What Scripture Says Its Wring To Put Animals Above People
Well, we definitely seem to take passed a threshold of sorts. For near of the sixteen years since I started blogging, one of the things I had to indicate out constantly to my readers was the tedious pace of historical change. Whenever I posted an essay on the twilight of industrial gild, I could count on fielding at least one annotate from a reader who expected the entire mod earth to crash and burn in the adjacent few months. I'd take to patiently remind them that Rome wasn't sacked in a mean solar day—that it takes years of breathtakingly moronic decisions motivated by mindless greed, vicious partisan hatred, blind ideological dogmatism, and a total unwillingness to think about the long-term consequences of short-term decisions, to bring a culture downwardly.
Now of course all through the years while I was telling people this, decisions of the kind I've just described, guided past motives of the sort I've merely characterized, were standard operating process throughout the industrial world. Those proceeded to take their usual effect. I all the same don't expect modern civilization to crash to ruin in the side by side few months, merely it's reached the bespeak that I no longer have to tell people that the Long Descent won't show up equally soon every bit they think. No, at this point it'southward my ironic duty to propose that they make whatever preparations they have in listen sooner rather than after, because the world shows no signs of waiting for them.
As I write this, the most obvious set of problems has to do with the economies of the United States and its client states. Those of my readers who follow fiscal media already know that signs of economic problem are elbowing one another out of the way to get to the front pages. The cryptocurrency market has racked upwards gargantuan losses; the stocks listed on NASDAQ take shed something like $7 trillion in value so far this year; the massively overinflated US real estate marketplace has sprung a leak and is showing signs of deflation, and layoffs are spreading through the economic system as corporations shed jobs at a rapid pace. It's shaping up to be a real mess.
Part of this is the ordinary rhythm of idiotic excess followed by equally idiotic panic—upwards with the rocket and downwards with the stick—that sets the beat of economic life in a neoliberal economy. That said, I recall there may be more than going on here than that. I don't know how many of my readers are aware that the simmering hostility betwixt the The states government and the oil-producing nations of OPEC is coming to a brisk boil but now. The steady ascent in oil prices over the last year or so has acquired stark panic in the White House, since increased gas prices correlate rather nicely with the fading of Joe Biden's concluding dim hopes of reelection. Repeated attempts to pressure the OPEC nations to increment oil production and bulldoze prices down take gotten no response, not least considering the Biden administration isn't offering anything in return, and has been noticeably hostile to the interests of several leading OPEC nations.
Cue the gibbering inmates of the US Congress to typhoon a beak that would make it possible for plaintiffs to sue OPEC nations for price fixing in American courts. Normally there's a matter called sovereign immunity—in plain English, the governments of other nations can't be held accountable to US laws—merely this nib, the cutely named NOPEC Act, would strip OPEC nations of sovereign amnesty in U.s.a. courts for whatever decision that some US lawyer could label price-fixing. The target of this project, of course, is the gargantuan corporeality of money that OPEC nations take invested in avails in the United States and its customer states, which could be seized to pay off judgments nether the new police force. Since governments in the US and Europe have engaged in exactly that sort of piracy toward Russian assets this twelvemonth, this isn't an empty threat.
So, dearest reader, if you were a high-ranking official in a petroleum-producing land, and you picked up the paper and read about the NOPEC Human action, what would you lot do?
That'south right. You would commencement quietly cashing out of your investments in the Us and its client states, and then those investments wouldn't be available for US courts to seize. Those asset sales would of course effect in a full general softening of marketplace conditions, and might well trigger a crash in nugget prices, just at least you'd get some of your money dorsum, you know. Meanwhile there are countries outside the U.s.a. sphere of influence that would be happy to provide a home for your investment money—Russian federation, Prc, and India come to mind, just for starters—and if the US and its client states get obstreperous, why, y'all can ever do what your granddaddy did in 1973, pass up to sell petroleum to the American market, and spotter the price of oil soar in response.
I don't know for a fact that this is what's happening to nugget markets in the U.s.a. and Europe. Nor do I know for a fact that this is office of what's behind the remarkable robustness of the Russian economy in the face of US sanctions: that would make perfect sense if there was a covert flow of OPEC wealth into Russian banks and securities, only doubtless there are other factors involved. If the OPEC nations have the brains the gods gave geese, they're using plenty of financial shenanigans to camouflage their reallocation of assets as long equally possible, and so it'll exist very hard to tell what's happening until a lot of money is gone. It could only be that the markets are insanely overinflated and what went upward is at present on its way back down. It could be that Prc is doing the same sort of nugget shuffle to free up funds to deal with its imploding real estate sector and the long term costs of its Covid policies. It could exist that something completely different is going on.
Still, information technology's pretty articulate that it has never occurred to anybody in the US Congress that OPEC nations might, you know, have their own interests in mind, and might reply to a hamfisted endeavor at bullying by doing something other than groveling at Uncle Sam's feet. I've noted before that the elite classes in the US and Europe today seem incapable of agreement that the rest of the human race doesn't consist of piddling automatons that will ever and only do as they're told. That failure of bones reasoning is fairly common in senile aristocracies, and it very often plays a big and colorful role in the collapse of empires. It may well play such a role in the collapse of ours.
One way or another, of course, heaven-high energy prices are an of import element in the set we're in, and that brings me circumvoluted dorsum around to one of the themes I sketched out last week—the complex twilight of fossil fuel resource summed up in the phrase "pinnacle oil."
Let'southward start with the basics. Petroleum is a nonrenewable resource. Yeah, I'm aware that there'southward a cornucopian fringe out there insisting, under the characterization "abiotic oil," that the Earth is full of oil and whatever oil field tuckered of oil will promptly be replenished from further underground. Do you lot retrieve the 2008 oil spike, when erstwhile oil fields in Pennsylvania, California, and a hundred other places that had been capped decades agone were opened upwardly again, since rough oil was worth up of $100 a butt? Not one of those fields had refilled, as the abiotic oil theory predicted. There'due south a good unproblematic word for a theory that makes predictions that don't pan out. That give-and-take is "wrong."
Petroleum is a nonrenewable resource. Information technology provides around xl% of all energy used by human beings on this planet, including nearly all the energy for transportation. (Electric cars and trains have a negligible share worldwide.) It's fairly rare in the Earth'southward crust, all things considered, and information technology's been extracted at a breakneck pace for more than a century. The charge per unit of new discoveries has been far behind the rate of annual extraction for decades. Do yous run across the trouble there?
The obvious solution, if you happen to want to sustain an industrial social club of the current sort, is to observe some other free energy source to replace petroleum. The other fossil fuels won't cut it—they're also existence used at breakneck rates, and facing the same depletion issues equally oil. More coal is existence mined and burnt today, for example, than at the peak of the coal historic period a century and a quarter ago, and most of the coal that'south being burnt now is low-quality brownish coal because all the good stuff got shoveled upward and burnt decades agone.
That ways that some new energy resource has to be discovered and deployed in a hurry. That's why scientists have been difficult at work on that projection for well over l years now, and the one pocket-sized difficulty is that they haven't found one yet. More to the point, they've found whatsoever number of supposed replacements for petroleum, which have soaked up a great many investment dollars and then failed to perform as advertised. There are two primary reasons why all attempts at a substitute for petroleum take failed: scale and net free energy.
Allow'southward starting time with problems of scale. To cite one example that took upwardly a dandy deal of attention and investment coin back in the day, you can abound corn, ferment information technology into ethanol—that'southward spelled "corn likker" in the flyover states, and it'due south great stuff if you don't mind the hangover—and burn down that in an engine along with, or instead of, gasoline. Dorsum when I was first blogging, there were ethanol trolls all over the peak oil end of the cyberspace, loudly proclaiming that all usa peak oil bloggers were every bit wrong every bit wrong could exist, because corn-based ethanol would brand upward the shortfall. The ane small problem with this analysis is a matter of calibration. If y'all planted every acre of farmland in the U.s. with corn, leaving no room for food or anything else, and turn it into fuel ethanol, y'all'd supersede only a small fraction of the gasoline nosotros use every single twelvemonth. (And that doesn't even brainstorm to bargain with the need for diesel, jet fuel, or any of the other fuels made from petroleum.)
Similar difficulties show upwardly with many other proposed replacements for whatsoever of the fossil fuels, because fossil fuels are far more than concentrated than any other energy resource on this planet. You lot get petroleum when huge accumulations of expressionless sea life in anoxic conditions get squeezed and roasted deep within the earth for millions of years, a process that soaks up vast amounts of energy that no human existence has to pay for. That's why to match the free energy in a single gallon of gasoline, for example, you need effectually one ton of fully charged auto batteries. That's one of the problems with renewables, by the mode: they depend on the diffuse and intermittent flows of energy we get from the sun right at present, instead of the highly concentrated resources the earth has stashed abroad in her sediments over the last half billion years or and so.
Problems of scale, though, are only one fix of challenges that accept to exist faced to replace petroleum. The 2d is net free energy. It takes energy to extract, process, and send energy, and to build the devices that use energy. Take the total free energy in a resource and subtract the energy that has to be used for all these purposes, and what'due south left is internet energy. It's exactly the same, conceptually, as net income: take your gross income and subtract your expenses, and yous've got your net, which is the amount of money you tin can actually do something with.
Y'all can have a huge gross income and still go broke. All that's necessary is that your expenses take to exist only a little chip larger than your income. (Watch the tech industry over the next few years if you want to see that assertion proved in a very colorful mode.) In exactly the same way, your gross free energy doesn't matter two farts in a True cat-5 hurricane if the energy inputs you demand are too high. The poster child here is algal biodiesel, another supposed substitute for petroleum that boomed and went bust a decade ago. On paper, information technology looks great: you farm vast amounts of oil-rich pond scum, process information technology into diesel, and away you go. In do, the cyberspace energy ranges well into negative numbers—in other words, it makes exactly equally much sense as trying to get a profit by buying dollar bills for $1.l each.
Cyberspace free energy is very difficult to calculate. Fortunately in that location's a user-friendly proxy, which is cost. The more expensive an energy resources turns out to be in do, the worse the internet energy turns out to be. Nuclear power is a great case here. Yep, I know at that place's always some exciting new nuclear technology that's certain to modify that, and provide abundant, inexpensive electrity into the far futurity. There'south always one of those on the cartoon boards, or more than one, and it'due south funny how reliably it turns out that every nuclear technology is affordable until it gets built. Then it turns out to be another gargantuan white elephant that tin only go along going with huge and ongoing government subsidies.
The secret is that the cyberspace energy of nuclear power is very, very low. You have to process vast amounts of raw material to produce the fuel rods, and that takes energy; you have to build and maintain a huge and complex power found, and that takes energy; you have to deal with the wastes, and that takes energy, and and so on through a very long list of energy sinks. That's another problem with renewables, past the way. Most renewable technologies yield very modest net energy, because so much energy has to go into gathering and concentrating the diffuse energy flows that power renewables. That's why they require the aforementioned sort of constant subsidies as nuclear plants.
Continue track of the economic dimension, in fact, and you tin can filter out most of the nonsolutions to the accelerating depletion of conventional petroleum. Keeping track of the economical dimension, in plow, is something that cheerleaders for purported replacements for petroleum inevitably will non do. They love to talk virtually technical feasibility, and of grade it'due south quite true that y'all can come up with any number of technically feasible gimmicks to replace petroleum. The trouble is that none of them can pay for themselves.
It'southward normally virtually this betoken in a discussion of peak oil that somebody gets angry and starts yelling, "Expect, there has to be some replacement for petroleum!" That's an understandable belief. Unfortunately, information technology also happens to exist expressionless incorrect. No law of nature requires another inexpensive, abundant, highly concentrated free energy source to pop up in time to salvage us from the consequences of wasting the one nosotros had. Near people figure out fairly early in life that if y'all spend your unabridged paycheck on booze, no good fairy is going to come with the rent coin in time to keep your rump from landing on the street. The same rule applies to energy, but for complex reasons rooted in our collective psychology, this isn't something that most people want to hear.
That brings us around to our electric current situation. Despite the aging economic system, petroleum is running well above $100 a barrel these days, because—ahem—we're running out: not all at one time, but slowly, one dry oil well at a time. The fracking frenzy that briefly boosted US oil production over the terminal decade is sputtering, because oil is a nonrenewable resource, and even if you lot don't accept to worry about the bottom line because the Fed is press money hand over fist and funneling information technology to you, eventually you run out of shale deposits that can be fracked.
Again, this doesn't mean that we're going to run out suddenly. It means that oil production firms take to run faster and faster, invest more and more money and resources, and struggle harder and harder against geological reality to continue the market supplied with oil—and this ways that an ever-growing share of economical output has to exist funneled into the energy industry, leaving an ever-shrinking share for everything else.
That's the futurity we've backed ourselves into. Nosotros're running on empty, and the last gas station is somewhere back in that location in the blueish distance.
I mentioned two weeks ago when I appear this sequence of posts that I was going to talk about what individuals, families, and community groups could do nigh all this. Fortunately, what to do about an energy crunch was explored in neat item one-half a century agone, during the oil crises of the 1970s, and before then in the severe shortages during the ii world wars. The difficulty we face is very simple. Energy—all forms of it—will become much more expensive than you expect, and everything made with energy—in other words, nigh goods and services, beyond the lath—will also become much more expensive than y'all await. Meanwhile jobs will become scarcer and economies volition contract every bit energy costs bite deeper into every class of economic activity. That's called stagflation: stagnation plus inflation. It'due south what happens when the toll of energy spikes, and information technology's happening now.
And then you have 2 straightforward tasks ahead of you lot, beloved reader. The outset is to use much less energy than you do right now. The second is to cut your expenditures on everything y'all tin, to free upward the coin y'all'll need to deal with soaring energy costs and toll inflation by and large.
Using less energy is easy if you're American. It's easy because nosotros waste energy and then profligately. Go here and you tin can download a set of bones energy conservation papers that were drawn upwards during the oil crisis of the 1970s. (They're the lessons I studied when I was getting my Chief Conservers document in the very early 1980s. Yes, they had Master Conserver programs dorsum and then.) If you rent, you tin utilize weatherstripping and cheap window insulation; if you own your own abode, there's much more that you tin do. Y'all can change your habits to cutting energy costs, and y'all can also pick up the g old 1970s addiction of doing more for yourself instead of buying things, since here again energy goes into virtually appurtenances and services, and prices will rising accordingly.
If you have the chance to choice up some do-it-yourself books from dorsum in the solar day, you'll be improve off all the same. The self-sufficiency books listed for auction in old issues of The Whole Globe Catalog, and other resources of the aforementioned era? Worth their weight in gilded. It also helps to know people who can teach you how to do things for yourself, and to put plenty of time and effort as soon equally possible into applying that fine old land maxim, "Use information technology upwards, vesture it out, brand information technology do, or do without." People thought they could afford to neglect that during the heyday of the fossil fuel era. At present we get to learn better.
Oh, and make sure to have backups for anything that depends on free energy you don't produce yourself. With its usual monumental stupidity, the US Congress is already talking about price controls, and those are amid the best ways known to our species to turn cost hikes into bodily shortages. (The US isn't self-sufficient in free energy resources, non by a long shot, and nobody will be in a hurry to sell oil to united states at artificially low prices, you know.) If price controls become through, wait gas stations to run out of fuel, diesel fuel shortages to play merry hob with product delivery to stores, and rolling blackouts if the price controls get applied to natural gas. Fun times!
One more detail. This isn't going to last forever; free energy crises never do. My working guess at this point is that the United states of america and Europe are facing a decade or so of economic crunch and soaring energy costs before need destruction, precipitous increases in free energy efficiency, and a modest helping of new technologies bring renewed stability in energy markets. Heed you lot, by then we'll have other things to worry about. I'll discuss those in the posts ahead.
Source: https://www.ecosophia.net/running-on-empty/
Posted by: owenswhearour.blogspot.com
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