We will not wait to be invited. We will enter, in some way, every physical and ideological fortress.

The truth is dwindling rain forests, spreading deserts, mass tree die-offs on every continent; looted pensions, groaning burdens of student debt, people working two or three dead end jobs; children eating dirt in Haiti, elders choosing between food and medicine… the list is endless, and we will make it no longer possible to hold it in disconnection from the money system. That is why we converge on Wall Street, and anywhere that finance holds sway. You have lulled us into complacency for long enough with illusions and false hopes. We the people are awakening and we will not go back to sleep.

Charles Eisenstein’s Blog