misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
- Terence McKenna
misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
July 2. My internet problem is fixed. I wasn't going to mention last week's Archdruid post, The Thermodynamic Economy, but I keep thinking about this bit:
Where energy is concerned, concentration counts for much more than quantity. That's a function of the second law of thermodynamics: energy in a whole system always moves from high concentrations to low. Within the system, you can get energy moving against the flow of entropy, but only at the cost of reducing a larger amount or higher concentration of energy to waste heat.
His example is warm ocean water, which contains enormous energy, but it's so diffuse that concentrating it is a net energy loss. This is part of the more general issue of EROEI, which brings us back to Dmitry Orlov's argument that if we spend too much of the GDP on energy, we get a collapse. So, whenever you read about a new source of vast energy, the important question is not how much there is, but how much it will cost to concentrate it into something the industrial economy can use. That cost includes costs in money, energy, other resources, and even "political energy".
Suddenly I understand climate change propaganda! Look at Earth 2100, or Al Gore's work. They're nice people warning us about a real danger and seemingly telling us how we can stop it... but notice that they always talk about reducing consumption, and never about throttling production. Economists assume that demand drives production: if we burn less, the fields will pump less. This is exactly backwards. In reality, production drives consumption: whatever the fields pump out, someone will burn. If not you, your neighbor; if not America, China; if a global government restricts consumption everywhere, and the fuel is still easy to produce, outlaws or the elite will burn it.
The oil companies love to talk about the whole world coming together and reducing carbon emissions, because they know that kind of bullshit will never prevent them from finding a buyer for any fuel they can produce cheaply. And that's the key: If we want to prevent catastrophic climate change, we need to make it more expensive and difficult to get the oil and coal and gas from the ground to market.
There are many ways to do this, and one way to make it more politically expensive. The opposition to mountaintop removal coal mining, or drilling in wildlife areas, is a start, but it's still all being framed in terms of local ecology. Even eco-activists have been fooled by the propaganda, which has framed global ecology purely in terms of consumption. If we can build a popular mental connection between fossil fuel production and climate change, then we can put heavier burdens on producers, and get more quickly to the point where mass extinction is no longer profitable.
July 1. On my last landblog post I mentioned reading somewhere that telling people you're going to do something makes it more difficult to do it, but I didn't have a link. There it is. Thanks Trevor!
July 1. Thanks Juan for pointing me to page2rss.com, a site that creates simulated RSS feeds for sites that don't publish them. From the page2rss version of this page, I've just recovered yesterday's lost post. And anyone who uses RSS and follows this page might want to subscribe there.
July 1. Somehow I accidentally deleted almost the whole page this morning. Through the google cache I've just restored all but yesterday's material. On top of that, the internet at my housesit is down, and I'm online through the neighbors' wireless, which is slow and sometimes hangs. It looks like the issue is with the cable company. Until it gets fixed, I won't be able to do anything that requires high bandwidth.
June 30. Compelling article on the function of depression:
Dr Nesse's hypothesis is that, as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones -- in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore, he argues, there is likely to be an evolved mechanism that identifies certain goals as unattainable and inhibits their pursuit -- and he believes that low mood is at least part of that mechanism.
So you fail, you get mildly depressed, and then if you adjust your ambitions and expectations to fit reality, you feel better, and if you don't adjust, you fall into severe depression. This fits with something else I read yesterday: that in most cultures, people have well-defined roles that they can easily fill and make life meaningful. But in western civilization, and especially in the American middle class, your role is not to do a certain kind of useful activity -- your role is to succeed, to gain ever-higher material wealth and status. If "success" is defined relative to other people, then every winner requires losers. And if it's defined relative to yourself in the past, then almost everyone will be a loser when energy consumption declines. And if you reject the whole game, then you have no social role at all, which might be even more depressing than having a role that you fail at.
June 29. Brief new landblog post about various things.
June 29. Fascinating Cryptogon post, Sine Wave Google Searches. Specifically, when you put "ringing ears" into Google trends, you get a sine wave with a one year period, high in January/February and low in July/August. If it were caused by the winter holidays, then instead of a sine wave, we would see spikes, like we do with a search for pie. And if it's related to seasonal temperatures, we should see the reverse trend in the southern hemisphere, and no trend in the tropics, but there's not enough data yet to test that. If it's not temperature, then we may be getting into fringe astronomy.
June 29. Something I didn't think of, in my big post on energy decline and climate change, is what happens if they burn the clathrates, the methane trapped in permafrost and cold seabeds. There are several issues here. If you're wondering about the collapse of industrial civilization, then the big question is the EROEI, which has not been answered yet. If you're wondering about the extermination of almost all life on Earth, then the question is whether this will increase global warming. On the one hand, if the methane is going into the atmosphere anyway, it's good to burn it, because burning it will turn it into CO2, which is a much weaker greenhouse gas. But if clathrate harvesting leads to the release of methane that would not otherwise be released, and if it's done on a large scale, then we're toast.
June 26. As usual, I'll be up at the land this weekend. Not much happening today, but John sends links to the Idle Foundation. That goes to the main page and here's their community page. I would join their forum myself if I had a little more idleness to spare.
June 25. Just got a correction from Dmitry Orlov, concerning his big deglobalization talk that I linked to a week ago:
It turns out that I misquoted some numbers, and the maximum percent of GDP that was spent on oil, triggering financial collapse, was between 6 and 8, not 25. The 25% number would have been realistic had all energy sources spiked together with oil, and to the same extent. But serious number-crunching types have agreed with me that this does not affect the rest of my argument.
If anything, it seems to make the argument stronger, since it lowers the threshold for an oil crash.
June 25. Last week on the forums, freecookies posted this 1941 essay, Who goes Nazi? The author spent a lot of time in Europe watching nations and people turn Nazi, and here she goes through Americans (and one German) at a party, one by one, sketching their personalities. Even if it wasn't about who goes Nazi, it would be worth reading just for the complexity of the characters and the glimpse of American culture 68 years ago. But the conclusion is also valuable:
Those who haven't anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don't -- whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern -- go Nazi.
This reminds me of how fire spreads: in a forest where everything is alive, a fire can't even get started. When the ratio of deadness to aliveness gets high enough, there's a tipping point at which a spark will turn into a spreading fire. And if the ratio of deadness to aliveness is even higher, then there's another tipping point at which the fire grows so hot that it consumes everything.
June 25. Thanks MK from Berlin for a $15 donation. I'm discouraging donations because, if you define wealth as net worth divided by monthly expenses, I'm richer than almost any of you. But I still happily accept them.
June 24. (Sigh) I can't even do a post about beer without getting into painful knowledge and exhausting uncertainty. Jussi comments that hops, the herb that makes the best beers taste so good, is loaded with estrogen. Here's a forum post quoting Stephen Harrod Buhner on hops. He argues that at the dawn of the modern age, the church replaced stimulating beer herbs with hops to make the population more docile. I don't want to hold a debate here, but if you all want to debate it on the forums, I'll read it and surely conclude that I have no idea how much IPA I can drink without getting "brewer's droop", although at the very least I should switch to stouts. Craigmill gruit ales are out of my price range for everyday drinking, but maybe I can get my bitter fix by adding yarrow or devil's club to kombucha.
June 23. New landblog post, and below, a couple new posts about beer and music, because I need a break from all the serious stuff.
June 23. I've decided to start drinking beer regularly for health: it will help keep my weight up, and it's also a great source of silica. But my old favorite, Bell's Two Hearted, is sold only in thirteen eastern states. Luckily, the northwest has lots of other IPA's, and I've been sampling them. The clear winner, based on availability, price, and flavor, is Deschutes Inversion.
June 23. I've worked through a couple audio processing bugs in Puppy 4, and last night I burned the first CD of my three-part Bob Dylan compilation, going from 1963-1965. I like to burn compilations instead of listening to albums, because there are only a dozen albums in the history of rock with no duds, and also because I really enjoy judging songs. I try to ignore how good they're supposed to be, and go purely on the pleasure of listening, and I'm discovering that a lot of classics don't hold up, and also that music is more important than lyrics. For example, "It's Alright Ma I'm Only Bleeding" has some of Bob Dylan's greatest lyrics, but once I've heard them a couple times, the song is boring. At the other extreme is "Ballad of a Thin Man", where the words are just a petulant rock star bashing a journalist, but I never get tired of the sound.
Also, I've had an ever-growing desire to listen to the Violent Femmes' second album, Hallowed Ground, so finally I bought a used copy online. The first five songs (what I used to call "side one") are even better than I remembered, and I've just added four of them to my Top Songs list.
June 19. I expect to be busy with land-related stuff for the next several days. Some stray links:
Ecological research saves a butterfly from extinction -- temporarily. Notice how narrow the butterfly's requirements are: a small change in grass height or temperature will kill it. This is the kind of finicky species that's unlikely to survive this century.
The state of Michigan will begin offering $25,000 to anyone who buys a house and lives in it. The idea is to help people fix up houses that would otherwise go to ruin. If I didn't already own land with a spring, I would be seriously thinking about moving to Detroit.
And completely off the usual subjects: as part of my ongoing project to compile my favorite tunes, I surf a lot of Wikipedia music pages, and here's something I didn't expect: The song "Mr. Bojangles" is about a white guy!
June 18. Impressive new Dmitry Orlov piece, from a talk and slideshow he gave in Dublin: Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation. If he's right, you can forget yesterday's post, because involuntary energy decline will slash carbon emissions beyond Al Gore's wildest dreams.
Specifically, Orlov argues that when 25% of the global GDP has to be spent on oil, the industrial economy stalls. Right now that comes out to $150 a barrel, which is why we got the collapse last fall. But here's the kicker: every time we get a little collapse, the GDP shrinks, which means the 25% figure shrinks, which means the amount we can spend on oil, without causing another collapse, also shrinks. So we're going to see a series of recoveries and collapses at lower and lower levels, until the industrial economy is not big enough to maintain its own infrastructure.
It's long talk and there's lots of other good stuff in it. I like the bit about how a dieoff can happen with nobody noticing except the workers who process the dead bodies. This must be because most of the deaths are people without friends or family to take care of them. Also I like the stuff in section 18, about how collapse happens one person at a time, and is always mistaken for personal failure. Even if you get out of the collapsing system and thrive, you will be seen as an eccentric loser by people who are still in it.
June 17. Here's the big post I've been working on. Thanks Erik and Billy for sending links and information. I'm going to start over from the top:
The Obama administration has just launched a new website about climate change, globalchange.gov, with a scientific report that until now has been suppressed, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. We're going to see droughts, crop failures, bigger storms, rising oceans, new deserts, species extinctions, and so on. But this level of catastrophe does not threaten civilization or life on Earth. Adaptable individuals, societies, and species will mostly survive, and some will thrive. My favorite article on this scenario is David Quammen's Planet of Weeds.
The much more serious threat is an anoxic event, in which the oceans get depleted of oxygen, and almost everything in them dies. Then they fill up with anaerobic microbes, which break down the dead stuff and generate hydrogen sulfide, which bubbles up and poisons life on land, and also floats up and dissolves the ozone layer. This has happened several times in the remote past, and caused giant extinctions.
It seems to start like this: greenhouse gases warm the climate and melt the polar ice. The rising oceans pick up lots of nutrients and organic materials, which feed oxygen-gobbling bacteria. Also the bacteria work faster at higher temperatures. Also, with the oceans at a more uniform temperature, the currents shut down and they become stagnant.
Here's good overview, Impact from the Deep. The author, Peter Ward, also has a book, Under a Green Sky. Ward says that two other anoxic events began when atmospheric carbon dioxide hit 1000 parts per million.
But in those cases, the CO2 came from massive volcanic eruptions on a younger Earth. The current CO2 level is only 390ppm, and has risen only 110ppm in the entire industrial age, in which we burned half the oil and gas and cut down most of the forests. So are we safe?
On the one hand, I don't see anyone saying that we can't get to 1000ppm because there isn't enough carbon around. But also, I can't find any good story about where all that CO2 will come from. This Climate Progress article on global warming feedback says that around 450-650ppm, we'll hit a tipping point that sends us up to 1000, but it doesn't explain how, except for a brief mention of soils and forests. If warming could drive enough CO2 out of soils and forests to add 300ppm, then I'd like to see a detailed description of how that would happen, so we can look for ways to stop it.
There's also methane, a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, which will make a feedback loop as it's released from thawing permafrost and ocean sediments -- possibly a very fast feedback loop called a clathrate gun. If anoxic events are caused by warming, then could we get a methane-driven anoxic event, with CO2 still under 700ppm? If so, then scientists should be talking about total greenhouse gas numbers or temperature numbers, instead of CO2 numbers.
Also I'm wondering how peak oil figures in. Climate doomers can tell a much better story if they ignore energy doomers and assume that fossil fuel consumption will stay steady or grow. For example, the Climate Progress article cites a 2003 study using "a typical fossil fuel emissions scenario for this century", but in 2003 the typical scenario assumed decades of abundant oil. Instead, world oil production peaked in July 2008 and is now at 2004 levels. Will it drop fast enough to save us? It might depend on how much we exploit oil shale, oil sands, and coal.
I don't believe for a minute that the whole human race will come together and voluntarily stop burning fuel that's right in front of us. That kind of behavior is possible for a family or a tribe, but not for our present big systems. If we do avoid anoxic extinction, it will be through some combination of government-enforced austerity, depletion of fossil fuels, collapse of the infrastructure to extract them, development of cheap renewable energy, and if we're lucky, a cooling sun.