Post-Peak Liberal: Tumultuous Limbo

Post-Peak Liberal

....... Life on the Downslope

Tumultuous Limbo

Well, it's been quite a while since my last posting -- over a month, unfortunately. I recently assumed a new position at work, so it's just been a bit hectic lately. Not much mental energy left to really get my thoughts together.

I am reading up on the idea of de-schooling, the notion that institutional schools are profoundly antithetical to education itself, and should thus be dismantled in favor a more integrated, decentralized culture of learning. So keep an eye out for a posting on that topic soon.

For now, though, there's plenty to discuss, including a remarkable trio of events that have starkly illustrated the dangers of centralized systems.

First, the horrific oil spill in the Gulf. The latest, as of today (Sunday 5/9), is that the four-story containment dome, a huge capping device that was supposed to funnel the flow into a manageable channel, did not work. So at least 4000 barrels of crude are gushing into the ocean every day. Tar balls are starting to wash up on the shore, and the wondrous days of animal-scrubbing are back. This is really an amazing story. An isolated disaster is one thing: a crash, explosion, fire, whatever. The media and our culture in general have proven scripts for discussing those things. But this is an ongoing catastrophe that just can't be stopped, for the time being. It's like one huge metaphor, an embodiment of all the slow-motion macro-processes that civilization has been perpetrating on the natural world for decades or even centuries. For example, one of the reasons that most people don't get too up in arms about global warming, or human-caused species extinctions, or the rapid depletion of topsoils, is that they can't see the results in their daily lives. Long-term processes that can only be explained by scientific data (i.e., confusing numbers, charts, and general hifalutin' gobble-de-gook) are all but invisible to the regular person, and thus easily ignored. But this oil spill is different. We can see this life-blood of our sprawl culture leaking out into the ocean right before our very eyes. And even the most oil-happy, drill-baby-drill knuckleheads have to admit that petroleum spewing into the water is probably not a good thing. So there is this kind of befuddled stupor surrounding the whole event. The MSM keeps covering the spill, but they really would prefer that it go away, so they can move on to the next event. In fact, the very language of a 'spill' is an indication that the media is not equipped to deal with ongoing disaster. A 'spill' is a one-time thing, a discrete occurrence, which is decidedly not what this is. The situation in the Gulf is a large-scale, gushing leak, or something to that effect. Aside from the media's discomfort with this whole thing, it is also a very uncomfortable for both Sarah Palin and the President. Undaunted, Palin has lamely asserted that this horrible disaster doesn't mean that we should stop drilling, just that we should check and 'verify' those awful 'foreign' oil companies who did this nefarious deed. Now, I'm sure that Palin's handlers will come up with a better shtick, since monitoring private companies (who I'm sure would be contracted to drill in a Palin regime) would require {gulp} Big Gub'mint. Of course, even this is predicated on the gusher actually being fixed. What if the leak goes on for another month, or another 6 months? What if the whole Gulf Coast ends up slathered in Texas Tea? What kind of triangulating, pro-business, pro-petro script would be able to handle that eventuality? Let's leave that alone for now. Suffice it to say that the President also looks like he came on board the pro-drilling bandwagon at just the wrong time. And the longer this drags out, the more this does have the potential to be his Katrina, as unfair as that might be. But the most important point in all of this is from the Peak Oil perspective. One of the main points of Peak Oil theory is not that we're running out of oil, but that the oil that is left will become increasingly hard to get at. It will be more expensive, or in more politically-unstable areas, or, as in this case, in more physically-dangerous places. The BP setup in the Gulf was drilling through 5000 feet of ocean, and then a further 13000 feet through the earth, to the oil reservoir. As all of the 'easier oil' gets exhausted, these deep-sea setups will only become more common, and all but guarantee more disasters like this. Of course, the pro-petro crowd will say that we just need to enforce stricter oversight, or fund more equipment development, or whatever. And sure, we may be able to do a lot of new drilling without further accidents. Until there is one. That's the point -- there will always be one. Complex systems deployed in dangerous, uncertain conditions, will always fail, at some point. For me, the risk-reward is not worth it. A billion dead animals and a ruined Gulf maritime economy would likely agree, if they were still around.
The second witness to the perils of centralization came last weekend, right here in Massachusetts. A single burst water main in the sleepy town of Weston resulted in 2 million people being put on a boil-water alert for three days. We're talking about a 7-year old, 10 foot diameter pipe knocking out drinkable water for a little more than one half of one percent of the entire population of the United States (if my math is right). I won't belabor this issue, since I droned on above for so long. But the lack of redundancy in this situation is obvious. So many should never be dependent on one of anything. A more decentralized infrastructure is highly preferable.
Finally, there was the adventure of the stock market this week. At this point, it does appear that a single trader miskeyed a billion instead of a million, triggering a huge wave of automated selloffs, dropping the DOW 1000 points in minutes. More panic set in, but then things recovered somewhat, later in the day. Market defenders are half-heartedly defending this whole thing, saying, 'see, we had a mistake, but the wonderful market self-corrected, so it all works....right?' And then, there is the predictable table-thumping that we need to reduce the role of automatic trading 'robots,' and put good old common sense back into the mix. Right, sure. Again, the really important point gets lost in the shuffle. That a typo could cause all this trouble is not in and of itself the issue. It's that we have created such a top-heavy, finance-driven, essentially non-productive economy in the United States. Long-term trends in technology, corporate legal structure, employment ratios, and the like, have resulted in a massive shift in wealth to a small number at the top (see my three-part series starting here). This elite has nothing better to do with all of that surplus wealth than create a dizzying casino economy of stocks, derivatives, swaps, and all that, leaving virtually nothing for the more humdrum world of household and community economies. So sure, it's bad that a single trader can bring the stock market to its knees. But it's worse that our entire society is so dependent on the ups and downs of a fickle casino economy run by sharks and plutocrats.

The great Jim Kunstler has been steadily predicting the failure of large, centralized institutions of all kinds, as we descend further into the Long Emergency. If the last couple weeks are any indication, he is spot on.