South Gippsland Futures

Summertime, and the living is easy…

2011-12-28T15:06:00.001+11:00

Hi everyone — it's been a long time since I last posted. We had our forum in Foster a couple of months ago and it went reasonably well. South Gippsland Shire councilors kicked in a substantial amount of money to help run it for which I'm very grateful! I was aiming it largely at the people who were on the panel and it may have had some benefit there. But it's all water under the bridge now — I feel personally that the time for consciousness raising is nearly at an end. Now is the time to start work with the new realities in mind!

But I'm having one last go at educating the public and it's a beauty! Stoneleigh (Nicole Foss) from The Automatic Earth is coming to Australia on a lecture tour and we are having her give a talk down here. It will be at the Leongatha (edit in response to comment: Leongatha is in Victoria) Memorial Hall in the Council meeting room on February 21st at 7:30pm (2 Michael Place Leongatha) for those of you in the area. Cost will be $10.00. It will (I suppose) be basically her A Century of Challenges lecture, which is pretty technical and requires at least some economic knowledge, but is very in-depth and far-reaching in its scope. Definitely a must-know for anyone seriously planning for the future at any level. I've just had a meeting with Malcolm McKelvie from Baw Baw Sustainability Network with whom I'm jointly running the talk and we're happy with our arrangements, so it should be a good show!

So what comes next? I'm working three part-time jobs at the moment while I have a think about what business to start. What I'm planning to do at the moment is to run classes for Arduino control systems programming and building. I'm thinking of aiming it principally at local kids (although some adults may be interested too). I want to (a) get a low capital and knowledge intensive start-up business going down here for the brighter locals and (b) find out who the best programmers and solderers are so I can employ 'em! Back when my exhibit building business was operational, John Banikos and I built quite a few things powered by PLCs (programmable logic controllers), mini computers used in industrial processes. The Arduino is a low-cost PLC essentially. There is also an ultra low-cost computer which has just been released — the Raspberry — which I will check out.

I'd really like to get some sort of hackerspace going and try 3-D printing too, but it will have to be one step at a time for a while!

Community forum background information

2011-06-15T14:32:00.006+10:00

Our little transition group is going to run a community forum to try and get as many key people in our district to have an understanding of the implications of peak oil for our local economy. Below is the draft of a background document I want to have available for participants. Does anyone have criticisms or suggestions? I'm a bit concerned that the references for economics are a bit thin. If any of you have any good links you think I can use, send them along!

Peak Oil & Finance Briefing Paper for panelists and participants at the Corner Inlet Fuel & Finance Forum, 13th June 2011
Prepared by Lloyd Morcom cornerinlettransition@gmail.com
Transition Corner Inlet District Inc
Partly adapted from “Peak Oil Briefing Paper” by Kate Leslie of Transition Hobsons Bay
which can be found at
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_vLC_EwqdPIfAFyUdCW20-JLKK9-nB4W9Hqo3gDlv38/edit?hl=en_US&authkey=CLmWzukB&pli=1

Executive Summary
The problem of Peak Oil and credit-based finance
Oil is a non-renewable resource with geological limits to its supply. In the past 150 years, we humans have used around one half of all oil. We are now using four times as much as we are finding.

It is increasingly believed by a range of experts that the peak of extraction may have already occurred between 2006 and 2008. This means that as each year goes by, there will be less oil available. Oil in the cheapest, most accessible reserves was extracted first. The reserves left are more difficult and expensive to access and extract.

Peak oil presents a real challenge to us as a society – oil has become such an integral part of our life that the end of abundant and cheap supply is bound to create serious disruption around the world and not least in South Gippsland. Oil is used in almost all facets of production. As well being a fuel it is the main feedstock for plastics manufacture. Its role in agriculture is crucial. In fact it underpins the stability of our economy.

What is hidden from most of us by the complexity of the world we live in is how our economy has developed into one dependent on an endless supply of cheap energy and oil in particular for its continued existence. Our economy is credit-based and uses fiat money: that is, it uses arbitrary symbols legislated into existence for use in trade and exchange. Most of what we call money has been lent into existence by banks and governments and exists as only as symbols on paper or computer screens. Because it must be repaid with interest, the supply of money continually expands and so must the economy it supports, in order to pay back both principal and interest.

If economic growth is curtailed by a shortage of energy, particularly oil, our economic system could collapse, as credit lent will be impossible to repay with interest and so banks would be unable to lend. This is what is currently happening more or less in slow motion to the world economy. The crises in Europe (Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain are all teetering on the edge of defaulting on their debts) and in the USA (with its enormous unfunded budget deficit to cover social security, health care and the military) are caused by an ongoing rapid increase in debt which is becoming increasingly clear will never be repaid. Currently governments have been coerced into using taxpayer funds to give financial backing to banks but this creates a political crisis which will blow up at some stage.

Australia seems to be a long way from these kinds of problems at the moment but our seeming invulnerability is an illusion and we could find ourselves dragged into them should these international crises affect our trade, which would rapidly reveal the fragility of our own finance and banking system.

Resources for understanding the problem: Peak Oil
There are two key concepts to grasp with Peak Oil. One is the “Hubbert curve”, the bell-shaped graph that shows how a resource of any kind is exploited, with a rising level of production to a peak and then an (often symmetrical) decline. The other concept is the idea of EROEI: “energy returned on energy invested”. This shows how expensive — in energy terms — an energy resource is to exploit. For example, the first oil wells in the nineteenth century produced more than one hundred times the energy value than it took to drill and develop them. Recent offshore oil fields on the other hand have a ratio of energy returned on energy invested of nearer to ten-to-one.

ABC Catalyst video on the problem of Peak Oil
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaNz3qS5WAo

A good primer by Gail Tverberg who writes at The Oil Drum
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3726

One in video format by another Oil Drum commentator, André Angelantoni
http://www.postpeakliving.com/preparing-post-peak-life

Australia’s CSIRO has put out a study called the Future Fuels Forum
http://www.csiro.au/science/FutureFuelsForum.html

An explanation of EROEI at Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EROEI

An explanation the the Hubbert curve also at Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_curve

A longer discussion of EROEI at The Oil Drum
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7786

Raw figures on the world situation from the Energy Export Databrowser
http://mazamascience.com/OilExport/

Another useful subsidiary concept is the “Export Land Model” based on work by geologist Jeffrey Brown. To quote from the Wikipedia article on it, “It models the decline in oil exports that result when an exporting nation experiences both a peak in oil production and an increase in domestic oil consumption. In such cases, exports decline at a far faster rate than the decline in oil production alone.”

The Wikipedia article can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_Land_Model

A discussion of how it affects Australia can be found here
http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/3657

A longer technical exploration of the Export Land Model is here
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7007

Resources for understanding the problem: the economy
It is more difficult to find an objective, all-encompassing explanation of the economic situation. There are many commentators who can give valuable insights but most have a limited view or are fixated what they believe to be the particular cause. But anyway, here are some links.

Chris Martenson has a comprehensive though necessarily US based view of the economy. His Crash Course is well worth a look for an explanation of the causes of the current big downturn: click on “Watch the Crash Course” on the top left of the web page.
http://www.chrismartenson.com/

An amusing stick-figure explanation of the crisis, again US based
http://cravensbrothers.com/cboutlook/

Steve Keen is an Australian economist and the author of “Debunking Economics”. He has been shouting “The emperor has no clothes” at those economists who see a return to business-as-usual soon. He is best at explaining the housing bubble, which is so important as a cause of the huge increase in debt which has driven demand in Australia. When the bubble pops, as it’s starting to do now, demand (= spending) will fall precipitously. Couple that with the grim outlook for local manufacturing and the erosion of retail sales because of online purchases, both caused by the high Australian dollar, and we have a very nasty outlook for the economy especially if our exports falter. This is a video presentation by Steve Keen with Powerpoint slides.
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2011/03/20/mortgage-finance-association-of-australia-talk/

Government initiatives - Local
What are governments doing about it? Not much apart from a Federal Senate committee investigation in 2007, although there has been some action at the local government level. Maribyrnong City Council addressed the subject with its Peak Oil Contingency Plan (June 2009)
http://www.maribyrnong.vic.gov.au/Files/Final_PeakOil_25_August_Website.pdf

Darebin City Council has an Adaption Plan (November 2009)
http://www.darebin.vic.gov.au/Files/Adaptation_Plan_Final_November_2009.pdf

In March 2007, Brisbane City Council’s Climate Change and Energy Taskforce released their final report 'A Call For Action'. Brisbane Council adopted some of its recommendations, stating “peak oil is a more recent consideration”.
http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/documents/plans_strategies/summary_intro_climate_change_energy_taskforce_report.pdf

Coffs Harbour City Council (NSW) adopted a 'Peak Oil Report and Action Plan' in November 2008.
http://www.coffsharbour.nsw.gov.au/resources/documents/CHCC_Peak_Oil_Report1.pdf

Sunshine Coast Council adopted the Sunshine Coast Climate Change and Peak Oil Strategy 2010-2020 in June 2010

Government initiatives - Federal
The Federal Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism, on behalf of the National Oil Supplies Emergency Committee (NOSEC) examined Australia’s current level of liquid fuel vulnerability and significant trends which may affect this up until 2020.
http://www.ret.gov.au/energy/energy_security/emergency_response/liquid_fuel_emergency/lfe_vulnerability/Pages/lfe_vulnerability.aspx

A Federal Government Senate Committee in 2007 published 'Inquiry into Australia’s Future Oil Supply and Alternative Transport Fuels'. It found Australia should be planning now for the enormous changes that will be needed to move to a less oil dependent future. The final report is here:
http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/rrat_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/oil_supply/report/index.htm

International reports
The UK Secretary for Energy and Climate Change committed in 2011 to establish an “Oil Shock Response Plan”. Reputedly it will address how to protect the economy “if we knew that the oil price would soar to $250 in 2014.” An article on it is here:
http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2072738/exclusive-government-develop-oil-shock-response-plan

The US Military issued a report in 2010 warning that “by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day.” The report may be accessed here:
http://www.peakoil.net/files/JOE2010.pdf

The German Military think tank tasked with fixing a direction for the German military analysed the implications of peak oil in 2010. The report was leaked. It reportedly warns of “shifts in the global balance of power, of the formation of new relationships based on interdependency, of a decline in importance of the western industrial nations, of the "total collapse of the markets" and of serious political and economic crises.” The Spiegel Online report is here:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,715138,00.html

Academic studies of social vulnerability
For a limited assessment of local impacts, two academics (Dodson and Sipe) have written a number of papers referencing maps of their “Vulnerability Assessment for Mortgage, Petrol and Inflation Risks and Expenses” (VAMPIRE). I draw your attention to the statement in their 2009 report that there are "increasingly pessimistic assessments emerging about the future security of conventional oil supplies."

2009 publication by implication. Quotes oil prices in mid 2008. No census date referenced. No Melbourne map
http://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/208220/ANZAPS09-Securing-suburbia-buy-Dodson-and-Sipe.pdf
 2008 publication. Has Melbourne map on p7. Based on 2001 Census data
http://www.aspo-australia.org.au/References/Bruce/Dodson2008PlannedHouseholdRisk_AustPlanner.pdf  
2006 publication. Based on 2001 Census data.
http://www98.griffith.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/10072/12665/1/41353.pdf

Musings on social meaning and direction in a declining culture

2011-04-02T10:36:00.010+11:00

I had an interesting experience on Thursday: my friend Fiona, who is a journalist on the local paper, rang me to say I should be at a park halfway between the town where I live and the one in which I grew up by just after twelve, in order to participate in some publicity for a stunt being run by Mercedes. Several cars running on hydrogen fuel cells are being driven round the world and this was to be a refueling stop for them. I turned up to find a great caravan of fuel trucks and support vans, necessary because places where you can top up your tank with hydrogen are pretty thin on the ground in South Gippsland.

So I chatted to various characters who were there. The cars came in and were refueled: we were promised a lunch but I had to miss out as I had a meeting to attend. What was striking was the size of the fuel trucks relative to the size of the vehicles. I had heard that hydrogen is a very bulky fuel and this will necessarily constrain any distribution network designed for it: essentially, it means it will work best for a dense concentration of vehicles close to a source of the gas, hence a city. To haul it long distances to outlets way out in the sticks won't work — the amount of fuel the trucks would consume would rapidly approach the amount they were carrying, and there are problems handling it too, due to its ability to leak through the tiniest orifice.

So I drove off musing on all this. The Mercedes people were full of enthusiasm for their project, needless to say, but is this the future of motoring? It could be the future of some motoring no doubt. Mercedes as a corporation may well survive the coming financial holocaust if their accountants are as smart as their engineers. Then they will be in a position to supply the elites in the cities with their clever cars, which have a range vastly greater than electric vehicles. But this is in no way the future of motoring for the masses. Because there can be no future of motoring for the masses.

Dmitri Orlov has just done a post at Club Orlov where he talks of the evolution of this phenomena: to quote…

…short-term political and financial trends point in an altogether different direction [from that of a continuation of the system-as-it-is]: that of the global industrial economy turning boutique. You see, one shoe has already dropped: the level of industrial activity that can be sustained today is already insufficient to provide anywhere near full employment and a reasonable quality of life for vast numbers of people; the solution is to disenfranchise them, to confiscate their savings, to cancel their retirements, to concentrate all of the remaining wealth in as few hands as possible, and to create a boutique economic and financial environment in which the lucky and unscrupulous few can continue to live comfortably…

As I said, if Mercedes plays this right, they may well have a future, providing for those who still have power and the money in the world. But don't be fooled into thinking that "alternative technologies" must necessarily be equitable, as well as "clean".

Good James Howard Kunstler interview & a great primer on the GFC

2011-03-31T10:27:00.004+11:00

JHK has only one tune in his repertoire but he plays it damn well. Here's an interview on Terrain.org (a journal of the built and natural environments) where he spins it all out in fine form — lots of quotable bits including this: "We will do what reality compels us to do, not necessarily what our fantasies propose." My sentiments exactly.

My friend Mike sent me a link to a broadcast which gives a background to the current financial crisis — if it puzzles you in any way, give it a listen! It makes very clear the motivations of players at every level. Highly recommended.

The passing of a master

2011-03-29T08:33:00.003+11:00

Joe Bageant is dead. He was the chronicler of his people, the rednecks of the American Scots-Irish underclass, whom he loved but for whom he despaired. Read his stuff: Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War and Rainbow Pie.

Australia looking down the Hubbert curve

2011-03-28T13:58:00.006+11:00

Here's a part of an interesting post on The Oil Drum.

Australia is next on the list and it appears to have passed peak oil production and as a result, exports have dropped from over 500 kbd in 2007 to just above 300 kbd today. The declines in production are expected to continue.

"The recent start-up of BHP Billiton's Pyrenees oil field and Apache's Van Gogh field - both situated off Western Australia's north-west coast - will provide a boost in the short-term; however, the long-term trend is for production to keep falling," EnergyQuest Chief Executive Officer, Dr Graeme Bethune, said today.(this from April 2010).

Current production is at around 540 kbd, having fallen 40 kbd in 2010.

The decline with a projected drop of 85% in 10 years can be seen from this graph:
Anticipated future Australian production (Geoscience Australia)

At the same time Australian consumption has been steadily rising, and is hovering just below 1 mbd.
Australian oil consumption (Index mundi)

In contrast, Australian natural gas reserves are significant. As with Malaysia it has supplied LNG to Japan, starting in 1989 and has just signed a $41 billion contract for a 20-year supply of LNG from the Gorgon field, taking 2.25 million tons of the anticipated 15 million tons (0.75 Tcf) of annual production anticipated from the field, as overall gas production continues to rise.

Current estimates of Australian natural gas reserves are of over 108 Tcf

Commenter Jedi Welder notes

In the graph above, Australian crude oil production seems to be all but anihilated in just 20 years from peak production. That is a realy big fall. How will they cope with that?

Indeed.

Wikileaks is a watershed

2010-12-07T18:51:00.007+11:00

Julian Assange has ignited a firestorm amongst the thinking classes. He is driving a wedge between the establishment and the general run of the intellectual class who work the levers of our modern industrial/financial world. This has grave consequences for the legitimacy of our rulers. Julia Gillard has had the approval of the US establishment, but is fast losing support at home because of her reflexive anti-Assange statements.

As Ran Prieur says in his December the ninth post, it doesn't matter who Julian Assange really is any more because he's become a myth, an enabling story that allows us (the intellectual class) to construct the narrative of our time. When a culture is on the rise, it's relatively easy for leaders to manage their business and to maintain the Mandate of Heaven. On the downward side — which we are now on, although it may be some years before this is widely acknowledged by the intellectual classes let alone the general public — problems multiply like the heads of the Hydra. It is an unfortunate time to be in charge of anything. The compromises one must make to reach the top of the greasy pole are becoming impossible to maintain. In such a time, uncompromising types like Assange find their opportunity. The times in a sense call out for them. A few years ago David Hicks had a similar chance to play this role but the time was premature and he was too shallow a vessel to carry the load, unlike Assange.

In a world of six billion people, where the dominant culture has reached the limits of its power and is starting to lose its grip, the tensions thus produced must find their expression through the lives of individuals. This is Julian Assange's fate. He has prepared himself for it and will no doubt acquit himself courageously enough according to his own values. The longer term significance is impossible to assess. But after he is gone there will be others, for better and worse. All types of people who have ever existed are out there — Christs and Hitlers — and in every crowded city these individuals are waiting, hoping their time has come.

Assange's writings are vague, overly-simple and fairly one-dimensional to my mind. He is not the new Messiah, although I have a feeling he'd like to be. But we'll see what he comes up with. And more importantly, what is made of him.

EDIT: The Archdruid in his latest post skewers the ruling elite more effectively than I can:

The elites that mostly run today’s industrial societies, like their equivalents in every other human society, have a deeply conservative streak under whatever surface layer of fashionable radicalism may be popular at any given time. They have the positions of influence that they do because they have the educations, hold the opinions, and think the thoughts that their peers, and more particularly the immediately prior generation of their peers, considered suitable to their roles. In a society that’s more or less sustainable, this is a powerful source of stability; in one that’s stumbled into an unsustainable human ecology, these same pressures for elite conformity can make it next to impossible for anyone in charge to think about the world in any way other than the one that’s making disaster inevitable.

2nd Edit: Ran's added a permalink for his Assange post so I've modified the link on his name above.

The moral issue of now

2010-11-10T06:37:00.002+11:00

Ran Prieur has a post which encapsulates the issue we in the industrial world face: the irrationality of our desires. He says…

My favorite election commentary is by Sharon Astyk: The election is over - Now what do we do with all the fear? I agree: the voters are not really idiots -- they are cowards, and using their human brainpower to convince themselves of fantasies that defy both reason and observation: that the government can dispense benefits without collecting taxes; that an economy based on exponential growth can continue on a planet of fixed size; that we can have utopia merely by filling the slots in the present system with different people. What they're afraid of is reality: that the government, the economy, the planet, cannot continue to give more than they get, that all the stuff we've been getting, we're going to stop getting.

If we expect Santa Claus (ie the great god of industrial civilisation) to bring us goodies endlessly while we have no appreciation of the costs, we will react with infantile rage when our desires are frustrated. And who will we blame? Refugees? Indians? Moslems? Jews?

After they lose their toys, the people will be hungry for leaders who call for the sacrifice of others, and I mean sacrifice in the literal sense: the ritual mass-murder of scapegoats. When there are piles of bodies in the streets, only then, from the sane fringes, will new and better systems grow to fill the dead spots.

And what will trigger this rage in Australia? My guess is a big collapse in real estate prices, brought on by a downturn in China which will slow our export bonanza. I hope it doesn't get as bad as Ran posits, but you never know.

The True Faith

2010-11-06T13:38:00.005+11:00

I'm talking about Science of course, or really its wildly popular but mentally subnormal child, Scientism. The believers in Scientism are generally the same people who believe in humanity's ever-upward climb towards perfect happiness and power — ok, we have the odd World War or financial hiccup, but everything will eventually get better and better, mkay?

The more paranoid fringe of Scientismists (I've coined a nice clumsy new term!), the sort who believe that George Bush bombed the World Trade Center because the Arabs weren't smart enough to organise something like that, tend to see conspiracies everywhere, except where they really are. Scientismists know deep down they're as dumb as dogsh*t, but that there are two types of smart people in the world, scientists and those evil bastards in the tall buildings. Scientismists believe in science, not as a system of inquiry, but as a reliable faith and the fount of all good things like iPhones and Prozac and Jumbo jets. They also tend to think like Ayn Rand: that the world is run by an incredibly smart conspiracy of evildoers who grab the ideas from the scientists and do what they will with them. Anything that disadvantages the powerful will be hidden away in some vast underground bunker. Like this wonderful invention that could let cars run on next to nothing! Watch this video!

What's worth noting is that no-one interviewing the guy asks where does the energy come from? And of course the designer, who knows what it is that he's made, just assumes that they know. But one comes away with the impression that these knob-heads think the energy comes from the salt water. All it took was a lone genius to see this! Just point radio waves at salt water and kaboom! Now watch the big energy companies suppress it!

Of course this is an American TV news spot and we know how ignorant a lot of those folk are. Not like Australia, where our ABC is rigorous in its scientific rectitude. But if you listen to people in this country talking and follow the political gossip you will soon realise that magical thinking and scientism is just as firmly embedded here — in control in fact — and that we are in no way especially intellectually privileged. For a start, who is talking about the fact that Australia imports 30% of its oil? We pay for it with our exports but how long can this go on? How do you think our economy will fair without that imported oil? Will electric cars magically appear? How about the parade of diesel trucks which carry the vast majority of our goods at some stage of their distribution? Will we get electric trucks too? And who supplies all this — Santa Claus? It is a dagger at the throat of our society, but no-one is talking about it! Instead all the talk is about the distribution of the goodies we have. The banks are greedy! No, they're the pillars of our economic strength! Houses cost too much because everyone wants one, but if you're smart, get in now and buy one because they always go up in value and you too can become a millionaire without working for it!

Most of us have very little understanding of how our lives really work. We're unaware of the vast investments in plant and institutions which so intricately underpin our daily life. All these complex arrangements are built and maintained by us, but we are conscious of only the tiny area we work in. For the rest, we deal in a kind of shorthand knowledge — a pseudo language which fools us and those we talk to, because it works. Until it doesn't. So house prices and stock prices go up and down and the trick is to know when to buy and sell, because stocks and houses have become almost purely gambling chips, the key to a future of living without working! Who knows what the stocks really represent? Because we all know we live in the best and luckiest country in the World and everything just gets better and better all the time because that's the Law of Nature, or something.

This spread of magical thinking has become the characteristic of our age, an age that began seriously in the nineteen-eighties. That's when somehow it seemed possible to spin something into nothing by talking the right talk. Young guys who had been nobodies only a few years previously suddenly had black clothes and cool haircuts and were driving new Porsches — rush hour to the eastern suburbs of Melbourne seemed to be jammed with them. The recession at the end of the eighties threw cold water on a lot of this for a few years, but it all popped up again in the mid-nineties and has powered on ever since. No-one makes anything, that's all done mysteriously, in China. Instead, we all work in service industries and the coolest thing is to be a celebrity, a chef or a footballer. And get a contract for a TV show. And spend enough on your credit card to get a free flight to Honkers and back. We just wish those dumb bastards in Afghanistan would see reason 'cause then they could live like us!

How long will it all last? One could argue that it will die when it doesn't work any more as a pseudo-philosophy. Of course it has never really worked, but over a short human life span it's possible to think all kinds of bizarre things and never have reality find you out. Only a very great trauma changes people's thinking and then usually only in those young enough to be receptive. I think scientism and its adherents will be with us for a very long time: even when it's obviously shot its bolt, like the Black Knight in The Quest for the Holy Grail, with all limbs missing its acolytes will think the corner will soon be turned and we'll be soon be back to Business as Usual.

Blaming, scapegoating and assigning causes

2010-10-25T16:46:00.005+11:00

First, read Dmitri Orlov's latest post, How (not) to Organise a Community. It's a ripper! Actually it's not great literature: it's a little too long and with a "put together" feel, but also what he's saying is a hard thing to listen to and to understand because it runs against what we want to understand. We want to follow the grooves we know — we want to form committees, have meetings, produce agendas, tick boxes and then have some feel-good social functions under the guise of "networking", where we can slap each other on the back and congratulate ourselves for "doing something". 'Cause that's how civilised modern types like us solve problems, isn't it? But what Dmitri says is what I've been feeling deep down, but without being able to articulate as well as he does: that the reality of life is that it doesn't matter what you think or feel or believe. All that matters is what you do and what the situation really is. And right action can be for all the "wrong" reasons, via the "wrong" people in the "wrong" places.

I'm plugging away at a number of projects at the moment, one of which is my novel, "Alex" (I've been a bit slow cranking out the chapters but they will appear in due course!). I've been thinking that what is going to happen sometime in the next three to four decades is we are going to lose the federal government we have now. Instead we'll have a military government, which I'm calling the Military Commission in the novel. It will come in as an emergency measure but then stay on for all kinds of reasons. The state governments may well carry on for much longer as they are, because we don't invest too much abstract value in them: their job is to keep the machinery of our lives running as well as possible and that's a management task. The federal government on the other hand has "spiritual" values attached to it: our picture of something we call "Australia", and we project onto it an ideal of our national selves. As this image of ourselves fails along with the tax revenues which support the federal government, so will the democratic institution itself. The quality of our politicians will fall and they will become paralysed by our inability to realistically to map out an agreed role for them. We can see this already happening in relation to the war in Afghanistan. What we want the war to be like and what we want our role in it to be is completely at odds with the reality on the ground. Politicians at the highest levels spout the mindless platitudes we want to hear while the military are playing it for their own ends. The result is not likely to be good for the government's legitimacy.

The other thing I'm thinking about a lot and which Dmitri covers as well is, how do we build a viable economic structure for the future? Do we do it with nice reasonable people sitting around boardroom tables playing the game by the rules? I don't think so and neither does Dmitri. The future will not be "managed". It will be an eruption, a tearing of the social and economic fabric, a giving up rather than a trying harder. Our current system, where small businesses carry something like 50% of the economy, where basically it's survival of the fittest within a set of legal and economic rules, will just get harder and harder to continue. The big players, the 50% of the economy run by corporations, will be able to tilt the board in their favour because they can control politics much more effectively than us little fish — but only for a time and while generating a great deal of bitterness and anger. But the problem will be the rules which we are all playing within are going to lose their agency. If you stick to the rules you will be lucky to survive. For a start, credit, the lifeblood of business, is starting to dry up and will eventually be completely gone in its present form to be replaced by — nothing! And the desperation of the government for tax revenue, which up till now has been fine while the goods and services tax (the GST) has boomed along with the consumer economy, will mean small businesses will be squeezed very hard because the big boys will tilt the board their way. Couple this with a continuing drop in global trade and the outlook for the mass of Australian industrial style agricultural workers and self-employed people is not good.

This means that the successful entrepreneurs of the future will most certainly be criminal at one level or another. They will be outside the tax system for a start. It may well be that marijuana will be legalised simply so the government can get some tax back on it, but other drugs will not be and the general level of misery will ensure steady sales, helping the financial underworld.

Who will oppose the rise of this new class? Firstly the government at both state and federal levels due to the dropping tax revenue and the perception that an illegitimate power base is arising, threatening the carefully constructed system which has been evolving in Australia since Federation. Those classes dependent on state revenues for pay: public servants, the armed forces and teachers will see their living standards declining and tend to blame the decay on "moral delinquency". They will be joined by the mass of baby-boomer retirees who will be falling into much deeper poverty than they ever expected due to the losses on financial markets and the decline in tax revenues and hence pension payments. The teachers and other public payroll recipients will resent having higher taxes to fund the baby-boomers too, so the solidarity of the current system will be very shaky. Add to that the great mass of workers turned out of the building trade due to the impending popping of the Australian property bubble and we have a very volatile mix.

An attempt will be made to pin the blame on particular groups. We may find ourselves in a major war simply because the population will be so maddened with rage, so confused at the mysterious loss of prosperity and so helpless in their personal situations, that having an identifiable enemy to fight will seem a blessed simplification. The Muslims have a definite target painted on them at the moment: perhaps some new twist in Middle-East politics will provide the trigger.

But all these considerations must play out in our real lives: we have to avoid being thrown under the bus because we have a target painted on us, but we must also find a way to survive in a much more uncertain and dangerous, poorer world. I've been thinking about all this in relation to where I live, in the poorest part of South Gippsland in southern Victoria, Australia. I can see how this area, which at the moment has a certain level of prosperity and happiness that it's never had before, could just slowly fail, with the clever and energetic people leaving for more promising prospects anywhere else and the social fabric fraying and falling apart in consequence. I've seen it in other areas of Australia and I can see how it could easily happen here. So I'm trying to hatch a plan to counter this. My idea currently revolves around the idea of a couple of business incubators, but of course it is more than that. What I'm really trying to do is build an alternative way of life: a true counter-culture.

Who would want to be a member of such a beast, in an area like this where if you have any talent you can still count on being whisked off to some brighter future in the city? My gut feeling is that it will be the bad boys and girls. We have a few of them around here! Anyway I'm vaguely negotiating to lease a large abandoned factory in a neighboring town which I'm feeling more and more could be the centre of some crazy social experiment. I'll keep you posted.

How do we really know collapse is immanent?

2010-09-23T08:04:00.007+10:00

Aeldric has done a great post over at the Australia/New Zealand Oil Drum entitled The Networking of Resource Production: Do the Networks Give us Warnings when They are About to Fail? which goes straight to the heart of the problem I have: how can you tell in an unambiguous way that the system we are living in is approaching collapse? After all our human culture is full of legends of The End, replete with prophetic dreams, visions and revelations. If they line up with reality they get incorporated in legend and religious tradition. If they fail, which is vastly more frequent, they make page four in the newspaper under the "Quaint-goings-on-in-some-nutcase-cult" section: something a sharp student doing their Masters in psychology could use as a good subject for a thesis.

As an ordinary member of Industrial Society, what information do I have leading me to say a crash is immanent? What does an ordinary person "see" in their day-to-day existence which allows them to make these kinds of judgments? All of us have networks flowing through our lives but no-one can easily "see" these networks from start to finish or how they may relate to one another. We may understand our little bit very well and have a clear idea what is right and wrong with it. Our appreciation of other people's part is necessarily vaguer and tends to be tinged with the natural human suspicion that "others" are not as competent or hard-working as we and our colleagues. To quote from a comment Aeldric added to the discussion of the above post:

This is not helped by the fact that the problem is hidden by complexity. The people who say "We have plenty of resource X" are not just saying this to inflate the share price - they truly believe it. From their perspective, it is true.

The reason that low-quality reserves of resource X will never be extracted is only obvious when you look at the overall system.

Unfortunately, each entity only looks at their own area, the overall matrix in which we operate is treated as a "black box" that supplies our needs just as long as we continue to play our part. This faith in the system has worked thus far, but it is misplaced - we need to look at the overall system.

Add to that the seemingly exponential increase in complexity when doing anything (My wife and I are building a house and the planning requirements have two extra levels to surmount from the time I built my first: bushfire rating and energy rating which is part of a large engineering bill I didn't have before) and you have a world where everything seems micro-managed for efficiency and effectiveness, yet is all too complex for the ordinary person to control or understand more than a tiny part of their own life.

This situation is also governed by a time factor and a certain perception of "rightness". By "rightness" I mean that in Australia (at least for now!) there is a quite strong sense that we live in the best of all possible worlds, that everything is getting better and better incrementally, year on year, and the time factor means that even big changes often happen imperceptibly. So we have much better cars and sound systems, better roads, cheap international travel and the Internet which we can feel good about, while not noticing how much more difficult it is to buy a house and support a family than it was thirty years ago. We can be lulled by shiny novelties trickling into our lives while seeing our problems making our way in the world a lot of the time as "personal": that is, governed by our individual failings in a complex world where we are constantly struggling to find a role for ourselves. And strangely enough, this perception of struggle to be or at least appear competent increases amongst the more highly educated! As Jim Kunstler remarked in some context I now forget, if you go into any room full of educated people you can bet 90% feel that they are frauds.

Those of us who do want to understand the bigger picture must necessarily depend on abstract knowledge, of which we as a culture have a lot, but which in its sheer voluminousness and the difficulty in assessing its relevance poses yet another challenge. You can hardly blame the uneducated or moderately stupid for plunging headlong into dogma and cultishness which promise a shortcut to true knowledge, usually in the hands of a dubious leadership. Add to this the fact that certain professions such as economics suffer from alarming delusions and are just plain wrong in their very basis and it is little wonder that true knowledge of our real situation is limited to a very few. And even the knowledge of these few is very incomplete!

This is another reason why a political solution is simply not possible. Without the goodwill of a large proportion of the population no political party can push through a program which can address what is coming down the line towards us. And if only the tiniest minority of the population understands what is happening, how can that support appear?

Nevertheless there are people working on the problem in a rigorous and as far as possible, scientific way, so you can get reasonable quality information on what's happening. The problem is here that the phenomenon we are looking at is part of complex systems theory and therefore very difficult to quantify. So we depend on clever simplifications such as that posed by Aeldric in the article on The Oil Drum. But we still have to rely partly on less rigorous methods: "gut feelings" and intuitions which are very difficult to prove or even demonstrate to someone else. One of my favorite commenters on The Oil Drum is memmel but he drives some of the other regulars crazy, because his writing style is dyslexic and his ideas while having the ring of truth sound like a shorthand grab from a much more rigorous theorem which he never gives footnotes for. Here's an excerpt from his first comment:

I'd like to add what I came up with as the warning signal of collapse of a complex system in particular ours.
You have outline the overt signals but whats missing is what the system itself does to counteract the situation.
Indeed to the point that it obfuscates its real state.

What I believe starts to happen is the system plays whats basically a grand game of musical chairs. Its no longer capable of any real growth yet its forced to fake it.

A simple example is every job in Mexico or China results in the loss of a job in the US with a dramatic reduction in costs. No new job is created yet profit margins go up. For this to work obviously demand has to remain robust for the product of the job. Rising debt loads allow this to take place. In a real expanding economy wages would have risen rapidly in Mexico and China as they demanded they purchased the goods they where making. The wage arbitrage would have dissipated rapidly.

The same of course works for resources as well as labor the economy shifts to increase profit margins as constraints arise. Its a complex system thus a tremendous amount of shifting around is possible.

It becomes difficult to discern that its really just running around in circles and nothing is happening indeed only the explosion of debt really shows the underlying system has peaked.

As you note eventually everything becomes correlated with money and thus the final signal is in the financial arena. And its pretty simple its debt.

Next its worse than that really by the time the debt load grows to horrendous levels the system is well past its peak. This is because a lot of the debt was issued based on equity valuations supported by the previous debt expansion. Ever cheaper debt aka credit serves to support previous valuation rounds making new debt safe to issue.

So given that eventually everything gets correlated with money the signal that the system is now unstable is easy to see its debt. To understand how the system can pull off such a situation you need to look into this game of musical chairs or circular economics which eventually results in trading partners allowing debt to balloon.
Everyone has to reap real benefits even as the debt bubble expands. If now it won't expand.
This is done by allowing gains to be made on each individual transaction. Eventually of course it ends with central banks forced to carry tremendous amounts of debt in one form or another. The profits are of course skimmed off and the debt load is socialized.

On can actually construct a small variant of this. Consider a village where everyone works to build houses for each other. As each villager gets his house built by the village he owes the village for the house. Assume that resources are constrained and each house costs more than the last all paid for via credit back to the village which acts as the bank. Eventually the last house is built and its ten times the cost of the first house and the village owes itself immense sums of money as notational credit. Indeed many of the villagers that had their house built first are notational multimillionaires. Then what?

Do you see what I mean? Personally I love his comments because his intuitions have for me a ring of truth but I can understand people finding them repellent. But if we try to be more rigorous, dotting the "i"s and crossing the "t"s we end up with this, quoted from an article available here (warning, it's a pdf):

The theoretical basis of the work on early-warning signals in simple models is quite strong, and the first results from more elaborate models suggest that similar signals may arise in highly complex systems (23). Nonetheless, more work is needed to find out how robust these signals are in situations in which spatial complexity, chaos and stochastic perturbations govern the dynamics. Also, detection of the patterns in real data is challenging and may lead to false positive results as well as false negatives. False negatives are situations in which a sudden transition occurred but no early-warning signals could be detected in the behaviour before the shift. This can happen for different reasons. One possibility is that the sudden shift in the system was not preceded by a gradual approach to a threshold. For instance, it may have remained at the same distance from the bifurcation point, but been driven to another stable state by a rare extreme event. Also, a shift that is simply due to a fast and permanent change of external conditions (Box 1 Figure a) cannot be detected from early-warning signals.

And so on for many more qualifying paragraphs. I think memmel is easier!

In the end we have to make decisions about our lives based on hunches and intuitions as much as anything. It doesn't hurt to have some solid theoretical backup but that can be wrong too! I guess my gut feeling is that a collapse of the US economy is not far off: maybe one or two years. How that will play out in Australia is much more difficult to say as we are tied very closely to the Chinese and Japanese economies and how they will fair is open to question, seeing both are very export oriented at a time when the importing economies, namely the USA and the Eurozone are wobbling badly. And as at my public lecture in October 2008, I stated Australia was importing 1/3 of its oil needs and that proportion has remained the same (choose Australia from the drop-down menu to display).

Right actions, right thoughts

2010-09-20T07:23:00.009+10:00

What is right action for us doom-and-gloomers? I'm caught up in our local Transition Town group. Sure, it's what some people want and it gives us members mutual support, plus we may be getting a big community garden and orchard going at the bottom of the town. But I have mixed feelings about, it in the sense that I can't see it being The Whole Answer to the problems coming towards us and I'm still copping it as well from a few people, accused of being too negative in a more general sense.

I guess my last post on the Aussie housing bubble was guaranteed to upset a lot of folk and was a typical snarky comment on things as they are now — I admit it was negative although I think it was a necessary corrective. But I think it's a good time to give a background on what I think is right action, which must first of all spring from right thoughts. And this implies a lot of what is going on amongst the chattering classes is wrong thoughts leading to wrong actions.

Why can't we just save the world by recycling plastic, buying an electric car and growing our own vegies? Why can't we do all this while making politicians pass good laws restricting pollution, exploitation and simultaneously saving the whales, while working for strong international covenants to stop those developing economies making things worse by letting their big populations to buy in to the consumer dream?

This is what I'd label the standard left-wing program save-the-world program.

The standard right-wing save-the-world program is a little different but we need to mention it too. The world is fine as long as I and my significant others are doing well! Those pesky foreigners trying to grab our stuff? Nuke 'em! Drug addicts? Kill 'em all — except for my son of course, for whom I've just paid thousands to spring from a prison in India after he was caught trying to smuggle some ganga back to Australia. The Chinese are all sub-human — except for George, with whom I go to watch Collingwood playing each week. And all these pollution laws — an evil impost on business! Except for the ones which stop the spraying of pesticides in those areas where our honey producing subsidiary has seen profits cave in over the past few years.

The right-wing is easy to mock: after all, these types always depend upon the left-wingers working for them to keep the show on the road. It's only on a few points that they can stick to their convictions. This also leads on to another not-much-mentioned paradox (to be discussed some other time): how come left-wingers and right-wingers end up building very similar societies?

But I'm more interested in the illusions of the left because they underpin a lot of what goes on in politics. Why can't we legislate to fix our problems with Peak Oil/Climate Change? Surely if everyone made a big effort to conserve, we wouldn't have a problem — right? We could all drive a Toyota Prius and presto! This is where the explanation gets tricky because it's counter-intuitive. When we make more efficient use of a resource it simply makes it available to more people, so consumption rises rather than falls. This is known as Jevons Paradox. This only applies to increases in technical efficiency of course — it's still possible to tax or otherwise restrict the availability of say, oil, in order to reduce its use. But can we restrict our use in Australia and tell the Chinese and the Indians they can't use it too? Of course you can run on and imagine some United Nations action that might force the nations of the world to restrict consumption if you put aside how utterly unlikely this is. But if it were possible, would this solve the problem of Peak Oil and carbon dioxide induced climate change? How could it, when at best, it might slow down (slightly), the rate of use of oil and coal, but the oil and coal would still get used anyway, just over a few more decades and it is still unrenewable and still adds CO2 to the atmosphere.

The fact is, the toothpaste is out of the tube. We (by which I mean the human race) will go on using oil until we can't — same with coal. You may swear off it (as far as you can, given that everything we use in day to day life has a fossil fuel component) but in the end it will all get used up anyway, irrespective of your decisions. So what if it takes fifty years longer to disappear, than if we continue to fly like mad moths around the planet? The effect will be virtually the same. Electric cars? Where does the electricity come from? From solar panels you say? How much embodied energy do they contain? You see, there is no escape. We can't have a complex industrial civilisation based on extracting sunshine from cucumbers to quote Jonathan Swift . We may entertain fantasies of a world where doves alight on the shoulders of young people dancing round the maypole at harvest time in Kabul, as well as in Korumburra, before everyone jumps on their bicycles to go back to the town hall for an election of councilors followed by a hoedown to a string band, but let's not confuse ourselves even further with these idle fantasies.

Of course it — that is, industrial civilisation — will end, and maybe quite soon. Nature will impose upon us the discipline we can't impose on ourselves. Our problem is not to save the World, but to save ourselves. By all means aim for a low carbon lifestyle, because pretty soon we will be living one anyway whether our politics is anarcho-syndicalist or slightly to the right of Ghengis Khan. Our issues will revolve around dealing with the consequences of a declining world industrial civilisation, not fixing its underpinnings.

The Heroic Materialist project is over, for all kinds of reasons. For a start, capital in the form of debt is in the process of vanishing, which is rushing us towards an economic collapse after which large-scale capital intensive projects will simply be impossible. Want to solve the energy crisis by building a nuclear fusion power station? Sure, hold a few fundraisers in your town and build one at the end of your street. Because that is about the level of economic co-operation we can expect to see in the future. The only projects which get done will be on a small scale, except in countries which can't maintain security, where we can expect large scale marauding warlord lead armies who will swiftly reduce the territories they prey upon to sparsely populated wastelands in any case.

I don't expect anything like that in Australia. We may have quite serious civil conflict if the industrial system's dispossessed citizens are victimised —always a possibility when a narrow, suspicious world-view amongst the elites replaces the boundless optimism of a time of growth. But a collapse of society I don't foresee. Instead I see the gloomy crumbling of individuals who are unprepared for the changes we are going to have to face, to be a followed by a new generation who accept the world they find as a given and get on with inventing their lives and their own goals and meanings. Some will be happy, some unhappy, but it was ever thus. Our task as the transitional generation is to smooth the way, cutting the suffering which will be inevitable while making the way clear for the next generation to find their own direction.

This will mean letting go of inappropriate dreams and plans as much as anything — at a federal level, dreams such as turning Afghanistan into suburbia and building the high speed rail link down the eastern seaboard of Australia. At the state level, we need to stop pretending we can go on living in our cities as if consumables such as oil, water and electricity are in infinite supply. And at the personal level, fantasies of a leisured retirement with overseas cruises will be snatched away.

On the other hand we will have a return of the natural world, which will no longer be under the extreme pressure industrial civilisation has been placing on it. We will eat more healthy food, get more exercise and use our wits to build viable communities rather than manipulate symbols on screens. Our lives will be in our hands, not those of "experts". For a short period, until a new system solidifies (as they always do), the world will be ours to mould in the image we think best.

Cruising along in our Aussie cloud of unknowing

2010-09-14T09:58:00.012+10:00

Ah, Australian exceptionalism! Could there ever be a more persistent yet fragile weed? Will a cold winter wind ever arise breaking those delicate fronds? Or will it be the relentless heat of summer which shrivels them to wisps of brown? No doubt we shall find out in due course.

In the meantime those guardians of our prosperity, the banks, are hard at work spreading the Love. Consider this, from News.com.au, which tells of yet more loosening of the purse strings helping feed our insane housing bubble (Bubble? It's demand lead isn't it? Another example of just how blessed, virtuous and better than everywhere else this great country is! Everyone wants to live here! In our endless good-news Aussie paradise!).

And these august Aussie banks, bastions of goodness and competence, would never, never tell fibs would they? Well, that mean man Steve Keen thinks they do. Have a look at what his digging has found out here about what the Commonwealth Bank has cooked up to suck in those overseas investors.

How thin our world view really is. Just because 95% of the population believes a particular delusion (witchcraft, the Earth being flat, endless rising real estate value) doesn't make it any truer. It just makes the bust when it comes that much more miserable.

Oh, check out Mish's take on it too.

Edit: David Llewellyn-Smith at Henry Thornton's pulls apart the Commonwealth's scheme even further. He also links to this blast in The Australian's business section. And Steve Keen weighs in again here.

Warning! Rant coming on!

2010-08-24T21:58:00.005+10:00

I went to a Transition Town training session on the weekend. I had misgivings before going but they turned out to be misplaced. It was a different style of learning to anything I'd done before, conducted by a pair of very competent women. We were given all the materials they used for the session plus a lot of extras at the end of it all, which is good because I can't see myself using what we learned for a while, as our group is still in its formative stages and I'm sure I'd forget most of it if I don't use it straight away.

I was interested in the attitudes and opinions of the other participants. Why do people get involved in something like this? Generally it is well-educated middle-class people like me I suppose, with some commitment to "doing good". However I found that there are some deep-seated ideas that are perhaps unhelpful even among the well-intentioned and well-educated. We did an exercise which was designed to help us explain rising carbon dioxide levels and the greenhouse effect. It seems from the reaction of the people I was working with that it is common to believe that by bringing pressure to bear on politicians and getting the message out to the public we will somehow reverse the trend. There seemed no understanding that nothing will be done, until the consequences make it impossible to carry on.

What do I mean by this? It is simply that anything the individual does is almost irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. I think we are well beyond remedial action on the macro, society-wide scale. We (the great Middle Class) seem to still be suffering from the illusion that we have Power. Power to change other people's behavior. Power to influence those in power. There is no general understanding, even amongst the educated, that freedom disappears the higher up the hierarchy one moves — that those at the top are so hedged in by prior constraints, massive inertias, debts owed and obligations that come with the job that our leaders have almost nowhere to move at all. And as for telling the Chinese and the Indians and the Brazilians that they need to radically restructure their societies — well it's not even worth a laugh.

We seem to be unaware that our behavior is animal behavior: we are no different from voles, slugs, armadillos or trout in our desire to produce descendants and make some space for ourselves in the larger world. And the sum of the actions of six billion humans is no different from the actions of six billion armadillos in this regard, no matter how intellectual and above "animal" behavior we think we are. Politicians know this instinctively and fear the animal passions of the "mob" — the great mass of the population — and usually (if they are "successful") stay within safe limits. But the average punter doesn't see this. We don't see ourselves as being part of some powerful mob. Instead we ordinary people are aware of our own feelings of weakness in the face of what seems to be overwhelming forces — we project our fantasies of real power onto our leaders, little realising that both feelings of weakness and fantasies of power are illusory phenomena. They come and go, depending on our immediate circumstances and the state of our digestion as much as anything. The middle classes —even the well-educated technocratic elite, working the cogs and gears of the system — don't seem any better at understanding this than the most illiterate forklift-driver.

Amongst the educated, frustration often turns into the blame game. The world is a mess, we see clearly what is wrong, nothing is being done, it's the fault of the Keynesians (if you're an Austrian economist like Mish or Gary North). Or it's the nervousness of the do-nothings in Congress who don't see the need to spend if you're Paul Krugman, the Keynesian. Or moving down the ladder into the unsavory depths, it's the liberals (if you're Anne Coulter), the right-wing demogogues and their puppet-masters (if you're a follower of Counterpunch) and so on downward to infinity where dwell the gamiest of conspiracy theorists, crazed religious nut-bags and scary eco-fanatics like Derrick Jensen. Don't get me wrong: each of these characters possess a fraction of the truth and there may be value in listening to what they say in order to see how the world works. But all of them are entirely primitive when it comes to Answers, because each of them believes in Salvation and Atonement. They believe that following their prescriptions will lead to Heaven on Earth. That's why they're dangerous. Like Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

Why do these people suffer from a common fallacy? Why do they have such broad followings? Well I could spend ages raving about our Judeo-Christian world-view (which still forms the way that most of us think, even if we believe we're athiests). But I'll let you, gentle reader, think all this through in your own time. Suffice to say there are some still, small voices which do talk sense. Steve Keen on economics, Dmitri Orlov on social realities. Nobody's perfect but some are definitely better than others and popularity is a poor guide to excellence when we are so embedded in the Judeo-Christian schema and we love good-and-evil dichotomies so much (beware dichotomies!).

So what is real and how do we choose actions which are effective? Well, look out the window. Smell the flowers. Smile at your neighbor. This is reality, the single endless moment we all live in. There is no future, except in our imagination. There is no past except in our memory. If you're crossing the road and a bus is coming, step back onto the curb! And likewise with the great changes pressing down on us. To go to an analogy, if the Titanic has hit an iceberg there's no urgency in arguing with the captain about whose fault it is. Your job is to get you and your charges into a lifeboat! So try and look at what is really going to happen, not what you hope will happen. What you hope will happen is that enlightened leaders will guide us to the Promised Land. What is really going to happen is complex, messy and unpredictable in many ways, but it will include the climate changing, the financial system seizing up and the economy going down the tubes. You can't stop any of these things from happening! All you can do is try and protect yourself from the consequences. Nature, in its majestic impartiality, will deal with humanity as it deals with everything.

Ok! That'll do for now!

My outlook for 2010-2011

2010-08-09T12:45:00.003+10:00

I'm going out on a limb but hey! — I'm not afraid of heights, just scared of hitting the ground. Anyway, I think we are not going to be so bad in Australia over the next few years as I thought a few months ago. We've just got a big price boost for mineral exports feeding into the system. The high temperatures of the northern summer seem to have done damage to the size of the Russian wheat harvest. I just drove back through several hundred kilometres of our wheat harvest and the way rainfall is going, it could be a big one. High wheat prices + world shortage + bumper Australian crop = $$$.

Longer term I think we're going to cop it along with everyone else. But we'll have the melt-down of the USA as a wake-up call over the next year or so, and that may generate the grass-roots political will we need to move to a more gentle energy descent. That and a bursting of the property bubble we've been in.

I'm cautiously optimistic. Really our greatest asset is our lack of population pressure, of the sort evident in more naturally well-favoured countries where the numbers of people have had time to grow to the limits of the environment. Not that the way of life in our cities is in any way sustainable at the moment, but it can change radically without killing half the population which is more than you can say about a lot of the world.

Our presentation to the Councillors

2010-07-22T07:22:00.009+10:00

It was a little intimidating to sit at a table facing all the Shire Councilors, the CEO and various other high-ranking officials. I was just there to support Peter who did a great job, plowing on manfully through the piece that he'd written giving an outline of the dangers facing us with peak oil, with both of us unable to read the reaction of the councilors who were not on "our" side. I handled one question from Cr Mimmie Jackson — not particularly well as I strayed a bit off topic, but Peter was better with his responses.

After our five minutes we stayed on to listen to the other people there to present their various cases, then at the end we went out to have our pictures taken by the reporters covering it. We were joined by our three Councilors who reassured us that it had gone well and that we must keep it up in future!

If any article about it comes on line I'll link to it in a future post.

Alex chapter two

2010-07-18T13:44:00.001+10:00

It's here — enjoy!

Preparing to Ride the Whirlwind

2010-07-15T13:48:00.006+10:00

Next week one of my fellow transitioners and I are going to do a presentation to our local Shire Councilors. It is our first and so it will be an interesting exercise in doing a pitch, so to speak, to group of average politicians. We already know three are on our side — they come to our meetings — so we won't be aiming at them. Instead it will be a case of persuading the skeptics, or maybe just the indifferent. How to do this?

There has been a very interesting post on The Oil Drum's Campfire discussion in the past few days entitled Dear Candidate - What Will You Do if Growth Is Over...?. I read the whole thing — all the comments, which is the point of the exercise — the other night. I was struck by the general gloominess of outlook from most commentators. I wonder if it is a reflection of the disengagement of people from their communities and from politics or whether it reflects a different political scene in the USA. Or maybe I'm a little naive. But it seems to me that it should only be a matter of casting the situation in the right light.

Politicians must read the future with some degree of accuracy if they're to succeed. I see our function as letting them know what they're facing. After all, in ten years time when we will be in the very eye of the storm which is now breaking over us, there will still be Shire Councilors in South Gippsland. The more accurately they have gauged the situation, the better I think our situation down here will be. Yes, there will be some terrible economic times ahead. But these times are going to also allow opportunities which the clever and energetic can seize. Whether good or harm comes from this depends very much on our preparation now.

Our transition group is focused necessarily on issues which mean most to our members now. These issues are generally focused on food security which is something individuals and families can take care of. The bigger picture is very important though. How does South Gippsland support itself now and how will that change in the future? This is what I'm thinking about.

Talking of the big picture, today I listened to a talk by Stoneleigh of The Automatic Earth to a transition group in the UK. It's quite long but it gives the clearest picture of what is about to befall us all that I've heard lately, so if you can, give it a listen.

More thoughts on complexity

2010-05-17T11:21:00.006+10:00

I've posted already a couple of times recently on complexity, once in response to the Archdruid's take on it, and an earlier look at Anne of Tagonist's argument. I'm not convinced complexity per se is a problem. After all we humans are very complex physically, but that doesn't matter most of the time to us and we don't need to understand it in order to get through the day. We know we'll wear out in sixty or seventy years all being well and there is really nothing we can do to change that.

I've just been listening to a talk by Niall Ferguson called Fiscal Crises and Imperial Collapses: Historical Perspective on Current Predicaments which you can listen to here. In the second part of the recording, the Q & A section, there is some talk about how the complexity of the modern financial system might make reactions to current events inherently unpredictable, versus the situation which existed even say twenty or thirty years ago before computerised, automated trading took off. All such discussion seems to me to contain the unspoken assumption that the system can somehow be fixed: modified and reformed to be safer, better. But the question is, better and safer for whom?

The financial sector of the economy has grown hugely in the past twenty or so years and the amount of money thus allocated to it for wages and dividends has become a large "take" from the wages of non-financial workers. The Global Financial Crisis showed that when you are big enough to have the welfare of the rest of the economy wound around your finger, you can dictate the terms to governments, even when the crisis can be partly shown to be as a result of your own actions. This talk of predictability and control, or loss of it, really applies to how the financial sector might see their continuing share of power maintained.

Those of us who are outside the financial sector need not worry about any of this — we just need to avoid being under it when it falls. To those of us who still imagine they need to worry, all I can say is any illusions of you being part of that class which think they have a future of living without working — and this is what all the talk of investments and superannuation is all about — are unlikely to survive the catastrophes which will engulf the world of money over the next few years.

For someone living outside the financial world, the problems are simple. How do I feed/clothe/shelter myself and live in a peaceful community? But for those who want to jump on the gravy train, of course the problem becomes one of complexity! If you think that you can live in a fashion that ignores the limitations of a sustainable existence, you are necessarily involved in game playing on a huge scale with millions of other anonymous predators, both individual and corporate, all looking for a percentage of the action, which comes down to the power at some future date to force other people to work for you. This leads quickly to fantasies of legal oversight, punishment and control, with you being a beneficiary as one of millions of superannuation fund holders or self-funded retirees who imagine that your government can look after your interests.

Let me put it to you plainly. The world economy is in the early stages of a profound financial collapse. For now you can watch the riots in Greece on TV and feel a certain smug aloofness. Soon it will be coming to a town near you. The game we have been able to play for the past thirty years, starting from the nineteen-seventies where even the moderately intelligent soon realised buying and selling real estate in an inflationary economy was a great leg-up, is over. So are all the slightly more sophisticated schemes of getting involved in investment funds.

Find another game to play!

How long can we stay lucky?

2010-04-29T16:09:00.004+10:00

There's been an interesting change in the mood of people I deal with over the last couple of years and in the public discourse at the top end of town. The kind of blowhard boosterism which was evident only a few short months ago (Prime Minister Rudd last year saying he made "no apologies" for a big Australia, but running away from that comment now) has been replaced by a much more measured and sombre view — the comments by the chief executive of the ANZ Bank on the "contagion" from the Greek collapse are a case in point.

So the Greek economy is melting down and now we can see that it is only the beginning. Goldman Sachs are on the back foot in Congressional hearings in the USA — no matter that they may be in the clear legally — people finally want blood and the "winners" make the most satisfactory sacrificial victims in a situation where there are many sore losers. More on this later.

We have been very lucky in Australia — so far. Many of us are starting to realise that this won't last much longer. I have been labeled a negative voice in the past by a lot of people I know, but that is starting to change as it becomes obvious that it's only a matter of time before the contagion reaches us.

I draw no satisfaction from this. I will gain nothing from being right, and are just as vulnerable to economic ruin as any other citizen of this wide brown land — more so in some ways because I'm fairly crippled physically (bad back) and have no great resources at my disposal. And I get no pleasure from seeing any individuals or groups brought down by this disaster, because I don't see the disaster as being anyone's "fault". It is just our fate to live in these times.

All I want to do is avoid unnecessary pain, for myself and those close to me. That is a normal human urge. It is also a normal human urge to find someone to blame for one's own suffering. In our society this primitive urge has been recognised for what it is and been held in check by a sophisticated legal system, built up over many generations. No death penalty, no torture of suspects, no eye for an eye justice. Unfortunately such refinements are easily swept away when things get tough. Already the blame game has begun — see Goldman Sachs — and it will continue. In the end the victims of the blame game will be anyone seen as different and "doing too well". Be warned.

My weakness is I want to understand what I see and tell other people. By doing so I put myself in some danger. But I'm not looking for a fight and will skirt one unless it is absolutely unavoidable. We shall see how that goes!

In the meantime, you stay out of trouble and stay lucky, but not too visibly, obviously lucky.

The Archdruid again! This time on the household economy

2010-04-15T16:25:00.002+10:00

A good post from John Michael Greer on the economics of earning less. If you're a two income family this is something you want to think about. I realised back in the seventies that doing stuff for yourself can be a far better way to go than trying to earn enough to buy it from someone else. That's why I built my own house back then and why I'm doing it again now. My wife and I had lunch with a couple yesterday who are thinking about doing it for the first time with no prior practical experience. I admire their courage! Truly it can be hard just to take the first step outside your comfort zone and although I've been doing it all my life I still have moments of self-doubt, even terror.

But I say, take that step! It's no good trusting to the direction of the majority any more. We must — we must — strike out in another direction, even at the risk of making foolish mistakes. The thing is there are plenty of people around who will pop out of the woodwork to help you, even as there seem to be many who shout you down. Listen to the positive voices and march on!

The Archdruid talks complexity

2010-04-13T21:42:00.003+10:00

In his post The Twilight of the Machine the Archdruid talks about the utility of machines in a low energy world — he basically says that complex machines only make sense in a situation where energy is very cheap and in reliable supply. This allows a complex specialised system to exist in which investment in machines, which are themselves highly specialised and delicate compared to a person, is worth the risk. Therefore in a world in energy decline, human labour will take the place of the machine.

This may be partly right, if we are to continue to have big human populations in areas where those population are now supported by a complex machine-based civilisation. But I think this will prove to be the exceptional case. I expect that mechanical civilisation will retreat but the areas which it leaves will be largely abandoned, because if they are well populated they will unstable politically as the economy declines and that will lead to migration away from them and high mortality within them. There may well be a new feudalism which emerges in some areas (this seems to be what the Archdruid implies) but while civilisation may shrink, modern weapons will still be cheap and readily available and this will make all but the most stable societies ungovernable and a new feudalism equally unstable. See John Robb's book "Brave New War" and Global Guerrillas for his take on all that.

I expect in the main we will see shrinkage, rapid in some places and slow and steady in others, but all the while maintaining at a minimum a machine-based system of control. In Europe this will be a mostly a steady, slow drop in population but in parts of the USA and Australia it could be very rapid, mainly in areas which have a highly specialised function (mining or industrial areas) with little depth to the society.

A diversion — my venture into fiction

2010-04-11T21:20:00.003+10:00

If it's good enough for the Archdruid, it's good enough for me! I'm publishing a novel set in the future, maybe sixty or seventy years or so, which will let me explore some of the themes I've discussed in this blog. Hey, but it will also be a story, full of adventure, intrigue and so on! Read it at Alex — a novel.

Complexity…ah, complexity!

2010-04-10T12:13:00.004+10:00

Complexity! Everyone is talking about it! The Archdruid has a typical long post where he champions the human versus the machine, John Robb over at Global Guerrillas talks about his resilient communities growing at the margins, Ran Prieur gathers it all up talking about the computers and cars in his life, and Anne at Tagonist weighs in on social versus technical complexity. And Stuart Staniford gets stuck into the Archdruid in his post with an argument which I can't quite follow.

I'll tackle the Tagonist bit first: Anne talks about reliable, simple machines versus complicated ones. Her examples (not good ones!) are the Kohler engine in her old Gravely garden tractor and an Italian scooter she's trying to fix for a friend. At one level this is a simple argument to scotch: if you live near a Kohler dealer you're OK, but it's a long way to Italy from Ohio (plus the imperial/metric problems of part substitution). And then again, I'm sure there aren't too many well-maintained Gravelys in Italia, but you'd have no worries over there finding a throttle cable at the local tip/wreckers which would fit your scooter.

So…but it gets more complicated. You can make parts to keep even complicated machines going if you've got the time and understanding to do so. And there is the problem of choosing between a local unreliable machine and an imported reliable one (both second-hand in the case I'm about to describe). We just bought a second-hand Korean Daewoo Matiz to replace the big locally-made second-hand Ford wagon which we've had for a year or so. We didn't need the Ford's big size and what tipped us against it was a series of problems with timing and unreliability running on LPG. It seemed every month we had another issue with it. And it was the sort of problem I couldn't fix myself — lots of electronic sensors and hard-to-get-at bits. The Matiz we got because we had one before and we had a few issues with it too, but we drove it from new until we wore it out at 290,000km. We know the gearbox selectors in the Matiz we just got will go in 150,000km or so, but that's seven years away for us. And we could fix 'em, if the rest of the vehicle's condition makes it worthwhile.

Then there's Anne's social complexity argument. What to do with all the editors and other specialists when the means for plugging them into the system goes pear-shaped? Well yes indeed, but this is mainly a problem when we work for highly specialised organisations in a very big system. I'll bet there'll be an editor at my local town paper, the "Mirror", until the Earth stops rotating.

It's not so much a problem of complexity as a problem of scale. When the Soviet Union collapsed it was the size of the social entities involved that made the problems, not their complexity. If your town or city depends on a single specialised industry to keep it going you are vulnerable in a way in which a big, complex city like say Melbourne is not, with it's multiple industries and functions, and its powerful political elite which command the resources of the surrounding state almost totally. Melbourne may well shrink a little when things get tough, but I doubt very much if it will disappear. It has too many reasons for being and not enough dire threats to its existence. Contrast with say Detroit, which existed because it was built for a purpose, to build cars. The cars go and Detroit goes.

Again, most European cities are near a border of some other country, or near enough to another city for friction over resources to develop. The intervening countryside is rich enough to support a reasonably self-sufficient peasantry and so an army can easily traverse the space between cities. This makes collapse, with its attendant scrabble for power and resources, a much more dangerous affair. Contrast with Australia which is has a resource-poor, sparsely settled countryside with very great distances between the big cities. Each major city commands the state of which it is capital. The major issue for each large city is lack of water, and only Adelaide, the fifth-largest city, is hostage to three other, larger states (Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland) for access to water.

We will indeed have a considerable level of discomfort here over the next few generations but it will not be Mad Max. There will be conflict within cities between the priviledged centre and the poverty-stricken edges, but the centre will always win. There will be border-protection issues in Queensland, the Northern Territory and the north of Western Australia. The Northern Territory, the most artificial and highly subsidised state, may well collapse or be absorbed into some other island based empire coming from the break-up of Indonesia some time in the next century, especially if climate change renders the interior of the continent uninhabitable and makes Darwin, its capital, even more difficult to live in. I can see Australia breaking up either de jure or de facto into separate city states in the next century.

I'll talk about the others' essays in another post!

James Lovelock puts it bluntly

2010-04-03T07:03:00.006+11:00

There's an interview with James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia hypothesis and the person who detected CFCs in the atmosphere which lead to the realisation of the dangers posed by their breakdown destroying the ozone layer, on the BBC — you can listen to it here. Jim's not running for office or trying to impress the girls (or anyone else for that matter): he's a very old man but a very intelligent one, who feels the urge to say what he thinks. I think what he says is pretty close to the mark.

What can we — should we — do about global warming? Jim's message is enjoy your life while you can, because the die has been cast, the trigger pulled, and we are faced with the consequences of global warming rather than the choice of avoiding global warming or not.

Jim sees the situation from a scientists point of view and also from a realists point of view. And he sees the inertia of our social system: the impossibility of rapidly changing the behaviour of the millions who depend on present arrangements for their survival. It will take a generation to change these arrangements.

This leads on to my thoughts. There are some who would not give a damn about the survival of anyone but themselves, and would be happy to support some political movement which hastened the coming depopulation of the world, if it was to result in the deaths of the billions who these supporters of a Party of Cruelty would deem inferior types, leaving more room for themselves and their supporters. How long could it take such a party to achieve real power? J K Galbraith, author of a wonderful book about the last big economic disaster of modern history, The Great Crash, 1929, said that great social disasters inoculate their survivors against a repetition until the memory of the trauma fades, which he thought takes about eighty years after a major event. So we can expect a successor to the Nazis to emerge some time around 2013-2015 if we are to time it from their accession to power in Germany in 1933.

What makes me wake up in a cold sweat at three in the morning

2010-03-24T08:49:00.004+11:00

From "Tipping Point, Near-Term Systemic Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production, An Outline Review" quoted from The Oil Drum…

If peak oil is imminent or medium-term, we have neither the time nor the resources to substitute for oil, or invest in conservation and efficiency, a point re-iterated in the UKERC report. It is not merely that the net energy, material and financial resources we need to adapt will be in shorter supply, or that we are replacing high quality energy sources with lower quality ones. Nor is it that the productive base for deploying alternative energy infrastructure is small with limited ramp-up rates, or that it competes with food. Nor even that as the global credit crisis continues with further risks ahead, ramping up financing will remain difficult while many countries struggle with ballooning deficits and pressing immediate concerns. But, once the effects of decline become apparent, we will lose much of what we might call the operational fabric of our civilisation. The operational fabric comprises the given conditions at any time that support system wide functionality. This includes functioning markets, financing, monetary stability, operational supply-chains, transport, digital infrastructure, command & control, health service, institutions of trust, and sociopolitical stability. It is what we casually assume does and will exist [my emphasis], and which provides the structural foundation for any project we wish to develop. For example, near future degradation and collapse of the operational fabric may mean that we already have in place a significant fraction of the renewable energy infrastructure which will ever be in place globally.

On building a house in town 2

2010-03-08T20:04:00.003+11:00

How is our house different from a "normal" house? And how is it the same? Our design criteria were to build something low maintenance, with zero heating and cooling costs and as autonomous as possible without resorting to technologies which might not be available or easily maintained into the future. It must be comfortable and robust: able to cope with the more extreme climate which may develop over the next few years and decades. And it must be as cheap to build as possible fitting the criteria already outlined.

The obvious way to heat a house is using the sun and the house I built in the 1970's was what is called a passive solar design — the sun shone in on a tiled concrete floor in winter and heated it up, thus moderating the temperature during the night as well. I wasn't a great builder and had very tight finances, so it didn't work as well as it could have but with the mild climate at Waratah North, close to the sea, it was better than nothing and certainly better than the house I grew up in only a few miles away in Toora.

But the Waratah North house was weatherboard and had fairly skimpy insulation (none under the wooden floor) and lots of single-pane glass, plus it had no ventilation other than through opening windows. Also the sun coming in faded the furniture and any other thing it fell on, so you had to be careful what you put in the room. The glare could be hard to bear at times as well. And the room which didn't get the direct sun got mouldy and musty.

The new house has a much more sophisticated solar heating (and cooling) system. While the sun can come into one bedroom and a corner of the living room directly, most of the heating will be via a solar air heater on the roof from which air will be blown by a fan down under the concrete slab floor and through a rock pile heat store, which being fairly massive (around one hundred tonnes) will hold the heat and release it slowly up through the concrete slab. A second, separate solar heater will draw stale air from the house via a system of ducts such as you would find in large commercial buildings and before venting it outside it will pass through a heat exchanger where it will heat incoming fresh air. The house will have lots of interior thermal mass, well insulated from the outside, and double glazed windows throughout.

In summer the same solar powered air extractor will draw air up through the rock pile (which will cool the hot exterior air on very hot days). There will also be a solar hot water heater. The toilet will be a composting type so we can recycle waste into the garden and cut down on water usage and disposal. All our water will be collected from the roof of the house and carport/workshop and stored in a large 90,000 litre concrete tank which we've just had constructed. We had a similar setup at Waratah North and the water from our concrete tanks there was like champagne! The water will be pumped to a small header tank on a stand via a small solar powered electric pump — no noisy pressure pump which stops running if the power goes off leaving you with no water.

The advantage of this heating/cooling setup is I can build it and maintain it all myself. There are no microprocessors involved and the highest tech items will be some fans and an electric pump.

As for the construction of the house, it will have a series of flat roofs made of the kind of material developed for big commercial buildings using insulation glued between two metal sheets. It can span a large distance which cuts down on most of the carpentry needed for roof framing. The outside walls will be corrugated colourbond mostly, fixed to treated prefabricated stud walls and heavily insulated, with a couple of timber finished walls in the courtyard to cut down the harshness of the finish. The colourbond is low maintenance and cheap, plus a good material for our fire vulnerable site on the edge of town.

The floors will be concrete slabs for thermal mass and silence! We are planning for rammed earth interior walls for thermal mass as well.

No windows on the east or west walls and only one glazed entrance facing west in the courtyard under a roof overhang. All windows are well under eaves (we're starting to get more frequent large hailstone events). No lawn! The north facing windows (which are all on the ground floor) are protected by stone courtyard walls from any possible fire. I've got to figure out how to glaze the solar heat collector with strong enough, long lived material at a reasonable cost.

It's not a simple house at all, but hopefully by limiting the amount of plumbing and not going stupid with the kitchen (fortunately I can build all this!) we won't shoot ourselves down financially.

On building a house in town

2010-03-07T21:36:00.006+11:00

My wife and I are building a house. I've done it before and I've helped others build their own places. Every house is a compromise, just like anything else in life. I'm designing it in Google Ske tchup because I wanted to try doing a house in 3-D CAD. If you think it's a cool way to design a house be warned: it's extremely time consuming. The good thing is you can design every little detail before you start: the bad thing is that you do! House plans are generally very abstract sketches showing no more than is necessary, because a builder knows how to build — they just need shape and size specified. But a 3-D CAD is something far more complex and formidable.One reason to do it this way is that it won't be a normal house. I think like an engineer making something for the very first time and novelty is something where you need to show lots of detail in order to work through any problems. That doesn't guarantee you'll get it right though.
I like designing. But it isn't necessary. We could have bought an old place and fixed it up and it would have been fine. We could have gone on renting — I've got plenty of other things I could be doing with my time. But building a house gives a sense of direction for me. I'm involved in lots of community stuff but I'm not really good at it. Or maybe I'm better than I think I am, but I don't feel all that comfortable with it. Otherwise I would be a politician.

I abandoned the dominant religion of our industrial civilisation, Heroic Materialism, in my late teens and early twenties but like a child brought up a Catholic, I was and am a product of my time. The future will need different philosophies and different spiritual and intellectual anchors, but this is what I do — designing and building.

I am very aware that the context for our house is as crucial as the building itself. That's where things become a lot more uncertain. Will our little town be a good place to live for another twenty or so years? Things like that are hard to judge because we are looking at big changes in our world, a world which we hardly understand now! However if we don't owe money and are reasonably healthy and active I'm sure we can get by. One of the great pluses of living here is that there no social tensions or crime worth speaking of, and another is lots of well-meaning and like minded souls who are willing to put in lots of effort on community projects.

So I feel investing a lot of work and money in a house is a reasonable risk.

Cogito ego sum — our major thinking error

2010-03-05T22:09:00.003+11:00

So my dears, What Is To Be Done about climate change? I follow the arguments in the online media, mainly the ABC news site plus BBC news, Guardian online, The Oil Drum and in case you're thinking what a narrow little latte leftist I am, I read Mish Shedlock several times a day plus take a look at Gary North every now and then. Amidst all the sturm und drang it seems to me one thing stands out: people want to win arguments. And for many of them, the confusion between belief and reality seems not at all clear, and only the argument seems real.

For the so called deniers, it often seems that their distaste for what they see as parasitic leftist types drives the agenda. Deniers hardly ever argue the real science (constantly quoting the most dodgy and discredited arguments and introducing red herrings willy-nilly), but go straight for the man. The motives of these climate doomers? Keeping their grant money pouring in by tickling the dominant scientific paradigm! So how can you trust anything these bearded blood-suckers say? Burn them all!

For many on the other side, the argument is merely a mirror image. Social progress and the saving of the whole of creation is being stymied by an evil plot! Hummer driving gun-nuts paid for by sinister transnational corporations are the enemy: may they all be lifted up in the Rapture only to be turned back at the Pearly Gates and thrust down into Hell! (Which of course we don't believe in, except for these special cases who deserve it!).

Both sides believe if we can win enough hearts and minds, the Kingdom will be reached! The lion will lie down with the lamb etc. and so on…

My reaction, I'm sorry to say, is to yawn. Why? Because nothing will be done! I repeat, nothing will or can be done about climate change or greenhouse gases in any real way. Copenhagen collapsed. Why? The terrible Chinese and Indians! Phew! All the pollies had someone else to blame. Because if those baddies hadn't stood up and done it, someone else would have had to. We all think in binary terms — good and evil — hot and cold. Either something is, or it isn't. But unfortunately climate change (which may well be partly or wholly anthropogenic) is something which no-one wants to do anything about at a personal level. We want someone to solve it — yes! We want cuddly polar bears to live and whales to swim free and the poor and ignorant to see the light and get a job in customer service, but underneath it all, deep down, we all know the Truth. We all realise that there are too many of us. And we'll be damned if we're going to jump under the bus to save all those lesser types. So we must find villains to blame (whatever side we are on). Anything to avoid facing the predicament we are in. Because we can't go on in such numbers!

Oh yes, the problem will be solved. "Nature this passionless spectator this unbreakable iceberg face that can bear anything"* — dear old Mother Nature will adjust, and perhaps the human race will survive and perhaps it wont. It will not matter what any possible human survivors think or believe though, but only where they are and what they do. Because in the real world, there is no justice, there are only outcomes.

*The Marquis de Sade in Peter Weiss's "Marat Sade"

Max Keiser kicks ass again!

2010-02-26T09:35:00.003+11:00

Good interview with a rather exhausted looking and sounding Steve Keen (who I saw the other day at Swinburne Lilydale) talking about the prospects for the Australian economy with the always amazing Max Keiser…

How to deal with failure

2010-01-31T21:55:00.009+11:00

Some great stuff out there on the web: Ran Prieur has posted this link to an article, The Misanthrope’s Guide to the End of the World by Venkat who writes a blog called ribbonfarm.com. There are some natural born thinkers out there who can riff on the subject of their choice in a very entertaining fashion: another is Anatoly Karlin who writes Sublime Oblivion which I've linked to on my link list. Anatoly has a great post on TEOTWAWKI too: The Final Gambit: Geoengineering.

But while it's good after-dinner fun to plunge into these heady spaces with a friend or two and some glasses of red, this is all about the world we are actually going to wake up to in the morning. Now it may be, gentle readers, that you are living lives in which you are wonderfully happy and in which you have control over your direction, your finances and the well-being of yourself and your Significant Others. Well if that is so, good on you. But we are talking about the business of failure here — the failure of an entire civilisation — and while failure may be an abstraction in an argument or discussion, in real life it acts through the lives of individuals — like us.

It's never so clear cut when it happens in our lives. It's harder to separate out the bit that's the failure of civilisation from our own weak character when we fail at the job interview/running a profitable small business/attempting to stop our kid joining the Moonies.

So this is the way the end of our civilisation will be seen by us, as a personal problem. We personally will have been too lazy, too materialistic, too non-materialistic, too far from God…and those who rule the media will ram the message home! People like Rupert Murdoch, Dark Lord of News Limited and friend of the downtrodden. And what about the young people? Why aren't they working & studying harder/giving more/being more optimistic/more politically active? For goodness sake — look at what the government is spending, just in our little town of Foster, on facilities for them! Millions! A new secondary school (which to me looks poorly designed and hopeless, energy-wise), a big new building at the primary school (did they need it? I don't think so, but as long as builder's labourers have the money to put a deposit down on a Ford or Holden V-8 ute, perhaps the empire can be maintained…). Meanwhile in Psychology Today, an article entitled The Dramatic Rise of Anxiety and Depression in Children and Adolescents: Is It Connected to the Decline in Play and Rise in Schooling? is published. Hmm.

I think it's time to stop trusting in the Powerful View ("What's best for them is best for you!"). Start a transition group in your area and see what fellow-creatures come out of the woodwork. Good luck!

Thinking about "Avatar"

2010-01-13T08:29:00.003+11:00

Ran Prieur has a good post about "Avatar", which I saw a couple of weeks ago at our local cinema. When I saw it I was somewhat taken aback by the heart-on-the-sleeve anti-industrial-exploitation-and-anti-imperialist stance, coming from the heart of the beast so to speak. My first thought was: how do you get the kids to join the Marines after they've watched "Avatar"? The "bad" characters were well drawn: the boss of the mine and the tough bastard in charge of security. The ordinary soldiers were also portrayed as "just like us" which added to the moral dilemma for the audience.

There was nothing original in the plot, but for a mainstream blockbuster to come right out and show the dynamics of the destruction wrought by our industrial civilisation so clearly and emotionally was, as far as I can remember, a first.

Many years ago I worked in the oil industry in Asia and saw all this sort of thing happening firsthand. What struck me at that time was how dependent we all are on this system for our wealth, and how ignorant most people were (and still are!) about how it works. Later, in the eighties, I was involved in the conservation movement at a political level and even there the gap between what people said they believed and how they actually lived amazed me. Like caring about East Gippsland forests but seeing nothing wrong with jetting off around the world for a casual holiday.

I hope I'm not coming across as a moralising extremist, because I think our problem lies not in struggling to be "pure" in some extreme way, but in seeing the embeddedness of our lives in a complex system which we have built, but which none of us understand or control and which has us all hostage. The most innocent of our actions have great moral consequences, such as buying a mobile phone which uses materials obtained from Congolese warlords, thus helping finance one of the most appalling conflicts on the planet.

What is the answer? "Avatar" certainly had none — the movie was made by the very system which it criticises and the ending is ridiculous. I think the real answer is both darker and in some ways easier than we would like: no great moral revolution, but a running down of the system back to a level of relative powerlessness, with no change in human nature at its core.

The "system" as it is, runs on the inchoate desires of us all. We get the political systems and politicians we "deserve" because very often they represent the various poles of our unresolved moral dilemmas, and we project the "otherness" of the parts of ourselves we can't handle onto those we see as our political foes, and over-idealise our political friends who stand for all our "good" bits. This is a childish morality which is undoing the sense of community which we need to preserve our present social systems, and it stems from a childish relationship to the forces which control our lives — necessarily, because we hardly understand them! Thus the system falls apart in yet another way, adding to resource depletion and overpopulation.

Thus the wheel revolves and the great cycle of nature takes its course.

Sugar coating a cow pat

2009-12-22T07:39:00.005+11:00

This Monday all over the world (in our more "advanced" nations at least), public relations people told their partners over breakfast it was going to be a busy week. After all, the various leaders of these advanced nations were winging their way home from the Copenhagen conference, back to the bosom to their constituents, whose shining expectant faces need to be fed the right mixture of optimism leavened with the need for caution against any moves which might rock the boat, upset the apple cart, or wreck Christmas. Our leaders would need help with this.

And as they sat in their Lexus or Audi or Merc crawling along the freeway with the radio chattering cheerily in the background, our public relations types would have been thinking about what they could pull out of the file as a template to fit the task. A simple job — making an abject failure look like a work in progress. There would be some meetings of key people straight off to outline the problem, but once it was roughed out it could go down the line for the juniors to flesh out the campaign. Nothing out of the ordinary, but a good solid couple of days worth of work that would be nicely billable at a tight time for a lot of firms.

You'll be able to make your judgment of their efforts yourself, but with only a couple of sleeps till Santa comes and then with New Year and the other distractions of the festive season I expect our interest in Copenhagen will have faded and we'll be gawking at Tiger Wood's porn-star lover's latest revelations on page one, while climate change will be back buried at the bottom of page six.

For some reason, I am reminded of the last scene in Zola's novel La Bête Humaine, where the driverless train careers on through the night full of happy, drunken, doomed soldiers.

Let's put my emotionalism to one side. Everything is going to an inevitable plan now and there is nothing we can do to stop it at any level above the personal. If we have made the decision not to go down with the ship, or join the drunken soldiers on the train, our task is quite simple, although not particularly easy, as we will be coming up against the resistance of those who take the p.r. spin seriously. But in essence it is to find the right place to live, get out of debt, have a maintainable shelter over our heads, a reliable food supply and a non-toxic community surrounding us. Good luck!

Edit: from Tagonist, a quote…

Speaking of Copenhagen (and the health care bill) I have a new motto: baby steps equals failure. Suck it up, spinboys...

Art on a Sunday night

2009-12-20T22:44:00.002+11:00

And now for something completely different (via Keep It Trill)!

Copenhagen, Rudd, Wong and other delusionary phenomena

2009-12-15T09:00:00.002+11:00

I know a lot of people follow the news, waiting with baited breath to see if our fearless leaders will "save" us all at Copenhagen. I find it a little hard to understand how anyone can believe in this stuff at all any more! I suppose the school kids have "ideals" pumped into them and then go out into the world to be exploited by their seniors until the juice is all squeezed out of them. They provide the energy, while it lasts, to give our political processes the appearance of life. But it's all a gigantic machine, set in motion by long-dead hands, where the outcome of hardly anything depends upon specific actors any more — they're all infinitely replaceable — but on the inertia of culture, the habits and desires of billions, the grooves into which our actions are forced to conform by the structures both physical and mental which we inhabit. And how can a system which depends upon infinite growth, ever-expanding credit and growing population and consumption, vote itself out of existence? Because that is the only answer to all our looming problems.

There is no such thing as "sustainable development". It has no more reality than "clean coal". We can go on pretending for a few more years. No doubt there will be people in fifty years time who when the ruin of our civilisation lies strewn about them, will continue to spout the kind of nonsense which fills TV, newspapers and our conversations. And this basically comes down to a frantic groping around for ways to keep the unsustainable way of life to which we are almost all so desperately attached, going a bit longer. But it will end.

Perhaps you find this difficult to countenance and are appalled by my "negativity". But I'm not being negative. I'm merely stating a difficult truth which we are all going to have to face if we live a few years longer. It's a law of nature if you like — and we are animals like any other, subject to the laws of nature as much as any other part of it, however much self-deluding drivel comes out of the mouths of opinion makers on every side of politics.

So is the human race Doomed? Of course bloody not!

The way to think about it is this. Will there be humans on this planet in one hundred years time? Almost certainly! Will they be living where you're living? If the answer to this is most likely yes, how will they be living? Do you want to be part of their future? Yes? Then it's up to you to try and work out how to get there from here.

Forget millennial dreams, or apocalyptic dreams. Forget all the idealistic or nihilistic nonsense you've imbibed if you can. Try to imagine the real situation which will exist in one hundred years, or whatever time span you pick.

By the way, Ran Prieur has done a great post on the same ideas I've been riffing on above. Read it here. A quote…

It is said that Obama is wearing a mask, being a deceiver, as if he carefully pretended to be a progressive activist for a quarter of a century because a time traveler from the future told him that would get him elected president in 2008 so he could pursue his secret right wing globalist agenda. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" -- but it's hard to imagine two presidents more different than Obama and Bush. The fact that the country is moving the same direction under each of them should tell us something else: the president is not the boss. Obama has never worn a mask -- Obama is the mask, and not a very good one. It has never been more obvious that America is an ossified dying empire with a suicidal inertia that no leader or movement can stop. If Sarah Palin, Dennis Kucinich, or Carrot Top were president, the system that the president pretends to run would still be bailing out banks and insurance companies, escalating wars, hiding atrocities, and generally chugging along to its ruin.

The whole thing is worth a read.

A bit more on Barnaby Joyce

2009-12-12T23:06:00.002+11:00

Here's a link to an "Age" article on Barnaby Joyce's views, via The Automatic Earth.

Barnaby Joyce

2009-12-11T20:55:00.006+11:00

Barnaby Joyce is conservative politician and a thug, and I don't like his world-view. He reminds me of some of the kinds of people I was at boarding school with: arrogant and overbearing. However he has done the unthinkable and spoken the truth — called the USA for the fake that it has become and blown the whistle on the Potemkin Village of Australian exceptionalism. Unlike the cardboard cut-outs he's surrounded by in Canberra, he speaks his mind. Naturally this has freaked them out. Sooner or later this was going to happen — the cosy consensus managed by spin doctors and PR masters was going to crack. Once it breaks the ground will open up in politics and we will get very different world emerging. It will be a dangerous world because we are living in dangerous times.

Riffing on the Archdruid's latest

2009-12-10T20:40:00.003+11:00

He strikes again! The Archdruid rarely disappoints and this week's post is another ripper, as he meticulously pulls apart our hopes and fears over climate politics and expiates on the folly of betting on the big end of town, political or business, to save our arses (or asses for US readers). Because it's over folks! Till your garden, mend your fences and talk to your neighbors, because that's what matters now.

The final episode of "Addicted to Money"

2009-11-22T10:57:00.004+11:00

I just watched "Addicted to Money" episode 3 via iView on the ABC's site (scroll the list till you find it — only 11 days to go before it disappears). A tiresome business in South Gippsland where broadband is not much faster than dial-up, so it took me two hours to watch the last half hour of the program. In the end it was an exhortation to be virtuous. I suppose given the shortness of the program and the complexity of the subject multiplied by the contentiousness, it wasn't fair to expect much more. In the end I was surprised by the directness and honesty of the presentation but of course it could only skim the surface, leaving the courses of action to deal with the situation entirely up to us.

Which actions to take? This is where our all-to-human prejudices come into play, and I don't pretend to be free of them. But let me just say that focusing on the shortcomings of others, either at the highest levels of politics or in your own street is not likely to prove a sensible course. Look at what you are doing, and remove the plank from your own eye before you make comments on the speck in other people's. Also avoid the related problem of depending on your so-called betters to solve the problem for you. Forget about electric cars, wind power and all the other fluff. In the end, if you can't build it and fix it locally, preferably yourself, then it will suck all your blood.

What am I doing? In the next few weeks we'll be getting an aquaponics setup going at our nursery. Aquaponics will become a very popular method of growing your own produce, especially in a water-constrained environment. I'll keep posting our progress as it takes place.

Our transition meeting

2009-11-20T12:55:00.003+11:00

We had our third meeting last night, and we used the Shires "Zing" computer system which allows a large group to get through a lot of business quickly, without being dominated by the loudest voices. There were a few technical problems but they didn't really make any difference. The virtue of the exercise was a credit to Christine Hamilton, one of the Shire's employees, who did a great job of keeping us all moving and shutting the obsessive talkers up.

I'm now waiting for the Shire to email us the results. I've got a reasonable idea of what they are, having read through the whole thing last night while we were doing it, and I think it's fair to say that the results are a reflection of both the wisdom and the folly of the educated and socially concerned citizens in our little neck of the woods. The wisdom comes from recognition of the inexorable grinding power of change, the folly from timidity and a desire to hang on to the known and a lingering belief in a Millennial notion of Progress, where a just and virtuous class of scientifically trained experts will usher in a Golden Age. This belief is really the last bit of social glue that can hold a complex society together and motivate middle-class people, binding them to the necessary life of self-sacrifice demanded by the gods of technocracy. It is a belief that will die hard and cause a lot of pain before it does.

What do I mean by this? Well, it is the idea that lies behind a lot of the rhetoric of both the Left and the Right, which thinks suffering is Someone's or Something's fault, and some fiddling with the social fabric or the silencing, re-education or execution of undesirables will lead us to endless happiness. Or perhaps it's just a matter of replacing all the V-8s with electric vehicles and having solar panels on every roof. Whatever. Perhaps you get my drift, or perhaps not.

Let me lay my cards on the table. Life goes on, according to what Nature allows, which may or may not be in accord with our wishes. During the rise of our technocratic civilisation over the past several hundred years we "won" more often than we "lost", which is why there are now so many of us. During the next several hundred years it will be the other way round. Whatever we do now can't alter that overall fate. Our task is to learn to accept whatever the moment can bring us (because in any case, that's all we have) and do the best we can, without false beliefs in our exceptionalism and other types of pseudo-religious nuttiness that infect our oh-so-secular age. Maybe solar panels will be of some use, but I'm not wasting time on peripheral issues like that. Food, shelter and community are the main requirement. Place is the most important single factor. The rest is up to the Brownian motion of fate, or the will of the gods if you like.

"Addicted to Money' again

2009-11-13T11:33:00.002+11:00

I watched the second episode of "Addicted to Money" — it really is quite good. It's interesting that a viewpoint is being presented that actually seems to bear some resemblance to reality, when 90% of what one sees or hears these days is either spin, fluff or a combination of the two. For instance our Kev (Australia's Prime Minister) drops in to Afghanistan and lets us know "we're there for the long haul", protecting the corrupt, powerless government of a country which is producing most of the World's opium. Way to go, Kev! And he's a fan of a Big Australia, even though we have no water, bad soil and are pushing our ecological limits over the breaking point.

"Addicted to Money" looked at the real story: the shift of power to China and how the Chinese are in turn caught in the US debt trap. Dear little Australia continues to be a pawn in their game, to be discarded without a thought when our moment comes.

What an amazingly interesting time we live in, with profound change gathering all round us. We are in a period like the "Phony War": the storm clouds are gathering and lots of people all over the world are suddenly unable to keep things going the way they were, yet we're living in a dream that somehow we can keep it like this in Australia forever. Make your changes now, while it's easy! Get out of debt and get in to a way of life that can carry you when the storm breaks!

Next week is the final of "Addicted to Money". Not to be missed.

Local Food Map Website

2009-11-11T09:01:00.003+11:00

Gordon Rouse has emailed me with his map of locally grown produce. It looks like a great idea. I'll quote from his email…

I wanted to let you know that my wife and I have launched our food map at http://www.localfoodmap.net.
The idea of the online map is to have locally grown produce easy to find wherever you are. You can search by keywords on your location, and registered producers will come up as icons on a map.

I am hoping as many food-producers from small vege growers to farms will put their farmgate presence on this map so that we can all find what is growing in abundance in our local area.
The system also allows users to subscribe to farms, which means growers can send out emails to their subscribers to let them know if there is a fresh harvest, or a large animal is being butchered.

I believe that this website could be an invaluable tool in meeting the aims of the Transition Town organisation, in promoting direct farmgate sales and food networks. I hope you can consider registering yourself as both producers and alertees, and maybe even letting your local members know about this through your contacts.

At this stage, there are only a few outlets in Victoria, so if you wish to see a demonstration of this working, I suggest you use "Melbourne Victoria" as your locality.

"Addicted to Money": ABC TV nails its colours to the mast!

2009-11-06T08:01:00.005+11:00

An interesting documentary, "Addicted to Money", was broadcast on ABC TV last night (Thursday). The Global Financial Crisis is so complex a beast that even those who are riding it for their own gain hardly understand it, so to expect a TV show to lay it all bare is a big ask. Television is a poor medium for intellectual exchange and the endless camera and editing doohickies filling up the space drove me nuts. The heavy-handed drug addiction metaphor irritated too, but there was no doubt of the conviction of the makers, or of their opinions of whose fault the whole debacle has been. Bankers, guard your estates!

Good talking heads interspersed through the show, particularly Elizabeth Warren who saw all this coming.

So it looks like the ABC is coming out of its corner fighting, after the long Howard years of being forced onto the back foot. Good oh! "Addicted to Money" is a series so I guess I'll tune in next week.

Cross-posted interview

2009-10-31T09:34:00.002+11:00

The interview I talked about in my last post between Stoneleigh and Euan Mearns is cross-posted at The Oil Drum, so you can read the always intelligent discussion of it by TOD people as well.

This is the way it'll go

2009-10-30T16:35:00.004+11:00

A superb but wrenching interview by Euan Mearns of The Oil Drum with Stoneleigh of The Automatic Earth. A truly sombre prospect for the USA. What can we expect here in Australia? At the moment it's all green shoots and rising interest rates. We're heading into summer with a good spring rainfall in the south where I live and family members are house hunting again.

You readers of this blog are volunteers — you don't necessarily have to agree with me, but you're unlikely to continue reading if what I say jars too violently with your world-view. So I feel no need to sweeten my message to make you "feel better". Rather the truth — it's a much better place to start thinking of where to go from here.

But it's a different case with family and in a small community, where I'm accused of being excessively negative for yelling "Danger!" I even get told that somehow by talking about it, I'm making it happen! That people like me are undermining confidence in the system and should just shut up.

I won't quote from the interview with Stoneleigh. Just read the whole thing. It lays out the course of our world history for the next twenty years. You can't stop it happening, just as I can't make it happen, but we sure as hell can attend to our immediate circumstances and make preparations to deal with it.

The meeting on Thursday night

2009-10-25T09:53:00.004+11:00

We had a good turnout, and I had some calls from people who would have liked to have come but had other commitments. There were quite a few people I'd never met before. We watched a film about Cuba, "The Power of Community", which was interesting although it kind of avoided the issue of exactly who decided Cuba was going to go permaculture. Was it Castro or the plebs? Perhaps it doesn't matter for us because if the figures they gave of the radical reduction in fossil food usage for food production are true then we should be OK even here, with our poor soils.

But back to the meeting. We had a discussion after the film where we went around the room and each person spoke about their area of interest and reason for coming for the evening, and we used that to make a list of the areas of concern. These we've emailed back to everyone. There will no doubt be additions and alterations but the list gives us a basis for planning a future for the district which will take the changes we're facing into account.

Here's our Transition Corner Inlet topic list
Energy
Renewable
Decentralised
Bulk purchase
Community projects
Leadership example for other communities
Self-sufficiency
Showcase
Efficiency & design

Education/information
Encourage others to join
Spread awareness & understanding
Film Festival
Environmental issues
Basic energy knowledge for home or community
Using local libraries to stock relevant books/periodicals
Climate change & energy resource issues education

Local economy
Tourism eco/transition
Bartering/alternative currencies
Bulk buying & co-operatives
Small-scale local economy
Resilience
Practical crafts and handy skills
Multi use of facilities (halls, community gardens)

Food production
Producing basic food groups
Preserving/value adding
Survival food
Food security
Sustainable practices
Community gardens across all communities

Technology
Explore & trial ideas
Alternative fuels
Alternative modes
Getting networks in place
Safety for cycling
Hand tools use and manufacture
Practical recycling of resources
Animal use & management

Health
Growing medicinal herbs
Preventative health

Social
Values (modest scale/frugality/generosity)
Survival/confidence
Sharing with youth
Maintaining social connections at a distance
Older people & physical demands
Employment conditions/availability
Welcoming incomers
Toxic politics/polarisation of views/community division
Starting with simple steps before tackling bigger things
Using/maintaining community halls as social centres more effectively
Personal growth through social involvement
Helping communities help themselves/encouraging community self-reliance
Setting targets/measuring outcomes
Process driven from bottom up
Using the Net & other technology to connect to others
Using non-threatening messages to promote change
Dealing with anxiety, stress, grieving
Co-operation and sharing skills
Network expertise
Developing, maintaining and sharing contacts

Some of our topics are a bit thinly populated. I'm sure health is a much bigger issue, but we were missing the crucial people who could have contributed there. But this is just the beginning and over the next year or so we will expand our contacts and refine our list. We will use the list to develop action plans which we'll be able to pass on to the areas of the community who need to see them.

I was happy to see how so many people are anxious to get their teeth into something real and it takes away the feeling of isolation which I've been feeling for a long time in relation to my vision of the unfolding events. Onward and upward!

Our Transition Town (Corner Inlet area, in our case!) film night

2009-10-20T21:59:00.003+11:00

We're having our next meeting this coming Thursday (details here). I'm rather looking forward to it and feel that we might actually do some good! I'm not sure how many will come but I think some interest has been ignited. There seem to be new people popping up out of the woodwork.

I'm very fond of our little town and have seen enough of the world to appreciate its subtle but real virtues. Hardly any crime, hardly any bad vibes! People who say hello in the street to you every day, even though you know they think you're a weirdo. But I'm aware how fragile this peace is, and how in many ways we lie in the hands of an indifferent fate, which with the turn of circumstance in the greater World could ruin all this tomorrow. That's what I think is worth fighting to prevent.

Max Keiser kicks ass!

2009-10-19T17:53:00.002+11:00

Max calls the bankers what they are: thieves.

Nasim Taleb talks about Extremistan & Mediocristan

2009-10-14T07:53:00.001+11:00

Planning your career

2009-10-14T07:33:00.003+11:00

Here is a quote from John Robb at Global Guerrillas, and my own thoughts…

(here's a follow up to the earlier post on Entrepreneurship as Resilience): In a world dominated by Mediocristan outcomes, employment is a function of long term planning, training and experience. People could spend a lifetime working in the same industry and doing the same thing. Further, it was possible to rely on the idea that things like pensions, health care, and a job would be there when you retire. That's gone. Entrepreneurship can provide a salve to this problem. It is a vital skill/mind set that allows you to rapidly pilot new strategies for income generation within a rapidly changing environment. Further, it assumes very little. If it doesn't work, try something else. If it does work, reap the rewards and go onto the next idea.

It's not easy, but we will have little choice! The danger of this kind of life is burning out, so you need first of all to be self-indulgent: that is, you need a lot of rest. This means scaling back your material ambitions.

Also in the future, going into debt for something you want will be a very short-term option. There will simply not be enough predictability to ensure you'll be able to service a longer-term loan. We will all need savings (remember them?) which we can call on when we need them. Most useful of all will be skills other people need. If you are in competition with others, then in a resource-constrained world your existence will be in constant peril. If you are able to help, your path will always be smoothed.

Transition Town blog for Corner Inlet district

2009-10-13T07:44:00.002+11:00

Fiona Mottram and I have set up a new blog, Transition Corner Inlet, which will be a vehicle for communication about transitioning to a low energy/low CO2 future. Our first function will be a film, The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, which will be screened next week at Foster Community Health Centre on Thursday October 22 starting at 7.00pm.

I'll keep this blog going as my personal take on the world, but the new blog will be a communal effort.

Maribyrnong City Council Peak Oil Contingency Plan

2009-09-30T13:55:00.006+10:00

Phil Hart has posted an article on The Oil Drum about this initiative for the Maribyrnong City Council Peak Oil Contingency Plan (warning: PDF) with which he has been involved. It's well worth a read. The comments are worth a look too (as they usually are at TOD). In the comments there's a link to an article about the Shire of Yarra Range's attitude to the same question. Here's the vital quote…

But councillors Richard Higgins, Graham Warren and Chris Templer disagreed, saying it wasn’t council’s responsibility to plan for such contingencies.

They believe it should be a State or Federal Government issue.

Shouldn't we all just wait for Daddy to look after us?

Let me just say that when the tide rises it lifts all boats, but when it sinks only those who make it to the channel can float. We South Gippsland people live in the State electorate of the leader of the National Party in Victoria (the conservative former Country Party), Peter Ryan, and we also live in a Federal electorate represented by Russel Broadbent, a member of the Liberal Party (also conservative, you foreigners!). Both these gentlemen are in opposition to their respective governments. Neither are likely to get a bone tossed to them by their political opponents.

So as far as I'm concerned, the Lord helps those who help themselves. We have already seen how the government in Melbourne works when those closest to it (electorally) are threatened.

A cheerful 6 minutes (not)!

2009-09-30T13:51:00.002+10:00

Here's a cheery video from Marc Faber about the immanent collapse of capitalism — enjoy!

Our Transition Town meeting

2009-09-24T22:45:00.003+10:00

It went well! We had fifteen altogether, although Ross West, who's in the State Emergency Service, was called away to an emergency (a lost windsurfer I think) soon after we started. Andrew McEwen (Director of Sustainability at South Gippsland Shire Council) talked about the situation which makes local community based organising so important, and Councillor Jennie Deane talked about how the transition initiative got going in Loch, which is a very small town up the western end of the Shire. Susan Davies (ex State Member of Parliament) talked about the Energy Innovation Cooperative which she is setting up. We had a fairly wide-ranging discussion, but in the end Fiona Mottram (who is a journalist on the Foster Mirror) and I decided we'd get a Transition Town initiative going here, just with the two of us to start with. Not quite sure what we'll do yet, but there were lots of ideas in the air!

Neat explanation of the current Global Financial Crisis

2009-09-16T09:15:00.004+10:00

From Steve Keen's Debtwatch, a quote...

According to Minsky’s theory:

Capitalist economies can and do periodically experience financial crises (something that believers in the dominant “Neoclassical” approach to economics vehemently denied until reality—in the form of the Global Financial Crisis—slapped them in the face last year);
These financial crises are caused by debt-financed speculation on asset prices, which leads to bubbles in asset prices;
These bubbles must eventually burst, because they add nothing to the economy’s productive capacity while simultaneously increasing the debt-servicing burden the economy faces;
When they burst, asset prices collapse but the debt remains;
The attempts by both borrowers and lenders to reduce leverage reduces aggregate demand, causing a recession;
If the economy survives such a crisis, it can go through the same process again, with another boom driving debt up even higher, followed by yet another crash; but
Ultimately this process has to lead to a level of debt that is so great that another revival becomes impossible since no-one is willing to take on any more debt. Then a Depression ensues.

What is a Transition Town?

2009-09-15T07:38:00.004+10:00

I haven't explained what Transition Town means — thanks Elizabeth! A quote from the Transition Town site…

A Transition Initiative is a community (lots of examples here) working together to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and address this BIG question:
"for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?"

Transition Town meeting in Foster!

2009-09-14T18:21:00.004+10:00

At 7:00 pm on Thursday the 24th of September — that's next week — we're having a meeting at the Community House in Foster (Corner of Station Road & Court Street, Foster) to talk about Transition Towns and related stuff. Andrew McEwen (Director of Sustainability at South Gippsland Shire Council) and Councillor Jennie Deane will speak. I'm sure I'll say a few words too. Bring some food to share, and ask anyone who might be interested to come along.
View Larger Map

Left or Right wing — what difference will it make?

2009-09-14T16:19:00.003+10:00

Our government in my state — Victoria — and federally is Labor, nominally left-wing. Will it matter in the longer term whether right or left wing parties dominate politics? Supporters of both sides hope that it will matter and hope their side will win, which is perfectly natural. But I wonder whether it will make a lot of difference in the long term. I'll concede it does in the short term. I was very glad to see the end of John Howard and his gang. I wish the new lot were less like him than they are. I'll admit it — I'm a soft, left leaning libertarian who wrote letters to the papers deploring the treatment of asylum seekers and the rush to support George W Bush in whatever international adventure he was involved in. But in the longer term, maybe it doesn't make as much difference as we would like to imagine.

Politics is the froth and bubble on top of society. It is the way power and resources, which are scarce, are apportioned to an infinite demand. Underneath however are the hidden trends which really control our lives and most often they are not the product of politics. Politicians of all stripes are "successful" when they surf the wave of prosperity, the way Maggie Thatcher surfed the wave of growth which resulted from the huge bonus North Sea oil gave to the British economy. In Australia, Malcolm Fraser and the Liberals (conservatives to you non-Australians: we're upside down here at the bottom of the world) reaped the whirlwind of the recession of the late seventies, while Labor under Bob Hawke were the beneficiaries of the boom brought on by a world awash in cheap energy in the eighties. Dmitri Orlov has it that the same cheap energy destroyed the Soviet economy which was dependent on oil exports to maintain the system, thus leading, at least in part, to the collapse of the Soviet system at the end of the eighties.

Peak Oil is not a political issue, it's a geological one. The same goes for all the looming shortages which nature is shortly going to impose on us freely breeding humans. Politics may matter to you and me in our immediate time and place, but in the longer term, which is not much longer these days, these larger, hidden issues are going to take charge of our lives in uncomfortable ways.

Malthus, the Commons and localism

2009-09-13T21:25:00.003+10:00

An interesting post from Ran Prieur. A quote…

Whenever someone brings up Malthus, I remember this critique of Malthus by Iain Boal, arguing that population only outruns food supply when there's non-local control of resources.

We've got a great example of that with Melbourne now pillaging the resources of the State ie. the water from the Thomson River and the North-South pipeline in order to keep the political peace in the ever-expanding outer suburbs. There is a certain inevitability about Melbourne acting more and more as a city-state, concerned only with its internal politics and riding roughshod over external interests. The most powerful player seems to me to be the construction industry, although you could argue their influence is national.

Anyway, bad luck if you're sitting on resources which the powerful in the City need to shore up their position. We are fortunate that so far we are just a bit too far away and awkwardly situated in South Gippsland for them to pinch our water. But it does underline the fact that local control of local resources is the key to sustainability. How can a community survive if the water is gone?

Reporting back

2009-09-12T12:31:00.003+10:00

The talk at the Green Door went well, considering that in the rush to get there (a fifty-five kilometre trip for me), I left my lecture notes sitting on the printer back at the office! But I know this stuff back the front and the crowd was pretty aware of the issues so I didn't need a script. I only knew two people there out of the twenty-five or so, but was impressed with the occasion: the attitudes of the people, their obvious commitment to finding new ways of doing things, and Karen's soup! Lots of stuff is going on everywhere it seems!

One of my friends there got stuck into me about what he sees as my excessive negativity (as he sees it represented on this blog). I'm not sure how to deal with this. I call things as I see them. Someone has to bear witness to the truth. I realise that my view of the world is very partial, and very personal in many ways. I don't think that invalidates it. There are plenty of people out there boosting their causes with lots of happy talk. No-one has to listen to me if they don't want to. I guess I'm more interested in the truth as I see it, than pushing any control agenda or trying to steer people in certain directions by subterfuge. This means I'm no politician, but someone has to say uncomfortable things if we're to understand what's going on. I'm aware that it may bring people down, but what is the alternative?

Talking of being the bearer of bad tidings, there is a great article online by J.S. Kim at Seeking Alpha, which calls the current stock market rally and happy green shoots talk for the fraud that it is. Long, but well worth reading!

Talking at the Green Door

2009-09-08T20:21:00.002+10:00

I'm giving a talk on Peak Oil at the Green Door Cafe & Produce Store, 29 Bridge Street, Korumburra this Thursday at 6:00 pm. Call them on 03 5655 2351 or email karen@greendoorcafe.com.au for more info.

Important post on The Oil Drum

2009-09-04T09:29:00.005+10:00

This is a pretty important post on The Oil Drum concerning how we in Australia will deal with a reduction in fuel availability. Please read it! A quote from the conclusion…

I hope these thoughts encourage you to consider the local and personal angles and think about what you and your family would be able to do. Good general advice is perhaps to buy a sturdy bicycle, get to know your neighbours better and ponder about how you can get around with much less fuel.

All very well for those city dwellers with a reasonable public transport system. Wot about us country folk eh? No rail to our area, only diesel powered road freight deliveries. Ulp!

Strategic minerals

2009-09-04T07:06:00.003+10:00

The Archdruid has just put up a post entitled "The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism" about the Chinese government's moves to stop exports of certain rare earth minerals. A quote…

Those of my readers who don’t track the latest fads in technology may not know that these have become crucial to many cutting edge technologies. Lanthanum, for example, is used in high-tech batteries, and neodymium goes into the permanent magnets used in electric motors and wind turbines. The innards of the Prius and other hybrids, to say nothing of the as-yet-imaginary electric cars being hyped by what’s left of the American auto industry, depend on rare earth elements, and China currently produces well over 90% of the world’s supply of most of them. The report thus sparked claims of an imminent shortage in these minerals and, predictably, a flurry of speculative interest in (and hype-ridden articles about) mines outside of China that can produce the same minerals.

An article from the Sydney Morning Herald (via Gippsland friends of Future Generations) gives more background on Australia's situation in regard to the production of rare earth minerals. Another quote…

A decision is looming in Canberra that could block plans by China to tighten its grip on the market for some of the world's most obscure but valuable minerals. China accounts for 93% of the production of so-called "rare earth" elements - and more than 99% of the output for two of them that are vital for a wide range of green energy technologies and military applications like missiles.

Over the next decade or so we will almost certainly see a rush to secure what are seen as vital raw materials by the dominant powers in the world. How this will play out for Australia is uncertain. While we are the source of many important supplies our capacity to control or defend that capability will be a major political test. The Sydney Morning Herald article refers to moves by Chinese miners to buy up rare earth miners in Australia. If China corners the market in these materials world-wide and then plays big power politics with them, we will find ourselves in a situation not unlike that leading up to World War 2, where the economic autarky of the 1930's, brought on by the Great Depression, saw the Axis power attempt to seize by force the economic resources they could not obtain by trade.

Will China attempt to make Australia into a vassal state? How will the USA react to all this? We live in interesting times.

The real world

2009-08-25T21:55:00.010+10:00

Via Ran Prieur, an interesting and arresting graphic…

Also from Charles Hugh Smith via Ran, a great argument for why survivalism is crap. A quote (his maths is a bit sus)…

Because the best protection isn't owning 30 guns; it's having 30 people who care about you. Since those 30 have other people who care about them, you actually have 300 people who are looking out for each other, including you. The second best protection isn't a big stash of stuff others want to steal; it's sharing what you have and owning little of value. That's being flexible, and common, the very opposite of creating a big fat highly visible, high-value target and trying to defend it yourself in a remote setting.

Globalisation and entanglement in the illicit economy

2009-08-25T12:06:00.008+10:00

John Robb mentioned an interesting video today by Nils Gilman on the illicit global economy. What struck me is the way moral integrity is compromised by large organisations and global entanglements. It is becoming impossible to live a normal life without at some level or in some way having an interest, even if it is entirely unconscious, in some illicit activity.

If you are a builder, how sure are you that the hardwood tropical timber decking you use isn't from an illegal logging operation? If you are having the house built for you what hope do you have of even knowing about such issues? And what about the consumer goods we all fill our lives with? Mobile phones are crammed with materials some of which come from places which have no reliable rule of law and where who knows who is profiting and who is suffering from the transactions involved in supply.

Our troops are in Afghanistan fighting a difficult and dangerous war with a doubtful outcome. How are the enemy there financed? Apart from the trade in opium there is apparently a huge protection racket operated by the Taliban and others which means that a large proportion of the cost of any project such as bridge or road building is skimmed off as a tax. This takes place at all levels, and starts with money paid to assure safe passage of goods into the country through Pakistan. So our troops are often overseeing the security of projects which are financing their enemies. What can the knowledge of that do to our young people who we've asked to put their lives on the line?

Remember the AWB scandal in Iraq, where it was alleged that huge bribes had been paid in order to secure wheat sales to Saddam Hussien's regime. To quote from Wikipedia,

On 11 July 2006, North American farmers are claiming $1 billion in damages from AWB at Washington DC, alleging the Australian wheat exporter used bribery and other corrupt activities to corner grain markets. The growers are also claiming that AWB used the same techniques to secure grain sales in other markets in Asia and other countries in the Middle East.

But of course this is a game everybody plays. What about Stern Hu and the allegations by the Chinese government that he'd been involved in bribery on behalf of Rio Tinto in order to obtain contracts for sales of minerals to Chinese industry? The whole point is that ordinary bods, wheat farmers, mine workers, administrators and all manner of staff who make up the bulk of the population and who are kind to animals and love their children ultimately give control of their prosperity to a few hard bastards who have to push the sales through. As long as we get the money, don't tell us how it was done!

One of the points Nils Gilman makes in the video mentioned at the beginning of this post is that money from illegal activities often ends up being invested in legitimate businesses, so that now

according to a report from Confesercenti, the second-largest Italian Trade Organization, published on October 22, 2007 in the Corriere della Sera, the Camorra [the Neopolitan Mafia] control the milk and fish industries, the coffee trade, and over 2,500 bakeries in the city. (Wikipedia)

The illicit global economy is huge and by degrees is becoming more powerful and influential. Legitimate business and government are becoming increasingly enmeshed in it and at the same time the moral legitimacy of these two becomes more questionable as they seem to fall more and more into the hands of self-interested cliques. The use of torture by the USA after 911 and the seeming impunity with which constitutional safeguards have been swept aside as "outmoded" in regards to civil liberties is an indicator of an internal change of attitude amongst big players in the US government where power is becoming more naked and there is less care for traditional legalities and restraints.

All this will inevitably add up to a loss of legitimacy in the almost religious sense in which it has underpinned the Western Enlightenment project. It will eat away at the faith of populations in their governments and in the nationalist enthusiasms which have been at the base of much of the power of those governments. What will be left are temporary enthusiasms, such as might be raised by a charismatic leader of the popularist/fascist type, but they will not have the enduring power of a deep "faith in our mission" which has been the case for most of the last century. What will also be left is loyalty to the local strong man, or tribe. If there is no-one there to fill that role then expect them to appear soon!

This may seem a long way away from Australia, but as seen by the AWB and Rio Tinto cases mentioned above, we are only holding that world at arms length for now. Soon it will be on our shores and in our cities and suburbs in an obvious way. What is the real price of our involvement in Afghanistan likely to be? Are we going to coldly throw away young lives on a doomed project or call it like it is? And how are we going to maintain our stupendous level of wealth versus the rest of the world, plus our precious sense of moral purity, when we are going to have to sit at the table with some very unpleasant people who will be demanding their pound of flesh for whatever it is we want?

A globalised world means we all play by the rules which are current. There has always been a sense that governments and corporations talk the morally pure talk but walk another line out of sight of the public. This is going to become more marked, especially when the game becomes not merely zero-sum but less than that on the slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. The gloves may well come off everyone when we find ourselves in a world which is controlled by gangsters at every level.

Jim Kunstler, Peak Oil's Tom Waites (well nearly!)

2009-08-25T07:15:00.002+10:00

Check out Jim's latest post. Nothing new here and I don't read JHK expecting to learn anything, but for sheer style and crackling drive-it-right-up'emness it's a ripper. A quote…

- the Green Shoots claque at the cable networks, to the assorted quants, grinds, nerds, pimps, factotums, catamites, and cretins in every office from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to the International Monetary Fund - every man-Jack and woman-Jill around the levers of power and opinion weighed in last week with glad tidings that the world's capital finance system survived what turned out to be a mere protracted bout of heartburn and has been reborn as the Miracle Bull economy. Our worries over. If you believe their bullshit. Which I don't.

At the limits of the possible

2009-08-20T12:46:00.008+10:00

Tight budget quashes US space ambitions: panel is the headline for a story from Space-Travel.com which landed in my in-box this morning. President Obama has commissioned a panel, which has produced a report laying out the reality of the costs involved in manned space travel versus the likely budget allocation. Here's a snip…

Reaching Mars was deemed too risky while returning to the Moon by 2020 was ruled out barring an additional three billion dollars per year to replace the retiring space shuttle fleet and build bigger rockets, according to the group led by Norm Augustine, a former CEO of US aerospace giant Lockheed Martin.

The problem is not the just the will to do manned space flight, it's the money. You need a lot of reliable finance for a manned space program, because it takes many years to develop and the people have to be recruited, trained and paid to stay there. They need confidence and continuity in order to do their best and you need the best kind of work from such people, because to quote Tom Wolf from The Right Stuff, "It can blow at any seam!". This is why the Chinese could be on a roll at the moment with their manned program. They have a certain stability and predictability due to their dictatorial political arrangements. At the moment they're likely to do better than the Americans over the next few years if their technical people are up to scratch and the leadership of their program is good.

But in the end we are all hostages to the environment we live in. Some may push out further along a certain path than others, because they can cooperate better or are more amenable to discipline. But no-one can live on nothing, and the Chinese are likely to discover their limits are not too far away either, because the manned space enterprise rests on the back of industrial civilisation in general, which in turn is hostage to cheap oil.

We now appear to have crossed the bumpy summit of peak production in oil sometime in the last couple of years and to be standing at the top of the long slope down. From now on oil will be available, but not affordable in the way it has been, and this will undercut the assumptions which have underpinned our growth economy and our ever expanding world population. The surplus wealth and energy at the command of large organisations, which is necessary for exuberant adventures such as manned space flight, will not be there for much longer.

This is a tragedy of a profound kind. It means we are likely now to remain forever on Earth until we, meaning humans firstly, and then terrestrial life in general, goes extinct. We had a tiny window of opportunity but we missed it. Maybe the step was always too big. While us space nuts could wheel out all kinds of blue-sky designs which could theoretically get us not just off Earth and on to our local planets but beyond to more distant stars, the cost was always going to be phenomenal. We almost had the chance at the beginning of the seventies, but once public interest in the whole enterprise waned after the initial Moon landings and we lost ourselves, in the words of James Howard Kuntsler, in dark raptures of personal consumption and non-stop entertainment, the opportunity slipped from our grasp.

The Space Shuttle is a triumph of sorts, more over a basically poor design than of anything really useful. To quote again from the article I mentioned at the beginning…

The White House could take months to decide its course of action, said John Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.

"We have inherited one of the many failed promises of the Bush administration -- to set out a very good program without providing the resources to fund it," he told AFP, urging a new direction.

"We have lived an illusion for five years."

The US space shuttle program and the ISS, he said, "were a mistake" when compared to the Apollo Project that landed man on the moon for the first time.

The unmanned commercial exploitation of space will continue for a few more decades and will return its shareholders money on their investments. There is a faint possibility that a manned program could grow out of it, but it is very unlikely, simply because manned flight is orders of magnitude more difficult than unmanned.

Isn't it an extraordinary thing though, to live at such a moment in world history when we are wheeling through the very outermost limits of what was possible. Of course our appetites are always well beyond our capabilities. But what a dream it has been and how difficult it will be to let it go.

Planning day at CERES

2009-08-19T09:59:00.003+10:00

I nipped up to Melbourne for the day yesterday as I'd been invited to a planning day at CERES, the Centre for Education and Research in Environmental Strategies, in Brunswick. CERES is planning for the next five to ten years taking into account what we face as a result of Peak Oil and climate change, especially the social needs which will arise. It was great to spend a day with twenty people who talked about what I think about! And thanks to Serenity Hill and Kirsten Larsen from the Australian centre for science, innovation and society at Melbourne University who dobbed me in as a participant.

Despite my wife running a nursery in Foster I'm no plant guru, so my contributions were restricted to the social aspects of the future. David Holmgren was there with his partner Su Dennett and briefly sketched in his future scenarios which we worked off. Then we broke up into small groups and came up with our plans.

The day went very quickly and I had to head off at the end of it to do some business for the nursery which meant I didn't get a chance to talk to the very many interesting people there other than Serenity, Kirsten and Chris Ennis, the Manager of CERES Organic Farm and Training. What the day did do is confirm my belief that the inner urban parts of Melbourne are probably going to to do reasonably well with the changes we are now in — they have a critical mass of bright, committed people with enough power in their hands and the right priorities to steer their communities in useful directions.

Pricking the bubble of Australian exceptionalism

2009-08-17T12:28:00.002+10:00

Steve Keen delivers a lecture on the role of debt in this crisis…

According to the Mainstream the recession is over, but there are dissenters

2009-08-14T09:36:00.006+10:00

One hundred economists, members of a profession which has always clad itself in rainments of science and mathematics but which is increasingly looking like a cross between advertising and astrology have said the recession is over in the USA (and that runs on to Australia), according to a couple of surveys which The Automatic Earth is reporting. However the reality-based and saturnine Nasim Nicholas Taleb, author of that wonderful book The Black Swan, calls phooey on this.

Recessions are "irregular" for most people and most economists. In our highly controlled Western Industrial culture, death, illness and economic downturns are not seen as an inevitable part of existence but as irregularities. This will allow our 100 economists some wriggle room when the recession returns in force: they "didn't see it coming", it's "totally unprecedented" and "not following the rules". And just as some primitive tribes blame every death on witchcraft, we will see the search for scapegoats when they once again end up with egg on their face. It's another sign of the primitive nature of our supposedly sophisticated world-view.

The moral basis of social disaster

2009-08-10T16:45:00.001+10:00

Another video: it's American but having seen the standard of Australian TV (Biggest Loser, Australian Idol) I can see we are in the same place…

Can we count on China saving our economy?

2009-08-07T12:59:00.005+10:00

I don't think so, and neither does this gentleman…(I can't get the video to embed!)

A moment of reality from the mainstream

2009-08-03T20:24:00.003+10:00

From an article in the business Age…

World faces 'oil crunch' within five years
August 3, 2009 - 11:15AM
A disastrous energy crunch is looming because most of the major oil fields in the world have passed their peak production, a leading economist has warned.

Fatih Birol, chief economist with Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), said such an ''oil crunch'' within the next five years could jeopardise recovery from the global recession.

Of course the problem is still some way off according to Fatih Birol…

[with] global production likely to peak in about 10 years - at least a decade earlier than most had estimated.

Actually global production appears to have already peaked, but never mind. This article picks up an interview in the "Independant" and has caused a stir in the mainstream media across the world. There's a great post on The Oil Drum about it: check it out, especially the comments.

What does it all mean? It means you've been warned folks. This is real and coming to your town very soon. Of course within a day or so the article will have been forgotten and we will slip back into the well of forgetfullness if we drink too deeply at the well of mainstream media. But the clock is ticking.

Last year at my public meeting I said five years for Australia, before we face the end of oil based prosperity. Only four years to go now.

Where to with small-scale technology and localisation?

2009-08-01T12:14:00.007+10:00

John Robb's feverish mind is spinning out ideas furiously. He sees self-reliant communities as the future (so do I) but he also has a take on sophisticated small-scale manufacture connected with it that is more difficult to nut out. Here's the essence of his thinking…

Here's some blue sky thinking I'm running through my head at the moment, it may be of use (or not):
Based on the explanation above, we may see a rapid exponential doubling in the performance of society/economics as well. However, to see this improvement, we will need to shift to resilient communities. Here's what it will require:
A technological imperative. In short, a suite of technologies that can increasingly replicate the functions of the global economy at the hyper-local level (the equivalent of the very small or nano level of the global economy) -- with headroom for advancement/improvement as far as the eye can see. There are signs that this is potentially true: think 3D printing ("fab labs"), computing, bio, communications, etc. Is it true for agriculture and energy too? The jury is still out but super-empowerment is in the air...
New beliefs and well funded processes drive improved productivity at the local level. The beliefs and process improvements required are already being developed at the organic level, but it's not getting much help from commercial sources. A good example of this is the Transition towns effort. However, new access to vast cash flows (like my proposal on using IRAs/401ks for investments in local resilience) would radically increase the velocity of money involved. This money would likely speed up the rate of doubling, dropping it from decades to years, by supercharging commercial and open source competition.
No hard constraints. An ability to avoid or work/route around "hard" constraints on any of items on the STEMI list. The best way to avoid these limits is to obliterate thinking related to the current legacy economic system. For example: exploiting rapid advances in virtual presence and collaborative software to achieve an order of magnitude improvement in worker productivity. This obliterates the need (which we would be unable to achieve) for exponential improvements in cars, transportation infrastructure, etc. for commuting/travel. Another example: exploiting communications systems to share or purchase virtual product designs that can be locally fabricated. This is in contrast to manufacturing products in remote global locales, packaging them, storing them, marketing them, shipping them, putting them on shelves, etc. in the hope that you will purchase them.

Ran Prieur, another thinker I'm fond of following has some pertinent comments on John Robb's visions. A quote from Ran…

Why fly when we could get there on horses or sailing ships? Why even travel when we could be happy staying in the same village for our whole lives? Why use clothing when we could just live in tropical areas? Why use fire when so many foods are good raw?

I take these questions seriously. To answer them, you either have to be an extreme primitivist, and say that we shouldn't use any tools at all that we don't need for comfortable basic survival, or you have to find some justification for technologies that go beyond that. And whatever justification you choose, whether you're aware of it or not, is at the root of your whole value system on tech issues.

What shall continue on — what technologies are going to have lasting value and which will disappear? I've been bitten lots of times with bad guesses as to future trends in business, and it's made me wary of trying to pick winners, but my thoughts are that anything that's critically dependent on a resource that you can't make locally and is fairly hi-tech will fade away. So small-scaled local manufacture may go through a transitional stage of growing sophistication, but will be wiped out if it's difficult to get these critical bits sometime in the future. And by that I mean specialised electronics, specifically computer CPUs.

Much more likely to continue are techniques which make clever use of easily obtainable resources and fairly simple technologies which reduce bad pain, for example modern dentistry.

These days we've become used to the idea that thinking and research is resource intensive: big labs, lots of funky hardware. My hunch is that we have that now because we can. If the money goes away, the thinkers will still be there, spinning out ideas. Ran Prieur is a great example — a solitary guy with hardly any money, but with a sharp mind and a passion for thought who cuts through to the centre of things intuitively. He's often wrong, but hey, so are these guys with the bucks behind them. How about the economics profession for instance?

Both Ran Prieur and John Robb are bouncing off an essay by Kevin Kelly on Moore's Law which lots of people are looking at and wondering how long the seeming endless rapid increase in computer power will continue to play out. My feeling is that all this kind of progress can only take place in a big, rich society and that when the money goes the project will halt. There's nothing God-given about it. When we come back to a more locally based production system we'll stop thinking about all this kind of stuff.

What will we think about and what will we do when the dust settles from our current shakeout (I mean say twenty years from now)? When we've gotten over the pain of change, and if we put aside those activities which are involved with the avoidance of pain, we will do what people always do when they're young, energetic and bored. We'll set tasks for ourselves within the context of our situation. We'll play games, take on challenges, overcome obstacles. The new culture will rise from that. But it wont be the kind of mass technocratic culture we now have. It will be based on human thought and physical abilities.

This makes it hard to plan for that future now. Our immediate task is to survive the next couple of tumultuous decades and that will take a lot of energy. We can't afford to waste resources at this time of projects which have a high risk factor. The task we have is to try and work out where the risks lie now that the rules of the game we've all been playing are changing. More on that soon!

Two World Views

2009-07-29T10:33:00.004+10:00

To follow up on my previous post about Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's essay in the Sydney Morning Herald, I think it's necessary to tease out the differences in the two World Views which he and I represent. Kevin Rudd sees the economy clearly enough, and has the advantage of the best advice and information available when he comes to form his views. But his views are also formed by his life experience, and the last fifty years have been one of unprecedented and almost non-stop expansion of every human activity.

It is only human to assume that the conditions one has always lived in will continue on into the future without revolutionary change. Even more so, if your life experience has been one of being enmeshed in a system with a clear hierarchy which you have climbed your way through for many years and the gradations of which you take very seriously. I mean otherwise you'd hardly take your job seriously would you? Such is the case of someone like KR, who has never as far as I can tell had any sort of experience which might make him question the legitimacy of the ladder he has climbed. He also suffers from the burden of success, which tends to make one aware of the sunk costs of getting where you are and all you would lose should your attention waver.

I am a much less focused, much more muddly sort of person than the Prime Minister, which is part of the reason I am completely insignificant in the the great hierarchy of power (I also don't get my jollies bossing people around). One benefit of being a muddler is however that you allow yourself the leisure to entertain doubts. This may weaken your focus on the goals which others might exhort you to achieve, but has the advantage of letting you test (to the extent which you are able!) whether these goals are valid or not. My diffuse attention has also wandered into areas which never seemed to promise any direct career or financial benefit to me — I loved history, psychology, art, music and religious philosophy. Couple all this with a necessity for me to justify my contrariness to myself as honestly as I could even if I couldn't to those who were distressed by my lack of worldly success, and you end up having a fairly clear eyed view of most human activities and foibles including your own.

Let's put aside our personal capabilities — I'm sure that Kevin Rudd is my superior in many ways — and look at how we see the World. I'm aware that KR is religious and that may well give him a different way to regard the World, in opposition sometimes to the very materialist slant which has been the dominant social vision of our modern industrial world, but I haven't seen any evidence of it modifying his economic views. He seems as hell-bent on infinite expansion as any blind cornucopian blow-hard. I see however we have reached the end of the race and are hitting hard physical limits at many different levels, and I can also see how that would be a very difficult fact for someone in his position to acknowledge. It will undermine fundamental assumptions underlying much of what he does at a personal and political level.

Of course he is aware of environmental issues, the population pressures and the other multitude of real threats to Business As Usual, but he does not connect these problems directly to the underlying causes of them. He still thinks God or science will pull a rabbit or a series of rabbits out of the cosmic hat and save us all from the collapse we're heading for in this mad race to produce and consume More.

This is why we have people in his position talking about nonsensical matters such as "sustainable growth". This is a cover, a poor intellectual bandaid over the cornucopian fantasy that growth can go on forever. People who talk this kind of talk really do think that at some level the Earth is infinitely large and nothing will ever run out. We'll colonise space, fusion power will produce electricity too cheap to meter and we'll grow all our food in little vats watched by brilliant, all-knowing white-coated technicians! None of this is based on real knowledge, but on the kind of superficial gossip and fantasy which we've become very good at blinding ourselves with in this era of CGI films and computer games. But the people on the job, the real engineers, geologists, agriculturalists and climate scientists know it aint so.

It takes a certain strength of character to step away from what you're doing and see it clearly for what it is. If you can bring up children with that kind of fundamental honesty you have done a very good job. Unfortunately mass education, especially at the higher levels, tends to create narrow intellectual strengths at the expense of moral weakness, so don't rely on that for moral guidance.

Perhaps the best one can say is that great desire for success in the World, unchecked by doubt, can lead to great weaknesses, even in the very clever. Moderation in all things is a more useful course!

Great population post by an ex-government minister

2009-07-27T19:01:00.003+10:00

Everyone should read this great speech by Andrew McNamara, ex-minister for the environment in Queensland which Rob Windt has posted at the Naked Mechanic.

The Prime Minister's essay on the economy

2009-07-27T13:04:00.006+10:00

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has published a long essay in the Sydney Morning Herald which lays out his vision of what's happening financially to Australia and what we can expect over the next few years. Steve Keen has published a commentrary on the essay on his Steve Keen’s Debtwatch blog which I'd recommend reading because he zeroes in on the fact that KR does understand what has happened to the World economy and to Australia's as well. That is he sees the crucial role which debt has played and the way deleveraging of that debt will hold back industrial economies for many years to come.

While I generally agree with a lot of what Steve Keen says, there are lots of red flags in this Kevin Rudd essay from my point of view. Take the following quote:

The second new challenge is to build the foundations of sustainable growth. It begins with recognising the source of our future growth cannot be the same as for past growth.

Sustainable growth? WTF is that? We are already running up against environmental limits all over the place in this country. As just one item in a million, I happened to watch a documentary last night in the ABC about the shrinking habitat of cassowarys in north Queensland - it appears there are only 1500 or so birds left. Their habitat has shrunk because we're building out their tropical rainforest home. Another quote

But this does not mean we should accept that growth has to be lower, or that we should reduce our aspirations. Just because the global economy will be tough, we must not accept lower growth as inevitable. The budget forecasts growth over the next economic cycle at roughly the same average level as growth over the last cycle. This will be achieved only through a responsible agenda of future economic reform.

Australia will need to work smarter and harder to achieve better national growth in a weaker global environment. We need to implement a global competitiveness agenda for Australia that reinvigorates the drivers of productivity growth. Our mission must be a more globally competitive Australia capable of securing a greater slice of what may well be a more sluggish global economy.

In other words, we are going to fight an economic war with the rest of the world, where those weaker than us will go under in order that we get our "share". As if our share is so small already! And who will these weaker competitors be?

This is the classic zero-sum game. It also assumes a world economic environment which is "fair"; that is, where the other players obey rules which will allow us to win. We are not in a position to dictate these rules to the players who are the real powers in the game: the USA, China, the EU and India. When the crunch comes, and it has come already as we have recently seen in the arrest and imprisonment without charge of the mining executive Stern Hu, players like China will play very hard-ball. And let's be clear about Australia's real strength in all these games. With a tiny population and a tiny defence force we are nothing.

The statement above by the Prime Minister seems to implicity recognise that the game is zero-sum. I believe we are in a transition towards a time when the gloves will come off, and at the level of international politics we will drop the polite fiction that there is one World we're all working towards. Within a few years the power plays will be naked with no polite pretenses. Let's be clear what's at stake: we have resources which other people want in order that they may win at the game. Are we going to be in a position of strength with regard to China, especially when we're bloated with debt and heading into a future where we are going to be even more dependent on oil imports to keep our economy operating? My feeling is that we are looking to a time where the kinds of humiliations which the powerful nations in the industrialised West have been able to inflict on those we have seen as "lesser" are going to be inflicted on us. Unless the Chinese come apart first.

The essay is an interesting document in that it does lay down the ground rules which whatever government which runs this country will follow for the next few years. We, meaning you and I, are exhorted to work harder. This is because the government is going to be strapped for revenue as we slide off the peak of world production of oil and other primary powerers of our economy, and unless we all become virtual slaves of the system, the system will crash. That the system is crashing anyway cannot be admitted because we have everything invested in it - there is no alternative. This is what always happens when a population of any sort of creature runs up against the limits of its environment.

There will be a mighty crash, despite everyone's best efforts. It's not that far away. If you want to come out the other side of it, start preparing now!

The Carbonic Civilisation & its Discontents

2009-07-23T09:42:00.006+10:00

Various legislative bodies around the World are busy pushing out laws which are meant to address the issue of greenhouse gases. How effective these laws are will be inversely proportional to the wealth of the country each legislature controls. This is because people are very bad at sawing off branches they happen to be sitting on.

Us ordinary folk may labour under the delusion that technology can solve any material problem. We see glossy pics of electric cars and solar panels, and imagine the only thing stopping the adoption of low-carbon technologies are some fossilised politicians and industrialists. But this is not so. The real brake on cutting carbon dioxide outputs are tens of millions of families with 2.4 kids, two cars, a hefty mortgage and orthodontists bills. The real costs will be very high for such folk, which are a lot of the people we know.

Why? Because you may recycle your plastic, not waste water, buy organic and do all the things we are told to do, but there is a whole lot of stuff "out the back" in the industrial suburbs of every city which has to operate on copious fossil fuels in order that we can live our lives, and this stuff — the factories, warehouses, freeways, waste treatment plants, hospitals, offices, roads, mines and railways — are expensive to rebuild and will take a long time to change. "Expensive to rebuild" means we must find the time to rebuild them. Either that or we must work to pay someone else to do it. And that assumes it is possible to rebuild them in a more benign form, which in many cases it is not.

We've just had a big materialist binge over the past few years, where the cost of the stuff we use has been kept artificially low because the Chinese have paid their workers a low wage to build it. That situation cannot last. We will soon go back to paying the real cost of living. This will mean less money to change our built environment to a less carbon intensive arrangement. Add to that the decline in oil availability and we have a real problem.

And then there is the unspeakable, uncomfortable truth that lies under all this — there are way too many people on the Planet. How are we voluntarily going to reduce our population to something more in line with what the Earth can support?

The truth is that we are animals like any other on Earth. We expand to fit our environment and then some. We want more, usually not much more, just that little bit, even the richest amongst us. Do you know anyone who wants less? No, I didn't think so!

We've expanded very successfully until now. Of course we always have Problems. And we always have earnest people, experts, discussing and proposing Solutions to these Problems. These Solutions, strangely enough, always need More of something. More spending on health care, education, law and order, supervision of industry. Surely a solution to the crises looming over us at the moment is a lot less of everything? People, cars, cows, strip mining, commercial fishing, driving, flying — well, make your own list!

But of course having a lot less means things get very tough for the great mass of people with the 2.4 kids, cars etc. They need to work to pay for their lives, they vote, or even if they don't, they can make trouble for the People In Charge. And of course we all want the world to be better, we just don't want it to be at our expense. Let the less worthy pay! So we will see the hunt for people to blame — scapegoats — intensify. But of course all that is in vain if the problem is all of us.

So what is my Solution? Well, it's in several parts.

Firstly it's your problem so you've got to solve it! OK, you didn't choose to be born, but can you tell me the name of anyone who did? So get over it — you're in charge of your life.

Secondly a lot of us, maybe most of us, don't feel we're really up to scratch in a lot of ways. We'd love to be told by some competent person what to do. We believe in experts. Well guess what? Experts are often wrong! And the more they say they know and the less you do, the wronger they tend to be. Sure, listen to what people say. But an honest heart and an open mind is of more value than believing any appearance of certainty. This may mean you run against the tide of opinion a lot of the time. Learn to deal with it. You don't need to broadcast your contrariness. But practice the courage of your convictions in small ways, because one day you may need to find it for something big.

You will come across people who believe that the world was made for the use of themselves in any way they see fit, and others who will tell you the human race is a blight on creation. Avoid these types — they are both expressions of arrogance, in that they make value judgements which no-one can truly make. And both attitudes lead to trouble.

The world will re-adjust to make everything right again. Nature has a way of dealing with these problems. Those who best protect themselves from what is coming will part of the future of life on Earth. Let that be a guide for your actions.

I don't think we can do anything at a world-wide or even nation-wide level about the greenhouse problem because of the pressure of population and the prior investments we have in our industrial civilisation. So we will have to deal with the consequences of dramatic climate change over the next few decades. That's the way it is folks. Just think about how you and those closest to you can survive the coming changes. Forget about survivalism and Mad Max scenarios. Most people will survive or die where they are, dependent on the conditions in their local area. So for a start, understand where you live, how it works, how people survive in it now and how they and you might survive in the future. If it doesn't look good, move to somewhere better while you can!

Understand how nature works. Darwinian selection works through the survival and reproduction of the fittest. That doesn't mean the ones who can win races, it means the ones that fit the best into their environment, who can gain sustenance, shelter and safety without wrecking where they live.

We are used to seeing ourselves in a very upwards and outwards way. I'd say the dominant story of our civilisation for the past sixty or so years has been "Everything will be fine once we get the settings just right and all those other people learn to behave themselves". But unfortunately that just isn't so, and we are going to be flung into a world soon where we wont necessarily have any idea of what's coming next. We'll be reacting to crises right on our doorstep, not trying to make the Afghans or the Somalis jump when we say jump. For a lot of us this is going to be a bitter pill to swallow. So preempt the change and embrace your inner powerlessness now! Just concentrate on what's close by and attend to its needs: self, family, community and the enclosing natural environment. Forget saving the world-as-a-whole. That's always been a totalitarian dream powered by cheap fossil fuel.

The hard part for many of us who wake up to what's really going on is we can feel very isolated. If our Significant Other doesn't share our new view of reality, what do we do? I don't know what the answer is here other than patience and good humour. Reality will impose itself on us all eventually. Your job is to make sure you're as right as you can be. Not that anyone predicting trouble gets thanked for it, but speaking from a little experience in these matters, time is on your side with this.

What do you tell the children? I have my way with this one too, but it may not be for everyone. I have four children, two of them step-children, the oldest of whom is thirty-four. My attitude has always been that children make their own way in the world and what you need to do is keep them safe, well-fed, emotionally secure and don't let them get away with bad habits. Everything else they will pick up themselves. If you push them in a particular direction you will get adults who either will do nothing unless they're pushed, or adults who believe in pushing other people.

I've been very lucky so far with how things have turned out, but I'm aware that it is luck and not good management. The problem is, if you do something to assure success, like spend a fortune on private tutors, all you do is create someone who can't live outside that sort of system. To my way of thinking the best you can do is let children grow up in an environment which is healthy, with not enough money to get them into trouble but enough to keep them fed and give them a few basic tools for their growth. As long as they don't feel crushed by the society they grow up in, or that they are too good for it, things are generally alright. As for us breast-beating about how we elders have squandered the inheritance and left them nothing, give it a break! The last thing anyone needs is an excuse for failure and by saying something like that, you will produce either arrogance (I'm not as stupid as the person telling me this!) or a victim's mentality (I'm one of you and therefore I'm doomed too!) in a child who isn't sensible enough to say "Phooey!" to you.

Education is important but I can't say that it is necessarily effective to spend twelve or more years sitting at a desk. Looking at the corner we're busy painting ourselves into with our mighty civilisation, one needs to question some of our basic notions here. It may become more difficult to fund in the future in any case. Opportunity is the most important thing, plus the ability to take advantage of it, which involves such things as good health, common sense and a lack of timidity. Character is something which matters more than just about anything and it matters a great deal when you're younger. And character is what will distinguish the survivors from the doomed in the next, difficult stage of our history — providing they are in the right place!

The next pillar of survival is community. We ordinary folk will find it much easier if we're part of a real community. Communities are the normal human social arrangement, but they have not fared well in our industrial world which demands loyalty to abstract functions and specialisations, and prefers humanity to be broken up into single, bite-sized functional units for easier deployment to places of highest profit. The Soviets did it by force, through murder and deliberate starvation in the nineteen-twenties to break up the village structure of the Soviet Union. Our more modern societies have done it through education (get the children away from their parents and environment) and propaganda (most advertising), and by driving local, small businesses under or by making them into empty shells, fronts for a franchise. All this has so undermined community that in many places it is vestigial, especially in big cities. As a natural human artifact, it is forever being rebuilt. But building community takes a long time, generations in fact, so in the face of the rapidity of the changes we're facing it's better to find one already in existence. I've had some experience of intentional communities (I'm an old hippy) and they tend to be unstable for a variety of reasons. So I don't recommend cults or communes unless they are embedded in a larger functional community and have good relationships with it.

The final step is for us industrially disabled types to throw away our crutches. Learn to walk or ride a bike — leave the car at home — grow some of your own food, talk to your neighbors, get involved in the work of your local community. Don't be like a little bird, lying back helplessly with your beak open, squawking and waiting for Big Daddy to drop something into it. Cause Big Daddy wont be there much longer.

The solution to the greenhouse problem of carbon dioxide will be a radical fall in its production by individual people, and this is going to happen not by executive fiat, but through the uneven collapse of the great industrial civilisation which has been built up on the back of the copious use of fossil fuels as these fuels stop being affordable to the great bulk of us. The cheap stuff has all gone, and the expensive stuff is too expensive to keep the wheels spinning. We will have wars for resources and people saying we've turned the corner and that new technology will save us — it's only five or ten years away! It's always just five or ten years away.

But the show is over. It will appear to run in for years, as the elites who manage to command remaining resources claim that everything has returned to normal and those who aren't benefiting have only themselves to blame, but that's the age-old story of the relationship between the haves and have nots. Forget alternative energy. It will provide only a tiny fraction of our energy. It simply costs too much compared to dirty old oil and coal.

Will life be worth living? Of course it will! This is an amazing time to be in. We have lived through and seen the peak of the greatest civilisation the World has ever known, and we get to decide how to deal with its dissolution and the shape of what comes after it. It would have been nice to have flying cars and holiday trips to the Moon, but there's still plenty of other good things to enjoy: wine and love, children, good friends, food, music. Have fun!

Cheers!

Lloyd

Thoughts on the anniversary of the Moon landing

2009-07-21T16:36:00.007+10:00

I was a primary school space nut. At the age of eight, growing up in a small, remote and poor country town, I knew all about multi-stage rockets, Werner von Braun, space stations and weightlessness. All through the sixties I ached for space travel to become an everyday reality. I wrote a story for my high school magazine in second form (year 8 these days) about an intrepid pair of space-tug pilots delivering some special cargo across the inky void. Finally in nineteen sixty-nine I sat with some of my fellow year 12 students in one of our science teachers' living room watching Neil Armstrong take his first step on the Moon and mangle his famous quote. And then what?

That was the problem. Having strained engineering to the maximum and somehow got hundreds of thousands of people to co-operate nearly flawlessly to race against the Russians, the United States won. But it was a strangely empty victory. There were more flights to the Moon, but they were a curiously dull spectacle. Nearly everyone lost interest in the endevour. The money ran out, and that was that. Space travel was and is incredibly difficult and expensive and there's nowhere to go — at least nowhere close by with anything interesting to do or which promises a quick return on the investment. There are no cool aliens to hang out with on Mars or Venus, no strange cities under the clouds.

Before the Moon landings we — or at least I — imagined somehow there would be a breakthrough and we'd be going to the Moon for holidays by the year 2000. But most of all, I was looking for something beyond that — something ineffable but powerful — a transfiguration, an escape from our dull and routine existence, a chance to be a hero and something to give life a stronger, more real dimension. I wanted to escape from my life. And I think this was true for a lot of people. The Moon landing had become some sort of spiritual goal for many of us materialists, but its banal, dusty rock pile reality brought us strangely undone.

It was a time of many broken dreams but also of new ones. The Vietnam war was staggering on towards the increasingly obvious defeat of the Americans in this holy war — because it was a religious crusade at bottom, even if the Vietnamese didn't see it that way. Again I'd bought into this as a teenager. I can remember arguing with great conviction (against what I remember as the leader of the Victorian branch of the Communist party. He addressed us at some sort of school function at Caulfield Grammar where I was boarding for a couple of years. What the hell was he doing there? Who knows and who would now remember?) that the North Vietnamese were the evil aggressors and had to be stopped. Two years later I was on the anti-war side.

There was no great road to Damascus revelation for me. I don't know how it was for other people caught up in that tumultuous time. I just stopped believing in what I now call Heroic Materialism. It retreated for me into an historic memory. As the time came for me to step of the educational conveyor belt, I realised in an inchoate, almost subconscious way (my thinking was not clear enough for me to articulate my thoughts) that Heroic Materialism was a totalitarian vision. It required the subjugation of the will of the masses to further the dreams of a fortunate few. My idle ambitions of being an artist-engineer or architect would require me to buy into a system of social relationships which I detested. Not only that, but it was quickly obvious that only the exceptionally ruthless and energetic could rise to positions of power in such a system, and that the merely talented would be spear carriers. I didn't want to be the lacky of persons I despised, nor did I want to design ugly commercial buildings for a civilisation I suddenly found myself at odds with. I dropped out of my architecture degree at the end of the first year.

What followed was what seemed to be a very personal and private struggle to find a meaningful way forward for myself. My girlfriend and I set off on a motorbike from the city. For the next few years I didn't watch television, listen to the radio or read newspapers. I worked different hard physical jobs and tried to figure out what life was really all about. How could what I do be meaningful and beautiful on a small, personal scale yet fitting into a larger, more seemly whole? As you can see, my ambitions were still grand underneath it all.

Of course what I thought of as my personal quest was really something I shared with many others at the same time. We met each other and we tried to build our New Jerusalems. We never reached what we wanted, but our efforts gave us a depth of understanding and an independence of vision. Now we are the old ones of the culture, the ones who know the subtleties and wrinkles of existence.

Just as only a small number of people could ever be truly free and powerful in a culture of Heroic Materialism, only a relatively small number of us have taken the outsiders path to try and build a new culture.

The old culture still stumbles on, with its spokesmen still talking the talk with increasingly less impact and conviction. The Americans are once more planning a Moon landing, but the budget for such an enterprise seems to be shrinking by the day. The Chinese are working hard on their space program and could still manage to pull it off if the decayed Communist Party can hold onto power and keep their industrial system spinning on for another ten or fifteen years. But I am not confident that either of them can ultimately manage it.

I grieve for the past glories of Heroic Materialism even as I despise the social arrangements it produced and which it depended on. I'm forever bifurcated by this split in loyalties. One of my favourite DVDs is a three part series put out by the BBC called "Space Race", about the rivalry between Werner von Braun and his unknown counterpart in the Soviet Union, the amazing Sergei Korolev. How much of what was achieved in space depended of the visions of these two people! And yet at what terrible human cost: more lives were lost using slave labour building the V-2 rocket, which was von Braun's first great achievement, than were lost when it struck its targets in the dying days of World War 2.

And so after forty years I can look back and say that the Moon landing was a crucial event in my life, a pivot on which my existence turned and took me down new paths. I'm still hopefully traveling. I haven't arrived yet.

Village politics

2009-07-18T07:28:00.002+10:00

I'm interested in the gap between what we are and do, and what we think we can be. Last night there was a documentary on TV about the gypsy village of Glod in Romania which Sacha Baron Cohen used for his home village, supposedly in Kazakhstan, for the "Borat" movie. The villagers were like something from a Brueghel painting, but aware of their place in the world. Some of the more "progressive" members, humiliated by their portrayal in the movie, saw an opportunity to make money out of a lawsuit against the film-maker. I didn't watch the whole show. But I was fascinated by the various characters, the dynamic of the village, the clash of ambitions and the sense of the whole human race writ small. Here was a village community, which while obviously poor, had enough resilience to have survived the vicissitudes of Communism and the years since then. And yet each member of the community felt imprisoned by fate and was fighting for change and more space, more life.

Yet it was also a village in which one could imagine middle-class tree-changers buying up houses and coming down from the city on weekends to soak up the atmosphere. It was also the sort of place which earnest post-peak-oilers could imagine to be the sustainable future model for humanity, looking at it from a systems point of view, with its simple robust infrastructure and horse-drawn traffic.

How did it compare to the little town where I live? Foster is more complicated socially. We have much higher levels of education here, even amongst the least educated! Girls aren't seen as old maids if they're not married by the age of seventeen, as is the case in Glod. There is a richer mixture of types here, we have much higher material wealth and a lot of us have had experience of the wider world. But the fact that we are embedded so completely into the industrial matrix of western society gives us very little real autonomy. If the trucks stop delivering to the supermarkets we'd go hungry. We are not materially self-reliant in the way a primitive European village like Glod can be.

But there are similarities. Foster people are physically tough. I see the netballers and footballers practicing at night at the footy ground opposite our house, no matter how foul the weather, and the young girls, sprigs of fashion, wandering around town in skimpy singlets on days when I'm rugged up to the maximum. And most locals can fix their own stuff — cars, houses or whatever. If you've made the commitment to live here, then you do what you must to get by, which means lots of different types of work. A lot of it isn't terribly highly skilled, but that doesn't mean it's easy, and many of us work long hours. Despite that, most people here are cheerful enough.

There are big differences in the way the people of Glod related to one another and the way we do. We're much more formal and strangely tribal — something I first became aware of when I worked with lots of Americans, who are emphatically not tribal. We are polite and not excitable in the way that the folk of Glod are. We are more trusting — for now — because we have all come through long, formal school education and therefore have a faith in abstract, complex systems. I don't think this simple trust will survive the next couple of decades though.

Will Foster survive? I'm confident it will. There are many towns in Australia which will not. Many were established by executive fiat, and command no loyalty from their inhabitants. Others are dependant on resources or other arrangements which are subject to the world financial system, are climatically marginal or are at the end of fragile supply lines. But Foster was established by miners over a century ago and when the mines ran out of gold, enough inhabitants found the place amenable to keep living here. Sure we will have to deal with some big changes, but short of invasion or the sea levels rising to swamp us, I think we're here for the long haul.

John Robb again!

2009-07-09T21:55:00.003+10:00

How does he do it? Here's another great post from John Robb on local manufacture…I need time to think this through for our situation in South Gippsland.

How do we get there from here?

2009-07-08T16:02:00.007+10:00

I've just been talking to my friend Leo about ideas for living arrangements in the area we inhabit, which is rural and moderately populated in Australian terms. Change is coming in a big way, whether we like it or not. Can we steer our lives down the correct path in the face of the end of cheap energy?

Leo comes from a business and science background. He's been fairly high up the tree in various organisations over the years although he's retired now. We were kicking around the economic implications for the high speed broadband network which the Federal government has announced will be built down here as a pilot for the national scheme. Leo's a forester by training but he's come up through big business and he knows how all that side of things works. The problem is, everything we could think of that could take advantage of the broadband depends on more Business-As-Usual — that is, debt-financed tie-ins to the larger economy. Now it may be that BAU will carry on in some way for a couple more years in this country. But then what? What is the use of building up industry and a way of life that simply won't carry on for more than a couple of years and will lose all the capital placed in it? We will just end up with a population of upper-middle class types down here with no future, and they will be forced to move on.

The problem for us is that the solutions we come up with currently are all contained within a paradigm which I believe is doomed. And maybe Leo thinks that too — we were filled not with hope by our discussion, but by a kind of exhaustion. Now it may be age related: I'm in my late fifties and Leo is a bit older again. We've both been burned by life and the struggle to succeed, and suffered blows of fate which may have been deserved or undeserved. And maybe for some of us, there's a limit to how much you can take. But I can't help but feel at the back of it all was a sense that it's all smoke and mirrors now. We're all caught in a game, or dancing a dance, that we can't stop because it's the only game we know and we have to play something.

But what other game is possible? There are visions — I've talked about them here — and John Robb has just posted a link to a great essay (behind a subscription firewall) he's written for the World Politics Review which sketches out the necessary attributes of what will come next. The difficulty is: how do we get there from here?

The key issue from John Robb's point of view is the self-reliant community. That is, while communities may link together, they need to be able to exist independently if they have to. What is the point of having solar hot water if all your food comes from a major distribution hub in a distant city via a line of diesel trucks? What disruptions to our current networks can our communities survive? How are we going to make out in South Gippsland if we have a diesel fuel shortage? It will happen. There is no backup — no railway (it's been mostly pulled up), no alternate fuels, no local production which we could turn to for food for the numbers of people in our population.

We have drifted into our current predicament without any great plan. It's been the Market at work, and Australia is a country which has been built almost entirely around the functioning of international and national markets. Because this has worked so well so far, there has never been, except for a few brief moments such as the "Back to Earth" hippy movement of the late sixties and early seventies and a few more cultish experiments, any alternative way of doing business here. There are no "peasants". The closest thing we have are a few aboriginal settlements in remote places. Europe at least has a memory of such a way of life, as does much of Asia and Central and South America (they also have better soil!).

There are two levels of the problem to consider as well. One is the Emergency Situation, produced by, say, a sudden shortage of diesel fuel. Our way of life might be disrupted for a time and maybe never quite recover if it went on for long, but if we could weather it reasonably well, it would soon be forgotten by most people except perhaps emergency professionals. The other is a crisis brought on by a longer series of such emergencies, which would force big changes in populations and how we actually live down here. It's the latter changes I'm trying to plan for.

Perhaps it's a vain hope to try and plan, because most of us are pretty much stuck in the traditional way of doing things and even if we could see the desirability of change, would find it difficult or impossible. What could make such changes happen? What are the "boundary conditions"?

I don't think it can come from any campaign of persuasion, no matter how much talking we do. And something external, such as a huge violent change would kill off or drive most of us away. The most likely agent for change would be a series of disruptions which left no-one unscathed, which could just be surmounted and which were continuous enough for it to become obvious that Business-As-Usual was over for good. The successful survivors of such a challenge would be residents in communities which were able to shelter their members to some extent through a series of such crises. In turn the members of such communities would most likely have a primary loyalty to the community itself rather than to a career or group of like-minded associates. This is very different from the way most people live in Australia.

The alternative is a highly stratified society with the haves able to fight the have-nots to the death for whatever resources were available. I've no doubt this will be the case in many places over the remainder of this century. I just don't want it to happen here!

Can you convert a place inhabited by a population of isolated career-focused individuals into a strong community? I have my doubts. That's a very strong reason why I live where I do. Foster is a town inhabited mainly by people doing whatever they have to do to live here. No, it's not perfect here. The soil is just OK, it's cold and miserable for months in winter, the architecture is unremarkable, nothing really stands out other than Wilsons Promontory, which is like another world right next door. It used to be the view from our bed when we lived out of town. I can assure you that a great view doesn't pay the rent, which is one of the reasons we sold. But overall, I can't see any strong reasons not to live here.

There are lots of great places to live in the World. A lot of them are going to stop working when the oil runs out in the next five to ten years. Our task if we wish to have a stake in the future is to help the ones that can survive to do so. So we've got to keep battling away at this problem: how do we get there from here?

A localisation recipe

2009-07-02T13:25:00.004+10:00

John Robb (whose mind must work at many times normal human speed!) has a short and solid post this week: "Resilience Judo". John's view of the world is probably a little too dark for many people, but he seems perfectly cheerful despite all that. He's like a scientist from another planet, picking over humanity's less pleasant mass characteristics with a cool eye. Anyway this post is so good I'm going to quote a lot of it with my comments.

There are growing signs -- from a black swan in savings/debt reduction to massive debt loads to quarterly trillion dollar losses in personal wealth to stagnant/falling consumer purchases to persistently low consumer confidence -- that the parasite ridden American "consumer" is finally dead. If this is true, the economic model of the latter half of the last Century is likely dead too, and that will mean wrenching change. It's my belief that the dominant solution is to prepare for a local future to ride out this storm.

I'd say we're about six months or a year behind the US in all this, but it will happen here soon. Here's the bulk of John's post…

Here are some of my random (more random than I would like) thoughts on what you should do to prepare:

Ruthlessly reduce debt. Nothing on credit. Pay off every loan. Strategically walk away from underwater assets (like homes that are worth less than the mortgage). This will allow you to stay one step ahead of the death throes of the old economy.
Turn your hollow home into a productive asset. Most homes are devoid of any productive capacity. Adding energy, food, etc production to them turns them into real, productive assets. Get your assets out of financial derivatives (stocks, bonds, etc.) as fast as you can and put them into productive assets (not commodities) you can touch.
Make everything you can yourself. Grow your own food. Produce your own energy. Make/repair your own clothes. Turn costs into savings. Reskill to do this. The new "fashionable trend" isn't what you can buy, it's what you can make. Anyone that buys "designer or branded" anything is a fool.
Work online. Convert your skills into something that can be sold electronically (most of my complex work is done this way). Develop the skills necessary to work as part of a virtual team. Telecommute whenever possible (and push to do this, even if it means less money), reduce the number of cars/dress clothes/etc you own in synch with this conversion (and move to a less expensive locale when possible!). Always have two jobs going at the same time.
Build a local business. Own assets that produce and sell that production locally. Even if it is small, it will help down the line via contact networks/experience (a new spin on modern "networking"). Develop the niche skills that sell locally. Group/tribe up when possible to tackle larger opportunities.
Barter. Cashless trades. Convert what you have to what you need. Skill set bartering is amazingly effective. Become part of a local barter network (the backchannel).
Bring your family home. Grow your home to accommodate more people. Bring back parents and grown kids (with their families). This will allow you to pool incomes and radically reduce workload/costs. It's also beneficial for security. NOTE: I've found that consideration/compromise is the best way to handle an expansive family home environment.
Suggestions welcome!!

To amplify on John's points, don't go into debt for anything at the moment! Prices are going to plummet left right and centre once the downturn really hits Australia. If you've got any stuff you don't really need, sell it on eBay now! Cash will be king for a while, until inflation creeps up as the Federal government starts to wash away its financial burdens (social security for a start).

Remember that power comes from ownership of the means of production! Get the tools you need, learn the skills you need.

Buy from Savers, or the local op shop. Go to garage sales for bargains. Swap stuff. Don't waste precious capital.

Think self-employment. My wife and I have a retail plant nursery and florist, a garden maintenance business, I design and build interactive educational exhibits and one of my sons and I are getting into breeding aquarium fish. All our businesses are tiny but they add up and we have no debt. Look at your skill set and see where you can go with it.

Look at your home and location. Is it going to work for you long term? We've bought a block of land in our town but are not building yet, and may sell and buy something more suited. Meantime another of our sons has moved back from Melbourne with his partner. She's working for us part-time as well as making and selling jewelry and he's working part-time for another retailer and running his own business, all with no capital costs worth speaking of. We share tools and help each other out. We have two vehicles between the four of us. Our costs of living are very low.

Last words to John Robb…

This change doesn't require cute and crunchy notions about "lifestyle" environmentalism. It's all about mitigation of stresses in the short to medium term as living conditions deteriorate, while at the same time preparing to ride the resilient community wave to rapid and sustained long term success/wealth.

Transition Towns, Permaculture

2009-06-30T11:02:00.004+10:00

I've been hovering about this subject for a long time, but Sharon Astyk has written a long and very good post on it and said very clearly a lot of what I've been thinking in a much fuzzier way. Now it may be that I'm part of self-selected group of semi-misanthropes who have managed to wall themselves off into a little world of their own. I'd be the first to admit there's some truth in that. But putting that aside I think Sharon is to be commended in facing up to some of the difficult key issues for those of us in the Preparing-For-Disaster game. Are we some sort of club for like-minded people? Do we have special insights — are we like a whole lot of Moses's leading our people to the promised land?

There are a lot of complicated issues going on here. Marginalised types (and an awful lot of us feel marginalised these days!) can have this strong urge for some Messianic role. We might feel we have some insight which can Save the World! And there is the natural human urge to congregate with the like-minded, which is so often associated with a subtle or not-so-subtle tendency to put down those outside our group. After all, we are the cool people with the deep knowledge! Often that is how people in groups tend to think and act. History is littered with examples of this sort of thing and somehow we never seem to learn the folly of it.

Sure, groups can be very powerful and get lots done. They can support their members in all kinds of real and pleasurable ways. The individual is weak and fallible. That is the way we are.

But I don't think we are going to find ourselves in a situation where any group will have a handle on what the best way forward is going to be. We may all have insights. If we can share them that's great. As for me, I regard myself as being someone who's looked up from what they were doing, seen the approaching danger, and shouted the Peak Oil equivalent of "fire" to everyone around me. Of course I'm caught up in wondering what the best response is for myself and my community, but having shouted "Fire" it's up to those who've listened to me to do what they think is best for them and respond as they see fit. I don't know enough to say what's best for anyone else. I have my ideas, but experience has taught me that ideas can come from anywhere or anyone.

Great post on "The Oil Drum"

2009-06-27T08:00:00.003+10:00

Check this post out over at "The Oil Drum". It requires a certain amount of background knowledge to understand what these guys are on about, but Have We Reached an Inflection Point in Economics History?: “Indeflation” and Energy (awful title — the post is easier!) nails many things which we need to understand. They are

It's over (meaning the debt-driven consumer economy)
Frugal is the new meme, with all that implies for investment
The cost of a barrel of oil is now close to the cost of production (no profit=no more oil)
Governments at all levels and in all places still don't "get it" and wont in the medium term
You're on your own, with respect to existing institutions

I'm in the process of setting up a forum with my friend Linda to get people together in my area who might have some ideas how we can work towards making where we live more attractive and survivable. I'm not smart enough to figure it all out myself, but if we start talking to one another about it (keeping the points outlined above in mind) we may shorten the time taken to work out whatever new arrangements we need.

Waiting on the beach

2009-06-24T14:27:00.003+10:00

I feel as if we're sitting lazily on the beach, sipping daquiris, while over the horizon the tsunami is rushing silently towards us. The housing bubble has burst so we are told, and now happy-face types are walking among us talking of "green shoots". Consumer confidence is up — so what am I worried about? Steve Keen has a story from Barry Eichengreen & Kevin O'Rourke entitled "A Tale of Two Depressions" (read the original here) which shows some startling graphs comparing various financial indicators of the Great Depression with our current GFC. Here are a couple of samples: it's not a good look…
Gary North has an interesting take on this "green shoots" talk. He says what's the next bubble? and answers consumer confidence. In other words, don't be sucked in by happy talk. Don't get trapped in the next bubble. Heed the tsunami warnings!

Why are we not experiencing such a sharp decline in Australia compared to many other countries? My guess is it's due to our position in the supply chain. The first people to feel the heat are the retailers, then the importers, then the manufacturers, then the raw material suppliers. It takes a while for it to work its way through the system.

The Automatic Earth's list of assumptions

2009-06-18T10:54:00.006+10:00

I don't like reposting other people's stuff generally, but this list from Stoneleigh is worth a glance. For Australia the emphasis will differ, but the fundamentals are the same. Also TAE reposts others' stuff endlessly (how do they get away with it?).

How will our situation in Australia differ? We are much more tribal and communal than the Americans. I think our publicly owned facilities (public transport, government services) will stagger on for much longer. Our leaders are seen as managers rather than elected kings, so we expect less from them. There are many other subtle but important differences which will change our diverse fates! But the overall fate of industrial society is written…

Stoneleigh: People have been asking how we see the future unfold. In case you wonder what we stand for, much of our view of what's to come can be found in the primers on the right-hand side bar [check their site]. Here is an additional brief summary (in no particular order and not meant to be exhaustive) of the ground we have consistently covered here at TAE over the last year and a half, and before that elsewhere.

Deflation is inevitable due to Ponzi dynamics (see From the Top of the Great Pyramid)
The collapse of credit will crash the money supply as credit is the vast majority of the effective money supply
Cash will be king for a long time
Printing one's way out of deflation is impossible as printing cannot keep pace with credit destruction (the net effect is contraction)
Debt will become a millstone around people's necks and bankruptcy will no longer be possible at some point
In the future the consequences of unpayable debt could include indentured servitude, debtor's prison or being drummed into the military
Early withdrawls from pension plans will be prevented and almost all pension plans will eventually default
We will see a systemic banking crisis that will result in bank runs and the loss of savings
Prices will fall across the board as purchasing power collapses
Real estate prices are likely to fall by at least 90% on average (with local variation)
The essentials will see relative price support as a much larger percentage of a much smaller money supply chases them
We are headed eventually for a bond market dislocation where nominal interest rates will shoot up into the double digits
Real interest rates will be even higher (the nominal rate minus negative inflation)
This will cause a tsunami of debt default which is highly deflationary
Government spending (all levels) will be slashed, with loss of entitlements and inability to maintain infrastructure
Finance rules will be changed at will and changes applied retroactively (eg short selling will be banned, loans will be called in at some point)
Centralized services (water, electricity, gas, education, garbage pick-up, snow-removal etc) will become unreliable and of much lower quality, or may be eliminated entirely
Suburbia is a trap due to its dependence on these services and cheap energy for transport
People with essentially no purchasing power will be living in a pay-as-you-go world
Modern healthcare will be largely unavailable and informal care will generally be very basic
Universities will go out of business as no one will be able to afford to attend
Cash hoarding will continue to reduce the velocity of money, amplifying the effect of deflation
The US dollar will continue to rise for quite a while on a flight to safety and as dollar-denominated debt deflates
Eventually the dollar will collapse, but that time is not now (and a falling dollar does not mean an expanding money supply, ie inflation)
Deflation and depression are mutually reinforcing in a positive feedback spiral, so both are likely to be protracted
There should be no lasting market bottom until at least the middle of the next decade, and even then the depression won't be over
Much capital will be revealed as having been converted to waste during the cheap energy/cheap credit years
Export markets will collapse with global trade and exporting countries will be hit very hard
Herding behaviour is the foundation of markets
The flip side of the manic optimism we saw in the bubble years will be persistent pessimism, risk aversion, anger, scapegoating, recrimination, violence and the election of dangerous populist extremists
A sense of common humanity will be lost as foreigners and those who are different are demonized
There will be war in the labour markets as unempoyment skyrockets and wages and benefits are slashed
We are headed for resource wars, which will result in much resource and infrastructure destruction
Energy prices are first affected by demand collapse, then supply collapse, so that prices first fall and then rise enormously
Ordinary people are unlikely to be able to afford oil products AT ALL within 5 years
Hard limits to capital and energy will greatly reduce socioeconomic complexity (see Tainter)
Political structures exist to concentrate wealth at the centre at the expense of the periphery, and this happens at all scales simultaneously
Taxation will rise substantially as the domestic population is squeezed in order for the elite to partially make up for the loss of the ability to pick the pockets of the whole world through globalization
Repressive political structures will arise, with much greater use of police state methods and a drastic reduction of freedom
The rule of law will replaced by the politics of the personal and an economy of favours (ie endemic corruption)

Dmitri's latest talk in Ireland

2009-06-17T08:17:00.004+10:00

Another great post from Dmitri Orlov, who has a way of saying uncomfortable truths in an amusing way. So many quotable bits; here's a taste…

Economics is not directly lethal, and economists never get sent to jail for criminal negligence or gross incompetence even when their theories do fail. Finance is about the promises we make to each other, and to ourselves. And if the promises turn out to be unrealistic, then economics and finance turn out to be about the lies we tell each other. We want to continue believing these lies, because there is a certain loss of face if we don't, and the economists are there to help us. We continue to listen to economists because we love their lies. Yes, of course, the economy will recover later this year, maybe the next. Yes, as soon as the economy recovers, all these toxic assets will be valuable again. Yes, this is just a financial problem; we just need to shore up the financial system by injecting taxpayer funds. These are all lies, but they make us feel all right. They are lying, and we are buying every word of it.

And this…

I think it is very important to understand social inertia for the awesome force that it is. I have found that many people are almost genetically predisposed to not want to understand what I have been saying, and many others understand it on some level but refuse to act on it. When they are touched by collapse, they take it personally or see it as a matter of luck. They see those who prepare for collapse as eccentrics; some may even consider them to be dangerous subversives. This is especially likely to be the case for people in positions of power and authority, because they are not exactly cheered by the prospect of a future that has no place for them.

Just read the whole thing.

Power comes from ownership of the means of production!

2009-06-14T08:02:00.006+10:00

A timely post from John Robb at Global Guerrillas. We in Australia are (as usual) a couple of years behind the US but the problem of the end of the current financial system is ours too. What do the middle-class do with their money if the consumer society is dead, and when the shonkieness which is destroying our current wealth generating strategy (investment-at-a-distance through complex and difficult-to-understand means) runs its course? The economy will collapse at some stage during the next couple of years and then rebuild. But it won't come back to what we had before.

In the end, wealth depends on control of the means of production — Karl Marx's key insight. In any society this is ultimately the case. What we need to do is look ahead to the new economy which will emerge over the next few years to replace the current one and invest wisely in it. Those who do will form the next dominant class — this is simply the way society works.

Our current system where we have only the vaguest notion of where our savings and superannuation funds are being deployed, by people we don't know who whatever their personal virtues may be, are governed by very short time lines and an outmoded economic model, is finished. That doesn't mean it will disappear overnight because institutional inertia and cultural inertia is huge. It will take down with it the present moneyed classes as well as the retirement funds of several generations. But the generations coming to maturity in the newly emergent economy in the second decade of the twenty-first century will have no loyalty to it.

Sunday funnies

2009-06-07T09:27:00.005+10:00

Jon Stewart strikes again. So glad Holden is totally unconnected to all this!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

BiG Mess

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Economic Crisis

Ah, experts! And our Dear Leaders too (of course!)

2009-05-29T15:36:00.010+10:00

How many of you watch the news, hands clasped to your swiftly beating hearts, as our betters — the captains of our fate — explain so clearly how their plans will save us? We're going through it all with swine flu at the moment. Experts are interviewed and of course they know something which they're happy to share with us. The Tamiflu factory is chugging out millions of doses to make us all safe at home and at work. A ship full of anxious tourists is sailing up and down the coast while our experts try to determine whether it represents a threat or menace to the health of us all, or to its own passengers, or both.

What is this all about? Why does it matter who says what? Does someone need to be blamed for the situation? Who is busy doing the saving? Why do we care?

We care if we believe that if we do the right thing, everything will turn out fine. And doing the right thing for many of us consists in some simple or perhaps not so simple, abstract, narrowly focused task that someone we have never known has decreed should be done and we must do. Every week day.

We may have only the sketchiest idea of how the whole system which supports us works, but we are sure it should. After all, it always has! We may have a fair understanding of what it is we do, but no idea of what our neighbour does. But we may believe that most of our our neighbours are busy like we are, keeping the Show on the Road. And although we have no real understanding of how the system actually works (although we may think we do!), we are sure there are special creatures far above us who do understand, who with knitted brows and stern expressions, steer the ship of State with its nervous passengers safely through the Storms of Life.

But what if they really don't know? What happens when they can't keep the ship off the rocks? We've invested rather heavily in this game: what if it turns out to be a dud? How many of us can build a new world and then survive and prosper should the need arise?

So many of us are fenced in by narrow specialities, abilities, desires, prior investments. We are fragile.

Don't lean on something for support which you don't really understand. Food comes from the supermarket, and fuel from the service station on the corner — for the moment. But no-one can tell you if it will continue. It's all too complex, fragile and unsustainable to go on much longer uninterrupted. No-one controls it or understands it. No expert, no leader.

So watch the news as though you're seeing Martians, not fellow humans. Get out of debt, grow a garden, learn to fix your own stuff, enjoy your friends and family, help your neighbours and keep clear of trouble as much as you can. Because in the end it's your life and you've got to take control of it.

If you leave it to the experts (and our dear leaders) you'll most likely be toast.

New times, new games

2009-05-21T11:34:00.008+10:00

We will get caught up in trying to save the unsaveable. The more we have invested in some arrangement, no matter how ill-fitting it may be, the harder we'll fight to preserve it. Of course our society is full of change and we've made a virtue of it for years, but the changes which kill off inappropriate small businesses are one thing (the individuals involved are generally too powerless to fight reality for long): those threatening powerful interests are another. So the battle will be drawn out, ridiculously, as everything the powerful can lay their hands on is thrown at the task of propping up the dead arrangements to which the powerful owe their place. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the car industry, the big banks, the building industry, airlines, newspapers. We'll all be told that life simply won't be worth living if these things shrink or disappear.

But of course a new generation will be born who have no knowledge of any of this stuff. They will take the world as they find it and invent new meanings and purposes for themselves. This will happen no matter what anyone now tries to do. The question then becomes, what will the values of a post-cheap energy world be? Who will champion these values? Who will fight against them?

The world is never a simple place. Almost everything that has ever been continues to exist at some level, but some trends and types rise to dominate and some formerly dominant fade. The dominance of our now inappropriate industrial living arrangements, the very complete dependence upon them by the majority of the population in countries like Australia and the huge mental and physical cost of building and maintaining them will create great conflict within society and between nations, and within the individuals charged with maintaining the system. Something too complex to fully understand, so all-powerful and so impressive will command the loyalties of millions even as it destroys them. Many of those who understand the folly of trying to maintain the system will see no alternative but to support it in some more limited form — perhaps limited to themselves and those closest to them.

The new thinking will come from those who feel they have little stake in the system as it is, even if they are deluded in these views. Groups or individuals who are marginalised always find it easier to break with the past or with widely accepted beliefs which have lost their utility. The uneducated, unemployed underclass will be the breeding ground for the new world, and so will a small fraction of the middle-class. It will be another cycle of the conflict which has characterised our world for the past few hundred years, one in which I was caught up in the 1970's where I suddenly saw the emptiness of what I'd formerly believed (Heroic Materialism) and I dropped out into the Counter-Culture, as we then called it. We thought we were the new hope for the World, but we had quite a few things wrong, not the least being the timing!

The Counter-Culture has been largely absorbed back into the society which gave it birth. It has changed some things. There is now a clear consciousness of the environmental price we pay for our way of life amongst a significant minority of the population in a country like Australia. But overall the cheap energy party has continued, as it was bound to do until the energy got too expensive. That's where we are now.

Amongst those who think a lot on these matters there tends to be a view that if only we could communicate the urgency of the situation to the larger world, then we could start to get the situation under control. I don't think so myself. I think only a small percentage of citizens, even in a well-educated country like Australia, will ever understand what's going on (and that's not to say they would then know what to do about it!). And even if the majority understood, action to deal with the problems is another matter.

I think it is going to be very messy. That is, I don't think we are going to have a situation of mutual understanding. I think we're going to have a Tower of Babel instead. But new and lasting arrangements will emerge eventually, when all the shouting and fighting has wound down. Don't be holding your breath waiting for it though. Look how long Rome took to fall.

The new successful games will emerge at the margins. States will hollow out quite quickly. All kinds of sub-groups will jostle for space inside the hollowed out State. Most will fail. But the successful ones will spread as the monastic movement spread through Europe after the collapse of Rome.

Living the life

2009-05-20T13:47:00.005+10:00

Bad-tempered blasts against stupidity at the top are easy and fun. The hard thing is to grind out a new way of doing things that's right for now. What am I doing?

A number of things which are interlinked but which in themselves seem like platitudes.

First we are out of debt. We sold our house and paid everyone we owed money to. We bought a block of land thinking we'll build again, but we didn't go for broke, getting something reasonably cheap. We've stalled on starting a new house though until we get the earning side of the picture right.

We have a retail plant nursery in town which we've been building up over five years. It seems to have reached a limit at the moment, due partly to the restricted size of our market and partly because people are nervous about spending. We've added a florist business to the nursery because there was a demand for it and that is growing rapidly, but it's all fairly insecure as no-one has to buy plants or flowers. But we're thinking about how to keep it all working.

We also have a factory which we rent at the bottom of the town. There we have a workshop and storage for nursery stock. One of our sons and I are setting up some fish-breeding tanks in it. Our son has a friend in the aquarium business in Melbourne who is advising him on how we can run it profitably and it's a fairly low-risk business because we already had a lot of the gear we needed plus the premises.

My wife and I live in a very modest rented house which we've been sharing with one of our other sons and his partner. Renting is much cheaper than buying. This has kept our living costs low. We have two four wheeled vehicles but we don't drive much because all our commutes are less than a kilometre. Also I have a Cargo Cycle, for which I'm an agent and which I use a lot instead of driving. I've got an ex-postie Honda motorbike too but haven't used it much.

This is the toughest time of the year financially with the nursery and we've got to get through to August when the Spring break kicks in and sales double overnight.

I had a business for years designing and building educational exhibits but that has been quiet, so I'm thinking about other opportunities for my workshop which might come along. Unfortunately a lot of the imported cheap stuff is currently impossible to compete against, but I'm convinced that will change over the next few years.

The big thing is to avoid entanglements and obligations which may become impossible to service. No debt! Or at least the shortest term debt we can manage when we need it. We don't have an overdraft or line of credit. We are in the black even with the trade accounts for the nursery, although only just at the moment.

How we'll go longer term is difficult to say. At an individual level I used to be quite confident in my abilities but I know now how much we depend on people and events beyond our control. That's why it's important to live the right way in the right place! Also we are becoming a bit more vulnerable health-wise, being in our late fifties. There are limits to how much you can take on. But I think we are not too badly off in an overall sense, although below the radar financially.

I'm spending a fair bit of time trying to get things right at a community level. There are lots of reasons why that can work here. We're not dominated by powerful outside interests, we have good relationships within our local area, there are plenty of talented people living here, we have a diverse local economy. It's not perfect but it could be a lot worse. And it suits me too.

The Great Bifurcation

2009-05-20T10:14:00.009+10:00

A headline from today's ABC News online: RBA subscribes to 'green shoots' theory. Have we ever been in such a time where the most august of experts, heirs of the great Western intellectual tradition, have seemed so utterly threadbare? And what are these guys basing their optimistic forecasts on? The Great Savior of us all, China! After all we got through the financial crisis of the late nineties didn't we? China saved us then!

But what do these people really know about China? What do the Chinese know about themselves? We can pretty quickly disappear into a hall of mirrors here. So let's just step back from this for a moment and look at this graph of World Oil Production to 2100…(you can click on this graph after you've read my bit to go to a very important article at The Oil Drum)
Now see the vertical dotted line roughly in the middle of the graph? And see the little halo at the top? That's where we are now. And the slope down to the right is where the World as a whole is headed as far as oil availability is concerned. And how does Australia rate in the vulnerability to oil supply shocks stakes? According to this article in "The Washington Times" Australia is less secure than the United Kingdom for vulnerability due to dependence on imported oil. And what does our economy completely depend on to maintain our accustomed prosperity? Yes my dears, it begins with the letter "O"…

Now it may be that the Reserve Bank of Australia is run by a bunch of swashbuckling risk-takers who habitually play double-or-nothing with the country's cash. Or it may be run by a crew of slippery-pole-climbers who have no ability to see beyond the very narrow slice of reality which they learned about all those years ago at Uni.

Does it make any difference if it's one or the other? I don't think so in the long run. But either way, the RBA certainly doesn't seem to be run by people I have much faith in. Somehow I don't think they have any idea of our dependency on oil imports and our rapidly increasing vulnerability in that regard. And I think their view of the world doesn't extend much more than a few months into the future. That's probably fine if you're managing the exchequer of a nomadic tribe in some primeval desert, but doesn't crack it for me when you're talking about managing a complex industrial nation in a rapidly changing environment.

We are at the very edge of titanic changes in our world. Australia is still jingling along as if the nineties had never gone away. Our leadership may have glimpsed the void ahead but has decided to retreat into a kind of childhood playtime where we all play housies and don't look up at the menace rising around us on all sides.

Don't be silly buggers and play along with them. Look after yourself. Get a grip of what the real game is going to be. This is the Great Bifurcation — the decisive split from the world we've all grown up in — and those who don't see what is coming towards us will be destroyed.

The silence

2009-05-18T13:34:00.004+10:00

I've been quiet for the last two weeks. I've been exhausted in a new way (for me): I simply haven't been able to access my mental faculties in the usual manner. It's been a self-inflicted exhaustion. A friend had written a play which I thought was good and which had a main character I felt I could become. But I also wanted to keep working and blogging through the whole thing. So I did. All went well until about a week after the show ended. I did a post on May 1st in my usual manner, and then kaboom! I stopped functioning as Lloyd. I've been able to mimic normal human behavior with those who don't normally see too much of me, but to those who spend a lot of time with me such as my wife I've been, well — subdued, a shell.

Anyway I'm slowly coming back. Maybe I needed some time out to get another perspective in any case. I've certainly had that. With no "higher" mental functioning for a couple of weeks I've been effectively living the post-industrial life. Is it good?

It's OK if you don't have too much to do.

But I've also come to realise how busy we make ourselves. I'm talking about the middle class here by the way — the ones who shoulder the burden of keeping the Civilisation Show on the road. The middle class needs to show enthusiasm and do the right thing (according to who?). The middle class needs energy and purpose in order to delay gratification, and to work those longer hours keeping the less focused up to the mark and on the job. But the Game is up even if most can't see it yet. And what will the middle class do if we can't keep going as we have?

Here in my little town we have a lot of older, burned out FMC (Former Middle Class). Some keep dreaming of one more round in the Big Time but most know we're shot. We're wandering around in a daze a lot of the time. The younger people are more energetic and less nuanced — more easily enthused and co-opted — for now. The best go off to the city looking for the bigger Game, to return for an occasional visit. But what shall we do when we can all see the Game is over?

We've mostly been able to find ourselves a place in the world in the past fifty or so years, and it's been easy enough to find reasons for the failure of those who haven't. What happens when finding a place in the bigger world becomes an exceptional struggle? Will new, local, games come into being more or less spontaneously?

It's going to be an interesting time. Try and stay tuned!

The Chinese begin their move

2009-05-11T13:55:00.003+10:00

From PRIME-TASS via Dmitri Orlov…"It's official: The government in Beijing has announced that the Yuan can now be used in international trade."

I was thinking it would be a bit longer but the Chinese are quietly making their moves. I wonder how long before the rest of the Industrialised World catches on?

Crisis? What crisis are you talking about?

2009-05-01T22:01:00.005+10:00

If you were facing a major financial crisis which you didn't fully understand and had little control over, and you were running the government of a small, isolated country crucially dependent on export trade for income and energy supplies, what would be your priorities? This is what Kevin Rudd is doing…

From ABC News: The Government is set to bolster Australia's military presence in the region with a huge funding increase to be outlined in tomorrow's Defence white paper.

Submarines, ships and cruise-missile firepower are all being upgraded in anticipation of a shift of power in the Asia Pacific from west to east.

As reported by the ABC in February, the white paper orders 12 new submarines be built in Adelaide in the single biggest defence project in the nation's history…

And what about our State government in Victoria? Aha! More pure genius…

The Victorian Government will build the Frankston bypass under a public private partnership (PPP), regardless of whether it receives federal funding.

And…

The Victorian Government says almost 5,000 jobs will be created as it intervenes in five more large construction projects…The new projects to be fast tracked include an upgrade to Avalon airport…

I watched this on ABC TV news tonight, complete with Lindsay Fox (the owner of Avalon airport and a man who I would characterise as well connected) looking like the cat who'd got the cream.

It looks as if the pillagers of the system are getting down to some serious work. Peak oil rendering investments in airports and freeways useless? Are you a Commie or something? Prioritising investment to reduce our critical dependencies on foreign oil? Don't worry, technology/our great and powerful friends/God/Santa Claus will provide.

Meanwhile, over at The Oil Drum, Gail the Actuary posts the real story…

At this point, it seems to me that we are in the lull before the storm. Demand has dropped, because society could not afford high priced petroleum products, but the supply has not yet declined to reflect the lower price level. Stimulus packages have been put in places, but the cost has not yet filtered through the system. People are hopeful for a rebound, and this is reflected in the stock market prices.

To me, the most vulnerable system is the international monetary system. As long as countries trust each other, trade will continue as usual. Once this starts breaking down, it seem likely that countries will need real goods to barter, rather than relying on promises to pay. A breakdown in the international monetary system could cause a major interruption to trade, and start a downward spiral. It seems like this could happen at any time.

What do you think warrants the most effort and attention?

Max Keiser on Revolution and the coming collapse of the US$

2009-04-27T18:16:00.006+10:00

Check out this video featuring economics commentator Max Keiser. Here is the kind of opinion and voice which is de-legitimising the powers-that-be and giving the justifications for the civil unrest which is undoubtedly coming. It will be interesting to see how these ideas spread, to whom and when. Note the latter part where he is talking about the moves the Chinese are making to make the Yuan the international reserve currency to replace the US Dollar – this will give the Chinese the advantages of seigneurage (the net revenue derived from the issuing of currency, one of the reasons why governments guard this privilege so jealously and hate barter currencies so much) and one of the reasons why the USA has been so rich since the Second World War. He thinks the Chinese will make their move in eighteen months, which is interesting in light of my prediction of the collapse of international trade due to the collapse of the US dollar sometime soon…

My meeting with our Federal member of parliament

2009-04-24T11:41:00.004+10:00

I've just come out of a meeting with Russell Broadbent, our local representative in the Australian Parliament. We met at the Source Café in Foster, with mum's and babies at nearby tables and the street scene of Foster strolling past the big window right next to us. Fiona Mottram, one of the two reporters for our local paper the "Mirror", spotted us there and darted in with her camera to take yet another shot of me for the paper. I'm already suffering from serious over-exposure in the "Mirror" due to all the publicity associated with acting the part of Hugo in "Dinner at Hugo's" written by our local playright, Edwin Coad (final performance tonight: sorry folks, totally sold out!). The "Mirror" has also given me a very good run with my Peak Oil forum. Thanks Fiona and Wendy Williamson (who also got a talking part in the ABC Radio National documentary and who said nice things)!

Russell is a very affable, high energy sort of guy who it is impossible to dislike, even more so due to his courageous and principled stand against the majority of his own party over the appalling treatment of refugees by the Howard government (policies some of which appear to be still running under the Rudd Labor government).

He's a very wily and experienced old politician all the same, and managed not to answer my questions as to whether there is a Plan "B" by either party to deal with the consequences of the Depression now bearing down upon us when their Plan "A", return to Business As Usual, fails. However he listened attentively to my concerns and to my vision of how we could build a more resilient community here. Maybe it is some sort of beginning.

Friday funnies

2009-04-24T08:38:00.002+10:00

Treasury Department Issues Emergency Recall Of All US Dollars