Last week I left off with this:
I feel sleep seeping into my head with each happy, irrelevant conversation I have, to the point I can hardly think
I had better stop complaining, and just accept it: This is my life!
Monday, at a discussion group, our topic was sustainable housing. Don’t ask what that means–we never got there. It was almost possible to ask where our food is going to come from; where we are going to live was too much to put on the agenda.
Did I ever feel sleep closing in!
The high-point (such as it was) was when I mentioned that the housing market has gone into a coma.
“What do you mean! You said that a year ago!”
Too true: A year ago I had refered to Ian Welsh’s prediction of July 2005 that the housing bubble would burst, probably in the fall of 2006 or winter of ’06-’07, with serious impacts on the US economy.
That was a year ago. The prediction was for THIS year. It looks to me now like Welsh is proving right, give or take a few months. The bubble-burst has arrived, the larger economic effects have not (yet). But how is it that what I said a year ago was remembered now, except with the meaning leached out?
This was so much like so many conversations these days. If we are “reality-based” (unlike the Rethuglicans) how can we ignore the context in which any political policy or program has to be placed?
James Howard Kundstler rails against peaceniks, well, the particular peacenik who sets off his ire drives not one but TWO SUVs! That explains a lot. The peaceniks I know myself do not bug me: I agree with them. (They also drive smaller cars.) Except that, to be really for peace, you have to welcome the implications of giving up the war. And while all of them are nice, good-hearted people, they are pretty adamant about not thinking about that. This does not seem to me a virtue.
The Green(!) Party is just as bad. I have nearly had it. I am almost ready to take Dmitri Orlov’s advice and found a local Collapse Party. If I had any organizing skills I would.
If I am going to stop complaining, I had better do something else instead. And so, I review our context, the Triple Crisis–or, as Catherine Austin Fitts calls it (you thought I was a pessimist!)–the Terminal Triangle.  
The parts: politics, energy, biosphere (climate). Each looks like a complete crisis, all by itself, but actually is generated by and linked to the other parts. This is why each is thoroughly intractible.
The political crisis is that the US is rotting out. In a way it is all familiar. Look at the 1890s or the 1920s: The concentration of wealth and power, and the corruption of politics at all levels, is awfully similar. The one period gave rise to the Progressive movement, the other to (the Great Depression and) the New Deal. But I think the familiarity is deceptive, in that we think of the troubles of those times being overcome by changes in the system, and that this time we can change the system and overcome our troubles too.
We can’t: The restoring forces are not there. The Progressive movement was able to expand beyond its spiritual base by appealing to common greed. This was possible because, as a rising empire, wealth in the US was increasing rapidly, and sharing it out to the public at large was a realistic possibility, and the idea of doing so could become popular. As we enter a time of material shrinking, this approach is not possible: No one will be able to maintain their position in the economy without stealing from others.
Of course the biggest thieves have been anticipating this and have been increasing their position for some time now. And this brings us to the second problem: The reason we have entered a period reminiscent of the robber-baron days is that the biggest players have figured out that the game is over. Rather than putting wealth back into the economy to expand it or even to keep it going, they are raking off all they can in the assumption that it will all end soon.
This has an interesting subsidiary effect: asset bubbles. Asset bubbles–the bidding up of asset prices beyond any reasonable value–happen for the double-sided reason that there is no longer any productive place to invest wealth (since the entire system is being run down) and that the bubbles themselves are an efficient way of cleaning out the weaker players. They are a process of wealth concentration.
Which brings us to the next part, the crisis of energy, which mostly means oil. Oil is not the only form of energy, but it is the most concentrated, convenient, and portable form, and our entire civilization depends on it. Now, the Triple Crisis is a crisis for the whole world, but for several reasons, the US is in an especially bad spot. For example, if we compare with Europe, in Europe a preference for population density means that transportation can be organized around trains and trams that can be powered in any way that produces electricity–even windmills. Most of the US can only be reached by automobiles, which need gasoline. So even if new sources of energy were found–though that is a whole other problem–the US would still be stuck with a devastating oil crisis. And this is a crisis that cannot be solved.
Agriculture is another area where the US compares (slightly) unfavorably with Europe. Industrial agriculture requires ten calories of oil to grow one calorie of corn. American agriculture is almost entirely industrialized. Its demise is already in sight. People are going to get very hungry, and the measures (state-sponsored, local, organic horticulture) that got Cuba through its industrial collapse are unthinkable in the States.
Interesting times! Will people starve to death rather than rethink the unthinkable? Certainly we will see.
(Yes, there is Community Supported Agriculture–“CSA.” Find out if there is any near you.)
The fork in the timeline was 1980. US oil production had already peaked several years earlier. It was known that World oil production would peak in the beginning of the 21st century. Anyone who had children, or thought about having grandchildren, had reason to know that something would have to be done to change the energy-basis of the US economy. The US President had been assiduously promoting conservation and research into alternatives of all sorts. But he found it rough going. And then he lost his election.
The survival fork was not chosen.
The death-fork had widespread appeal. It was comfortable: Turn those thermostats back up! Sell off that dinky car and get a high-power monster more suited to one’s manly prowess. And so forth.
The powers that be liked the death-fork too. They may have thought it through thus: A new political economy would be unpredictable, threatening to their control. Look at what a near thing the hippie movement and the peace movement had been! Sustainability”–whatever that might be–could be worse! Whereas, if the US were to collapse into a third-world country–what harm? We have been dominating and controling third-world countries for decades: It is all well-known.
Whatever the powers that be were thinking, their preference was clear. And they had no trouble gaining adherents.
However, once they had done so, the looting of the US infrastructure was forgone. In a way, it is impressive how much of it there was (and is) to loot. The S&Ls (the banking scandal of the mid 1980s) were first, and the plain sign of what was to come: Enron, the selling off of public goods, the looting of pension plans . . . we are far from done. Anywhere you see money lying around, in trust or in the common good, it is money waiting to be raked off the table. The final stage will be when money itself is hyperinflated into worthlessness.
The problem for progressives these days is that we talk as if the political economy can be restored, and made more just. It can’t. It can’t be restored, so it cannot be made just. All politics is now rear-guard, a form of damage limitation. I don’t mean it is useless–limiting damage is important!
But positive change can not be made this way.
But to return to the energy crisis itself, it goes beyond oil. This is because our civilization uses more energy per day than comes to us in ANY form. Windmills can do a lot. Hydro-electric power can do a lot. Passive solar power could do a lot. But altogether they do not begin to match the energy-use of our civilization.
I do not mention expansion of nuclear fission power because it is a different, and probably worse, death trip. With luck it is already beyond our reach.
Fusion too may be beyond our reach. No reality-based politics can count on it.
The short of it is, we will learn to use less energy. The problem is, we don’t want to.
There is a secondary problem which is tightly related: Non-oil based sources of energy themselves depend on oil for their implementation. This means if we were to have had a non-oil energy infrastructure, it had to be put in place before the oil crisis hit. President Carter understood this implicitly. It is a window that is now mostly closed.
Eventually we will start doing what we can, but by then the means will be extremely limited. The “soft landing” has passed.
The third part of the Triple Crisis is biological, and it has two aspects. The first is easy and obvious–global heating. Burning oil increases the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which causes the atmosphere to retain heat. The Earth is warming, and will get warmer. Climates everywhere will be disrupted.
Climate change will disrupt food supplies, with drought and flooding being immediate problems. Changing climate zones will disrupt food production further.
Global heating will also raise the sea-level. The world’s most populated areas–on every continent–will be under water before the century is out. This will cause further disruption.
The less obvious aspect may prove more important. When the US chose the death-fork, it chose to encourage rather than suppress destructive economic practices. Over-fishing (Peak Fish occurred in 2004, and the World’s oceans are being deliberately fished to extinction with catches already dropping precipitously) and over-logging are just two examples. Our civilization has decided, in its last years, to accelerate destruction of the biosphere upon which its existence depends. This is an act of murder/suicide.
It is also a key reason why it is no longer desirable to prolong our civilization.
More perhaps should be said. Murder/suicide is an important theme of American life. But what to say about it? Michael Moore devoted an entire movie to it, but ended up saying nothing at all. Americans have accepted living in fear–well, he did say that much–and living in the violence that makes murder/suicide an inevitable facet of life. But why? And how? Perhaps I will take this up at another time. Indeed, I had better, because it is these structures of thought that propel our civilization, and propel it to its demise. And guarantee we will repeat our mistakes, over and over, endlessly–even post-collapse–unless we are willing to give them up.
Meanwhile, I want to return to oil, and the War for Oil. This is progressives’ weakest point, for the War for Oil was also an inevitable consequence of the death-decision of 1980. Why inevitable? Because dollar diplomacy can only do so much. Because once the US became dependent on foreign oil, it meant that an ever-increasing glut of petrodollars would be in foreign (mostly Saudi) hands, to gradualy unbalance the economic system. That the measures to compensate for the imbalance–globalization, cheap credit–might work in the short- and mid- terms but would be destabilizing overall. That the system, being ever-voracious, could not allow competitors to control oil it wanted for itself. And that finally, control means boots on the ground.
It is almost sure that the War for Oil was launched too early–that the game of diplomacy had not been played out. But the cartoon-crudeness of America’s political leaders is probably inevitable as well: The best people do not go where corruption is the rule of the day, nor do they join strategies that have already announced their terminality.
Why do I say weakest point? Because we are acting like our peacenik friends, and it is not enough to con the electorate into “bring the troops home” (even if we can). Unlike the Vietnam War, where we finally did bring the troops home, this time there will be consequences. One can’t just say “oops!” after the fact. Our “Way of Life” is about to change drastically (or disappear). Bringing the troops home means embracing that change. It means accepting that the price of oil is ALREADY beyond our control, and facing the consequences of that fact. It means accepting not only that the War for Oil is ALREADY lost (it is) but accepting the changes that will have to be made because it is lost.
Now the result of accepting these changes is actually better than clinging to what is already gone. It means we really are ready to stop gassing up our cars with blood–even knowing that that could mean not gassing up our cars!
When we achieve that, the Triple Crisis really will be our context, and we can begin to talk sensibly about what it is we have to do.
