Bubble Babble

Oh, they're having so much fuuuuuun! You'd think it was Times Square on VE-Day.

Four months to the day after oil passed $120.00 per barrel on an unstoppable climb it hit the latest - but certainly not the last - peak price of $147.27. Now, after a couple weeks of sliding it is back trading just under $120.00, a temporary respite before returning to its upward movement.

When oil first crossed the $120.00 barrier the press was full of articles about how devestating that price would be to the world economy. The world economy seemingly shrugged it off and adjusted to continuing rises in the price. The articles and headlines about the serious economic impact continued however.

When the price of oil dipped back under $120.00 a little over four months after it rose above that level for the first time the headlines were declaring that the good times had returned, that the bubble had burst, the stock markets climbed, the US dollar rebounded, we were on our way back down to oil prices of double digits, all was right with the world.... at a price that was considered the deathblow to the world economy just four short months ago.

Some writers were even so bold as to claim that peak oil was history, that peak oil had peaked, that the peak oil wing-nuts should crawl back into their caves. Clearly the market is in control of oil, not geology. I guess if you don't understand geology, don't bother to learn even the basics of geology, take all of your cues and information from economists and financiasl analysts you would have that point of view.

Those who understand oil geology, those who have studied the oil supply demand picture, those who have bothered to educate themselves in the underlying foundations of peak oil theory, those who know that M. King Hubbert and Mother Hubbard are not related, know that this is just a dip in the ongoing oscilation in price on the ever-upward trend in price that will accompany and follow the peak in global oil production. The prospect of $200.00 oil before year's end is still on the table. The likelihood if sub $100.00 oil is slim.

So to all of those who believe that $120.00 oil signals a return to the good old days, go out and check the tire pressure on your SUV, check the oil, check the battery, fill up the gas tank and get out there on the highway and have a rip-roaring good time. Enjoy the good times...... while they last.

Waiting for those Benevolent Aliens............

One of the prevalent and pernicious variations on the belief that technology will save us is the belief that we will soon make contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial species that will teach us magical secrets and technological wonders that we will use to avert the disasters looming ahead of us. And like all variations on the belief in salvation through technology this simply is not likely to happen. If we bank on that, like mid-lifers planning our retirement around winning the lottery, we are planning on having to live through the worst case scenario of all these future crises.

I am by no means challenging the assumption of other intelligent life in the universe. In fact I fervently adhere to that belief. For some it takes a fundamental refocusing of their belief system to step away from the belief that man is the center of the universe, that man has some special dominion over all the other living species on this planet, that man can do with this planet, and any other part of the universe we manage to reach, whatever we wish. Our species has no special place in the overall scheme of things. Our sun is a minor star in a remote corner of an unspectacular galaxy, one of billions in the vast universe. A growing array of mathematical models suggest that life is probably ubiquitous throughout that universe, possibly existing on billions of planets. We still have not disproven the existence of life elsewhere in our own solar system. It is the ultimate in species chauvinism to believe that, with all of that life, we should be the only intelligent species that exists. The fact we haven't made contact with other intelligent life does not mean that it is not out there.

We are just now developing and enhancing the technology that allows us to determine from earth the chemical constituencies of distant bodies, stars, planets and moons. We are doing so in the hope that we can identify distant planets with the chemical makeup capable of supporting life. The chemical markers we will be looking for have been present on earth for billions of years for any intelligent species out there to have detected. Our sun is a relatively young star. Any intelligent life around a much older star, which is most other stars, could have reached our level of progress millions, even billions of years ago. Assuming that there must be other life and other intelligent species elsewhere in the universe our life-capable planet has in all probability already been detected long, long ago.

In just a century we have progressed from the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk to sending a Voyager spacecraft out of our home solar system to venture slowly across the galaxy. Growth in knowledge is exponential. Imagine what progress we may have made in another thousand years. Now imagine the progress an intelligent extraterrestrial species could already have accomplished if they are millions of years ahead of us in intellectual development.

If we were to receive from outer space a signal that we could clearly identify as being of intelligent origin, whether or not we could understand that signal, it is critical to remember that that signal could have left its planet of origin as much as millions of years ago (the distance in light years from earth to the point of origin of that signal). The species that sent it, whether intentional or accidental, were already at the stage of technological development we achieved in the early 20th century, a short century ago, as long ago as that signal was transmitted.

Radio signals have been leaving earth now for a century. That means that any potential intelligent species on any planet within 100 lightyears distance is able to receive those signals, just as we are constantly monitoring the sky with SETI. They know that we are here, even if they do not understand those signals.

Soon after the development of radio the ability was developed to jam radio signals. The use of this technology has helped dictatorial governments prevent their citizens from receiving radio and television signals from outside the country in order to control the information their populace receives. Once it was understood that radio signals were leaving our planet and emanating out into space an interest developed in using jamming-type technology to block or mask those radio signals leaving earth in order to control what messages extraterrestrial intelligent life might intercept.

It is probable that any intelligent species elsewhere in the universe that develops radio technology will sooner or later want to and eventually succeed in blocking radio signals escaping from their planet's surface. This probably means a period of a century or less when accidental, uncontrolled radio signals would be released into space from any species going through a process of technological development. Once the ability to jam or control outbound radio signals is developed that species may or may not decide to allow any signals to exit their home planet and those allowed are probably going to be designed to be heard by prying ears.

A century of unblocked radio signals may seem like a very long time, significantly longer than the average human lifespan. But it is the blink of an eye in astronomical terms. The potential for us to receive uncontrolled or accidental radio signals from an extraterrestrial intelligent species will depend heavily on a number of lucky factors. The most important of these is that such a species must be in that period of social evolution and technological development where radio transmission has recently been developed. But they must have been at that stage of development at a point in our past equivalent to the distance in lightyears their planet is from earth. For us to receive such a signal today from a planet 1 million light years away that species must have been at a level of technological development equivalent to 20th century earth 1 million years ago.

Any extraterrestrial intelligent species that went through the development of radio longer ago than that will have likely already developed the technological ability to block and control those radio signals before we ever began listening for extraterrestrial radio signals. That does not mean that we will not receive a radio signal from them. What it does mean is that any signal received will be controlled and intentional.

It should not be difficult, relatively speaking, to determine if any extraterrestrial signal received is accidental or intentional. The accidental will clearly stand out as a radio signal but may prove impossible to interpret and understand, like an early broadcast of Amos and Andy or an evening news broadcast. The intentional signal, on the other hand, just like the plaque attached to Voyager, will be meant to be understood by alien species outside the planet of origin. It is likely to be pictorial and/or scientific in nature. If it is not directed at an alien species known to exist but rather meant for any intelligent species that might receive it, it will probably contain information that is believed by its senders to be universal, information like the periodic table, universal physical laws, astronomical data, etc.

If, on the other hand, it is directed at a know alien species, a species from which the originating species has already detected radio signals, any message directed at them will probably be designed to be understood by that species alone. It may echo back information they have gleaned from previous radio signals from that species, very possibly in the language and context of that species to whom their message is directed. In other words, if there is an intelligent species out there that has picked up radio signals originating from here on earth, any directed response they would transmit toward us may very well come back to us in English, or French or Russian or any of the other earth languages that have left this planet as radio signals. They may transmit back to us, as Carl Sagan suggested in Contact, the first television image that left this planet, that being Adolf Hitler opening the Olympic games in 1936 Berlin.

There is another important factor for consideration, however. Trust! When we are aware or suspicious that someone is monitoring our communications and we are uncertain of their motives and intentions - such as in the case of spying whether industrial, political or military - one consistent tactic is the leaking of misinformation or disinformation. This has been done most effectively by we humans during wars, hot and cold. It should not be assumed, therefore, that any radio communication picked up from an alien species has been sent with good intentions. If they are aware we are aware of them they will want to determine our intentions and motives and decide whether we can be trusted or should be feared. They are not going to begin intentional communication with the formula for a new energy source or the blueprints for a fantastic new machine using a previously unrecognized or untapped energy source.

Any extraterrestrial species that has been monitoring radio signals (which includes television) emanating from earth will not have been seeing a very flattering picture of our species. Our news and TV programming tends to largely focus on our darker side; wars, murders, violence, crime. Should an advanced extraterrestrial species volunteer any technology or knowledge to us, and I am at a loss to understand why they would, it is not likely to be of the type that would enhance our ability to make war nor help us further destroy the environment of our planet.

It is far more likely that any intelligent species out there that has become aware of us and has been intercepting our radio signals will now be in an observe-only status, continuing to monitor our radio signals without making themselves known to us. And they are likely to stay in that mode until they determine that we have in some way resolved or lived through the current tumultuous period of human development. They will likely want to see if we can advance beyond our warlike tendencies and whether we can learn to live within the limits of our environment. It may take a very long time, centuries perhaps, before they see a satisfactory outcome of either of those.

One of the incredible ironies is that what signals any alien species may pick up from earth represent the lowest, basest picture of our species. Through that they get to see us at our worst. They are receiving what passes as entertainment and mass media, sensationalized journalism. They have no access to print media, to books that represent the highest expression of human wisdom, or to the internet with its constant search for truth and representation of and support for alternatives. They would have no way of knowing, through what communication they can intercept, that there is wisdom in our species. What a shame.

GMOs are N O T the Solution to the Current Global Food Crisis

In the current game of political football, as the world's leaders meet to discuss the means by which the current global food crisis might be solved, there seems to be a growing momentum building around support for a solution based on genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The suggestion is that the world's industrial seed companies (e.g. Monsanto, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland) should develop new genetically modified strains of food crops able to produce higher yields in the face of shifting global climates brought about by global warming.

Haven't we been here before? Aren't GMOs a major part of the reason we have gotten to this point?

The Green Revolution of this past half century came about as a response to the last global food crisis. It was centered on the use of high-yield GMO seeds, the liberal use of soil and water polluting artificial fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, large-tract, mechanized, industrial agriculture, high density irrigation using mechanical pumps and water drawn from both increasingly polluted surface water and and dangerously over extracted groundwater sources, an energy-intensive global food distribution system. It was based on the industrial production of food and the building of a global industrial dependence through the supplying of food to the world's poor, rather than supplying to them the ability to produce their own food. And ultimately it created the current global food crisis through allowing, even encouraging, a tripling of the world's population from a little more than two billion to the current 6.6 billion with a new U.S. (300 million people) added to the population every year.

So what's the problem? The problem is that the Green Revolution was and continues to be dependent on the constant availability of cheap energy, especially cheap oil. GMOs are a high-tech solution to a natural problem. And high-tech means high energy consumption.

A problem cannot be its own solution. We cannot solve the current global crisis caused by the Green Revolution by doing more of the same. Those high yields on which the Green Revolution was based come at the expense of tremendous loss of life-supporting topsoil through erosion and overcropping, and the irreversible destruction and drawdown of both surface water and groundwater (aquifers) sources. It has led to the unsustainable destruction of forests critical to the planet's ability to balance the climate, and critical to the planet's water cycle, atmospheric cycle and carbon cycle. To seek to solve those problems with even more industrial agriculture and even higher yields, which will undoubtedly require higher uses of petrochemicals and water and the higher loss of critical topsoil, is no solution at all.

Most importantly, the Green Revolution was, as mentioned above, dependent on abundant cheap energy. A key part of the reason the current crisis has developed as that the world's oil supplies are declining at a rate that has pushed us toward various alternative fuel sources. The most critical of those, of course, is biofuels which have directly contributed to the current, escalating global food crisis. To move forward into a future that will be even more deprived of the cheap abundant energy on which the Green Revolution depends with a strategy that will perpetuate that agricultural need of cheap, abundant energy is taking the crisis of today, pushing it out a couple of decades and transforming it from a crisis into a catastrophe.

The Green Revolution has already allowed - almost demanded - the global human population to push into serious overshoot. There is not enough global agricultural capacity to support the present global human population, let alone the additional human population that would result from a second Green Revolution. To attack the current global food crisis without also addressing the very sensitive and complex problem of human overpopulation and the need for global population control is to offer no solution at all.

Peak Oil Choices

Life is choices. Choices must be made. Those we do not make, those we choose not to make, those we opt to ignore, those of which we unaware, often for reasons of chosen ignorance, are often made for us, by default. Those choices we choose not to make we have no control over. The outcome is decided by someone or something else. It's like an election. The old saying is - and I am not trying to quote but to paraphrase - if you choose not to vote don't complain about the results. Your vote is your entry fee for the right to complain. You get the government you don't bother voting for.

The approach of peak oil has brought with it a wide array of choices that had to and have to be made. Most of us in the peak oil movement are well aware of many of these choices, are making them at the personal level, are involving ourselves with the process of making them at the local community level. Through key web sites and organizations like ASPO we are attempting to get those national and international choices made. But it is a tremendously difficult task, like changing the course of a runaway ocean liner or stopping a runaway train. The end result of the inaction is that many of those choices are being made by default, by nature.

The biggest problem is getting decision makers - those who have to make the right choices - to understand what peak oil really is and what the implications of peak oil are on our global society. Peak oil is many things but it is not about running out of oil. The mainstream media seem to, for some reason, be very slow (unwilling?) to understand this. They continue to define peak oil as running out of oil and, as a result, characterize peak oil pundits as fringe wackos. If, indeed, peak oilers were defining peak oil as running out of oil that would be a fair criticism. Lew Rockwell, for another example, defines peak oil as the point where all of the oil has been found and irreversible decline starts. That's a little closer but still not a clear understanding of peak oil. All in the peak oil movement understand that discoveries will continue well after peak oil but that those discoveries will be fewer, smaller and far more difficult and expensive to process. The reality is we will probably never run out of oil.

Peak oil is not about your cost of gasoline as such. We will reach a point where whatever oil is left is so energy-expensive to extract and process that it will take more energy to turn it into fuel than the energy we get from the fuel produced. At that point it will simply be left in the ground.

Peak oil is about the rate at which what oil, in its various forms, does remain can be extracted and processed. The global human population currently uses somewhat more than 86m barrels of oil or other liquid hydrocarbon fuel every day. We do not extract that amount of oil and have not done so for over three years. The difference between what oil is being extracted and what liquid hydrocarbons are being used is being made up from alternative sources such as; tar sands, oil sands, coal to liquid, gas to liquid, methane to liquid, bio-fuels and from drawing down strategic petroleum reserves.

At the moment there is still a small buffer in all liquids, being liquid crude and the alternatives listed above. But that buffer is paper thin and global consumption has, for these past three years, been growing faster than the alternatives can fill the gap. That problem has been masked so far by a small amount of demand destruction as more and more "users" are priced out of using petroleum products by the rapid run-up in prices over these past three years. This demand destruction has been most apparent and most damaging in poor third world countries, many of which can no longer afford the importation of any gasoline. A thriving black market has developed in many of these situations where fuel is smuggled into the country and sold at ridiculously high prices to those few customers who are still prepared or need to buy fuel at whatever price.

But spot shortages are starting to occur in the rich, developed countries as well, including U.S., Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, Australia and more. Gasoline shortages in developing nations such as China and India are also common occurrences as growth in demand far outstrips the development of the infrastructure needed to satisfy this demand. The frequency of shortages will undoubtedly increase. The global liquid fuels supply, because of the paper thin buffer, is susceptible to significant disruption from previously insignificant events. Every hiccup in Nigeria, Qatar, Venezuela or any other producing and exporting nation, the falling off the exporter list by countries like Indonesia, Mexico, possibly Venezuela, Russia and others throws a major monkey wrench into the global oil market and sees a major up-tick in spot market prices which may, over the course of a week, climb by more than what the average global price of oil oil was ten years ago or less.

One of the most economically disruptive impacts of the choices not made in the face of peak oil - more often exactly the wrong choices made - will be the death of globalization. Globalization has been the driver behind economic growth and expansion throughout the developed and developing world over these past several decades. China, India and other Tiger economies have been, much to the chagrin of a large portion of the population in the older economies of the "developed" world, the greatest beneficiaries of globalization. While the older economies have remained relatively static - these economies have seen a shift from a production to a service economy rather than real growth - with "real" growth (when there is growth at all) of only a couple of percentage points, the economies of China, India and other developing economies have grown at double digit rates, often exceeding twenty percent in good years.

But the mechanics of globalization are driven by cheap oil and its derivative fuels. It depends on the massive and rapid movement of goods over thousands of miles by ships, airlines, trains and trucks, all of which run on liquid fuels derived from oil. All of these forms of transport are under serious threat from rapidly rising oil prices. Airline companies are having to take a number for the line-up at bankruptcy court. Trans-oceanic shipping is teetering on the brink with shipping costs doubling or more because of fuel costs, especially for the long list of products where energy and shipping cost are a major cost component (in many cases more than 25% of the overall product cost before the price run-ups began). Rail lines and carriers, particularly in North America, have been shrinking and consolidating for years and no longer have the financial vitality to absorb these rapidly rising fuel prices. Independent truckers, which now represents the bulk of overland transport in North America, has absorbed so much of the cost of rising fuel costs that they can no longer stay on the road (as they slide ever closer and ever quicker toward bankruptcy), even if they could charge surcharges for fuel costs.

As I detailed in Peak Oil, Deglobalization and Ecolomics many outsourced industries that are being hit hardest by rising fuel prices are beginning to repatriate their operations closer to their markets. U.S. steel imports from China have, over the past year, declined by 20% while U.S. domestic steel production is ramping back up and has increased by 10% during the same period. Much of the production and assembly of goods that had been outsourced to China and other Tiger economies is being repatriated and ramped up in Mexico, the closest source of cheap labour for the manufacture of goods for the American consumer.

But these simplified repatriation decisions that may seem to make good economic sense in a business-as-usual scenario are not, as I detailed in the above article, are not good decision or choices in the face of peak oil. They simply move the energy consumption of the manufacturing processes from one location to another but are still built around an unchanged model of centralized production of goods moved by a hopefully-viable distribution system to the markets and consumers. Moving production to Mexico is definitely not wise in the long term. Mexico's domestic oil production is plummeting, by as much as 20% or more each year, and that poor country will soon find itself a net importer of oil if there is much effort to move outsourced American industry from China to Mexico.

Repatriating outsourced industries from the developing world to the developed world and doing so without redesigning the processes to be less energy-intensive and converted to decentralized processes that produce right in the consuming market, wherever it may be, simply defers the eventual and necessary industrial response to peak oil. Very soon there will not be enough liquid fuels being produced globally, from whatever source, to satisfy total global demand. Very soon the industrial model is going to have to be changed, choices - correct choices - are going to have to be made, to cope with the reality that there is not enough fuel being produced globally to support the present model that relies on centralized, mechanized production and long distance distribution by liquid-fuel-dependant transport infrastructure.

The choices we have neglected to make, for whatever wrong-headed reason, have been made for us. We are no longer in control of the rules of the game. that's the price of choices not made.

Peak Oil, Deglobalization and Ecolomics

According to the Ecolomics website ecolomics is ".....an improved balance between inter-generational ecological objectives and more short-term economic priorities. The relationship between these two often disparate spheres is perceived as being dominated too much by the latter. .....ecolomics at the same time can facilitate more broadly the discussion, negotiation and analysis of the interaction between ecological and economical concerns. " It goes on to explain, "This is not a new subdiscipline but a political concept, somewhat similar but considerably narrower than the concepts of sustainable development and of ecopolitics."[23]

The field of ecology for the first time brought to the environmental movement, at exactly the time it was important to begin making serious inroads into reducing the degradation we were inflicting on the environment, the benefits of a disciplined scientific study of the complex interrelationships and interdependence of all living and environmental systems. This new science may have been, in large measure, responsible for the general public understanding and acceptance of environmentalism.

As we approach a serious confluence of peak oil, other resource peaks, global warming, a global freshwater crisis, a global food crisis, a global soil crisis, all exacerbated by massive human overpopulation, can ecolomics serve as the catalyst to achieve a general understanding of the catastrophes that lay ahead of us? Can it help build a momentum of public support for the programs that will be needed to mitigate the impact of these crises on human society? Will ecolomics succeed in getting people to finally realize, especially those in power, that the environment is not a servant of human economics nor can economics function independent of the environment but must be, in fact, a subset of it?

We cannot continue to treat the global environment as a human cesspool in the name of economic convenience. We cannot continue to allow travesties that threaten the future of environmental survivability such as the Canadian legislation that allows lakes to be reclassified as "tailings impoundment areas" to allow mining companies to dump their toxic effluents there which would otherwise be in clear contravention of the government's own fisheries act.[24]

The more scarce the resources become that our industrial society are built on, it seems, the further industry and government are willing to push environmental degradation to get at those resources. Much of that environmental degradation has been pushed on to poor, desperate nations under globalization, nations prepared to destroy their local environment for the sake of an influx of western capital. Under deglobalization brought on by energy scarcity, however, as we increase the push to exploit our own dwindling resources to make up for exhausted, cheap offshore supplies, all of that degradation could be brought home to roost.

For the past several decades the incessant debates over the issue of trade globalization have largely centered on the cost benefits of production efficiency through the industrial concentration of zone specialization versus the adverse downstream economic impact on the industrialized economies brought about by offshoring of manufacturing and industrial processes and the skilled jobs that go with them. This has generated an endless barrage of hand wringing such as, "Over the past half-century, the United States has seen its global dominance in dozens of industries slip away, mostly to Asia, and particularly to China and Japan, not to mention a continuing procession of tiger economies." and "Once upon a time America owned the automobile industry ..... the US no longer dominates an industry that it practically invented. "[1] and "We're talking about 4 million jobs that will be outsourced to India probably over the next ten years."[2]

Job losses and loss of the industrial base in the OECD nations, therefore, have been the core concerns. Until now that is.

The biggest issue in trade globalization over these past couple of years, and an issue that is going to grow in importance as oil demand begins to seriously outstrip oil supplies, is the rising cost of those offshored products due to the serious and incessant rises in the cost of shipping brought about by rising fuel costs, most particularly rising oil prices. Trans-oceanic shipping remains essentially fully dependant on oil as a fuel source. A recent report issued by CIBC World states, "Higher energy prices are impacting transport costs at an unprecedented rate. So much so, that the cost of moving goods, not the cost of tariffs, is the largest barrier to global trade today."[14]

Finally we are getting close to the debate being recentered on what will be the defining issue as oil scarcity following peak oil pushes us into a new era of deglobalization.

The OECD offshoring of so many industries over the past few decades has not only outsourced the jobs from those industries. It has also outsourced the demand for energy, particularly oil, that the outsourced industry and jobs would have consumed at home. In short it has had an odd effect of redistributing a significant chunk of the oil and energy usage away from the industrialized OECD countries toward the emerging industrializing countries like China, India, other Asian countries and Latin America.

UK statistics show, for example, between 1990 and 2006, a major energy use reduction in a number of key industries that is only partially, and only in some instances, accounted for by improved efficiency. Iron and steel production, for example, saw a net reduction in energy use over this period of 36,763,200 boe (barrels of oil equivalent) per year - US steel production was reduced by more than half in the same period, despite there being a marginal domestic increase in steel use during the same period. British non ferrous metals production energy use declined by 2,023,200 boe, mineral products by 9,820,800 boe, industrial engineering and related products by 6,026,400 boe, vehicle production by 2,239,200 boe and construction by 4,147,200 boe (an overall demand reduction in those industries of over 61,000,000 boe/year). This is contrasted against general increases in energy consumption and production in other industries such as textiles, food, furniture, etc. and an overall relatively flat industrial energy usage as industrial growth was offset in most industries through achievement of significant energy efficiencies during this period.

Most in western societies seem to believe - this belief largely fostered by self-serving politicians and nation-centric media - that the massive increase in oil demand in China, India and other emerging economies, is because everyone in those nations is suddenly buying and driving automobiles. You cannot view the exploding Chinese auto sales market through a North American or even European perspective. Perhaps the more appropriate is a Cuban perspective. A very large proportion of automobile purchases in China (as much as half in many cities) are made with the express intent of using the vehicle as a taxi, either one officially licensed as such or as a black market taxi - you know, the one owned by the shadowy character standing in the corner at the airport going pssst. The vast preponderance of travel in Chinese cities is by bus and other public transit, taxi, or bicycle (China has far more bicycles than any other country, including India). In recent years, however, new legislation in China's largest cities like Shanghai and Beijing is pushing rickshaws and bicycles off city streets in favour of car traffic. This is pushing more and more people into taxis. The upsurge in car sales is not necessarily an increase in private car ownership but rather car passengership. This heavy usage of automobiles as taxis, by the way, significantly distorts the Chinese national vehicle miles travelled (VMT) statistics. The VMT per vehicle is higher than in the U.S. because the ratio of taxis to personal autos is so high.

The reality is that much of the growing oil demand in China and India originates from the massive volume of construction in those countries (China and India over the past several years are using more concrete and construction steel than the rest of the world combined) and from the high energy needs of rapidly increasing industrialization. Most of that industrialization is for products for export as OECD countries offshoring the industries they once dominated continue to turn these emerging economies into their manufacturing plants, refashioning themselves as service economies in the process.

With the dramatic increases in the price of oil over these past five years, however, this trend is already beginning to be reversed. Industries are slowly being repatriated, or the last hold-outs against offshoring are finding their business volume exploding. U.S. steel imports from China have, for example, declined by 20% over the past two years while at the same time domestic steel production has increased by 10%. And the momentum is picking up as OECD nations are forced by rising energy costs to re-examine the benefits of globalization. As the paper Reinventing Globalization puts it, "The heralded increases in oil costs due to the exhaustion of reserves and global warming linked to CO2 emissions are going to force us, experts believe, to take a new look at the global flow of merchandise...."[18] That paper goes on to make this point; "Eight hair dryers, toasters or coffee-makers out of ten sold in the world are made in China. Is the logic of specialization by production zones tenable when the cost of energy is going to explode?"[18]

The issue, however, gets much more complicated than most seem to be thus far allowing for.

If oil prices continue to rise because of increasing supply-side issues is the repatriation of industries to the OECD countries a reasonable or even workable response? The daily barrage of financial news coverage of steadily rising oil prices assaults us with an endless litany of excuses, none of them touching on the reality that the underlying reason is declining global oil supplies. We may have already seen the global peak in oil production, as long ago as spring 2005. Increases in all liquids since that time have largely been the result of non-conventional oil like tar sands and deep water, alternatives like ethanol, coal to liquid, gas to liquid and coal bed methane. For much of this year, and in some cases earlier, countries like the U.S. have been dipping into their strategic petroleum reserves. And globally oil production and consumption have surpassed new oil discoveries since the early 1980s, global production and usage now four to five times greater than new discoveries.

There is no question that rising oil prices are starting to hurt globalization. As the report Will Soaring Transport Costs Reverse Globalization? puts it, "In global shipping, the increase in ship speed over the last fifteen years has doubled fuel consumption per unit of freight. With oil prices now accounting for almost half of total freight costs, it should come as no surprise that soaring oil prices have translated directly into soaring transport costs. ..... Currently, transport costs are equivalent to an average tariff rate of more than 9%. At $150 per barrel, the tariff-equivalent rate is 11%, going back to the average tariff rates of the 1970s. And at $200 per barrel, we are back at “tariff” rates not seen since prior to the Kennedy Round GATT negotiations of the mid-1960s."[14] In the report Globalization death watch, Part I: Airlines, cargo ships increasingly desperate due to rising fuel costs they state "The cost of shipping a 40 foot container from Shanghai to the east coast of North America has gone from $3,000 in 2000 to $8,000 because of the cost of fuel, and for many products, the Asian cost advantage has virtually disappeared. ..... But at $200 per barrel, it will soon cost $15,000 in transport costs to ship from China to the US eastern seaboard."[13]

Repatriating the industries that are generating products abroad and shipping them to countries like the U.S. does not, however, eliminate the problem. If fuel costs are rising because supply can no longer keep pace with demand, repatriating those industries and the production energy they consume is simply going to change the geographic location of that energy consumption. If there is insufficient oil to meet demand, where is the extra oil going to come from to power the industries that are being repatriated? To build the industrial infrastructure that those industries will need? To supply the transport energy for the importation of the raw materials needed by those repatriated industries? All of the industrial energy consumption that was exported through offshoring under globalization will again have to be met at home. The nations repatriating industries are going to be facing increased domestic oil and other energy demand at the same time that global oil supplies, the reason for the repatriation, are diminishing.

Yes, declining global oil production is "going to force us, experts believe, to take a new look at the global flow of merchandise...."[18] When we do, however, we cannot do so with a narrow point of view focused on the final product assembly, finished product shipping, and final market distribution of those products. We must examine the whole supply chain, from extraction of raw materials and their transport to a manufacturing site to the final delivery of products to retail outlets. If we do not review the whole system we will be perpetually having to readjust as we go through the transition from the globalization that has characterized the last several decades to the progressive localization and regionalization that will follow peak oil.

I have included far more references and links below than I have quoted in this article. They are included for those who wish to achieve a deeper understanding of the issues involved in the coming deglobalization.

============================

1) America Loses Another Industry
2) TOM'S JOURNAL
3) OUTSOURCING: India readies to state its case
4) Costly Trade With China: Millions of U.S. jobs displaced with net job loss in every state
5) UAW Kills Thousands More American Jobs
6) American Worry-Mongering About China
7) New Awakening About Free Trade
8) The Great American Jobs Scam
9) Job Repatriation?
10) Forward Slash?
11) Senate Passes Smith Repatriation Provision with JOBS Act
12) De-Globalization? Musing about Oil Prices and Trade Costs
13) Globalization death watch, Part I: Airlines, cargo ships increasingly desperate due to rising fuel costs
14) Will Soaring Transport Costs Reverse Globalization?
15) Fuel Prices Putting Globalization in Reverse?
16) The Establishment Rethinks Globalization
17) The End of Globalization - Can you Smell it Yet?
18) Reinventing Globalization
19) DEFEATING GLOBALIZATION
20) Energy Use and Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Steel Production in China
21) Energy-Efficiency Improvements for the U.S. Steel Industry
22) Saving One Barrel of Oil per Ton - A New Roadmap for Transformation of Steelmaking Process
23) Ecolomics website
24) Lakes across Canada face being turned into mine dump sites

Pushing the Automobile as an Environmental Savior

One of Canada's largest daily national newspapers, The Toronto Globe and Mail, seems to be on a campaign, for whatever reason, intended to convince it's readers that the automobile, not public transit, is a solution to the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. Over recent weeks that newspaper's Report on Business has been deriding public transit and praising the automobile for everything from lowering traffic congestion to saving the planet from the evils of climate change. One of the high priests of this insidious campaign seems to be columnist Neil Reynolds. His latest column (Statscan public transit spin is out of control) is a thinly veiled critique of the new report called Commuting Patterns, from Statistics Canada.

This report reviews the statistical changes in the use of public transit in a cross section of major Canadian cities. Those changes have, unfortunately, been minor by any measure and continue to reflect the poor usage and support of public transit in this country. Reynolds seems to be suggesting that the low ridership on public transit systems is, in fact, a reason that they should be dropped and the financing that is wasted on them should be diverted instead to even more development of highways and automobile infrastructure.

The consistency of these types of attacks by The Toronto Globe and Mail in general and Neil Reynolds in particular makes one wonder what automobile company or auto industry association is paying the tab or pressuring for this spurious and patently ridiculous series of columns. If they were being put out by the small newspaper in my hometown with its circulation of under 1,000 I would be inclined to laugh it off and maybe write a scathing letter to the editor. But this is a large national newspaper with a circulation of a million and an online readership that probably rivals that. That is a little too large to ignore and, as a result, a little too dangerous to leave unchallenged.

The Globe and Mail and any other newspaper that engages in such a campaign as is obviously underway in these columns and articles is in large measure, unfortunately, making a major contribution to the car culture that is itself at the heart of so many of our environmental problems, not to mention its contribution to our national health problems, and its major and central contribution to our global diminishing supplies of not just oil but a wide variety of finite resources. It is a major contributor to the ongoing campaign to lead us blindly over the cliff that awaits with peak oil. The careful and wilful manipulation of data and statistics to feed the public love for their automobiles, to push the automotive agenda is unconscionable.

Why is There a Shortage of People and Equipment in the Oil Industry?

The common lament of oil executives today, and the increasingly tedious explanation for the drop in oil production, is that there is a shortage of trained people and the equipment needed to increase exploration, development and production to offset declines from older fields. Both shortages, I would very strongly suggest, are born out of the same realities.

What attracts people to most professions is not the mundane. It is the potential for the exceptional, the potential to be part of the big find, the big discovery, the big breakthrough. The simple reality is that the peak in oil discovery was a full half century in the past, production now at 4-5 times the level of new discovery. The last major oil discoveries were nearly thirty years ago. Production of the premium, light-sweet crudes have now been in decline for several years. Overall crude production has already decline with increases in production in recent years coming from alternatives, not from increased crude production. The long decades of major technological development in the oil industry since then, in terms of both exploration and production, have not altered those realities. That is hardly a situation that is going to attract the best and brightest to the profession. It is more likely to attract those who walk in with their eyes closed, who have not bothered to check the landscape before they commit themselves. When you add into the mix the disdain that most people today now feel for the oil industry, the fact that new exploration and development is taking place in some of the most inhospitable regions on the planet, the reality that oil is soon to become a dying industry to which it would be very unwise to hitch your wagon, there should be very little surprise that the industry is having trouble finding qualified people.

And the equipment that is declared to be needed and in short supply is in the same boat. The geography and geology involved in the new oil environment take a tremendous toll on equipment, or require totally new equipment because existing equipment simply can't do the job now required. As with qualified people, why would the companies that build the equipment be investing large amounts in the research, development and production of equipment for an industry which looks increasingly like it will not remain viable long enough for them to recoup their costs? It may be culturally suicidal to use the words peak oil inside the oil industry but it would likewise be suicidal to not be aware of that reality. Corporate culture demands an awareness of the risks to investment and peak oil is unquestionably the greatest risk for new investment in the oil industry.

What the executives of the large oil majors are doing is trying to convince others, like equipment developers, national oil companies, exploration companies and today's students to take the risks that they are fully aware are foolhardy. Those oil executives know what the future of their industry holds. That is clear in their rush to diversify into other forms of energy. They are not going to commit their own profits to further investment they know will have no pay back. The only strategy left open to them was to convince others to make that investment. Failing to convince them to do so, after all, gives them a point of blame to focus on while they run out their term in office and crank up their golden parachutes.

Peak Oil: City Survivability

It is probable that one's view of what type of community will be survivable on the other side of peak oil is heavily influenced by that in which they were raised. It is important for you to know, therefore, that I was raised in a small town with a population of about 1,300 with the nearest "significant" community of over 30,000 about thirty miles away and the nearest large city over 100 miles away. I freely admit that my views are biased toward that as the most survivable of post-peak community arrangements but I do not concede that it is rooted solely in my upbringing. It is a bias based on considerable thought, research and in-depth reasoning.

An obvious key to post-peak community survivability is that the further we go beyond peak oil the greater the compromises that have to be made in the usage, allocation and marketing of what oil remains and is available on the world market. It is a reasonable question, in fact, as to whether an "oil market" will or even can persist beyond peak oil. The primary role of marketing, after all, is to create and maintain demand for a product, to ensure that the marketplace absorbs the surpluses that the producers turn out. But the Texas Railroad Commission which controlled world oil prices while the U.S. was the world's primary producer and exporter of oil lost control of the market pricing for oil when the U.S. passed peak. Similarly it looks as though OPEC is losing control of the market price as they seem to have collectively arrived at Peak Oil as well. At the moment, in fact, there seems to be a multilateral tug-of-war to see who is going to control oil prices in the future. In a world of no oil surpluses, however, the greatest need will be to stifle demand, not encourage it. If the massive machinery of the marketing industry can be turned toward stifling demand and developing new, rational consumer expectations it may still have a vital role to play. The likelihood is slim, however, that the oil marketing juggernaut can or will go through such a major turnaround.

You will have to forgive me if the following is repetitious to you but it is a point I am passionate about making. Peak oil is not just about the oil, not about liquid fuels! There are over 300,000 products in everyday usage around the world that are wholly or partially made from or derived from oil and natural gas. Not only does our society run on oil - including, very importantly, our production of food - but it is largely built from oil and built and maintained by the energy derived from oil. Whether we are yet approaching, at, or already past peak oil is irrelevant and the ongoing discussion of "when" is a needless and dangerous diversion. The uncertainty as to when does not in any way mean there is uncertainty about "if". Peak Oil will happen! What is important is that knowing we are approaching the limits of our oil production capacity we should be working to reduce our dependence as quickly as possible while we still have the oil-energy to fuel the required transition away from that dependence. Instead we continue to increase our dependence. As many as 14,000 new products per year are brought on the market which are wholly or partially made from oil or its derivatives. The result is that the closer we get to peak oil the more critical becomes our dependence on that oil and the greater the price we will pay after that peak. There are two lines in a poem of mine that keep haunting me as I see this unfold;
When you've come to the end of the line
And the living hurts more the shorter the time..........
Those lines were written about the physical trials of aging but the deeper I have explored the full implications of peak oil the more applicable they have seemed to me to that issue.

It should be obvious, but seems not to be to many including our political leaders, that cities are not now, have never been nor are they capable of becoming self-sufficient in a fossil fuel deprived world. The heavy concentration of population in cities relies critically on resources from outside the city for its survival. There is generally insufficient arable land within a city to grow the food that the city's population needs. The hard goods required by the city are made of metals and other resources that must come from outside of that city. The goods that the city produces are invariably greater than the citizens of the city can absorb and require markets outside of that city to absorb them. The physical distances within a city, especially modern cities, require some energy-dependent system to move the population about from place to place. And the other factor within a city that keeps cities energy dependent is the vertical development. Cities, especially modern cities where over half the people live in apartments, are built up as well as out. That vertical development requires energy to overcome gravity, a simple reality that is too easy to gloss over in an energy-rich world.

Regardless of the size of the city, thousands of tons of materials flow into and out of the city every day. Even with a drastically downscaled lifestyle hundreds of tons of materials, most importantly food, are going to have to flow into and out of the city everyday if the inhabitants of that city are to survive. Without fossil-energy transportation reliance is going to have to be on other forms of transportation, e.g. rail, water, animal-drawn transport, human-drawn transport, etc. As we are starting to see with oil-producing countries holding back reserves to use in their own futures, however, when there is a future conflict in rural areas surrounding cities of degrading their own resources of soil and water to produce food for the city or preserving those resources for their own future needs the obvious human decision is to hold back supply in order to preserve resources for future use.

The vertical infrastructure of cities will become a serious post-peak liability rather than an asset. A twenty-five storey apartment building without benefit of water raised by pumps, electricity for heating and lighting, and without elevators to move people and goods up and down will not be functional when the energy to do all of those things runs out. Anything higher than three or four floors up simply will not be workable over the long term except for the extremely fit. The most consistent argument in favour of the city as a post-peak community model are based on the efficiencies achieved by concentrating population in a smaller area. But when that density is based on vertical development and that population relies on resources from outside of that city the energy required to achieve those efficiencies of density negate the benefits in an increasingly energy-deprived world.

The increasingly common sealed apartment buildings dependent on mechanized air filtration and conditioning, for example, will be particularly ill-suited for the post peak era, regardless of vertical size. In these buildings windows cannot be opened in order to manage air flow, especially for cooling in the heat of summer. The concurrence of peak oil and global warming do not bode well in this regard.

The other major component of the city's vertical infrastructure, of course, is the office building. In the city center office towers of fifty stories and more are increasingly common. These are almost always sealed buildings and totally dependent on elevators for movement of people and goods.

The average city of one million occupies an area of 500-1,000 square miles. That is an equivalent of 320,000-640,000 acres (640 acres per square mile). Assuming that all of that city space were turned to the production of food (no buildings, roads or other infrastructure) that would mean .32-.64 of an acre per person for food production. The estimates of how much arable land per person is necessary for survival vary from a low of .5 in warm climates where multiple crops per year can be taken from the land to 5 acres or higher in cooler climates limited to one crop per year because of the short growing season. The reality is that over half the space in a city is taken up with buildings and other infrastructure which would mean less than .16-.32 acres per person for food production within the city. Clearly, therefore, even with the most efficient food production techniques possible without fossil fuels means that only a small fraction of the food needed by the inhabitants of a modern city could be produced within the confines of that city.

When any species or group exceeds its carrying capacity within the territory it occupies a number of things may happen to bring population and carrying capacity back in balance. I say its carrying capacity because multiple species may share a common territory when those multiple species do not compete with each other for food or other resources. As long as they do not compete for common resources they can continue to share the territory in relative harmony and balance.

But when the carrying capacity of a region is exceeded by one or more species or groups within that region various scenarios unfold. The members of the group may fight amongst themselves for ever-dwindling resources until they achieve some sort of equilibrium with carrying capacity, a battle that will recur regularly as the population continually rises above carrying capacity. If there is unoccupied territory on the periphery of the region the group may expand into this territory thus temporarily increasing their carrying capacity until an increasing population again exceeds that expanded carrying capacity. The group can go to war or battle with groups in adjacent territories and, if successful, increase their carrying capacity by acquisition of their neighbour's land. The group may recognize the limits and develop a new relationship with the environment of their region such that they can live sustainably within the region's carrying capacity. The group may try to simply carry on business as usual and pay the price as nature reduces their numbers down to the carrying capacity. Regardless of which scenario plays out there will have to be a rebalancing of population and carrying capacity. If the region in question is a city it is not difficult to imagine the various scenarios.

When the region in question is a city, of course, the possible scenarios are the same Cities do not exist in a vacuum. They are invariably surrounded by territories that are occupied by other groups, or are pushed up against natural boundaries such as a coast line, mountains, lakes or similar limits. There is no unoccupied territory on the periphery of the modern city into which it can expand. In fact there is essentially no unoccupied hospitable land left anywhere on earth in which a human population could establish themselves sustainably. Under the present system expansion of a city is accomplished through economic development, surrounding farm land bought up and developed with new suburbs of the city. In time, however, these cities begin to run into each other, the rural land between them all gobbled up. But that form of city expansion is a function of the current, growth-oriented economic system which is unlikely to survive, at least in its present form, much beyond peak oil.

It is difficult to live in our modern, highly-advanced society with our advanced technology, high employment, widespread social safety nets and our unprecedented size and power of the middle class, and comprehend a not too distant future where the most important key to our individual survivability will be, simply, food. But that is the future we are racing toward and the gate-keeper is peak oil. Whether you have money or not or whether that money does or does not have any value will matter very little if you cannot get food. I remember many years ago reading a newspaper story about a man found starved to death in his apartment. There were tens of thousands of dollars stashed in the man's apartment. As food becomes increasingly scarce on the other side of peak oil that may be a scenario played out over and over again with people who have done nothing to prepare because they believed that money would always get them what they needed. Ain't necessarily so.

Just as there is insufficient land within most cities to produce the food needed by the city's population, there is considerable debate whether the planet has sufficient carrying capacity to support the massive global human population that now exceeds 6.6 billion. The global push for biofuels as global crude oil reserves are pushed to the limit to try to keep up with global demand has brought the issue of food and carrying capacity into sharp relief. While energy companies are running ads with messages like "I want to grow my fuel, not pump it" critics the world over, including the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF, are warning that biofuels are creating a dangerous situation that might quickly lead to a massive humanitarian disaster where tens of millions could die of starvation either because their is insufficient food globally or because the poorest of the poor can no longer afford what food is available. The idealist in me believes that access to food must not become the province of wealthy western people and nations alone. With the green revolution we promised the world's poor that they could be fed. The obligation to live up to that commitment must not disappear simply because we need to use their land to produce fuel for our SUVs.

A simply reality that we also too easily ignore in our modern world is that the arable land and the production of food does not exist where the populations that most need that food exist. Our ability to feed 6.6 billion people is heavily dependent on a few small areas of the planet where the soil, chemistry and technology has allowed us to produce food surpluses that can be shipped all over the planet to where the people are that need them. The chemistry, technology and energy through which we produce those surpluses and the energy required to distribute those surpluses all around the globe are already going into an inexorable decline. Peak food is several years behind us and global food production which is already in decline will continue to worsen dramatically over the coming years. Thus far the available global food calories per person have not declined to the level that we are seeing dramatic increases in deaths by starvation and other nutrition-related diseases. But we are definitely at a tipping point and over the next decade the impact of having passed through that tipping point will become headline news on a daily basis, provided the media are not kept from publishing hard truths as they all too often are today.

Cities will definitely not be immune from the approaching energy, food and freshwater crises. The impact on them may be initially disguised, a process that may be underway now. Throughout history politicians and power brokers have lavished their attention and whatever money they could extract from the populace through taxes on the cities. It is very likely, based on what we see in the daily news, that cities will continue to be the objects of their affection. The further that goes, however, the more blatant it becomes, the greater the disparity to what financial and political attention is being spent on the rural community, the greater grows the likelihood that the rural areas and the agricultural community are going to cease being willing partners in maintaining the artificial sustainability of the cities. This has happened many times through history but never at a time when what the rural community has has been so critical to the ongoing survivability of the cities. The balance of power in the equation is very definitely going to be shifting in favour of the agricultural community as peak oil lags further and further behind us. It is unreasonable to draw too many parallels to history in this. Never in a our history, after all, have we headed into an age where every form of energy society uses is going to go into serious and irreversible decline over the course of a single lifetime.

No Planet for Old Men

We are arriving at peak oil at a time when the largest generation yet in human history is entering statistical old age. Even more important, in most major western nations, it is a generation in which the majority of people have spent their working lives in various service industries, making their living through the neuron-firings of their brains rather than the sweat on their brows. Most have never turned a shovel, plowed a field, dug up a garden, grown their own food, canned, dehydrated or otherwise preserved their own food, harnessed a horse or helped a cow through the difficult birth of a new calf.

I am unusual in many respects. Firstly I was technically born before the arbitrarily-designated beginning of the generally-recognized Baby Boomer generation. It is generally accepted that that generation covers the period 1946-1964. I was born three months earlier in September 1945. I entered the computer software industry, one of those clearly service-oriented professions, in 1963-64 (long before the advent of the PC, computer monitors, GUIs and the internet) and spent thirty-five years in that industry. But unlike most in that industry I have done all of those self-sufficiency things I listed in the opening paragraph and even more, things such as working on farms during my late teens and even earlier if you count helping out on my uncle's farm as often as I could and working side by side with my mother and step father in our half-acre vegetable garden.

Despite my familiarity and comfort with skills that would be important in a post-peak world where self-sufficiency will be critical, I do not realistically expect to be able to achieve, let alone maintain, self-sufficiency in the coming years. In fact I do not expect to be a post-peak survivor. Nor do I at all expect the vast majority of the Baby Boomer generation to be long-term, post-peak survivors. It is one of those things that makes me wish that my non-belief in the afterlife turns out to be wrong so that I could watch from afar as peak oil unfolds...... just to see what happens.

In addition to the massive size of the Baby Boomer generation we are essentially a generation that have lived our lives with a totally unrealistic sense of entitlement. We feel that the lifestyle of relative wealth - relative to the rest of the world - and relative ease in which we were raised and have since lived and made our own way, is a God-given right. We have no sense of history, of the reality that we are the first and probably only generation that has lived in a long enough period of relative peace and economic expansion to have developed that myopic sense of entitlement. But it is the historical exception, not the norm. And the reality of history is very soon going to bite us in the ass and disconnect us from the matrix.

The other unrealistic view that we have developed in this past century is the assumption of a long and healthy life. Peak oil, I believe, will also mean peak life expectancy. Many seem to be unaware of or oblivious to the fact that the average life expectancy in industrialised nations has nearly doubled since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The greater the energy use per person the longer the average life.

That co relation is very definitely not accidental. That increased energy use has been the engine of innovation in human hygiene, human nutrition, human work and, most importantly, human medicine. Two keys to that statistical rise in life expectancy are; a major reduction in infant mortality especially in the areas of premature births and births of children with genetic diseases; and the dramatic improvements in medical care for the aged. Essentially if you can live into your sixties modern medicine can and will be used to keep you around for another couple of decades or longer. A very large proportion of seniors today have become seriously medically dependent, owing their continued survival to the wonders of modern medicine.

Both of these areas will face serious hurdles when we pass peak oil and the energy to continue the medical miracles of the past century - to which we have become accustomed and to which we feel entitled - goes into serious decline. Infant mortality will again be on the increase as access to medical facilities for difficult births declines. The increasingly difficult life that will accompany the decline of global oil availability will also exact a tremendous price on the aging baby-boomer generation and future generations of seniors. The heroic medicine that has been responsible for up to a 10-15 year increase in average life expectancy will be increasingly difficult to maintain as the world's energy resources decline.

I don't want to engage in a debate about creationism or intelligent design nor is this statement intended as an endorsement of either of those two points of view. Our bodies genetically evolved during millions of years where the average life expectancy was under forty years. Nature, for any species, does not expend a lot of resources on maintaining an organism beyond reproductive age. Man is the only living species on this planet that enjoys a lifespan that lasts twice as long as our reproductive period. That longevity is not of nature's doing. It has been of our own making, and it has been strongly linked to our use and expenditure of energy. Just as we have used energy - especially that from oil - to create an artificial carrying capacity 5-10 times greater than the earth's natural carrying capacity, we have used that energy to create an artificial life expectancy more than double the natural life expectancy for our species.

As the energy declines the age to which seniors live in industrialized nations will also go into decline. The artificial life expectancy created by our energy and technology will gradually be replace again by the natural life expectancy for which our bodies have genetically evolved. It is reasonable to assume that the first casualties in this transition will be those whose continued survival has been a result of the most recent and dramatic changes, improvements and innovations that our use of energy and technology have given rise to in this past century. The more medically and technologically dependent among us - which covers a high proportion of the senior population - will be the first to face serious problems as energy declines.

On a personal note..... I have been through two serious medical events in the past year, related to my heart, my circulatory system and my endocine system. The tests alone that I have endured would, if I were paying - I am Canadian and we have a universal health care system - would have added up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The medicines that I have been prescribed and to which I owe my continued survival would, without that universal heath care and a good private medical plan, cost hundreds of dollars every month.

I am one of those medically-dependent people that will not fare well during a decline in global energy supplies. I have long accepted that. I continue to write what I write for the benefit of others. I want you to think about the ways in which your life and your survival, now and in the near-term future, are dependent on energy and technology. I want you to think about what you are going to have to do to ensure your longevity when the technology that our heavy of use of energy has allowed begins to disappear. I want you to consider what changes you are going to have to make as you become increasingly responsible for your own continued survival as the "system" that has taken care of you begins to fall apart.

Sorry, no more presentations

I have had several requests in recent months to make peak oil presentations. I regret that I have had to turn them down and that, further, I can not commit to any future presentations at this time. I have had serious health issues this past year and, considering the nature of those issues, do not see any point on the near term horizon when I will again be in a position to make presentations.

I have a condition called cardiomyopathy. Specifically two of my three heart arteries are completely collapsed, but the good news is that my circulatory system has rerouted itself successfully meaning that the cardiologists say there is no point in a bypass operation which would only duplicate what my body has already done for itself. The down side of my condition, however, is that I only have thirty percent heart function, which means my energy level is low, I tire easily, and long drives and air travel are definitely not recommended by my doctors.

All of that is further complicated by the fact that I have progressive arthritis in my hips, high blood pressure, and have, as a result of the heart condition, developed type 2 diabetes. All in all I am physically a mess at the moment
The good news is that none of this has interfered with my research and my writing on peak oil, of which this blog is a major component. Nor do I intend to let my condition interfere with that, other than concessions to my easily tiring.

I thank all of those who are regular readers of my blog and hope that it is contributing to your awareness of peak oil and its serious societal implications.

People Starting to see the Light on Oil Supply

In a recent WorldPublicOpinion.org poll (just released on April 20, 2008) conducted in 16 nations collectively containing 58 percent of the world's population, a majority of the 14,896 poll respondents believe "that governments should assume that oil is running out". That is the good news. The bad news is that they also believe "it is necessary for governments to make a major effort to replace oil as a primary source of energy." "Only 22 percent on average believe that enough new oil will be found so that it can remain a primary source of energy for the foreseeable future.” according to the poll. There does not appear to be a belief, however - there were no questions in the poll by which one could get an accurate reading - that this is a cause to change our lifestyle. The onus in the questions as posed in the poll is on governments to find replacement energy sources to allow life to carry on as is, for business as usual. It is not clear whether this was predicated on a pre-existing belief that that would be the position of the majority of people. It does, however, limit the utility of the poll.

Although it is heartening that a significant majority of people polled (the number of poll respondents is too low to be statistically accurate) appear to now understand that global oil supplies are running out, it is very disheartening that they have not made the connection that this is going to require any changes on their part. That connection has to be made before there is any chance of a realistic move toward a post-fossil-fuel society. Small steps, nonetheless, are better than no steps at all.

According to Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org, in fact, “The widespread consensus that oil needs to be replaced as an energy source may be prompted by concerns about the effect of oil on climate change as well as the belief that oil will run out.” That suggests that there is, as yet, little understanding, even though the majority of people believe that global oil supplies are running out, of the serious implications for global society when they do. It suggests they see global warming as a threat to global society but do not make the same connection for depleting oil supplies. This may be based on the apparent belief or expectation that governments will find that elusive replacement for oil that will allow things to carry on as usual. The energy fairy would seem to be alive and well. Clearly much more work has to be done to get people to see the full picture.

What this poll does do, in a limited way, is help define the nature of the myopia in public opinion as regards the approaching global energy crisis. It gives us a little better picture of where the major efforts are going to be required to raise public awareness to a level where meaningful action can be undertaken. It also clarifies what the general public perception is of government's awareness of the energy situation. Whether that perception is realistic is irrelevant; perception is reality. Clearly if government continues down the road of assuring the people there is no problem, that technology will solve the energy problem, they are going to be in dire straits when that public perception catches up with reality, when people finally realize that there is no viable replacement for oil. Having now finally realized that oil is running out, when that final shoe drops (that there is no viable substitute) it will be devastating to society. Clearly as the public starts to make that connection there is going to be a strong need for very clear and meaningful leadership and direction of what society needs to do to powerdown to a non-fossil-fuel lifestyle. That's when things are going to get really interesting.

============================

World publics say oil needs to be replaced as energy source by World Public Opinion
World Publics Say Oil Needs to Be Replaced as Energy Source

Wherefore Art the Widgets?

This article deals with the issue of whether nations need a National Infrastructure Database to prepare for the possibly severe infrastructure management challenges that will manifest themselves as we move past peak oil and head down the post-peak downslope. It was suggested by Geoff Holman of Australia, for which I thank him. Ah, the wonders of the worldwide web. May it last long and prosper. It has made this peak oil dialogue truly global, which it needs to be but which would have been very difficult to accomplish without the internet.

Also see my other articles in this blog on infrastructure;

Peak Oil and the Three Sisters of Social Collapse
Peak oil and overpasses
The myth of permanence: post-peak infrastructure maintenance
Post Peak Dam Maintenance, or Lack Thereof
Our Dangerous Infrastructure
Cascade Failure in River Systems with Multiple Dams
Our Dangerous Infrastructure II

Infrastructure is generally seen as - and loudly proclaimed by politicians and the captains of industry as being - a societal facilitator. In thefreedictionary.com it is described thus; "The term infrastructure has been used since 1927 to refer collectively to the roads, bridges, rail lines, and similar public works that are required for an industrial economy, or a portion of it, to function."[6] And investorwords.com defines it as "The basic physical systems of a country's or community's population, including roads, utilities, water, sewage, etc. These systems are considered essential for enabling productivity in the economy."[7]

But what happens when the ability to maintain that infrastructure disappears and the infrastructure becomes a hindrance rather than a facilitator, such as it will do during the probable long, grinding economic decline accompanying peak oil? When the current infrastructure maintenance professionals begin retiring or dying and aren't being replaced because of ever-tighter budget constraints, who will even know in a broad context what all is included in "infrastructure", where it is, what condition it is in, when it was built, how old it is, how long it should last, what maintenance it needs and when?

Will the same politicians who built their election campaigns around throwing up new feel-good infrastructure be as quick to accept the responsibility for ensuring it's maintenance as the global economy falls into serious, terminal decline? The paper, Deconstructing the Manifest has this take, "of course, maintenance of these "public" projects is left to the public. .....no politician could ever successfully run on a platform of "maintenance" or status quo. The public will is not swayed by the mundane. And so we see our roads and bridges decay, slowly, inexorably,..... Truly comprehensive maintenance is simply too expensive....."[12]

The reality is, as well as facilitating an economy, infrastructure is also a limiting factor for that economy, a constraint. The infrastructure defines the limits within which an economy can effectively function and, more importantly, evolve, adapt and change. For the economy to shift direction, as it must surely do on the peak oil downslope, it suddenly finds that its infrastructure is an impediment. The walls that enclosed and secured the fortified cities of medieval Europe, for example, were a serious constraint as those cities sought to expand and open up as the Industrial Revolution swept across the continent. The established infrastructure of any city suddenly becomes an impediment when that city wants to install rail lines or highways or subways linking the city center with the suburbs and areas beyond. The destruction of the infrastructure of so many European and Asian cities during two world wars, in reality, facilitated the rebirth of those cities around new infrastructure, saved those cities the agonizing decisions and complications of replacing and upgrading their infrastructure to satisfy and facilitate the drastically changed needs of a technology-oriented, growth-driven, post-war society.

The strong probability is that the infrastructure needed and maintainable by a post-fossil-fuel or seriously fossil-fuel-deficient society will be as different from today as today's infrastructure is different from that which existed in pre-industrial Europe. In the past, however, the impediment imposed by seriously outdated and unmaintainable infrastructure was handled by demolishing and replacing that old infrastructure with new. But will this be an option still open to us if we wait until we are on the peak-oil downslope before we start to address the infrastructure needs of the future? We will no longer have the exploitable energy, technology, finances and vast quantities of raw materials needed for wholesale replacement of that infrastructure. The only options left open to us if we sleepwalk into peak oil may narrow down to trying to somehow maintain that crumbling infrastructure in perpetuity or simply doing without as it falls apart. But infrastructure doesn't just shrivel up benignly in the sun like a tomato dropped from the vine. As infrastructure crumbles through age and lack of maintenance it can impose very serious risks on society that could, collectively, jeopardize millions of lives over the balance of this century and beyond.

Geoff Holman, a reader of this blog from Australia, as noted above, graciously suggested an article on the question of building a national infrastructure database to serve as the basis for dealing with the massive infrastructure inventory during the declining economy that will likely occur beginning with peak oil and the downslope beyond. Not surprisingly, various attempts at building national infrastructure databases have been made in the past.

One of the first projects, for example, of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, formed following the terrorist attack on the U.S. on September 11, 2001, was the establishment of a Critical Infrastructure Database. This database was intended as a reference source of all U.S. infrastructure considered critical and susceptible to terrorist attack, infrastructure like nuclear power plants, major dams, water systems of large urban centers like New York, airports, and so on.

Like so many projects begun in the bowels of bureaucracy, the design of this database and the data collected for it was, at best, fuzzy and incomplete. An assessment report issued by the U.S. Inspector General's office in July, 2006 turned out to be a blistering critique. The Inspector General's report cited several deep flaws in the database that underlies the plan, including: "The database’s failure to distinguish the criticality of the approximately 77,000 assets it includes; The database's failure to provide a comprehensive picture of national assets; The need to develop more sophisticated tools to assess risks associated with various assets; The need for substantial additional work to complete the database. ..... The IG report specified multiple flaws that arose in the process of building the database, such as missing ZIP codes, missing facility names and language translation problems. At one point, “officials estimated that on average each [critical infrastructure/key asset] record they researched was missing information for about seven fields,” according to the report. Department officials progressively improved the methods of gathering and processing the data over the past three years, the report added. The IG analysts predicted that the database could eventually grow to hundreds of thousands of records."[11] Another report notes, "Among the critical assets in the database are Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, a Kangaroo Conservation Center, Jay’s Sporting Goods, several Wal-Mart stores, Amish Country Popcorn, and the Sweetwater Flea Market."[9] Partly as a result of the criticisms the database has been morphed into a National Asset Database but the fuzzy design, structure and data-gathering procedures still persist[8].

Whether or not the failings and criticism of the Critical Infrastructure Database/National Asset Database are responsible, the U.S. congress has recently introduced legislation taking another shot at a National Infrastructure Database. "The Dodd-Hagel National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2007 is a bipartisan measure that addresses the critical needs of our nation’s major infrastructure systems. The legislation establishes a new method through which the Federal government can finance infrastructure projects of substantial regional or national significance more effectively with public and private capital. ..... Infrastructure projects that come under the Bank’s consideration are publicly-owned mass transit systems, housing properties, roads, bridges, drinking water systems, and wastewater systems." The focus here, however, is still largely that of future infrastructure projects rather than maintenance of that already in place. Analysts and critics of this new bill, such as the American Society of Civil Engineers, note that "the current condition of our nation’s major infrastructure systems earns a grade point average of D and jeopardizes the prosperity and quality of life of all Americans." According to the Environmental Protection Agency, "$151 billion and $390 billion is needed respectively every year over the next 20 years to repair obsolete drinking water and wastewater systems. Drinking water and wastewater systems range in age from 50 to 100 years in age."[1] One wonders whether any database resulting from this effort will prove any more successful than that of the Department of Homeland Security.

A long, thirty-year career of designing and building information systems, almost always incorporating a database, has taught me that any database is as good as the ingenuity built into the design. Going back after the fact and trying to resurrect a poorly-designed, disfunctional database through retrofitting patches simply further exacerbates the problems and leads to the almost certain demise of the database, like retrofitting new extraction technology to a played-out oil well. Databases, unlike living organisms, do not evolve well. Any database, especially one as potentially complex as a national infrastructure database, needs to have considered in it's design; the motivation behind the database's existence, the breadth of data to be included, the depth of data the database can support, the data relationships to be incorporated which seriously impacts the flexibility, the controls on the purity and veracity of the data gathered, the uses the database is intended to satisfy, the ownership of and responsibility for the data contained, and much, much more. The fuzzy thinking and lack of clarity of potential use of the database that has characterized various government efforts at national infrastructure databases (not just that elaborated above) is and will, in my view, continue to be a drawback of institutional and bureaucratic control over the design and operational management of such databases. And yet I am not, for a moment, suggesting that any such national infrastructure database be privatized and handed over to business and industry. That, in my opinion, would burden such an effort with a purely business-centric, economic motivation rather than gearing it to the societal need it should serve.

For any nation to set out on a course of developing a national infrastructure database designed to help manage the infrastructure inventory on the peak oil downslope and transition into a post-peak, post-fossil-fuel age they must surely first recognize peak oil and the impact it will have on infrastructure maintenance. And considering the amount of feeding from the public trough that will be involved in the design and construction of such a database and the massive drain on public finances that will be involved in mitigating the impact of that decaying infrastructure while the national and global economy implodes, that is going to be an extremely difficult sell. It is an impossible sell when that government will not even utter the words peak oil but insists on perpetuating the myth of the steady growth economy.

There is no question, in my mind at least, that the massive, technology-dependent infrastructure on which our modern society is built is going to be a tremendous and dangerous liability on the peak oil downslope. I simply do not believe, however, and I hope that I am wrong, that any workable database could be developed at this late stage in the game, even if the political will were there to develop it, that could help mitigate the problem. Any such database is itself going to be dependent on a technology and infrastructure that may not survive long enough for the database to be a viable tool during the developing criticality of infrastructure decline. I for one, therefore, will not be joining and grassroots movement to demand that government build such a database. Sorry.

==========================================================================
1) NATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE BANK ACT OF 2007
Senator Christopher J. Dodd and Senator Chuck Hagel
2) User Friendly Electronic Database Management System for Infrastructure Maintenance in Small Cities
3) British Virgin Islands Infrastructure and Utilities Broad Policy
4) The Age of Infrastructure
5) Definitions of Infrastructure on the Web:
6) Infrastructure
7) infrastructure
8) Critical Infrastructure: The National Asset Database
9) Critical infrastructure database full of useless junk
10) National Infrastructure Coordinating Center INSight Application
11) DHS asset database can't support vaunted infrastructure protection plan
12) Deconstructing the Manifest

Peak Oil and the Three Sisters of Social Collapse

Three of the fundamental and basic human needs - food, water and shelter - have in the past century all become critically and increasingly dependent on technology and the fossil fuels that power it - at least in the developed world but also to a lesser and growing extent in the underdeveloped and developing world. These three needs will, as we pass peak oil, become the three sisters of global but uneven social collapse. Peak oil alone would make that a serious problem but they are also each going to be heavily impacted by the progression of anthropogenic or man-made global warming. Both of these serious global problems, it now appears, will occur at roughly the same time, seriously increasing the risk in these three critical areas. The whole in this case is definitely greater than the sum of the parts.


The predominant focus of debate around the peak oil issue is still, unfortunately, centered on energy itself; endless debate over when oil will peak; obfuscation over sweet versus sour versus synthetic crude, debate over the minutiae of various alternative energy options; the price of gasoline/petrol, etc. That is as much a form of denial within the peak oil community as that practiced by energy executives, politicians and the mainstream media. Peak oil is not about the oil! Focusing on the energy itself is safe, makes one appear to be aware and involved while successfully avoiding dealing with the disastrous implications of that peak and decline. Keeping the focus on energy is a self-perpetuating debate by setting up easy deniability for energy executives and their paid-for politicians, allowing them to attack the variability and imprecision in the various peak oil estimates. That in turn facilitates their continuing the climate of endless disinformation that easily serves as a smokescreen and a roadblock to beginning the increasingly critical process of preparing for the transition away from fossil fuels, a process that should have begun with the 1970s oil shocks if not earlier when the concept of peak oil was first introduced by M. King Hubbert in the 1950s.

But that transition is not or should not simply be a question of finding a workable alternative for our profligate use of oil and the other fossil fuels to power our modern society in the style to which we have become accustomed. That is, or should be, an impossible dream. Put simply, how could we move a world consisting of 6.6+billion people, 1+billion automobiles, hundreds of millions of trucks, buses, trains, planes, ships and heavy equipment, trillions of dollars of energy-dependant infrastructure and 300,000+ products at least partially made from or derived from oil and other fossil fuels into an era of declining fossil fuels that will be effectively devoid of those fossil fuels (from an EROEI perspective) within a century without impacting that society? The answer? We can't. As we approach peak oil, however (if we have not already arrived there and moved beyond it, as I believe we have), rather than dealing with that question and getting on with the transition and the massive and sometimes traumatic changes it will entail, we continue to increase our reliance on fossil energy and technology in these three areas of basic need.

The bulk of the food produced in the world today (and the foundation of the artificial carrying capacity, created as part of the Green Revolution, on which our massive surplus population survives) is very much dependant on heavy duty agricultural machinery driven by fossil fuels, massive applications of artificial fertilizers and pesticides produced from fossil fuels, on energy-intensive GMO seeds (as much as 70% of the crops we eat are now produced using GMO seeds), on the major, energy-intensive global distribution network that gets them to the farmers and the food they produce to your table, and on irrigation facilitated through powerful, fossil-energy-dependant pumps extracting water from both surface water (lakes and rivers) and groundwater (aquifers) sources (globally 70-75% of our freshwater usage is for agricultural irrigation). The building global food crisis - food riots have already occurred in several countries such as Egypt and Haiti and are probable in many more as this year progresses, and in many of the world's poorest nations food purchases already consume 50-90% of the average person's meagre income - is not so much a problem of insufficient food or even insufficient land on which to grow it. The problem is rapidly decreasing global agricultural productivity, a result of a staggering annual global loss of topsoil from erosion, toxification and salinity and a rapidly growing deficiency in soil fertility, largely a result of industrialized, petrochemical-intensive agriculture and decades of serious overcropping.

Soil fertility is produced by millions of soil micro-organisms which are all being decimated by our profligate and dangerous overuse of agrochemicals. Soil erosion and other forms of land degradation, in fact, now rob the world of 70-140,000 square kilometers per year of farm land. The total world availability of topsoil is estimated at 7,000 gigatonnes - about seventy years of topsoil at current rates of destruction and loss according to a U.N. estimate. The peak slaughter of these critical soil organisms will occur concurrent with peak oil and at the same time, therefore, that our global need for natural soil fertility will begin a dramatic increase. Globally, food availability, especially for the poor - the global emergency food grain reserve, as I detailed in my article Biofuels: Recipe for Artificially-Induced Overshoot of Earth's Carrying Capacity, has shrunk over this past decade from a marginal 120 day supply to a sub-critical 53-55 day supply [5] - is further exacerbated by the rapid increase in meat consumption in the world's major developing nations like India and China and in the frantic push toward biofuels in the rich, western nations, biofuels being produced from those already diminishing global stocks of food grains.

The vast majority of new water and irrigation projects in this past half century have been reliant on the use of powerful pumps to extract water from underground aquifers (many of which are non-replenishable, like the heavily-exploited Ogallala Aquifer in the U.S. midwest, and the majority of which are being drawn down at levels well above their replenishment rate - many of the world's major aquifers, both replenishable and non-replenishable, are declining by more than twenty feet per year), desalination plants heavily dependant on fossil fuels (this same desalination technology may soon have to be used on water drawn from coastal aquifers, like those in many nations in the middle east, which are becoming increasingly contaminated from saltwater intrusion because of excessive drawdown), powerful, energy-intensive irrigation equipment for irrigating large monoculture fields, desperate increases in agricultural development in arid areas, marginal lands and even deserts. It is a common fallacy, particularly in most of Europe and North America, to think that our supplies of fresh water are somewhat infinite. The reality is, as the report UN Highlights World Water Crisis outlines, "Despite the fact that 75 percent of the Earth's surface is covered by water, only 2.5 percent of it is fresh water, and three-quarters of that is locked up in glaciers and permanent snow cover. Only 0.3 percent of the water is surface water, found in rivers and lakes. The rest is buried deep in the ground."[6] The general lack of awareness of the limits of earth's easily-accessible freshwater resources leads to dangerous over-exploitation and abuse. Imagine the energy crisis we would be looking at if only 2.5% or 0.3% of the oil in the world were accessible, recoverable and usable and the cornucopean energy executives had been reassuring us for decades that it was all recoverable. It wouldn't much matter if there were people saying this wasn't true and that a crisis is coming. There is an unfortunate tendency for people to believe - and even go out of their way to find - those who are telling them what they want to hear, that there is no problem.

The infrastructure (using the broadest, social definition of infrastructure) on which our modern societies are so dependant (including the homes in which we live) has primarily been constructed in the past half century, most of it with a designed life span of fifty to seventy-five years (will all of those mass-produced McMansions really last that long?), built of materials that are derived from or dependant on fossil fuels, and requiring heavy fossil fuel inputs in their maintenance, upkeep and demolition. "There's a tremendous need," said Larry Roth, a professional engineer who is deputy executive director of the American Society of Civil Engineers. "Not only are we not keeping pace with growth, but we're not keeping pace with the maintenance that's required. As a result, our infrastructure is simply crumbling."[1] Most of this infrastructure will achieve and surpass its designed life span just as we pass peak oil when the natural resources (Mike Stasse, owner and moderator of ROEOZ, in his excellent paper, What Went Wrong, calls it natural capital) to replace it will no longer be available, when the energy, materials, finances, trained people resources and technology required to maintain it will no longer be available, and even when the technology and resources to decommission or demolish it are becoming increasingly unavailable (how do you tear down a fifty storey steel and glass tower before it falls down, or decommission a massive dam before it collapses and possibly kills hundreds of thousands or even millions of people?). The costs of infrastructure maintenance, always underestimated, are sobering. “We have a major infrastructure problem in this country,” said Maureen L. McAvey, an executive vice president with the Urban Land Institute, which recently published a report on global infrastructure issues. “The civil engineers have estimated that we have a $1.7 trillion shortfall in this country [U.S.A.] alone”[2]. And the growth of this deficit is very likely to accelerate as the growth economy grinds to a halt. Maintenance is almost invariably the first place that budget managers look for cuts when finances get tight.

Much of the money that needs to be spent on preparing our society for life beyond fossil fuels in the areas of food production, water usage and infrastructure maintenance, replacement, decommissioning and rebuilding, is being drained off paying for the increasing cost of supporting our car-centric mobility and our energy-dependant lifestyle. Oil prices - as well as the cost of other fossil fuels and the cost of almost everything as everything is at least partially dependent on the cost of oil and other fossil fuels - have increased dramatically over these past several years as we are increasingly dependent on more expensive and more technologically-challenging sources of energy. Shawn McCarthy, in his Toronto Globe & Mail Report on Business article, Oil peak theorist warns of chaos, war, writes, "The average cost of producing a barrel of oil has more than doubled in the past eight years, with most of that increase occurring in the past four, he[Matt Simmons] said."[3] The fossil-energy story doesn't end at oil, however. Natural gas is also fast approaching peak and prices are increasing in lockstep with the price of oil. And Richard Heinberg reports, in his article Burning the Furniture, "A soon-to-be-released study by the Energy Watch Group in Germany [the report has now been released] on the future of global coal supplies has implications so surprising and far-reaching that energy policymakers may take years to digest it. ..... The report’s central conclusion is that minable global coal reserves are much smaller than is commonly thought, and that a peak in world coal production is likely within only ten to fifteen years."[4]

Much of the misinformation and disinformation surrounding these three primary issues centers on the complexity of quantity versus quality. GMO crops, despite constant claims otherwise, produced with massive applications of artificial fertilizers and bombarded with herbicides and pesticides simply do not have either the taste or nutritional value of natural foods produced with non-chemical, organic methods. GMO seeds, particularly with the boost of global climate change, may produce larger plants and higher yields per acre but the result is like sugar- and salt-laden snack foods. The bulk is there but they are devoid of nutritional value. Like those snack foods, the more you eat the hungrier you get. The world is also lapsing into a global food allergy crisis as our digestive and immune systems struggle to adapt to relying on these unnatural foods for our nutrition.

Over one fifth of the global population today do not have access to clean drinking water. As many as a quarter of the deaths in poor third world countries is caused by water borne diseases, most commonly and crtically dehydration from diahrea caused by contaminated water. Another one fifth of the world's population only have access to one quarter to one tenth the amount of drinking water that the U.N. has established as the daily minimum requirement, and not enough water for basic hygienne. This problem worsens with each passing year. It is estimated that the majority of the global population increase over the next half century will be in areas already struggling with critical water shortages.

The glut of infrastructure development over this past half century has neglected durability and survivability in favour of speed, ease and cost reduction of construction. Sprawling suburbs of cookie-cutter houses and strip malls have grown like a cancer outward from established urban centers which are all expanding outward toward each other, gobbling up the low-density rural spaces between them. Cities have rapidly evolved over this past century into morbidly obese mega-cities covering thousands of square kilometers of concrete entombment.

It is difficult for many to understand why and how food, water and infrastructure can form the foundation of global social collapse without first gaining an understanding of the individual contributors to that collapse, the small details and problems which by themselves may seem meaningless but when combined together do build to a monumental crisis that can and will engulf the entirety of global society. This is further complicated by a general and understandable uncertainty as to the relative timing of peak oil and the subsequent decline in oil and other fossil fuels and the progression of global waming/climate change. But variability in timing ultimately affects only the severity of the challenges at any point in time. The following is by no means intended as a complete list of these problem areas but rather a representative sample.

....Over this past half century the vast majority of small, regional seed companies (many specializing in maintaining rare varieties of crop seeds) have disappeared, gobbled up by multinational companies like Monsanto, Cargill, Dupont and others. This has resulted in a rapid decline in genetic diversity as these large multinationals focus on their favourite varieties on the basis of business economics. It has also, however, made seed production a centralized industry dependent on the global distribution system, often with global seed production concentrated in either the northern or southern hemisphere, out of sync with the seasonal seed needs of the other hemsphere. This has made global agriculture and the seeds on which it relies a handmaiden of the global economy and, with centralized production and global distribution, the global energy situation. It's not just a question of reactivating and regrowing the small regional seed companies. The biodiversity of the available seed line will not be sufficient to accomodate the needs of regional climate and soil diversity. The risk and impact of crop loss with an increasingly limited global emergency food reserves is often discussed. Rarely considered, however, is the globalization of that risk if the crops being lost are the seed production of these centralized seed production companies. A major crop loss in one area, without redundancy built into the global seed production system, could suddenly wipe out the needed seed supply of much of the world. Similarly, with the drastic reduction of crop biodiversity under the control of multinational seed companies, the risk of a sudden susceptibility of a particular, widely-used variety of crop could leave much of the world with no usable fall-back variety.

....Global demand for food crops continues to rise. This is due to continued increases in the global population (more mouths to feed), global changes in food and nutrition requirements (more people turning to meat as their source of protein), more and more food crops being diverted to the production of biofuels. The problem arises from the fact that the demand for the resources required to grow that food do not rise at the same rate. While the population has tripled over the past century the usage of fresh water ras risen over six fold and the water for agriculture over eight fold. In the past twenty five years alone global use of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides has grown by an amazing thirty-three times. The amount of energy involved in food production has grown exponentially over this past century to the point that for every calorie of food energy produced and consumed more than ten calories or energy input Are required. Food miles traveled by food produced has gone through the stratosphere this past half century with food travelling now more thasn 1500 miles between field and table. Topsoil loss has grown dramatically over this past have century because of serious overcropping, erosion from irrigation and bare-field tillage, losses due to chemical toxicity and salination. Resource consumption and depletion involved in producing those ever greater quantities of food, therefore, is dramatically greater than the additional food produced.

....There was a time not that long ago when for practically ever farmer, regardless of the crop produced, saving and storing his own seed was still standard practice, and more recently still was in the underdeveloped and developing world. This localised, cultural practice of seed saving was a key component of food crop biodiversity around the world, with local varieties of the same crop genetically evolving independent of the same crop in other parts of the world. With the insidious spread of GMO seeds this critical component of biodiversity is disappearing. Everyone in agriculture knows the tremendous cost and complexity of taking on the big multinational seed companies when their seed cops invade your property and accuse you of saving seeds from their crop when your own crop has been cross-contaminated from crops of neighbouring farmers using their patented seeds. The use of GMO seeds is so ubiquitous that the ability to prevent cross-contamination of your own crop, a product of generation after generation of careful seed saving, is very slim. Often their own carefully-saved seed turns out to be sterile after cross-contamination from a GMO containing a terminator gene, a gene inserted to prevent the plant from producing seed or to cause it to produce a sterile seed so the plant can't be reproduced from its own seed, this securing the dependence of the farmer on the seed company. Even those farmers who are trying to hold out against the seed giants are finding their crops contaminated and the courts consistently come down in favour of the big multinational seed giants.

....With the bulk of modern agricultural crops being produced from GMO seeds restrictively produced in one area of the world and shipped all around the world from that one point, the production of the world's food is becoming rapidly and increasingly dependent on the health of the global economic system. This will make the next depression, when it happens, so much different from any past depression. In severe economic downturns of the past, or in times of war and heavy civil unrest, people would quickly revert to producing their own food and this was very often the key to surviving the hard times. Even if you have a crop today, the chances of your continuing to produce a crop in the event of a severe economic downturn or social chaos are extremely slim because your crop probably will not produce a usable seed and the seed company will very likely have fallen on hard times as the economy implodes. Where is the food to come from if no one is saving seeds, the small regional seed companies no longer exist, and the multinational seed companies that produce all the seed and the global distribution system that gets them to the farmer go out of business in an economic downturn?

....The bulk of the commercially produced food crops in the world (as opposed to the personal garden) are produced with the use of specialized, heavy farm equipment. With the exception of some of the equipment available in some third world nations, the equipment needed for small scale farming, the equipment meant to be used with human or animal power alone, the equipment that our ancestors used a century ago simply no longer exists, nor do the companies and the manufacturing equipment to produce it. Most of us have seen a piece or two of such equipment rusting beside a barn or planted with flowers on a suburban lawn. If the coming energy-decline economic downturn is very slow and very gradual and business, industry and government act with foresight, and the raw resources to do so are available, it is possible that the production of such equipment can be revitalized and ramped up in time to prevent an economic recession or depression turning into a critical global food crisis. That is a lot of ifs that are extremely unlikely to all come together in the right way and at the right time.

....There is an old and, at one time, frequently used expression that somewhat pinpoints the agricultural crisis that awaits us on the other side of peak oil: dirt farmer. Today's farmers are mostly chemical farmers and machine operators (I apologize to any legitimate dirt farmers who take umbrage with that generalization). When the fertilizers and pesticides are no longer available and the tractor and combine and electric milking system no longer function most of today's farmers will be as ill-equipped for farming as the person born, raised, and having spent their entire lives in the inner city. It is a common fallacy to think that when the machinery stops running we'll revert to labour-intensive manual farming as more and more people get involved, as workers, in the production of the food they consume. But who is to teach them what to do? Who is to teach them how to work a field of crops without the aid of machinery? Who is to show them the difference between a seedling of a food plant and the sprout of a weed? At the beginning of the last century as much as 50% of the population were involved in the production of food. Today that is less than 2%. Getting from here to non-chemical, non-mechanized, non-industrial, labour-intensive farming is going to take decades of rebuilding the skills and knowledge bases that will be needed. Trying to do this on the other side of peak oil, when the ability to absorb years or decades of non-productive trial and error doesn't exist, could be truly devestating.

....Along with the disappearance of local seed companies this last half century has also seen a wholesale collapse of the local grain storage and milling business. There was a time that virtually every small agricultural community had a small-scale miller where local farmers would take their seed to; be stored; turned into animal feed; turned into flour; pooled and shipped to centralized grain terminals, stored (and often mixed with that of other local producers) as seed for next year's grain crop. Local bakers would get the flour they used from the local miller. Often the miller, generally a grain farmer himself, would take as payment a set amount of the grain he was given to mill or the product he produced from that milling. Often miller and baker were one in the same. My small town had such a mill until twenty years ago. Now all of the grain produced goes into the impersonal national and global distribution system. The chance of the grain produced in an area even ending up on the tables of local residents is extremely slim. Once the distribution system begins to break down and the large, centralized milling companies begin to falter because of operating costs, lack of feed stock and lack of markets, how are small scale grain producers to have their grain processed into flour and seed? It could take a decade or more to revitalize and rebuild the local milling industry.

....Tomatoes in February. Ice-cream in July. New Zealand spring lamb and kiwi fruit in Toronto. Canadian maple syrup and bacon in Sydney Australia. Our food and our food tastes are a biproduct of a global food distribution system that is critically dependent on high-volume, long-distance shipping and energy-intensive refrigeration both in shipping and in general storage. When I was a child we had a root cellar for over-winter cold storage of root crops, nuts, grains and certain other fruit and vegetable crops. In addition we had an extensive food storage cellar that got restocked every fall with preserves and canned (meaning bottled) vegetables and fruits, dehydrated vegetable fruits, and a host of other preserved foods. Much of the food preserved we grew ourselves but that which wasn't was purchased locally and grown locally. When the global food distribution system begins to break down on the other side of peak oil, when energy-intensive refrigeration is no longer available for storing food after the harvest, when the materials such as mason jars, crocks, sterilizing equipment critical to canning food, when the supermarkets can no longer be looked upon as the primary source of the family's food, how will people manage? How will you manage? It could take a decade or longer to reaquire the skills and equipment and storage facilities necessary to ensure your family has food to eat at any time of the year.

....Over the last half century while much of the world has become increasingly dependent on groundwater from aquifers (97% of the world's liquid freshwater) for drinking water, industry, agricultural irrigation, and frivolous usage such as golf courses and casino fountains, the would's fresh surface water resources (lakes and rivers) have become increasingly contaminated with chemical toxins and aghricultural runoff. Although surface water is part of the global hydro-cycle and the water in the surface water systems turns over in a matter of days (water in aquifers is trapped there for, on average, 1400 years) the toxins in those systems build up in bottom sediments and continue to keep the water above toxic. It could take decades or even centuries for nature to remove the toxins that have built up in contaminated surface water systems. This is a matter of critical importance as we pass peak oil. Our ability to rely on deep aquifers for our fresh water (most shallow aquifers have already been sucked dry or have become contaminated in the same way and at the same rate as surface water), most of which are already heavilly over-exploited and declining by twenty feet or more per year, will disappear as the electricity and fossil fuels to run the massive pumps that are needed to draw water from these deep aquifers gets increasingly scarce and unreliable. Hand pumps - there were four of them within 200 yards of the home in which I grew up on which we relied for water in our plumbing-void house - are genrally not powerful enough to draw water from deep aquifers. Hand pumps are also a very scarce commodity in our industrialized society. This could place much of the world in the same position as one fifth of the world's people already are, having to rely on contaminated, chemically-toxic, disease-laden surface water and shallow aquifers for not just agricultural irrigation but for industrial use, basic hygienne and drinking water. The rate of incidence of death from water-borne diseases, which already claims millions every year, will most certainly increase exponentially.

....Vast tracts of homes have been constructed over this past half century in our industrial society. They are built to standards that assume there will be sufficient fossil-fuel and electrical energy to maintain heat to a level of 70F degrees or higher in winter and cool them to a comfortable 70F or lower in the heat of summer. Without this high-energy input those homes, more and more with sealed windows, do not have the insulation and thermal mass levels needed to maintain a home within livable standards. When the seriously-aging and materially-crumbling grids fail, even sporadically, and the fossil fuels are not available, sporadic, or priced beyond the reach of the average household, the vast majority of our modern homes will become increasingly problematic. To upgrade them all (hundreds of millions of them) to a thermal standard able to cope with the coming declines in fossil fuels will not only prove very expensive but will probably run up against increasing material shortages as available resources decline. And we most certainly aren't going to be able to think in terms of buldozing he suburbs and starting over again with housing suitable to a world of steadilly decreasing energy.

In what has become known as The Hirsch Report (commissioned by the U.S. congress and co-authored by Hirsch) [7] Robert Hirsch adamantly makes the point that it would take a minimum of 1-2 decades to prepare for the energy crisis presented by peak oil, if that effort were begun before peak oil arrived. That may already have become a moot point as we may already have passed that point with no such preparation having yet been done. But the energy crisis represented by peak oil, as I have tried to show here, is a small portion of the problems that peak oil will create or seriously exacerbate. Where preparation for the energy crisis may take 1-2 decades preparing for the parallel food, water and infrastructure crises could take many times that, could be 1-2 centuries rather than 1-2 decades with the same qualifier, that the effort is begun before peak oil, and with the additional qualifier that priority usage of the world's remaining fossil energy reserves be given to this effort. We spent the first half of the world's fossil fuel reserves creating the world as it is. It will take the other half to recreate the world as it will need to be to be workable without those fossil fuels.
===========================
1) Is aging infrastructure slowing the U.S.?
2) Engineers See Dangers in Aging Infrastructure
3) Oil peak theorist warns of chaos, war - Shawn McCarthy, Globe & Mail - Report on Business
4) Burning the furniture by Richard Heinberg
5) Biofuels: Recipe for Artificially-Induced Overshoot of Earth's Carrying Capacity
6) UN Highlights World Water Crisis
7) Peaking Of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management