BLOGGING, AND THE JOURNEY

BLOGGING CAN BE HARD...Not like writing a personal journal, something that you might not want others to read. People do read this blog (of course, I encourage you to by telling you when there is a new posting), so it has to be that it is more interesting that just writing a journal.

I started this blog because friends in Portland suggested it as a means of keeping folk keeping up on me, having moved across to the east side. My son says that it works this way for him, away Down Under in Sydney. There is a chap in Brazil, whom I have never met, who reads it and occasionally makes a comment. The thing about a blog is that one cannot just sound off about any old thing; in my conceit, I like it to be interesting to others.

Then there is the journey. Initially, I thought this would just be about occasional travels and the mundane, the quotidian things to do with the garden, discouraging the woodchucks, the compost pile, and the like. I had not counted on all the books I would be reading over this past year or so, kind of book-surfing, from one interesting question to the next. Fascinating things like how the western culture evolved, why is it that Europeans have been so dominant, the role of waste in the scheme of things, how all life is interconnected and that, maybe, our planet is a living organism of which we are a small and overly influential part, and that maybe Earth is the only really living thing in the entire Universe. And, anyway, how much of this stuff might be interesting to others?

The other interesting thing about blogging is that it seems to come to have a life of its own, calling me to set down and say something to it and, maybe, to you.

I admit to being a bit 'stuck' with this business of energy and the economy. There will always be an "economy" so long as we trade things with each other. About 40,000 years ago some folk learned to sharpen stones into objects useful for killing and cutting up animals, discovered that other hunters were prepared to come great distances to trade these stones for salt and, lo...the economy was born!

Sharpened stones then, oil now...

Since it became important in our economies, oil also became inseparable from politics and international affairs. Ensuring a reliable source of plentiful and cheap oil has been the key stone of Middle Eastern affairs since the beginning of last century and especially since the '70s, when the OPEC countries embargoed oil. Why the Middle East? Well, that is just where Mother Nature has chosen to store most oil.

Like water to fish and air to birds, there are things in the background we humans find hard to notice and be aware of.

The role of oil in our culture is one such; few alive in the oil culture can recall the time when it was not central to our life or understand that that there are places still where this is just beginning. Likewise, we are mostly unaware of the shift in oil-politics. Once, developed nations were the main consumers and contrived to dominate the politics of the oil exporting countries.

The great western private petroleum companies once controlled 90 per cent of oil production, now only 10 percent. There is a new oil-based nationalism and the countries that once only exported oil now are increasingly industrialized and will need more oil for their own purposes. The globalized economy means that these countries can sell their oil to many other customers beside what used to be called The West. For example, it matters not that the US refuses to buy oil from Iran since Iran can as easily see to China and India.

This means that international politics and foreign policy must now march to the sound of a different drum. So too must internal politics. With increasing international competition for oil supplies, we cannot expect much longer to use oil as we have. Continuing to base our culture on motor cars requires a rethinking of energy. It's somewhat like those advertisements with dominoes that cascade to produce a message, perhaps like,

USE MORE SUN,

or

USE ENERGY BETTER.

THE BOTTOM OF IT ALL...

OUR ECONOMY IS BASED ON....

ENERGY

That's right...everything takes energy. Suppose you thought that you could become rich if you discovered gold. With amazing luck, stepping out into your back garden one day, you stub your toe on a huge nugget, previously dismissed as just another large stone. Does this make you rich? Not immediately...you must somehow transport it to someone who will give you money for your find. This is the least amount of energy you would need to exert to transform your nugget into wealth. Were all you needed to do was carry the nugget to a gold buyer, just doing so would invoke an intricate meshing of economic pathways to find energy (through eating). If the nugget were too heavy to carry, you would need to load it into a pick-up thereby using much more energy.

So it is with every resource transformed and traded. Nothing can happen without energy. Iron was once made by smelting ore using the heat of burning timber (a form of stored solar energy). Later charcoal (cooked wood, just another form of stored solar energy) was found to be more effective. At that time, coal was a despised fuel only used by some poor folks. When the forests were almost gone, we turned to coke ( a form of coal , stored solar energy). Once steam power was widely established, coal became the star fuel and remained so until the 1950s. From then, cheap oil replaced coal on many fronts. Coal remained king in power stations.

The association between energy used and the size of the economy is plain enough. If you want to get up to pace on energy, a great place to start is Robert Bryce's recent book (Gusher of Lies, The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence).

Over the past century the US Gross National Product (GDP) has grown 300 times and so has the amount of oil imported. Almost as spectacular is the 200 fold increase in the number of motor vehicles over the same period. The increase in GDP has been steady since 1950 and is exactly paralleled by the rising consumption of oil, increasing amounts of which have been imported since then. Transport accounts for almost all the oil consumption.

From this one might infer that, however the complex economic machine works, transport has played a critical role. Transport has ever been the basis of trade and trade is what generates wealth. As the structure of cities has evolved over the last 60 years to make automobiles basic to personal transport and access to employment, much oil is consumed in motor cars.

In the US and other developed countries, wealth has enabled us to live in large houses requiring air conditioning, filled with all sorts of electronic gadgets all of which require increasing amounts of energy. We have become car junkies, gadget junkies, and at bottom energy junkies. The average American uses 19 times more than the average energy use per person in the rest of the world. And we are using more and more each year.

Today, just over half of the energy the US consumes comes from non-renewable fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas). The rest comes from nuclear and hydro-electric sources, with a very small amount coming from sources such as geothermal, solar arrays and wind farms. One can convert all the energy produced, from whatever source, into barrel of oil equivalents. In an article in Wall Street Journal, Robert Bryce has done this for us and shown that wind and solar currently contribute about 1% of all energy used in the US. The amount of energy from hydro-electric and nuclear is at a plateau and likely to continue so for decades to come and may even decrease due to problems such as silting of dams and disposal of radio-active wastes.

Unless the role of alternate energy sources grows enormously and quickly, reducing the contribution of fossil fuels would have a distressing impact on the economy. We can produce energy more efficiently (most goes off as heat), reduce the amount used (less air conditioning and more energy efficient appliances, turn off gadgets that use standby modes), reduce miles traveled in cars (that are more economical); these are are obvious ways to preserve wealth within a tightened energy budget. Beyond that lies the not-much-traveled land of alternate energy. This is the green collar economy of which Van Jones writes ("The Green Collar Economy; How one solution can fix our two biggest problems", Van Jones, Harper Collins, New York, 2008).

When you come right down to it, if somehow the 60% of oil consumed that we import suddenly slowed, the complex process we call the economy would quickly stall. Realistically, it will take decades of highly focused effort and immense expenditures before alternate energy sources catch up, if ever they can. In the meantime, we have little choice but to go on burning hydrocarbons, including oil from the Middle East where, long ago, most of it was laid down. Fortunately, the most efficient fuel, natural gas, is very abundant and to it we must increasingly turn.

In the realm of energy, it is easy to get apples and oranges mixed up. For the next decade, the only way to reduce oil imports is to use the cars we have now less. Probably 'the market' will take care of this for us. As oil demand the world over (especially in India and China) increases, the price of fuel will once again escalate and we will drive less and more frugally.

Every cloud has a silver lining, so the saying goes...the hard recession we are experiencing (not to mention the effect of impending serious drought) will slow energy consumption, giving a breathing space for new, necessary infrastructure to be built and the existing, precarious infrastructure to be repaired.

CAN WE PULL THROUGH THIS?

YOU DO NOT NEED ME TO TELL YOU to know that the economy is in the pits. The BIG QUESTION we are all asking is, CAN WE PULL THROUGH THIS MESS? Please bear with me as I attempt to work through to some understanding of our current dilemmas. I hope you will jump right in with comments.

A wonder to me is that, having lived almost 72 years, I have experienced, and appear to be about to experience, the two ends of a remarkable period in human history. To touch briefly on some points made in an earlier blog, I was born at the end of the Great Depression. My parents lived through it on a small farm in South Australia.

Swaggies, the equivalent of the US 'hobo', often came by looking for a meal in exchange for work. Our farm, like all the others in the area, had no electric power; we lit kerosene lamps at night and cooked on a wood stove. We had a telephone, linked to a switch board by a 'party' line. Originally, my father used horses for plowing, seeding, harvesting, hay cutting, and the like; in my memory he had come to use a tractor to accomplish these activities. In the evening, after milking the cows by hand, he used a hand driven separator to separate the cream from the milk. Selling butter from this cream in the town market provided weekly cash, otherwise we depended on money from harvests. In the nearby town, less than ninety miles from the capital city, few people had permanent jobs. My parents depended on casual labor to run the farm at peak times, like the harvest.

When the Second World War broke out, the demand for laborers swiftly peaked as factories were turned to support the war effort. Many men enrolled in the military services and the rest were in high demand. When I was about four, my father could no longer operate the farm due to the scarcity of labor; he rejoined the Army and we moved into the nearby town, leaving the farm to be operated by a larger neighboring farmer. This town was Clare now the center of a wonderful wine growing area. I think we had about 3,000 living in the town and its surrounding countryside.

During the war years, everything was short in supply and rationed. Recycling materials was a peak effort that involved everyone, especially children who received badges for good effort at finding and delivering scarce materials (like tooth paste tubes, for example). No one knew it but the Great Depression was ending. We were so intent on winning the war that we did not notice a fundamental change had overtaken the economy. Australia was following America into a heavily industrialized society. Increasingly, the cities grew and manufacturing proliferated; wealth was about to steadily increase.

Nowadays, I am beginning to read articles about the collapse of manufacturing here in the US. A recent headline in the New York Times proclaimed, "Job Losses Hint at Vast Remaking of Economy".

So you see, I am feeling that, having grown up in an expanding industrialization, in my latter years, it is all winding down.

Will we pull through it? On all sides, we are being assured that this will not be like the Great Depression. However, there are some uncanny resemblances, such as the likely demise of the motor manufacturers (did you know they went to the wall in the early 1930s and had to be rescued by, yes, a 'bail out'?). I think there are a couple of concepts we do likely do not understand and a never likely to. One is 'the economy'; Business Dictionary provides two definitions (you can follow the links):

1. Activities related to the production and distribution of goods and services in a particular geographic region, and
   
2. The correct and effective use of available resources

Economists attempt to understand the economy; while not to be dismissed, this strikes me as pretentious since economics is, at best, an unproven 'science'. As for the rest of us, who can say? One thing is undoubted, the exchange of goods is based on the relative abundance of underlying resources. As certain resources become depleted and thus more expensive, we search for cheaper alternatives. This is how coal replaced wood and coke and how oil replaced coal in more recent times. I witnessed the latter transition as the diesel-electric locomotives of my teen years replaced the steam engines of my childhood and, similarly, diesel buses replaced street cars in the city.

The other mystery is 'money'. Who knows really what money is? The supply of money far exceeds the bank notes in our wallets and pockets or all the gold in the world. So what is it, really? Don't look to this blog to explain money as I am sure I will never know. However, the sharply reduced supply of money seems to be at the core of our present troubles. The current economic 'fix' favored by politicians is to throw money at 'the problem'. Americans have long believed that money can fix almost anything, if not buy happiness. But where does all the money come from? At base, we are borrowing from future generations so they will not have to live in the effects of our failure to fix our current problems. But what will they be able to do if we are not successful?

Presently it seems to me that money is useful in directing resources to their proper use. At the base of all societies is the use of available resources. Analysis of the collapse of societies (see Jared Diamond's book,"Collapse") suggests that this occurs when a particular society out-reaches or uses up completely its resource base. Our critical resource is oil and to oil I will return in my next posting.

Hang in there...this is more important than "pulling through". It is about pulling through to "WHAT"; about what is next.