Life After Fossil Fuels

In 2020, Jeff Gibbs’ documentary Planet of the Humans fell out of the sky.  It aimed a spotlight on the many ways in which solar and wind power were neither green nor renewable — no free pony.  In response, many “green” activists explosively soiled their britches and demanded that the film be banned.  Millions watched it.  Similarly, in 2021, Derrick Jensen and team published Bright Green Lies, which was soon followed by a documentary based on the book.  

These two projects were righteous fire-breathing exposés of the deceptions regularly made by folks promoting “green” technologies.  Passionate preaching can often get some folks to listen.  Sometimes it inspires minds to change.  Other folks prefer to have deeper understanding before revising their views.  Alice Friedemann’s book, Life After Fossil Fuels, will appeal to them. 

Without rage and condemnation, she calmly and carefully described why she thinks we would be wise to end our addiction to fossil fuels as soon as possible.  She evaluated the alternatives, and concluded that most are not free ponies.  Importantly, she carefully explained the benefits, limits, and faults of the various options, and meticulously cited the sources of her information — literally hundreds of them. 

Readers are introduced to the notion that alternative energy is not the magic key to a sustainable utopian wonderland.  The status quo is a high speed, ridiculously luxurious, one-way path into dark and treacherous realms.  We’ve been living like scruffy back alley gods on drugs.  The good news here is that no “green” solution can permanently keep the massively destructive status quo on life support — it’s going to end up where it’s headed.  “We are nearing the end of a one-time binge.”  Indeed!

So, my eyes began tap-dancing across page 1, and I was soon scrolling through a thrilling 86-page joyride.  Friedemann presented an informative and embarrassing birds-and-bees discussion of the horrific unintended consequences of our childlike obsession with living like crazy dysfunctional grownups.  I cheered with excitement with each new chapter.  It was so refreshing to experience such a sumptuous feast of clear and coherent bullshit free information. 

Readers are introduced to the important notion of EROI (energy returned on energy invested).  Each year it’s taking more and more energy to find, extract, process, and distribute fossil energy.  Imagine having a job that paid $100 per day, but the bridge toll for getting to work was $99.  For this reason, enormous amounts of fossil energy will remain in the ground forever, thank goodness!  About 65 percent of buried oil is technically or economically unrecoverable. 

The fracking industry is drilling like crazy, while more and more unlucky tycoons land with a splat in the tar pits of bankruptcy.  The richest discoveries were drilled and drained first.  “Globally, new oil discoveries have fallen for 6 years, with consumption of oil six times greater than discoveries from 2013 through 2019.”  Trouble ahead. 

In manufacturing, would it be possible to eliminate fossil energy by switching to wood-based fuel?  Take a wild guess.  Can we continue producing mountains of food when energy-guzzling synthetic fertilizers have become fond memories of the good old days?  Can industrial agriculture continue when energy-guzzling farm equipment runs out of affordable fossil energy to guzzle?  Will high speed horse carts haul fresh California veggies to Minnesota?

Can industrial civilization exist without energy-guzzling fleets of ships, planes, trains, and trucks?  “In the U.S., trucks deliver 80% of goods over 4.1 million miles of roads, with 80% of towns completely dependent on trucks.”  Can transportation systems shift to electric power?  “A truck with a driving range of 600 miles needs a battery pack weighing 35,275 pounds and can carry just 10,000 pounds.”  Oh, and cold weather reduces driving range by 35%.

“All contraptions that produce electricity need high heat in their construction.  They all need cement made at 2600°F.”  There is no known way to make concrete with electricity.  Making steel for wind turbines requires 3100°F (1700°C).  “Solar panels require 2700° to 3600°F (1500° to 2000°C) of heat to transform silicon dioxide into metallurgical grade silicon.”  Nuke plants still on the drawing board, in theory, might be able to generate 1562°F (850°C), but this is not hot enough for making cement, steel, glass, and lots of other stuff.

Friedemann’s key question is: could life as we know it continue in an alternative energy future?  By chapter 13, all contestants for powering a happy sustainable future were rejected, except one — biomass.  Prior to the fossil fuel era, heavy industry was powered by charcoal made from dead trees.  Brazil is still making steel with rainforest charcoal. 

“Biomass is the only renewable energy source that can generate the high heat needed by industry to make cement, iron, steel, aluminum, trucks, computers, electronic equipment, ceramics, bricks, and machinery.  Biodiesel is the only renewable drop-in fuel that can keep heavy-duty trucks, locomotives, and ships running.  Biomass, with a little help from hydropower, is the only renewable way to keep the electric grid up.”

Yikes!  This spooky paragraph sent a cold chill through my body.  Weird chapters followed.  I began to wonder if I had just wasted two entire days of the only life I may ever live.  But, by this point, I was aware that Friedemann had a whimsical side, so I kept reading, hoping for a sharp turn.  It came later.  Act two of the book was focused on contemplating how we could produce enough biomass to power industrial civilization, and prepare to feed the 3 billion additional folks expected for dinner in 2050.  Hope fiends will have a good cry.

Bummers obstructing the rise of a biomass utopia include climate change, freshwater scarcity, brutalized topsoil, and our addiction to countless fossil powered processes.  Turning biomass into a liquid fuel known as ethanol is idiotic.  Trucks can’t guzzle it, and it refuses to be pumped through pipelines.  It takes about as much energy to make a gallon as the finished gallon contains.  (Ethanol is a monster child fathered by gold plated government subsidies to Big Ag.) 

The bummer parade is long and unusual.  Make biodiesel with algae?  Make ethanol with seaweed, sorghum, or corn stalks?  Biodiesel could indeed replace oil-based diesel, if we were able to produce it in high volume.  This would require enormous amounts of cropland, and it would pummel the land as much as other types of agriculture.  If climate shifts blindside farm country, game over.

Bottom line: “The electric grid can not stay up without natural gas due to a lack of energy storage.  Transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing can not be electrified.  If transportation can not be electrified or run on Something Else, civilization as we know it ends.  Agriculture goes back to horses and human labor.”  When readers finally reach chapter 33 and slither across the finish line, their brains have been reduced to a bucketful of steaming glop.  It doesn’t look like we’re on the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City.  The sky is full of flying monkeys.  What a book!

The pisser here is that this very important book is sold by a textbook publisher, and it’s very expensive.  It won’t be able to catch much of a ride on the wave of interest generated by Gibbs, Jensen, and others.  Its modest collegiate audience is mostly the well-dressed offspring of the idle rich, and desperate students who are massively in debt.  Non-billionaires may need to rob a gas station, or get a library card.

The bigger pisser is that 12 year olds don't already know this stuff.  Maybe it would be polite to inform youngsters about the challenging future they have inherited.  I hope that Friedemann is busy working on something like a Dick and Jane primer for school kids — an affordable, competent, un-redacted, easy to read, mind-expanding introduction to actual reality, warts and all.  Imagine that.

Friedemann, Alice, Life After Fossil Fuels, Springer, Cham, Switzerland, 2021.

NOTE TO ALL: Alice Friedemann has made THIS ENTIRE BOOK AVAILABLE ONLINE FOR FREE on her website:
https://energyskeptic.com

Jeff Gibbs interview

 

Snake Oil: Fracking’s False Promise

When a dark and furious storm is racing in, and the tornado sirens are howling, smart folks stop staring at their cell phones, and head for shelter.  But what if the cell phones were streaming messages that the storm warnings were a hoax, and there was nothing to fear?  Twenty years ago, Peak Oil was a ridiculous absurdity conjured up by notorious idiots on the lunatic fringe.  Ten years ago, it had become an acceptable topic for polite conversation.  Today, an extremely effective disinformation campaign has inspired many to toss their energy concerns out the window.

This made Richard Heinberg hopping mad, so he wrote Snake Oil to set the record straight.  He’s been blasting the warning sirens for more than ten years, via a series of books.  Nobody sane disputes that fossil energy is finite and non-renewable.  Nobody sane disputes that our current path has an expiration date.  The argument is over when that date arrives.  For most folks, something that may become a problem 50 to 100 years from now is simply not worth thinking about.  Heinberg is getting strong whiffs of trouble right now.

The production of conventional oil and gas is close to peak, but new technology has enabled production of unconventional oil and gas.  We are now extracting oil and gas from shale.  We’re cooking oil out of tar sands bitumen.  We are drilling in deep waters offshore.  This energy is far more expensive to produce.

Today, for each barrel of new oil we discover, we consume four or five barrels pumped from elderly fields.  In 1930, oil was as cheap as four cents per barrel.  In 2002, a barrel of oil cost $25, and in 2012 it was $110 (with a $150 spike in 2008).  Deep water drilling is economically possible when the price is $90 or more.  Existing tar sands projects can continue production at $60, but new tar sands projects need at least $80.  Almost all drilling requires $70.  The era of cheap energy is over.

A hundred years ago, drilling in ideal locations led to mighty gushers of black gold.  It only took one unit of energy to extract 100 units of energy.  So, the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) was 100:1.  By 1990, the EROEI of U.S. oil production had fallen to 40:1.  In 2013, it was about 10:1.  Tar sands, oil shale, and biofuels are all less than 5:1, and at this level, the economy gets dizzy, wobbly, and sweaty.

Every gold rush produces a few winners and legions of losers.  In order to drum up the necessary investment funding, it is customary to make highly exaggerated estimates of the immense wealth just waiting to be reeled in by wise guys (like you).  I recall industry hucksters once proclaimed that the Caspian Sea province contained up to 400 billion barrels of oil.  By 2001, after ten years of intensive work on prime sites, far less than 20 billion barrels were produced, according to petroleum geologist Colin Campbell.

Everyone agrees that the production of unconventional oil and gas has delayed our blind date with disaster a bit.  Is this delay years, decades, or centuries?  Heinberg introduces us to petroleum geologists who believe that U.S. gas and oil production will begin its decline by 2020.  “Production from shale gas wells typically declines 80 to 95 percent in the first 36 months of operation.  Given steep shale gas well decline rates and low recovery efficiency, the United States may actually have fewer than 10 years of shale gas supply at the current rate of consumption.”  In the North Dakota oil fields, 1,400 new wells have to be drilled every year, just to maintain current production, according to a story in Financial Times (27 Aug 2014).

Today, everyone has spent their entire lives in an era of rising energy production and economic growth, just like our parents did.  But economic growth is getting dodgy.  It’s being kept on life support by skyrocketing levels of debt.  As energy production approaches its decline phase, prices are sure to rise.  There will come a day when economic growth goes extinct.  Without economic growth, our way of life will eventually become a hilarious story told by the campfires of our descendants.

Should we be making serious plans for the coming challenges?  “Heck no,” says the energy industry.  Our treasure of unconventional energy is the equivalent of two Saudi Arabias!  We now have a 100-year supply of gas, according Daniel Yergin.  T. Boone Pickens says 160 years.  Aubrey McClendon says 200 years.  Even 100 years is daffy.  How was it calculated?  “Simply by taking the highest imaginable resource estimate for each play, then taking the very best imaginable recovery rate, then adding up the numbers.”  This results in projections that have no relationship to reality.

The Bakken and Eagle Ford deposits produce more than 80 percent of U.S. tight oil.  David Hughes, author of Drill, Baby, Drill, estimated that the combined production of both deposits will end up being the equivalent of ten months of U.S. consumption.  The U.S. Geological Service (USGS) estimated that Bakken contains 3.65 billion barrels of recoverable oil — about six weeks of current global consumption.  The U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) predicted that Bakken oil will peak in 2017.

Tim Morgan is a consultant who does a lot of work for investment bankers.  In his eye-opening 2013 report, Perfect Storm, he concluded, “the economy as we have known it for more than two centuries, will cease to be viable at some point within the next ten or so years unless, of course, some way is found to reverse the trend.”

Heinberg recommends that we shift to renewable energy with utmost speed.  Hmmm.  Solar panels and wind turbines have a limited lifespan.  Using them, repairing them, and replacing them requires the existence of an extremely unsustainable industrial civilization.  This civilization is unlikely to last long as it gets strangled by energy shortages and hammered by social unrest.  We’ll be forced to make a painful transition to muscle-powered agriculture, which cannot feed seven billion.  Somewhere along the line, televisions, laptops, and refrigerators will become useless ballast.  Even if scientists invented a way to extract affordable energy for another 200 years, it would be a foolish thing to do.  We’ve burned far too much carbon already.

I wonder if it might be more useful to voyage into the realm of unconventional thinking, on a sacred mission to explore a lot of big questions.  Over and over, we are told that cool people work really hard, become really prosperous, and buy lots of really cool stuff.  To me, that sounds like a tragic waste of the precious gift of life.  It’s causing lots of irreparable damage for no good reason.  We weren’t born to live like this.  We were born for a life of freedom, to enjoy a normal and natural standard of living.  Imagine that.

The book is short, full of helpful charts and graphs, well documented, and delightfully easy to read and understand.  The book’s Introduction can be read HERE.

Heinberg, Richard, Snake Oil — Fracking’s False Promise, Post Carbon Institute, Santa Rosa, California, 2013.

The Coming Famine

Consumers live like toddlers, in a comfortable crib surrounded by colorful toys, with others providing our needs.  We can turn on our computer without blowing apart mountains to fetch coal.  We don’t have to murder indigenous people to put gas in our Prius.  We don’t have to destroy rainforests to plant soy for our veggie burgers.  Someone else does it for us.  The grocery store always has food, so we can spend seven hours a day staring at screens.

Electricity and petroleum were experiments that have far higher costs than benefits.  Luckily, they are finite, and humankind’s devastating addiction can only be temporary.  Food, on the other hand, is an actual need.  Those who attempt to quit their food habit soon experience painful withdrawal symptoms and die.  Experts tell us that our population will hit nine billion by 2050, but reality isn’t required to obey trend lines.  Experts predict that by 2030 there will be five cities having populations in excess of 30 million.  Imagine what a hellish life that would be.

Experts also tell us that we’re already beating the stuffing out of the planet with a wee herd of just seven billion.  We’re engaged in a mad effort to prove that perpetual growth is possible, an endeavor slithering with slimy brain worms.  It’s an embarrassing and disgraceful enterprise for a species so proud of its legendary intelligence and evolutionary superiority.

And yet, there is tireless jabber, by serious straight-faced experts with nice neckties, about what needs to be done to feed nine billion, a heroic humanist project as sensible as space colonies.  Only humans matter, they believe.  Humanists are not biologists.  Biologists comprehend ecological reality.  They have a clear-headed understanding of overshoot, and the dependable all-natural remedy for overshoot.  What goes up must come down.

Obviously, we could reduce almost all of our serious problems by shifting our population into reverse, and flooring the gas pedal — a rational strategy that’s theoretically possible, but the experts are not interested, nor is anyone else.  It’s traitorous heresy.  God commanded us to breed like there’s no tomorrow, so we must.  Big Mama Nature laughs out loud at our folly, and with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes, fetches her medicine bag.

Julian Cribb is an Australian science writer of good repute, who suffers from having both humanist and biologist tendencies.  He began to suffer from nightmares, in which humankind’s amazing techno-magic failed to provide regular happy meals for nine billion, resulting in human suffering.  During the daylight hours, he rolled up his sleeves and did a lot of high quality research, to envision a way to regularly provide nine billion happy meals.  Then he wrote The Coming Famine.

The path we’re on today is in the fast lane to serious famine, which is expected to peak by 2050.  It will not be a single global catastrophe, but a series of regional famines scattered over time and place.  Rapid economic growth in nations like India and China is accelerating the fast lane, because one of the first desires of the newly prosperous is to have a luxurious high protein diet.  This diet requires raising far more animals, which requires raising far more grain, which requires far more cropland, water, oil, fertilizer, machinery, and so on.

This high protein trend implies that increasing the table settings from seven billion to nine billion will actually require doubling global food production.  Is that possible?  Maybe, says Cribb, but it won’t be easy.  His book provides a valuable catalog of the serious obstacles to success, and it optimistically points to a chance of temporarily feeding the projected mega-crowd.  Success requires massive, radical, intelligent change, on a global scale, really soon.

Climate change alone could block success.  It may make it impossible to feed anything close to the current population, let alone nine billion, and it’s out of control.  Runoff from the Himalayan snowpack enables the survival of 1.3 billion people, and warming temperatures will change the flow patterns of major rivers.  Many other regions, like the U.S. southwest, are also at high risk.  Agricultural systems cannot tolerate unusual patterns of precipitation and temperature, and huge populations cannot tolerate food scarcity.

Water shortages alone could make dinner for nine billion impossible.  We’re already having serious water issues, and growing urban populations will divert more and more water from the fields, while contributing more and more pollutants.  Aquifers are being drained right now.  Rivers are being pumped dry.  Hot weather is speeding the evaporation of reservoirs. 

Cropland destruction alone could spoil the big dinner party.  Soils are being depleted of nutrients.  They are being carried away by water and wind.  They are being rendered infertile by salt buildup.  They are being buried by urban sprawl — most cities have been built on the finest farmland in the world.  Deserts are expanding.

Peak cheap energy alone seems certain to cancel the party.  Even if population growth stopped forever today, the end of cheap and abundant energy will radically change the crazy way we’ve been living for the last 200 years.  Imagine feeding seven billion without farm machinery, irrigation pumps, refrigerators, and transportation systems.  By 2050, when nine billion are expected for dinner, the global fuel gauge will be quite close to empty. 

All life requires nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium — remove any one and life ends.  It takes cheap and abundant energy to manufacture, distribute, and apply fertilizers.  Phosphorus is likely to become the first essential nutrient to reach crisis stage, since phosphate production peaked in 1989, and what remains is of declining quality.  As rising demand exceeds supply, prices will get uppity, tempers will rise, fists will fly, and crop yields will wheeze.  Phosphorus is transferred from the soil to the corn, from the corn to the hog, from the hog to the human, flushed down the toilet and sent to the sea, lost forever.  Nutrients flow into cities and are not returned to the fields.  Poop is precious.  Remember that.

Our disastrous experiment with fossil energy enabled the mass production of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, an enormous expansion of cropland and irrigation, and the tragic success of the Green Revolution.  There were 2.5 billion people in 1950, and more than 7 billion today.  The techno-miracle that can double food production by 2050 has yet to be imagined.  Half of the fertilizer we apply never reaches the target plants, and neither does half of the irrigation water.  Half of the food we grow is never eaten.  It’s really hard to reduce this costly waste.  We’ve tried.

Cribb doesn’t reveal the brilliant silver bullet solution for avoiding the coming famine, but he’s bursting with smart suggestions.  It’s so hard being a smart person living in a society that has lost its mind.  It drives him bonkers.  He is focused on better management, tighter controls, and smarter processes.  Other species have managed to do quite well without controlling their ecosystem, by simply adapting to it, and enjoying their lives.  Could there be a lesson here?

Cribb has created an excellent book.  It clobbers a generous number of dangerous illusions and lunatic fantasies, and shines a floodlight on the monsters beneath the bed.  It’s well researched, easy to read, and an essential contribution to the human knowledgebase.  Read it to the kids at bedtime, and make it the standard gift for weddings, birthdays, graduations, vision quests, and consumer holidays.

Cribb, Julian, The Coming Famine, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2010.

Here is a 22-minute video of Cribb discussing his book.  YouTube has longer videos.

God Save Me From A Normal Life — Part Four

OK, so our modern civilized world is lost, but we’re starting to wake up to the notion that we’ve travelled a long ways down a dead path, because we have been guided by a dead vision.  We didn’t create this vision, we inherited it, and we have (so far) been unable to summon the power to acknowledge its fatal defects, reject it, and outgrow it — a long and difficult process.

Luckily, as we move beyond the temporary bubble of abundant energy, the unfolding collapse will undermine the dead vision.  The portion of the vision related to perpetual growth and insatiable consumption will be run over and killed by economic decay.  Unluckily, the portion of the dead vision related to the notion that humans are the divine owners and masters of the world is likely to persist, as we return to a muscle-powered way of life — but it will be weakened and vulnerable.

Following the Black Death, many survivors lost their faith in religion.  Why worship a god that permitted such immense horror?  In the wake of our collapse, many minds will likewise be roaring with resentment about all aspects of industrial civilization.  Our glorious era of astonishing innovation and human brilliance will shapeshift into a hideous calamity of unimaginable stupidity and unforgivable destruction.

“Never again!” will be the mantra of the survivors.  But how thoroughly will they comprehend the mistakes that created the disaster?  How likely will they be to continue the practice of unsustainable habits, especially soil mining, animal enslavement, and metal making?  One of the most powerful medicines of all is understanding.  What knowledge would be of great importance to our descendants?  How can we help them escape from the tentacles of our dead vision, and safely return to wildness and freedom? 

They will need to understand a reality-based version of history that discards the daffy myths and tells us who we are, warts and all — how we stumbled into this mess, and how our mistakes snowballed into the current disaster.  They will need to understand genuine sustainability, an extremely important subject that our society keeps chained up in the basement.  This is why I’ve written two books on sustainability — to shine a light on a clan of thinkers who are not wind turbine salesmen, or sustainable development hucksters.

Unfortunately, our institutions of education, religion, media, and government are manifestations of the dead vision, and they seem committed to going down with the ship.  To them, real history and genuine sustainability are matters of heresy that must religiously be beaten and stoned.  Sustainable living will never become our goal if we don’t know what it is, or why it’s essential to the health of the land, and the survival of our species.

Fortunately, the system is rotting from within.  In its prime, this system vigilantly protected us from fresh ideas and healthy visions — the cultural gatekeepers never allowed this information to enter our madhouse.  But the madhouse walls are crumbling. 

Recently, we have entered a delightful bubble of freedom.  For a limited amount of time — until the lights go out, or freedom is squashed — anyone can publish a book, release a song, display a painting, share a video, or discuss ideas with people from around the world.  For a limited amount of time, we have access to a global communication system.  Anything you do can be made available to billions.  If the moment is ripe, fresh ideas and healthy visions can go viral, rapidly spreading — and these days, large numbers of minds might be intrigued by fresh ideas and healthy visions.  Amazing things could happen.

Today, seven-point-something billion people are sitting ducks in a no-man’s-land between two powerful unfriendly forces.  On one side is climate change, which has many uncomfortable surprises in store for us.  On the other side is the end of the cheap energy bubble, and the collapse of industrial civilization, which will also bring many uncomfortable surprises.  In other words, big trouble is coming, big suffering.  The bill for our experiment in tool making has come due, and it is enormous.

Along with big trouble comes big opportunity.  Mother Nature will mercilessly resolve the overpopulation problem that we have ignored, a problem that has made sustainability impossible.  Another barrier to sustainability, our industrial system, will run out of energy, disintegrate, and rust in peace, terminating our dreadfully meaningless consumer society.  The final barrier to sustainability resides between our ears.

When the lights go out, our crippling isolation from the family of life will thankfully end.  There will be nothing to eat in the refrigerator, and all of our glowing electronic screens will thankfully go blank forever.  We will have no choice but to go outdoors, devote some serious attention to the living world, and develop a profound sense of respect for its power and beauty (and edible aspects).  We will have the precious opportunity to shift to a healthy path, and remember how to live like wild and free human beings once again.  Will we do it?

We at last come to the mother of all questions.  If people educated in industrial cultures survive the storm, will they regroup and repeat the same mistakes we’ve been making for thousands of years?  Or will they wisely perceive these devastating mistakes as important lessons to be learned?  What happens if the dead vision has no serious competition when the lights go out?  Game over?  Maybe climate change will make it impossible to repeat our cardinal mistakes.  Maybe it won’t. 

What if people imagined new visions before the lights went out, and shared them with the world?  What might happen if the moment was ripe, and these visions became as popular as Avatar, Lady Gaga, or Harry Potter?  What might happen if millions of minds received healthy doses of stories depicting real history and genuine sustainability?  What might happen if we acknowledged the existence of reality and began to have deep, meaningful discussions about it?  Could this awakening make a vital difference for those who live in the aftermath?  Could it help the present generation make better choices?

Those whose minds dance outside-the-box are not sodden with despair.  Big change is coming, and the rich and powerful can do nothing to stop it.  There is a faint light at the end of the tunnel.  The gang rape of the planet is running out of fuel, and will eventually cease.  Better days are on the way — a long era of healing.  Sooner or later, with or without us, the family of life will once again return to balance.

The ancestors remind us that there was a time before civilization, industrialization, overpopulation, the madness.  There will also come a time when they have long been forgotten.  There is no undo button, but there will come a day when the storm has passed.  Joy!

God Save Me From A Normal Life - Part One

Returning to genuine sustainability in the near future is impossible, because there are far too many people in the world.  There is no way to feed them all without causing deeper permanent injuries to the ecosystem.  Sadly, humankind displays almost no interest in doing what needs to be done to address overpopulation.  It’s much easier to unplug our brains, close our eyes, and assign the unpleasant business to famine, war, and disease.  So be it.

Our extreme overpopulation is possible because we are living in a temporary bubble of abundant energy.  Unsustainable industrial agriculture can produce far more food than the unsustainable muscle-powered farming of earlier times.  But the days of cheap energy are behind us now, which means that the outburst of unusual growth and prosperity will wind down, stop, and reverse.  Sooner or later, industrial civilization as we know it will run out of fuel and collapse.  Industrial agriculture will no longer be possible.  The next 50 years are going to be radically different from the last 50 years. 

We’ve spent our entire lives living in a massively unsustainable, planet-killing way of life.  So did our parents and grandparents.  To our minds, this way of life seems perfectly normal, and we expect it to continue forever.  Actually, it’s a bizarre accident in the human journey, it’s moving into its final stages, and it can never happen again, thankfully. 

A huge obstacle to the healing process is our perception of history.  We’ve all been taught that our industrial civilization is nothing less than a miracle.  It’s always getting better, and the best is yet to come.  Does this sound like a problem that needs to be fixed?  Well, what it sounds like is a history that has little relationship with reality.  Bogus history provides us with a false identity, and it enables self-destructive thinking and living.

Thus, a primary task in the healing process is deliberately unlearning bogus history.  We mistakenly assume bogus history to be the truth, because it has been repeatedly hammered into our brains during many years at school.  It becomes the foundation of our worldview.  Bogus history hides the enormous problems of progress under the bed, and presents us with glorious myths of brilliant achievement.

If we gaze in the mirror and see the reflection of a being lucky to be living at the wondrous zenith of the human journey, then the notion of genuine sustainability is purely absurd, and not worthy of consideration.  But what if we see the reflection of someone who has had the misfortune of inheriting a hideous treasure of mistakes and illusions from 300 generations of well-intended ancestors?  In this case, genuine sustainability takes on the appearance of the antidote, the cure, something precious — a lifesaver.

Unlearning bogus history is like taking a powerful laxative that vigorously cleanses us of our false sense of identity.  Happily, this process has begun.  A growing number of radical thinkers are seriously questioning the value of domestication, agriculture, civilization, and industrial society.  They are coming to appreciate the intelligence and virtues of nature-based societies. 

The doddering drooling defenders of the mainstream work hard to keep these new thinkers safely locked away in the lunatic fringe cage, but their efforts will fail.  These new thinkers are displaying the first signs of powerful wisdom to emerge in the entire history of civilization.  They announce that our way of life is a mistake, and it’s rapidly destroying us.  Comprehending this essential idea enables and encourages clear thinking, intelligent change, and great healing — beautiful breakthroughs long obstructed by the idiotic old myths of progress and perpetual growth.

We must have history.  We cannot live with vision and power if we don’t know who we are, and where we came from.  After we’ve thrown bogus history overboard, we’ll need new histories that have deep roots in reality.  At the foundation of the healing process are learning, thinking, discussing, simplifying, and exploring nature (rewilding).  This work can be pursued at low cost, with greater freedom, outside the realm of formal institutionalized education, by people who want to make meaningful contributions with their lives.

Once upon a time, Carl Jung said, “I am not what happened to me, I am what I chose to become.”  This is why many nature-based societies encouraged people to discover their calling via vision quest ceremonies.  Living with a vision provided us with a direction and purpose in life, and helped us avoid getting lost and wandering aimlessly.

Societies also need a vision to live well.  In nature-based societies, vision was provided by the time-proven traditional culture.  The way to a good life was to carefully follow the path of the ancestors.  In today’s disaster-based societies, the guiding vision enshrines perpetual growth — a dead-end path of infantile excess that fuels catastrophic ecocide, and pandemics of mental illness and degenerative disease. 

Our disaster-based culture is bloated with fantasies of unsustainable science fiction futures, like the Jetsons, Star Wars, or colonies on Mars.  Nature exists outside the walls of these bleak humans-only prisons.  We dream that tomorrow will be a technological wonderland — robot-driven electric cars, smart highways, smart grids, high-speed trains, Internet everything, windmills and solar panels, and on and on — nothing sustainable, and nothing that is necessary for a healthy and enjoyable life.  This vision has no future, because the temporary bubble of abundant energy has no future.  Perpetual growth on a finite planet is impossible, and pursuing it is insane.  It’s time for a new vision.

To be continued.

Easter Island II

I keep having nightmares about one possible future: biofuel hell.  Clearly, they are visions sent by ancestral spirits, and they are meant to be shared.  Perhaps they will inspire writers, movie makers, and other creative people to produce healing, mind-altering work.  Perhaps they will inspire contemplation and sincere conversations.  At this point, I’m just going to dump a bag of jigsaw puzzle pieces on the table.  See what you can do with them.

During World War II, when gasoline was rationed, or unavailable to civilians, hundreds of thousands of vehicles in dozens of nations were converted to run on wood gas.  Car owners installed equipment that weighed 400 to 500 pounds (180 to 225 kg), plus another 50 to 100 pounds (22 to 45 kg) of fuel — wood chips or charcoal. 

In the firebox, fuel was ignited to release the gasses, primarily nitrogen and carbon monoxide.  Carbon monoxide was the flammable and explosive energy source.  It was also extremely poisonous, much to the delight of morticians.  Many folks drove with their windows rolled down.  The gas contained twice as much non-flammable nitrogen as carbon monoxide, which meant that it was not a high-powered fuel. 

In wartime Germany, 500,000 wood gas vehicles were in use, including cars, buses, tractors, motorcycles, ships, and trains.  These vehicles were also used in Denmark, Sweden, France, Finland, Switzerland, Russia, Japan, Korea, and Australia.

Charcoal-powered cars were developed in China in 1931, and they remained popular into the 1950s.  Before World War II, the French were consuming 50,000 tons of wood for vehicle fuel.  This increased to 500,000 tons by 1943. 

Readers who want to get a better feel for what life was like in an era of wood-fuelled transport should read Producer Gas & the Australian Motorist by Don Bartlett.  It’s a 26 page discussion of what Australian drivers experienced during World War II, when little gasoline was available. 

Today, rising gasoline prices are renewing interest in wood-power.  Modern technology allows wood-powered cars to cruise at 68 mph (110 km/h), with a driving range of 62 miles (100 km), consuming 66 pounds (30 kg) of wood.  There’s just one little drawback with biofuels.  “If we were to convert every vehicle, or even just a significant number, to wood gas, all the trees in the world would be gone and we would die of hunger because all agricultural land would be sacrificed for energy crops.  Indeed, the woodmobile caused severe deforestation in France during the Second World War.”  France was not alone.  Remember that there were far, far fewer cars in the world 70 years ago.

Americans are fiercely defensive about their sacred guns, but this passion is trivial in comparison to our God-given right to drive energy-guzzling motorized wheelchairs.  Most of us would rather be stoned to death by an angry crowd of Taliban than switch to bikes or buses.  Have no doubt that when gas rises above $20 or $30 a gallon, or when filling stations are out of gas for days or weeks at a time, countless hucksters will fall out of the sky, selling wood gas conversion units — and every one of them will be bought.

Air travel is a dinosaur industry, and will likely be replaced by rail.  The University of Minnesota is working with the Coalition for Sustainable Rail (CSR) and the Sustainable Rail International (SRI) to create powerful, fast, clean, and modern steam locomotives.  “If the demonstration project is successful, however, trains could be merely a starting point for biocoal-fueled steam power.”

The Natural Resources Research Institute at the University of Minnesota has invented biocoal.  They feed “cellulosic biomaterial” (like dead trees) into a torrefaction process and turn it into black pellets.  The raw material is exposed to high temperatures, pulverized, and then formed into fuel pellets.  Unlike wood pellets, torrefied biomass pellets will not absorb water, so they can be stored outdoors.  The pellets have the same energy content as coal, with no sulfur or heavy metals.  

Tests in the US, Europe, and Japan have shown that torrefied biomass can successfully be used in coal-fired power plants with few modifications.  Several plants for manufacturing torrefied biomass should be in operation by 2013.  This fuel has a higher energy density than wood pellets or wood chips. 

Here’s a gem: “Biomass gasification is being considered as a possible technology for converting at least 10 million acres of Texas brush into biofuel, according to Dr. Jim Ansley, Texas AgriLife Research rangeland ecologist in Vernon.”  Vast areas of mesquite and juniper wood are just going to waste, and need to be put to productive use.

This winter, many Greeks are heating with wood, since the tax on heating oil rose 450 percent.  Slimeballs are busy illegally cutting trees in national forests.  At night, people are going into Athens parks and cutting limbs and felling trees.  High levels of smoke are sending pollution readings far beyond danger levels.  What’s odd is that this hasn’t been a cold winter.  In Athens, nighttime temperatures typically dip into the low 40s (F).  That’s warmer than where I live. 

I’ve run my heater maybe four hours all winter.  I’m a writer, and writers have no choice but to live on nothing.  Every morning I get out of bed and put on a tee-shirt, heavy sweatshirt, fleece jacket, thick hooded sweatshirt, insulated cap, blue jeans, socks and shoes, and I’m ready for a long day of work.  Writers know that our sense of coldness is culturally programmed — it’s all in your head — and has little to do with our animal bodies.  Once we understand this vital secret, we can live with far greater comfort, at far lower temperatures, at far less expense. 

So anyway, as we move beyond the bubble of cheap energy, we will certainly burn more biomass.  Will we use biomass energy to fuel our wood stove, cars, tractors, trucks, railroads, and power grid?  No doubt we’ll give it a good try.  It’s clearly an insane idea, but it’s hard for us to imagine a life without our addictions.

Anyone who has read John Perlin’s essential book, A Forest Journey, clearly understands the folly of running an industrial civilization on wood.  It’s been tried many times, and always failed, because it wiped out a resource that the civilization depended on for its survival — just like we’re doing today with fossil fuels. 

Jared Diamond is a geography professor at UCLA.  He has given many lectures on the Easter Island story.  His students always have a difficult time grasping the image of natives cutting down the last tree on the island.  “That's simply not possible — people aren’t that stupid!”  Well, unfortunately, yes we are, is Diamond's conclusion in his book, Collapse. 

Today, we’re moving in the direction toward a treeless planet — Easter Island II.  Ten years from now, somewhere in Nebraska, there may be a morbidly obese accountant who drives his wood-powered F350 4X4 monster truck two miles to work every day.  His fuel box is empty.  In his back yard is the last living tree on Earth.

OK, so those are the puzzle pieces.