The party never ends

27 July 2008

Almost 30 years ago Bill Catton succinctly explained the predicament of an overpopulated planet. Not only are we doomed to die off, but when it's over and the dust has settled, the ultimate carrying capacity of humanity on Earth will be less than when we started. Yet in that short time the human population almost doubled again from about 4.5 to almost 7 billion. Six or seven million souls are added every month.

In the modern tradition of gasoline burning Americans, I departed mid-July for a semi-annual road trip across the southwest to about the middle of the continent. Numerous writers have claimed recently that the increased cost of fuel is keeping people off the roads. "Staycation" has entered the lexicon. I don't believe it. There was as much traffic on interstates 15, 70, and 80 as I've ever seen. Americans drive the biggest cars they can find as fast as they can go. On the uphill approach to the Eisenhower Tunnel I'm sure one driver burned as much gas passing me in his Dodge Ram 3500 pulling a boat and trailer as I did coasting down the other side into Denver. The only change in people's behavior as a consequence of $4/gallon gasoline that I've seen is a significant increase in the level of whining and complaining.

Bill Catton was right. Paul Erlich was absolutely correct when he said that famine will stalk the world. Malthus' words of wisdom ring down through the centuries. Meanwhile we burn gasoline like there's no tomorrow (and maybe there isn't). I personally turned over 120 gallons of regular unleaded into atmospheric carbon dioxide propelling my jeep almost 2500 miles down the highway. Nearly everyone passed me, not because they don't know that driving slow saves fuel but because they don't care. They want to go as fast as possible. The cost in money is no big deal. They don't know and don't care about any other costs. Despite James Howard Kunstler's weekly incantations, the suburbs continue to grow. Every new wannabe metropolis I drove through – St. George, Cortez, Fort Morgan – was bigger than the last time I saw it. We just can't have too many shopping malls and McMansions.

The stars were high above them and the moon was in the east

The sun was settin' on them when they reached Miami Beach

They got a hotel by the water and a quart of Bombay gin

The road goes on forever and the party never ends

Robert Earl Keen

• teosinte @ 21:20 

  The banks of Denial

  17 July 2008

  Delusions line the banks of Denial, a deep, wide river that runs through America. Willful Ignorance stands tall on the shores, carefully cultivated by the Gods of the electromagnetic spectrum with endless, mindless chatter. Today our problems ended. Thank God that's over. The stock market shot up, the price of oil is finally going back down, and the troubles with Fannie and Freddie are ancient history. It was getting pretty bad there for awhile. Some people were late with their cable payment and a few other poor folks even had to put off upgrading to a bigger high definition plasma flat screen TV. Fortunately a fresh batch of zero interest credit card offers arrived in the mail just in time. And now that gas has gone down a dime you'd better hang on to that SUV or trade for a Hummer while you can still get the extra large, vintage model. Meanwhile, on the energy front, Al the Goracle recommended that the laws of thermodynamics be repealed for the good of the planet.
  
  It's a good thing we're the smartest, richest people in the world. Even my dentist can see that what we need to do is start using our own oil instead of importing it from those awful foreign countries. The three wise businessmen at the table next to us in the restaurant agreed, we need to drill our way out of this. Everybody knows there's plenty of oil down there if those damn environmentalists would just let the oil companies drill for it. And at the office I was once again identified as a whacko conspiracy theorist for merely suggesting that inflation devalues our money. The government will take care of us. Don't worry. It will bail out IndyMac and make it whole again. It will see to it that Freddie and Fannie fulfill their mission to make housing affordable for everyone while the investors and executives make millions. The government will create wealth out of nothing and there's no end to where that comes from. It's only sore losers like me who won't believe and who won't have fun at the party.
  
  Yes, this is a simple blog. I have no pretensions about explaining the way it is. If you want to see what's going on, look at the news links to the right. My attempts at posting solutions turn out to be mostly about failures. My water page is about how the groundwater table is dropping and how long it might last. My gardening page is mostly about insects and squirrels. My energy page must be plain wrong, given all the oil that everyone knows is down there and how the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to us. It's finally morning in America once again. If we all shut our eyes tight, clinch our fists, and wish really hard, the leghorn roosters in the media and halls of power will crow the sun up.

  • teosinte @ 20:35 

    Best of intentions

    11 July 2008

    The monsoon hit last night in a fury. The sky became a cosmic strobe light freezing pounding raindrops in midair with each flash of lightening. Bolts seared my eyeballs for several minutes after they were gone and their thunder rumbled across Silver Valley. I had to stay out and watch it, I haven't seen a storm like that in ten years, even though I was getting soaked by sheets of rain driven by howling wind. After it drove me inside and I saw that the power was out, the wind shifted to the south. Gusts of probably 60 mph pressed against my house as I frantically tried to batten down the hatches. This is when anything that isn't nailed down tends to be gone. Finally I lay in bed feeling the wind pound against the wall and wondering if my roof would come off. I don't know how, probably electricians drove out in the middle of the night in a big, diesel engine boom truck, but the power came back on sometime in the first few hours of the day.
    
    Plans are for the Mojave to become the Saudi Arabia of solar generated electricity. Hundreds of applications have been filed to turn hundreds of square miles of public land into privately owned power plants. Sunlight will turn water into steam that will turn turbines spinning magnets in coils. The grid will be energized. Even Joshua tree-hugging liberals are going on about how this "wasteland" has no higher purpose than to power our toaster ovens. But all things are not equal. Although the energy crises can be written in terms of kilowatt hours the crisis de jour is in transportation and at its basis is oil. Humans have known for all time that petroleum burns but we didn't start using it until about 1859. Our ancestors weren't stupid and we aren't smart. Think of it this way. If you have a pile of wood and a pool of oil and you want to get warm, which would you burn? Our ancestors didn't burn oil because they didn't have internal combustion engines. Likewise we won't drive to the grocery store on solar electricity because we don't have electric cars. The grid may be energized by hydro, solar, and wind, natural gas and coal but it still runs on oil. Our cars run on oil and our food supply runs on oil. Not very much is interchangeable, except for food and oil. We can trade oil for food and food for biofuel and wind up choosing between eating or driving.
    
    In the old Bugs Bunny cartoons Wile E. Coyote would chase the roadrunner out into midair over a canyon, stop, look down, walk around a bit, and ponder his mistake. Then sure enough, it was real, and a long whistle to a small poof in the bottom of the canyon would ensue. Just like Wile E. there's a time lag in our response to reality. Empty claptrap chicken wire and stucco shacks will bake under no money down zero interest rate signs in Las Vegas while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac go under. Billion dollar high speed trains will be scoped and surveyed while casinos ponder their bottom line and wonder where all the tourists went. The desert will be bladed to build solar power plants by companies that have no future. All with the best of intentions, hopes, and dreams, followed by a small poof in the desert sand, we'll come back to the lives of our ancestors – a little mesquite, corns, beans, and squash.

    • teosinte @ 21:13 

      Free advice

      4 July 2008

      "Gas is soo expensive," my dentist said to her assistant over the whine of the drill. "It cost me $70 just to fill up."
      
      "We're really cutting back," her assistant replied. "We don't drive nowhere we don't have to."
      
      With a mouthful of anesthetic, latex suction tubes, and steel I fortunately wasn't expected to participate in the conversation. But they did pull the tools out long enough to ask if that was my Prius parked out back. The conversation turned to movies and movie stars, many of whom seemed closer than family. What else can you say about beautiful, witty people entertaining you in your living room every evening.
      
      "Are you going to the party in Big Bear this weekend?"
      
      "No, I have to work in Apple Valley that Thursday and by the time I come back to Barstow I won't have time to make it."
      
      I wondered how much cutting back was really being done.
      
      "It's going to be so rough going back to Vegas this afternoon. Traffic is already bad."
      
      On the way home I saw a sight that's becoming slightly less common. A caravan of the biggest SUVs, Escalade, Expedition, Tahoe, Suburban, went roaring past, bumper to bumper, pulling boats and trailers with personal watercraft, trying to pass each other on the right in-between semi trucks. One last $200 hurrah at Lake Mohave or Lake Havasu. The only thing missing was the dual flags flying from the windows like horns on the beast; so common back on July 4, 2003.
      
      "Are you as gloomy as I am?" a friend emailed me after I said that I'm known as Dr. Doom around the office. Actually I'm not gloomy, I'm pretty happy. Although I'm sorry for the suffering the party couldn't go on forever. Living within our means, both financially and ecologically, is not optional. My friend had reason to be gloomy as he'd gotten a four month notice of termination from his County of San Bernardino employer. Even though the American economy has shed jobs steadily for the past six months, government is still hiring. But at the County level they are asking staff they can't get rid of to take unpaid leave and dumping everyone else. This will work it's way up as the tax base dries up. At the Federal level, though, I think we'll just borrow money for wars and stimulus payments and a bigger military budget and aid to Israel and whatever else right up to the end. My bet is that the last U.S. government paycheck won't buy a loaf of bread.
      
      My friend asked what I thought about the general situation so I emailed back with some free advice, worth about what he paid for it.
      
      In the near term be prepared for shortages of fuel, food, and water. Also be prepared for the crime and social unrest associated with shortages. We are conditioned to expect a bailout. But this time the official response is going to look more like a police state than a welfare state. In the mid-term you'll need to provide for yourself locally, independent of long supply chains. In the long term life will never return to the glory years of the nineties. From here on down it's duck, cover, and make do.
      
      In the deep currents running under most of the big factors of our civic culture, trouble in the financial sector, the mortgage mess, the military budget, commodity prices, are enormous transfers of wealth on the order of trillions of dollars. As we follow this trend, wealth and resources will come to be controlled by a very small elite minority, leaving the rest of us with not much more than debt.
      
      As I said, I'm not gloomy. Recently I've discovered a couple useful things. Wheat grows like a weed out here in Newberry Springs and have you seen the price of wheat lately? I'll bet wheat is easier to grow, easier to harvest, and easier to sell than alfalfa. Take note all of you diesel tractor drivers. Melons and squashes do fairly well. They seem to resist the insects and the hard casing around the fruit means that I get to eat it, not the vermin.

      • teosinte @ 20:32 
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