An ongoing discussion about energy and finance, and how we might plan our lives, businesses and community in beautiful South Gippsland in the face of a changing world.
From Michael Pettis' finance blog, a dose of cold water on the vaporous conceits of our bloated miners…in two years time this will be old news and we will have adjusted to the new realities, but for now it is amusing although rather chilling to see our treasurer, Wayne Swan and Glenn Stevens from the Reserve Bank strutting around as though they are personally in control of our current good fortune. It will be interesting to see how they behave when the rug is whipped out from underneath them.
The problem is of course the shortness of human memory and our brief life span. I'm old enough to have lived through three recessions, but if you're under the age of forty-five you will have never experienced one as a responsible adult, and if you spent your young adulthood in tertiary study, raise that age to fifty.
Even when the evidence of past disaster is around you, it can be hard to notice it for what it is. When I was at university at the beginning of the nineteen-seventies I lived in Carlton, which was a suburb built in the eighteen-hundreds. The whole area had narrowly survived complete demolition as an intractable slum in the nineteen-sixties. Carlton was on the up and up when I lived there: Fitzroy, the suburb to the east was still grim, poverty-stricken and Dickensian. Yet both suburbs had been prosperous when built. They were clobbered by the depression which started in 1873 and which ran through until 1896 — the first Great Depression. Seventy-five years later they were just beginning to emerge from that disaster! Of course prosperity had returned and disappeared several times since the initial disaster but it had happened somewhere else: other suburbs were built from the fruits of prosperity while Carlton and Fitzroy were largely forgotten. Now, they are both very much up-market, one-hundred and twenty years later!
So be aware of the transitory nature of human affairs and trust not in the utterances of the mighty! The real story is written in other places. Don't worry about Gina Rinehart's crazy public bloviations: they will soon be amusing footnotes to history.
For a good current view of the Australian situation, check out this PDF. from Variant Perception (an independent global macroeconomic research service). This is investment advice, but don't be fooled by the title, "Australia: The Unlucky Country". Despite the short-term pain we're going to suffer, the longer view is still better than a lot of other places!
I've just watched a presentation by Jeremy Rifkin — a very clever and articulate man — which is below. It's long but engrossing — go on, watch it, I'll wait!
If you watched it you will see what I mean. But did you also see how it is a piece of theatre, rather than a closely reasoned argument? He presents us with a view of human progress which, to condense Jeremy's argument, equates pretty much with increased energy consumption! Ergo, we must keep up the energy level! And then he pulls a whole lot of techno-speak out of the air, equating distributed information with distributed energy generation (see, one works, so the other must too!) and sketching out a sexy-sounding future with the whole world of little home generators linking together, busy making their contribution to the betterment of the human species! The young people know all about this kind of stuff 'cause they're on Facebook and Twitter! So lets get them all going on it.
Only it's all a crock of — well — crap, I'm afraid. His argument for human progress is so thin, so grossly over-simplified and ridiculously reductionist as to be no better than the sort of thing that pops into your head when you've smoked some really good weed after dinner. And then to use it as the justification for leading the young people of the world off on a campaign of technological positivism, based on about as much technical savvy as in a Jetson's cartoon, is to my mind, positively criminal. To me, the underlying game here is "Keep my scam going (and my books selling) for as long as possible". From the blurb on Amazon that goes with his book The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World:
Jeremy Rifkin is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and the author of eighteen bestselling books, including The Hydrogen Economy and The End of Work. He has been a guest on Face the Nation, The Lehrer News Hour, 20/20, Larry King Live, Today, and Good Morning America. The National Journal named Rifkin as one of 150 people in the U.S. that have the most influence in shaping federal government policy. He has also testified before numerous congressional committees, and since 1994, Mr. Rifkin has been a senior lecturer at the Wharton School’s Executive Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Rifkin is chairman of the Global CEO Business Roundtable, which includes IBM, Cisco, Cushman and Wakefield, and has served as an adviser to various global leaders, including Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Angela Merkel of Germany. His monthly column on global issues appears in many of the world’s leading newspapers and magazines, including The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian in the U.K., Die Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany, Trud in Bulgaria, ClarÃn in Argentina, and Al-Ittihad in the U.A.E. He lives in Bethesda, MD.
So this dude is a heavy hitter with influence. Maybe he is a "nice guy". But what he says, if you strip away the flashy factoids, the glossy visions and the dodgy science is no better than a high-class advertisement for himself. God help you if you take anything he says seriously (for a cogent critique of his book "The Hydrogen Economy" look here). Keep him away from the children!
On to my next guest. This is Margaret Alston, a holder of an Order of Australia, Professor of Social Work and Head of Department at Monash University and Director of the Gender, Leadership and Social Sustainability research unit. Chair of the Australian Heads of Schools of Social Work. Much less flashy than Jeremy Rifkin, much more earnest, lots of academic credibility. This is a talk on Radio National's Big Ideas program, which is a broadcast of the Sidney Myer Rural Lecture (click to get to the page with the podcast) entitled "Rural Education…Shaping Leaders for the Future".
She is a lady with a sweet voice who is trying to Do Good Work. She starts off well by talking about the problems facing rural areas with climate change, the economic crisis and peak oil, and how leadership has to come from within rural communities rather than be imposed from outside. At about the eleven minute mark she strays off overseas, running through a number of international projects she has been associated with. The classic moment comes with her description of a conference at the Prado campus of Monash University in Italy, to do with gender and climate change. The thought of all those earnest folk (mostly women?) arriving by jumbo jet from far-flung places, trailing clouds of glory fairly impressive carbon footprints, brought a faint smile to my lips. I'm sure lots of important resolutions were passed, and great thoughts were — well — thunk. And her book about it will be out soon. Then we're off to Bangladesh which is of course full of problems, but the village people are passionate that their children be well educated even though they themselves have nothing and live in villages that get washed away every time you turn around — kablam! Just like that.
But here we have come to the meat and potatoes of the good professor's talk: education! As it is for the Bangladeshis, so it should be for us country folk in Australia! Then follows a long discussion of the problems down on the farm. Rural youngsters don't get as much education and tend to rush off to the city if they've got any brains. And how do you get young teachers to go happily off to Lake Boga to Spread the Word? Dear dear dear. With enough resources, we could be leading the world with all these brilliant country youngsters, who instead are drinking Jim Beam & Coke, crashing their utes, watching Biggest Loser, beating each other senseless or shagging in their time off from fixing fences or cleaning at the motel.
I think I've got the good Professor's schtick worked out. You make some statement about the world which catches attention and being an intelligent person, she makes an intelligent statement. Then comes the bit where you must blow your own trumpet, but in a subtle way. The international connections, the book etc. This segues into the main subject, which is to get more funding for your particular gig. Fortunately education is like love: you can never get enough of it. So her talk is — surprise! — a big advertisement for herself and her institutions. All those bright young people sitting there like little birds with their beaks open, waiting for mummy bird to drop in the Worm of Knowledge! And who is better equipped than you-know-who to play mummy bird?
Will it do any good? I think at this point, we need to find some historic, successful rural leaders of note and examine their education. How about Attila the Hun for a start? Let's get real. Rural Australia is simply a thinly-spread industrial suburb of the great international civilisation of which we are all a part. The survival of rural Australia is therefore is therefore tied closely to the fate of this mighty construct — not to whether little Johny or Jane in Grong Grong gets a diploma of Gender Studies. Unfortunately the signs aren't good. Climate change and economic collapse means quite simply that large areas of this great brown land are going to be abandoned. Those parts that will survive and thrive are quite easy to identify. They are the ones without extreme climate (sorry inland Australia, the Northern territory and Queensland!), which have good soil and which are favoured as holiday spots by the elites which will be running our cities.
As the economy starts to shrink, the chorus of entitlement-seekers will rise to a shriek. Unfortunately many intelligent people have been recruited into roles as the highly-educated technicians who run our current bloated system. Their wages are now paid by what will soon become a rapidly shrinking tax base, or by industries which cater for discretionary purchases such as cars, Coca-Cola, corn chips or holidays in Bali over which the sword of consumer cost-cutting hangs.
As reality bites will we turn away from Snake Oil salesmen like Jeremy Rifkin? Probably not — we all love a good story even if it's not true, us gullible human beings! The fate of the educators is easier to foresee — those who can teach you what you need to know will be fed and those who are peddling a scam will starve.
I've been ruminating for a few years on the best way to go about increasing the economic resilience of our corner of the world. For a time I focused on a scheme to build business incubators, and spoke to various people including our local shire's business representative, the Department of Planning & Community Development and to Regional Development Victoria, trying to drum up support. My theory: build it and they will come! I even had spaces in mind to locate the two sections, which were the retail part (in Foster, our throbbing, pulsating commercial centre!) and the manufacturing part (to be in the abandoned factory in Toora). If I could persuade the Shire to buy the Toora factory and finance the purchase of a CNC milling machine, and then somehow get a shop in Foster which could be split up into a series of little retail spaces…but my scheme never seemed to get any legs. The factory in Toora sold to someone in Sydney for what sounds like a pie-in-the-sky scheme to set up plastic recycling (and it looks more derelict and sadly overgrown by the day) and Foster also seemed like a closed door with no suitable spaces available. Plus no-one showed any enthusiasm for dropping serious money and effort into my proposal.
It all got too hard, and if something's too hard then the time or the idea isn't right. In the meantime, doodling around on other projects lead me to the Arduino processor and I started teaching my self to program it and dream vaguely of the commercial possibilities. And suddenly the world seemed to open up with lots of people talking about the new world made possible by the sudden miniaturisation and cheapness of this new generation of microprocessors. John Robb over at Global Guerrillas has been on a tear, with lots of posts on drones, drone warfare and his big push for resilient communities. And I was re-reading all my blog posts (for the first time since I started it!) when I clicked on the name of a commenter, leading me to the man himself, Mitch Davis, and his Hackvana site. Suddenly I saw the time was right! Mitch made a comment about electronics which chimed in with what I'd been thinking for a few years: to quote him
How lucky am I to be alive at this moment, when the hackerspace movement is taking off. Five years ago our "electronics" shops had ditched their components, and the world looked set to be slave to the consumerist mindset: We buy it, it fails, we throw it away, we buy it again. But a funny thing has happened in the past three years: The advent of inexpensive microprocessors, of open source hardware and software (I'm thinking in particular of the Arduino, that incredible gateway enabler) and the manufacturing power of China means that now anyone can get into electronics. And come to think of it, electronics isn't even the main point - it's just the vehicle. The main point is that we don't have to consume, we can realise how satisfying it is to create, to repurpose, to collaborate and share.
So true: I did a big job up at Renmark in South Australia a few years ago and discovered getting bits from an electronics shop was a real battle in Mildura. At that time it seemed make-it-yourself was dying.
That was then, this is now! I contacted Mitch and he gave me some valuable pointers: to Hack Melbourne and to Little Bird Electronics amongst other things. Checking out Hack Melbourne I saw that one of the members was an old workmate of mine, Michael Borthwick, with whom I'd worked on a science museum in Malaysia back in the nineties, and he was into some wild stuff (check the Lunar Numbat Project!). Plus the Hack Melbourne seemed to be full of all the things I'd been idly kicking around: 3-D printing, electronic controls and monitoring, even DNA analysis. It seemed to be full of my kind of people. So following Mitch's advice I contacted Andy Gelme, the man behind it all, who replied to me in the middle of writing this post with an invitation to visit Hack Melbourne. Yay!
My plan is to hold a meeting in a couple of weeks (after my Hack Melbourne visit), advertising to all interested parties plus the Shire's people and get something moving. I have one schoolkid on the bus I drive who's really interested and another who might be. That's one eighth of my small sample. One in eight of the three hundred and sixty or so kids at the secondary college would be forty-five, plus a few maybe from the primary school, plus who knows how many out in the general community.
Before with the business incubators, it was a big up-front investment to get it off the ground. This is scaled way back on the financial front. Getting a space to operate in is still a problem, but I do have an interest in a factory at the bottom of the town where I'm sharing with my mate Scotty. Plus another mate Gunnar said the place he's renting in the middle of the town might be available soon. Hmm!
We had our public lecture with Nicole Foss (Stoneleigh from The Automatic Earth) the end of last month. It was organised as part of her Australian tour, and Malcolm McKelvie of Baw Baw Sustainability Network and I co-operated to put it on in Leongatha. Malcolm did a great job, whereas I was a bit behind the eight-ball for the weeks leading up to it as I had a heart attack on New Years day (my first, but a minor one fortunately) so I didn't get on top of the publicity as I'd hoped to. But it didn't matter: we had around eighty people turn up which was much better than I expected. South Gippsland Shire in the shape of Christine Hamilton from their Sustainability department was completely wonderful, organising the venue and arranging a donation to make it happen as well as cleaning up afterwards. Baw Baw Shire has also kicked in a substantial donation. So it was all good!
The lecture went well and Nicole was in fine form, especially with the Q & A afterwards. My friend Ross turned up just as the lecture was about to start and acted as moderator for the Q & A which was great. After the show we went back to our place in Foster where I was putting Nicole and Ilargi (he's a great guy!) up and we drank red wine, putting the world to rights until 12:30 or so. I mentioned to Nicole I was driving the Mount Best school bus and that if she, Ilargi and Trevor, the friend who had driven them down to the lecture, wanted to they could come with me in the morning for a spectacular tour of the hills of South Gippsland. So I woke Nicole up at 6:30, we picked up Trevor (Ilargi had elected to sleep in) and off we went. It was a perfect day, the views were superb and the kids on the bus didn't riot! After we sat around drinking coffee and talking about life, the universe and everything until just before midday when they headed off for the next lecture in Geelong. Whereupon I had to have a little lie down! It took me a couple of days to recover: I hope Nicole wasn't as exhausted as I was!
I'm a long-term resident of South Gippsland, with a history of community involvement. This blog is my contribution to the conversation we need to have if we're to navigate the difficult years of transition to an energy constrained future. Contact me directly at storcom-at-rabbit-dot-com-dot-au
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