by donstewart » Sun 28 May 2017, 06:51:39
2006 Article; Robert Hirsch
The article from 2006 points out how flexibly humans can behave to rise to any challenge in terms of Peak Oil. If a flexible response is practicable, then it doesn’t make sense to view Peak Oil as some Systemic Challenge.
Let me go back to the only ASPO event I had anything to do with. It was about a decade ago in Washington, DC. There were all kinds of people there pushing all kinds of solutions: local food systems, solar and wind, conversion of food crops to perennials, gas replacing oil, nuclear, and so forth. The cold water that I remember was the Robert Hirsch talk. Hirsch was of the opinion that if we were going to change, we needed to have started 20 years earlier. But his consulting company had also looked at solutions such as the rationing which had been used in WWII, and found it to be completely unworkable. So the fundamental dilemma was that, yes, we needed to begin a change, but no, it couldn’t be accomplished by government regulations, and finally, oil was the best primary energy source humans had ever discovered and anything else was going to be less valuable. So voluntary change was likely to be scarce.
Even further back, in the early 1980s I was getting a mid-life MBA. One of our teachers was teaching us ‘environmental strategy’. He said that most all environmental disputes revolved around the value of assets…not about restrictions which might merely affect the ability to do something in the future. Thus, if a town adopts zoning for vacant property which precludes it use as an oil refinery, the person doing the complaining is likely to be the landowner, not companies who are interested in building refineries. We studied one case where the issue was effluent from paper mills. There were two existing paper mills, one in Maine and the other on the Strait of Juan de Fuca between Washington State and Victoria, BC. Everyone had to admit that the effluents were noxious. So the question became: are the mills required to reduce effluent or are the mills allowed to simply dilute the effluent. Not surprisingly, the Maine mill argued for reduced effluent, while the Washington mill argued for allowing dilution…because trillions of gallons of seawater sloshed by the Washington site every day. The Maine mill won, largely because of the influence of Senator Muskie from Maine. If the Washington ‘dilution’ argument had won, the value of the Maine mill would have promptly sunk to zero. Asset value carried the day.
Since 2006, and the ASPO meeting, the world has continued to dig the same hole deeper.
Debt to GDP has increased from 170 percent to 325 percent.
CO2 in the atmosphere has increased from roughly 370ppm to 410ppm.
Cars have been replaced with SUVs.
Green buildings still don’t sell.
The Central Banks have inflated agricultural land prices (now collapsing) to make subsistence farming impossible or at least very hard. Ethanol is still subsidized, diverting land to corn.
The Central Banks have inflated asset values by driving interest rates to zero. Pension plan assets have suffered and pensions are insolvent.
It’s hard not to think that the cold water thrown by Robert Hirsch was prescient.
On the positive side, science has progressed since 2006. We now know a lot more about human well-being. I have pointed to the Barrett book on Emotions. If pleasant emotions are an important goal in life, then we now know a lot more about how to achieve that than we did back in 2006.
What about the continuing information revolution? Some things are better. I was working on a small farm in 2006. We did not use cell phones. Now practically all small farmers carry cell phones, and they are helpful. I am sure that people who drive around in vans servicing things have become wedded to cell phones. But on the downside, cell phones have proliferated advertisements and seem to be destroying some of our basic human assets, such as interpersonal skills and empathy.
I happened to watch the 1995 movie Beautiful Girls recently. The cast was all the bright young people in Hollywood in the mid-1990s. It’s a complex story, but one notable rant is by Rosie O’Donnell leading a couple of guys into the corner grocery store and opening a Penthouse Magazine. She points out that the models they drool over are constructed of plastic. If, against all odds, they did manage to hook-up with one of the models, they would likely become bored with them very quickly. One of the men looks lasciviously at the model and says, ‘yeah, after 20 or 30 years I might get a little bored’. A completely different way of looking at a sexual partner (from the male perspective) is that here is a woman with an amazing sexual capacity which involves that mysterious thing that women do: multiple orgasms. It might be really rewarding to make a life with a woman and help her exercise that capacity. (Since 2006, we have also discovered that orgasms are very good for us.)
But any glance at popular media shows that most men are still thinking of women about like the guys looking at the Penthouse magazine back in 1995. So the potential for an authentic, low fossil fuel, engagement is not being reached. Instead, we still have trophy girl friends and wives and big cars and bigger houses and parties in the Hamptons.
Consequently, an article from 2006 saying that Peak Oil is wrong because we are flexible and smart human beings who can cope with anything has not been proven. The evidence so far is much more consistent with the Robert Hirsch message.
Don Stewart