Wild Free and Happy Sample 42

[Note: This is the forty-second sample from the rough draft of my far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.]

SACRED ENERGY

Sunbeams

Alfred Crosby wrote a fascinating history of energy use.  There are two primary sources of energy, nuclear fusion from the core of the sun, and heat that rises up from the molten magma within the Earth.  Almost all of the energy used by the family of life traces back to the solar source.  Every day, the sun reliably provides clean energy for our planet, and it never sends us a bill.  Solar energy will very likely continue to be delivered for millions of years.  It is genuinely sustainable.

Energy arriving via incoming sunbeams is captured by the living solar panels built into a wide variety of green plants.  The solar panels contain chlorophyll, which uses sunbeam power to assemble simple carbohydrates by combining molecules of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and water (H₂O).  This magic act is called photosynthesis, and it enables the existence of the entire family of life.  The carbs it produces include sugars, lignin, and cellulose.  They are used for the plant’s basic survival, growth, and reproduction.  Some plants store carbs for later use.  The byproduct emitted by photosynthesis is a gas called oxygen.

By a remarkable coincidence, living organisms called animals require both carbohydrates and oxygen in order to survive.  Animals burn (oxidize) carbs and release a byproduct called carbon dioxide, the gas that plants need to perform photosynthesis.  Animals consume food from plant and/or animal sources and use it for growth, reproduction, daily activities, and so on.  The portion of their food intake that’s not utilized is emitted in wastes called pee and poop, which are highly nutritious substances for plants.

Finally, all living plants and animals. sooner or later, become dead plants and animals, and dead stuff is a highly nutritious source of food for the recycling crew of wee beings.  They convert dead stuff into humus.  This organic matter sequesters essential nutrients and improves the fertility of topsoil, much to the delight of the entire family of life.  Under ideal conditions, the fertility and depth of topsoil can improve continuously for thousands of years.   

Ladies and gentlemen, please stand up and give an enthusiastic round of applause for the amazing magic of life — a brilliant, intricate, functional process that has been perfectly sustainable for several billion years, successfully rolling with the many powerful punches of change!  Hooray!  All lives matter!  All deaths matter!  The dance goes round and round.  Woo-hoo!  Big Mama Nature rocks!

Here’s something I didn’t know before.  Earth is an unusual planet, because its land surfaces include accumulations of carbon-rich organic matter, stuff left behind by the family of life.  This matter enables the possibility of fire.  Three things are needed for fire: oxygen, heat, and fuel.  A living forest can burn, and so can collections of dead dry stuff.  Crosby suspected that Earth might be the only planet where fire is possible.

Carboniferous Period

The family of life is sunbeam powered.  Soil organisms are children of the sun.  Plants and trees are children of the sun.  Everything that swims, flies, crawls, or walks is a sunbeam critter, including you and me.  Fossil energy is hydrocarbon compounds originally created by ancient sunbeams.

Coal is fossilized sunshine from tropical swamp forests that lived during the Carboniferous Period, which was roughly 360 to 300 million years ago, long before dinosaurs.  This fossil biomass accumulated over the course of 60 million years, largely in the vast swampy rainforests of Europe, Asia, and North America.  The rainforests absorbed sunshine and carbon, and used it to create carbon-rich biomass, via photosynthesis.

Today, tree trunks are roughly 1 part bark to 4 parts of wood.  During the Carboniferous, the trees trunks were more like 8 parts bark to 1 part of wood (up to 20 to 1).  Back then, there were no microorganisms capable of decomposing the lignin in the bark of dead trees, so nothing rotted for 60 million years.  The biomass in the rainforest swamps eventually became carbon-rich peat.  Over time, pressure and heat transformed the peat deposits into coal.  In some locations, coal beds are up to 39 feet thick (12 m). 

Because so much carbon was buried, there was far less of it in the atmosphere.  Consequently, the oxygen content in the air soared to 35 percent (now it’s 21 percent).  So, for the animals living in that oxygen-rich air, many things grew to giant proportions.  Dragonflies had wingspans of 29 inches (75 cm), and millipede-like bugs grew up to 9 feet long (2.7 m).  Some amphibians were almost 20 feet long (6 m). 

 Finally, the Carboniferous Period was brought to an end by climate change.  Wet and warm became cool and dry.  Glaciers grew, sea levels dropped, and many rainforest species went extinct, including most of the forests.  In the new climate, many reptiles adapted well, because the eggs they laid on land had shells that prevented the embryo from drying out.  Eventually, this enabled the emergence of the dinosaur era, which included the ancestors of modern birds.

It took many millions of years to transform the woody biomass into coal.  Over the passage of time, Big Mama Nature buried most of the sequestered carbon.  The family of life had no need for it.  So, the fossil sunshine took a long and pleasant nap.  Much later, when human miners rudely began drilling and blasting, the coal spirits were totally infuriated.  They cast malevolent spells against the screw-brained primates.  Their curses loaded the atmosphere with carbon, jerked the rug out from under a stable climate, and blindsided ecosystems everywhere.  Leave the coal where it is!

Jurassic Period

Petroleum and natural gas are buried sunshine that began in bodies of water during the Jurassic Period, the age of dinosaurs.  In those days, the climate was very warm, creating perfect conditions for teeny-tiny plants called phytoplankton that float around in oceans, seas, and lakes.  They absorbed Jurassic sunshine, and used it to create carbohydrates (their food), via photosynthesis. 

Today, phytoplankton are the most numerous organisms in oceans.  It is estimated that they comprise one percent of global biomass, yet most of them are too small to see with the naked eye.  They are the foundation of the oceanic food chain, and all sea life depends on them for survival.  Of all the photosynthesis performed on Earth, they do half of it.  They produce half of the oxygen in the atmosphere, the stuff you’re breathing now.  They asked me to tell you that they are really pissed off about the climate crisis and ocean acidification.  Leave the oil and gas where it is!

During the Jurassic, countless gazillions of these floating organisms lived happily.  When they died, they sank to the bottom.  In some locations, large deposits accumulated faster than the material could decompose.  These deposits formed between 260 and 10 million years ago.  Once they were buried under layers of sediment, heat and pressure stimulated chemical reactions.  Oil and gas were created when the deposits were cooked for millions of years at temperatures ranging from 180° to 280°F (82° to 137°C).  In many locations, large concentrations of these hydrocarbons (oil and gas) have survived to modern times.  (So, oil is not dinosaur juice, it is phytoplankton stew.)

It took 250 million years for the biomass to accumulate at the bottom of the sea, and additional millions to finish pressure cooking it into oil and gas.  During this extremely slow process, 90 tons of ancient biomass was transformed into oil from which one U.S. gallon of gasoline (3.8 l) could be refined.  Over the passage of time, Big Mama Nature deeply buried most of the sequestered carbon, because the family of life had no need for it.  The world continued to live happily, and the air remained fresh and clean.

Vicious Circle

Our hominin ancestors appeared maybe four million years ago.  Like all other animals, they needed food, air, and water to survive.  Plants made their own food via photosynthesis, so they needed sunbeams, air, and water. 

As mentioned earlier, the invention of the fire drill, and the domestication of fire was a major turning point in the human saga.  Our early hominin ancestors may have lived for a million years or more prior to fire making.  It wasn’t necessary for biological survival, but it eventually enabled civilizations to develop the deadly technology needed to destroy entire ecosystems, and destabilize the climate.  We do know that, sooner or later, our ancestors became seriously addicted to using fire.  At that point, they developed a never-ending interest in fuel — dried organic matter like grass, leaves, dung, peat, and wood. 

Fire enabled them to better defend themselves against man-eating carnivores, so fewer brothers and sisters became cat food.  It also enabled cooking, which sharply increased the number of potential food resources from which they could extract solar energy.  So their addiction to sunbeam energy now expanded beyond the food they ate, to the solar power stored in the fuels they burned.

Humans are walking sunbeams.  We absorb sunbeam energy when we eat nuts, berries, fruit, tubers, and other digestible plant substances.  We can’t acquire it by eating grass, but we can absorb it when we eat grass-loving herbivores.  We can encourage the expansion of their herds, and increase our food resources, by deliberately expanding herbivore habitat — grasslands.  This can be done via firestick farming or deforestation.  For humans, grasslands provide more food than deserts, wetlands, forests, or brushy scrub. 

Wild herbivores are far less likely to overgraze than are herds of domesticated livestock, because a herder’s wealth and status is based on the number of critters he owns, not the condition of the grassland.  More is better.  For this reason, herders also have a long history of aggressively exterminating the wild carnivores that also cherish their herds.  As mentioned earlier, some ecosystems have been reduced to wastelands when overgrazing leads to catastrophic erosion over time.

Cropland can produce far more food per unit of land than grazing land, so it was often expanded in regions that were suitable for agriculture.  The healthy community of wild vegetation was ripped off the face of the land, the soil was tilled, seeds were planted, and sunbeams nurtured a generous banquet of nutrients we could digest.

Like herding, agriculture also has a long history of degrading ecosystems over time, in a number of ways.  Each crop removes nutrients from the soil that are often not returned — nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other stuff.  When sunbeams heat up exposed soil, they stimulate microbial life that degrades the humus, causing precious carbon in the soil to float away as carbon dioxide.  This long term carbon loss is even greater when cropland was originally created via deforestation.  Wild forests and unmolested topsoil are two huge treasure chests of precious carbon.  In a later chapter, we’ll take a closer look at the serious harms and challenges related to agriculture today.

Once again, attentive readers will see that the hunter-gatherer way of life had far less impact on ecosystems.  It wasn’t consistently harmless, but it kept humans alive for 300,000 years, and our hominin ancestors for several million years.  In comparison, the lifespan of civilization will be more like a quick flash in the pan, a train wreck.  Prior to the dawn of herding and farming, the planet remained in far better condition than it is today. 

Human cleverness, motivated by good intentions, and handicapped by ecological ignorance, has spectacularly backfired — and this failure is not understood by billions of folks who know little or nothing about environmental history.  Catastrophe is invisible to them.  Their virtual reality headsets stream images of a high standard of living, wondrous prosperity, amazing genius.  Let’s go shopping!

Craig Dilworth described the ongoing rise and fall of civilizations as a vicious circle.  Clever innovation enabled folks to control and exploit more sunbeam energy, and this enabled population growth.  More mouths needed access to more sunbeams, which required more cleverness, and on and on.  It was a merry-go-round that kept spinning faster and faster, until it ran into solid limits to growth that cleverness could not sweep aside.  Then, the merry-go-round shifted into reverse, and the game got slower, simpler, and quieter.  Societies strangled by scarcity, or bulldozed by stronger outsiders, tumbled into the tar pits of oblivion, while new merry-go-rounds began spinning elsewhere.  What goes up must come down.

Albert Bartlett tirelessly preached that growth in population and resource consumption is undesirable, unwise, and unsustainable.  Therefore, the super-trendy buzzword “sustainable growth” is an oxymoron.  Unfortunately, it seems that the majority of educated people in the world are radicalized believers in an absurd oxymoron.  It’s like the neon sign in the tavern window, “Free Beer Tomorrow.”  Our obsession with perpetual growth is batshit crazy.  Luckily, ignorance is curable, in theory.

By removing the forests, and growing crops, orchards, and livestock, the incoming solar energy could generate far more digestible nutrients.  More nutrients enabled the survival of more primates, so more forests were converted into manmade nutrient factories, and the primate mob grew even more.  The trees cleared could be processed into many useful products.  The charcoal could be used to smelt ores, and produce metal tools.  Metal tools made it much easier to remove forests, build things, plow cropland, and kill enemies and other animals.  This merry-go-round of cleverness has never spun faster, with greater fury — a vicious circle indeed.

Muscle Power

Throughout the four million year era of hominins, muscle power has been a primary source of energy for doing stuff.  Muscle power is highly versatile, able to run on a variety of edible fuels — grains, beans, meat, eggs, fruit, nuts, roots, insects, and so on.  Clive Ponting noted that until 1800, about 75 percent of the mechanical energy needed to run civilization came from human muscles, and most of the rest was from animals (wind and water were minor sources). 

Prior to 1492, the indigenous Americans had enslaved zero extra-large beasts of burden (beside humans).  The grand cities of the Incas, Mayans, and Aztecs were built entirely with human labor.  Much human energy was used to create Egypt’s pyramids.  The Great Wall of China was constructed by one million workers, half of whom died in the process.  The Greek and Roman city states held large populations of slaves.  Slavery was common from the dawn of civilization until the nineteenth century, and so was forced labor for “free” peasants.

Pita Kelekna wrote that horses were wild and free until maybe 4000 B.C., when humans began enslaving them.  Wild horses had been popular large game for many thousands of years.  Several scholars have speculated that domestication probably saved horses from extinction.  You can only eat a horse once, but you can force it to perform heavy work month after month, year after year.  They could be used to pull stuff, haul loads, and carry riders.  Four legged slaves enabled a tremendous expansion of soil mining, forest mining, mineral mining, bloody empire building, and economic growth.  They helped unlock the gateway to industrial civilization.

Humans produce less muscle power than horses, but we need less feed, and can digest far more types of foods.  We have bodies and brains that allow us to perform a much wider variety of physical tasks.  People can travel across deserts, up rugged mountains, and through dense rainforests.  Horses are less adaptable to hot climates and arctic regions.  Each one requires five acres (2 ha) of good grassland, and the supply of good grassland is not infinite.

By 1900, the global population of humans had soared to about 1.5 billion, and the era of horse power was wearing out its welcome.  Eric Morris wrote a fascinating essay to help us remember life in the Peak Horse era.  The streets of big cities were jammed with horses, carriages, and wagons, squishing through a deep layer of manure and urine, past rotting horse carcasses, amidst dense clouds of flies and overpowering stench.  Cities were rapidly growing, as hordes immigrants moved in to enjoy miserable industrial jobs, while living in crowded, filthy, disease ridden slums.  Each horse emitted 15 to 30 pounds (7 to 14 kg) of manure daily — 3 to 4 million pounds (1.3 to 1.8 million kg) in New York City each day.

(To be continued…)

Wild Free and Happy Sample 07

[Note: This is the seventh sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 199 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Fire: Big Juju

Civilization would have never been possible without the domestication of a superpower we call fire.  Look around you, and eliminate everything you see or use that was directly or indirectly made possible by the combustion of coal, petroleum, wood, or natural gas.  For example: metal, concrete, plastic, glowing screens, internal combustion engines.  If you could magically eliminate everything enabled by fire-based processes, you’d immediately be sitting naked in a wilderness — except that your existence was also made possible by a fire-powered civilization.  You and I are fire children.

The original tool for kindling fire is called a fire drill.  Its spindle is a straight, pointed, dry wooden stick that is spun back and forth with the hands.  The tip of the spindle is inserted into a cone-shaped socket in a fireboard of dry wood.  Rapidly spinning the stick creates friction as it rubs into the fireboard’s socket, and eventually, if all goes well, a glowing ember comes into being.  The fireboard is then tilted to drop the ember into a fluffy wad of dry tinder.  The ember is gently blown on, forcing its heat into the tinder.  Finally, a wee flame emerges in a puff of smoke.  Success!

Tom Brown described a Native American legend about fire making.  One day, the Great Spirit gave people the “wisdom of whirling wood.”  The spindle was the male element, active and aggressive.  The fireboard was the female element, receiving the whirling spindle, and nurturing a glowing ember.  The ceremony was like two lovers passionately meeting, and giving birth to a powerful being.  The bundle of tinder was the Earth, which nurtured the new life into fullness.

The invention of the fire drill enabled our tropical primate ancestors to migrate into chilly non-tropical ecosystems, and eventually spread to all continents, even the arctic.  As hungry hominins, skilled at ambush hunting, moved into unknown lands, many species of megafauna gradually disappeared from the stage — millions and millions of animals.  Without fire magic, I expect that hominins would be absent in much of the world today — the regions having annual or permanent snowy seasons.  The Americas would maybe still be home to mastodons, wooly rhinos, sabertooth cats, and other beautiful wild giants.

The original hominin homeland, south of the equator in Africa, was a highly unlikely location for the emergence of civilizations.  Jared Diamond wrote that, of the crop plants domesticated in Africa, all originated north of the equator.  He added that no large herbivores suitable for domestication originally lived south of the equator in Africa — only the guinea fowl was enslaved in this region.  This implies that if we had never wandered out of our ancestral homeland, the planet might have remained unspoiled.

Anyway, some too-clever African ancestor succeeded in inventing the fire drill.  What if a hungry crocodile had dismembered this person ten minutes before the big discovery?  Would we have been likely to migrate out of Africa, and spread around the Earth?  Would the world of today be a civilization-free wilderness, home to fantastic numbers of animals?  Would London still be a vast ancient forest, home to hippos, elephants, giant deer, aurochs, and lions?  Would the Thames still thrash and splash with huge migrations of giant salmon?  Would a wee population of hominins still be chasing critters across the savannah — wild, free, and happy?

Types of Fire

Stephen Pyne, one of the world’s foremost experts on fire history, described three categories of fire.

(1) Natural fire is not ignited by humans.  Nature can start fires via lightning strikes, volcanoes, meteors, or falling rocks.  It rarely ignites when the temperature is cold, the ecosystem is moist, or where little or no fuel is present.  When conditions are ideal, these wild fires can quickly reduce large areas of forest or grassland to ashes.  This is perfectly normal and natural.  In regions where wildfires commonly occur, like America’s west coast, the vegetation consists of many species that are fire dependent or fire tolerant.  Some plants actually require fire to germinate their seeds.

(2) Anthropogenic fire is started by humans, deliberately or unintentionally.  It can be ignited in many different ways — fire drills, flint and steel, friction matches, electric sparks, machinery, power lines, chemical explosions, atomic bombs, and so on.  Until recent centuries, it primarily burned biomass fuels like wood, grass, or dung.

Unlike modern societies that burn fossil biomass imported from distant lands, preindustrial communities had firm limits on the firewood available nearby.  At its peak in A.D. 1050, the Native American civilization at Cahokia (near modern St. Louis) was home to 30,000 folks who cooked and heated with wood.  This was twice the number of folks living in London at the time, and London was Europe’s biggest city north of the Alps.

Cahokia’s homes were wood framed and thatched, and the palisade that surrounded the settlement was made of logs.  They had no carts, horses, or iron axes.  By 1250, it was a ghost town.  Did they run short of fuel, overhunt, deplete their topsoil, perish from warfare, experience a climate surprise, or all of the above?

Anthropogenic fire has been used extensively around the world to alter ecosystems, in order to make them more suitable for agriculture, herding, and wild game.  More on this subject later.

(3) Industrial fire is a more recent variation of anthropogenic fire.  Its primary fuel is associated with fossil biomass — coal, petroleum, and natural gas.  It can burn anywhere — in airplanes, ships, diamond mines, and skyscrapers.  It can burn on barren sand dunes, in soggy rainforests, or in the frozen arctic.  Industrial fire is often designed to burn automatically, like in a furnace or water heater.

Fossil biomass consists of enormous deposits of sequestered carbon.  Coal is rainforest vegetation that accumulated over the course of 60 million years.  Oil and natural gas come from dead phytoplankton that accumulated over 250 million years.  Combined, this is a one-time 310 million year stash of extremely high quality energy.  Industrial civilization is furiously burning this fuel on a huge scale, at an increasing rate.  Every day, the remaining fuel is further depleted, to support the survival of several billion humans who live like there’s no tomorrow.  What could possibly go wrong?

Pyne says that the civilization of our grandparents was limited by the amount of fossil fuel reserves remaining — eventually, the fuel gage would drop to Empty, and the party would end.  The current generation has a new and closer limit.  Before the needle ever hits Empty, the planet will become an ecological catastrophe.  The Big Burn is belching out far more harmful waste than our planet’s ecosystem can absorb.

The oceans are acidifying.  Carbon is building up in the atmosphere, resulting in rising temperatures and intensified storm systems.  Ice packs are melting, and sea levels are rising.  More than a billion people survive on food grown on cropland irrigated with water from melting snowpack and glaciers, which are shrinking.  Acid rain is hammering forests.  Millions of people are sick and dying from the perpetual haze of industrial air pollution.  And on and on.  Fire is powerful juju.  Wistfully modifying Smokey the Bear’s slogan, “Only you can prevent anthropogenic fire!”

Joy Ride to Global Collapse



 

Note: I need to devote more time to my upcoming book, now known as Wild Free & Happy.  The following is Jim Minter’s review of James Howard Kunstler’s book, Home from Nowhere.  It was posted over 20 years ago (5 December 1996) on the e-design website.  This was back when the Peak Oil movement still lived in caves.  Oddly, most of the essay could have been written in 2018.  America’s fanatical addiction to motorized wheelchairs is stronger than ever.  Minter is an excellent writer.  Enjoy!

 

Joy Ride to Global Collapse:

Reflections on Kunstler’s Home from Nowhere

Here’s a prediction for you.  In the next two decades millions of Americans will begin a serious search for an alternative to the gasoline-powered automobile.  It is not going to be a happy search.  If you think trying to wean gun owners from their passion for firearms is a hornet’s nest, try talking to the great majority of us about reining in our passion for the automobile.  Lordy!  And yet, most of us agree there is a problem, vaguely phrased as, “There are too many other people out there clogging up the highways and slowing me down.”  Otherwise our attitude is similar to the rabid firearms bumper sticker: “You’ll get my car when you pry my cold, dead fingers from around the steering wheel.”

No one is talking to us about giving up cars today — even though there is hard scientific evidence that the freewheeling automotive world we know today will have totally vanished within the lifetime of most of us now living.  A few idealists are talking about maybe getting us to constrain our use a little bit.  None of them are running for any position of political influence in this country.  They would be lucky to get their family’s vote.  We don’t want to hear it.

Auto mania is not confined to Americans.  The love affair is international and now grows fastest in the nations of the Second and Third World.  Humanity burns 70 million barrels of oil a day.  At the present rate of increase, it is projected we’ll be burning 100 million in 20 years.  But we’ll never get there.  We are close to that peak of global production which was foreseen almost half a century ago by Dr. M. King Hubbert, the foremost petroleum geologist of his day.  The descent from that peak only takes a few decades.  We know that petroleum is a finite resource.  But even as gasoline prices begin to creep upward some time in the not-too-distant future we won’t curtail our driving until real supply shortages absolutely force the issue.

Take a look at an ugly future scenario: The sudden, agonizing death of the private automobile is a wall that global society will hit full speed, pedal to the metal when a global petroleum crisis finally catches up with us.  We will not accept any solutions that will soften the impact until the real shortage hits us at some time (early) in the next century.  If we continue to fail to take any reasonable steps to prepare for it, and it comes upon us thus, the constriction of the petroleum base of our global economy is quite likely to begin a plunging, bucking, gasping downward spiral towards a deep and lasting depression-with-inflation that could virtually end modern times as we now know them.

I will explain the combination of hard science and human hard-headedness which backs the likelihood of this future.  But first, let’s examine where we are.  Even if we believe that we are joyriding toward the abyss, few of us will volunteer to be first to quit driving.  I’ve tried it twice.  Once in Tallahassee as Florida’s “Energy Czar,” and once as a freelance investigative reporter in Washington, D.C.  What a royal pain it was to be carless in Florida’s sprawled-out, little, old capital city.  What a joy it was not to have to fool with parking in our nation’s capital.  Cabs there were plentiful and cheap.  Walking was a pleasure.  The excellent subway and bus lines were just a hop from my little flat three blocks from the Library of Congress.  But that urban experience is the exception. 

For most Americans life without a car is unthinkable — even in Washington, D.C.  It is too late to talk about rational restraint.  As James Howard Kunstler’s new book Home from Nowhere makes clear, the entire complex of the American civilization and infrastructure that we have built since World War II is almost unworkable without our massive herd of private autos.  We can’t get along without them, although Kunstler would clearly like to tame them.

Kunstler’s first best seller, The Geography of Nowhere, was described by a Wall Street Journal reviewer as “a sharp polemic.”  The language of Home from Nowhere is just as crisp and creative as he continues his positive indictment of America’s post-World-War-II built environment.  I say “positive,” because in Home from Nowhere Kunstler tries to focus on curing the blight — what we are already beginning to do in a few places, and what more we can and must do.

I, however, turned immediately to the chapter entitled “Car Crazy.”  The book’s dust jacket says it “offers real hope to a nation yearning to live in authentic places worth caring about.”  Not only does the car chapter not deliver hope, Kunstler’s auto jeremiad is almost as bleak as my post-petroleum scenario.  After a splendidly concise and eloquent damning of what American car craziness is doing to our built environment, he concludes his chapter, “We have the knowledge to do the right thing; we lack only the will to do the right thing.  The inescapable conclusion is that our behavior is wicked, and that we are liable to pay a heavy price for our wickedness by losing the things we love, including our beautiful country and our democratic republic.”

Pretty appalling.  Hello!  Is anyone home, out there?  No.  We’re out joyriding.  “But,” you protest, “lose our country?  Our form of government?”  Perhaps that’s not impossible. 

The sudden death of the automobile in America would produce a major crunch that would dwarf the Great Depression.  Kunstler deplores the negative aspects of the car without understanding just how endangered the automobile truly is.  He even purports to see signs that we may be wandering away from the automobile.  Fat chance!  We Americans are not going to abandon our cars.  Especially because some guru is telling us they are immoral.  We don’t care if they are immoral.  We won’t abandon them even if they cause global warming and melt the polar ice caps putting Florida and New York City under water.  Even if we have to wear gas masks because of pollution and the whole nation grinds to gridlock we will still sit in our cars on the freeways, beeping our horns and idling our engines, praying we can creep just a few more yards.  We are not going to walk or ride bicycles except for exercise.  We are not going to ride buses, streetcars, subways, taxicabs or rickshaws except as entertainment.  A personal automobile is the right of every American.  It says so in the Constitution.

Ah, would that Kunstler’s prophesy of a gradual taming of the automobile were possible.  Nothing so gentle as that seems likely to me.  The Auto Age is going to hit a rapid deceleration.  But it will not be graceful, gradual or planned.  Disregard for a moment the thesis that the environment will run out of breathable air before we run out of petroleum.  What is unquestionable is that if we keep burning it, one way or another, the human species is eventually going to burn up the planet’s vast store of petroleum.  The only question is when.  Some very good scientists who study the globe’s petroleum supplies, but don’t work for oil companies, auto companies or nervous governments say that time is closer upon us than we suspect.

The Petroleum Age will begin sputtering into crisis as demand continues to rise and petroleum production peaks (within a decade, according to the best Hubbert projections to which I will link you at the end of this column).  We will not yet be at the bottom of the barrel, just turning towards it.  Vast windfall profits will be made by some, which will complicate the ability of leaders to explain the reality.  And the supply-side religion will tune-up its highly paid chorus.  In fits and starts prices will rise and then fall, spiraling upward because of real shortfalls in the distribution system, or in anticipation of shortage, then dropping as over-speculators take a bath, only to rise again and then fall again, but with prices always rising further and falling back slower as supply constricts.  And if an “artificial” shortage is politically created in anticipation of hoarding for the real shortage down the road, it could be a recipe for wars.  Either way, most of us will not be able to imagine curtailing our driving until the bitterest end.

What makes the decline of the Petroleum Age so relentlessly damaging is that there is no fuel that is going to substitute for it.  I know the technological optimists, with a lot of cynical hype from the auto/petroleum industrial axis and a lot of naive wishing by the Greens, vaguely promise a clean, beautiful, driving world on “a mixed fuel economy.”  It is this promise that keeps us tranquilly driving along burning it up for “a few more years” without feeling at all wicked.  Some cabal of scientists in white coats is going unmask the Second Law of Thermodynamics as an oldthink fraud.

NONE of the promised alternatives will replace petroleum.

It ain’t gonna happen.  None (let me get way out on the limb and repeat that: NONE) of the promised alternatives will replace petroleum — not even vast stores of natural gas, which is the closest potential substitute, but is also finite.  Nor will liquified and “scrubbed-up” coal juice.  Nor (again disregarding for the moment the environmental and safety questions) will the scores of new nuclear plants needed to charge up electric cars be economically supportable in a Post-Petroleum Age. 

Why?  That was explained to us by an almost forgotten scientist at the University of Florida over 20 years ago.  It is the concept of “net energy.”  If it takes one barrel of oil to produce every ten barrels of oil, you have nine barrels of oil left to run the rest of society.

As oil becomes more difficult to find and transport, the net yield decreases.  There is less to run society.  Oil costs rise.  All other costs that are touched by oil (everything) also rise.  Eventually, you creep into recession-with-inflation, which economists said wasn’t supposed to happen — until it did happen after the 1973 oil embargo.

This is where economists display their ignorance of physics.  Many economists, people who should know better, say at that point people go out and explore for more oil.  (We’re still finding new oil, but not at the rate we’re burning it.  And there are a steadily diminishing number of places on the planet where we haven’t poked holes.)  Or, economists chirp, we’ll find other energy sources and drive prices back down.  That is what happens for every other commodity, they say, and energy is no different from any other commodity.  Not so.

Energy is the great exception to conventional economic theory.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics is why.  Every time you “use” energy you lose some.  You can never get perfect efficiency.  So burning energy to get energy is a “losing” process.  Burn oil to get electricity and you end up with less energy in the electricity than you began with in the oil.  Transmit that electric energy over wires to a home or factory and you lose some.  You can’t “make” energy; and though you can sometimes “store” it in another form for a while (with loss each time) you only use energy once.  So the more complicated a process is.., the more “technologically involved”.., the more you lose in the processing.  That’s the problem with burning electricity which is a “highly refined” energy, to get hydrogen, a “lower” form, from water to then burn in cars.  That’s also why liquified coal will always be devilishly expensive to burn in autos and trucks.

The great shale oil fiasco of the late ’70s is a perfect example of what is wrong with all of the proposed “high-tech sources” of “new” energy.  Economists kept saying that when the price of oil rose high enough, extracting the oil from shale deposits would make it an economical commodity.  We burned billions of your tax dollars and billions more in private investment money trying to make it work.  There are those who still say it will work some day.  Don’t let them sell you any shale stock.

It doesn’t matter how high the price of shale oil rises

The problem with shale oil is that it has to be mined and crushed and heated to extract the oil that is there.  Mining machinery burns oil.  Crushing machinery burns oil.  Heating shale burns oil.  Hauling and dumping the spent shale burns more energy.  And of course, refining that oil into useable product takes more energy.  As does transporting it, and transporting all of the workers in the process, etc., etc.  In the ’70s we discovered that we burned about a barrel of oil to produce a barrel of shale oil.  (So-called in situ production methods shared a similar problem.)  In other words the “net energy” was zero.  So it didn’t matter what the price was.  If the price rose to a million dollars a barrel, it would still consume a million-dollar barrel of oil to produce a million-dollar barrel of shale oil and there would be no net gain to sell.

Energy is not just another commodity in our modern economic system.  Energy is the underlying power that carries the burden and makes our modern economic infrastructure “more productive” (less labor intensive).  Petroleum is the dominant energy source for the transportation network that undergirds the global economy, and the planet’s most plentiful, most versatile, most transportable and most efficient energy source.  In a very real and measurable sense the price of every other energy source we have floats on a “subsidy” of cheap petroleum.  In other words every other energy form we use, including all of the “solar” energies are as cheap and usable as they are because they are “underwritten” by cheap oil.  (Cheap petroleum and natural gas produce and transport those silicon PV cells.  When the oil is gone, the price of “solar” will skyrocket, along with every other “alternative energy source,” in direct proportion to the petroleum used in every step of its production and delivery.)

“Gasohol” is another ideal example of an “alternative fuel” that floats on a cheap petroleum subsidy.  It takes cheap oil for each step of planting, tending, fertilizing, spraying, harvesting, transporting and processing corn into alcohol.  It takes more cheap oil to blend that alcohol into something that will (still imperfectly, compared to gasoline) power your car.  Gasohol from corn, sugar, peat, beets, sawdust, tropical rain forest, or any other “biomass” is not going to run our present global auto world, let alone the expanding auto world glowingly predicted by the car industry for the future.  Ignore, for a second the fact that such massive use would quickly begin cannibalizing the biomass that supports all life and supplies such basics as food and oxygen.  “Biomass” is not a long-term massive source of global energy because many of our current agricultural and forestry practices “mine the soil,” and are, in the long run, neither “renewable,” nor “sustainable.”  Ignore the environmental concerns about CO2, ozone, etc.  Ignore the shrinking global biomass and arable land that will be needed in ever greater amounts to feed, clothe and house a swelling human population.  There isn’t enough biomass on earth to run our petroleum economy at its present level if we are insane enough to try it.  (And we are.)  We would quickly turn the planet into a desert trying to run our current automobile fleet on biomass.

And so the real “Catch 22” for alternative fuels is that when the petroleum economy begins to stumble over shortage, all of the “alternative fuels” that are supposed to be waiting in the wings, are going to rise in price dramatically.  It is going to be an ugly, cost-pushed, escalating thing that is going to cripple the global economy and impoverish global society.

Cleaned-up coal and natural gas and perhaps even some nuclear will provide our electricity for a period of time.  And some niche-market transportation, too.  Wind power can be a real electric winner for many places on the planet (not much wind here in Florida and cloud cover makes solar PV a marginally expensive source on much of the planet).  But none of these sources, along with their electric cars, will run our present automotive economy at the level of wealth and consumption we enjoy in this glorious sunset of our Petroleum Age.  Trans-continental economies that are most strung-out on automobiles and trucks (the United States, Canada, Australia, etc.) are likely to be hardest hit first. 

So just when we need to make the transition to other fuels we will discover that everything we do is much more expensive and we seem to have less than we anticipated.  It will puzzle economists.  The economy will slow down but the prices of everything will keep on rising.  We will then rediscover the age-old truth: money is not a real thing; it is only an accounting device.  Congress can’t print oil and they can’t repeal the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  So after we have ritually fired the then-current crop of politicians and the new ones haven’t changed anything, we won’t know who to blame.  What will be going on?

Now pay attention economists.  Here are three dicta that may sound heretical.  First is Minter’s Little Observation: Neither capital nor labor can create energy.  Growing out of this observation is Minter’s Little Law of Energy Subsidy: The shortage of a more efficient energy source in an economy will always make the remaining sources of less efficient energy more expensive and even less efficient.  Will humanity belatedly begin to use all energy more efficiently when we finally hear those sucking sounds in the petroleum barrel?  Of course.  We will have to.  But such efficiencies will not make us more prosperous (as they do today).  By that time they will only slow the rate at which we get poorer.  Why?  Heed Minter’s Little Maxim: A society’s transition from a more efficient energy source to a less efficient energy source will always and invariably decrease the wealth, flexibility and options available to that society.

In other words, just when we most need the wealth and flexibility of cheap petroleum energy to make the transition to a less energy-intensive infrastructure, everything is going to cost much, much more.  We will be poorer.

If this is all true, what should we be doing?  I do not have many answers.  We should at least take off the rose colored alternative fuel glasses that are blinding the Greens and providing a smoke screen for short-sighted governments and industries.  Until we do that we can’t accurately begin envisioning what a post-petroleum society is really going to look like.  Possibly we should stop sinking so much money into long-term expansions of infrastructure to support automobiles.  Maybe a few advanced thinkers will begin considering post-petroleum cities with electric-only cars, or without private-passenger cars altogether.  You tell me.

One thing that seems obvious is that we need to begin an honest net energy analysis of all of the proposed alternative fuels, and just what their true net is after all of the present petroleum subsidies are worked out of the formula.  That is not going to be as easy as it sounds.  Petroleum subsidizes everything we make and do.  But it is vital if we are to make rational judgments not based upon the partisan polemics of vested interests or true believers.  Just what we will do with this knowledge once we get it is another matter.  The Western World is run by corporate leaders who think quarter-to-quarter, politicians who think election-to-election, and a public that is hostile to bad news about their lifestyle (especially our beloved cars).  The Pacific Rim countries are enslaved to automobile exports (and petroleum poor).  The oil exporters are already exaggerating their reserves to get loans and the global financial community is making those loans.  Is there anyone out there who isn’t heavily vested in a continuation of the existing myopia?

In an earlier column, I said that since we obviously are going to do nothing about transportation until it is way too late, America’s only energy policy option is to work for efficiency in our buildings and built environment.  Certainly that is the focus of Kunstler’s two books.  That is the focus of what we have been calling “Sustainable Design.”  What is crucial for the design professions to realize is that we probably don’t have as much time as we think before we will not be as rich as we once were.  To me that spells building for quality and endurance.  It means an end to “consumable” buildings.  It means building for ourselves and posterity.  It means the old-fashioned conservative virtues of thrift and investment, not burn-up and squander.  To be Biblical, it means using the remaining fat years to prepare for the coming lean years.

Without considering the decline of petroleum, Kunstler already thinks we are wicked to be trashing our lives, our cities, and our infrastructure in our mad romance with the automobile.  Would he think us diabolic if he understood we are really racing towards a post-petroleum economy that stands to impoverish our posterity?

If so, he would probably be right.  Morally what we are doing is very much akin to burning the children’s lifeboats on the Titanic to keep the partying adults warm for another half an hour.

In the very humane, final chapter of Kunstler’s book, he reflects on the fine life that the success of his previous book, The Geography of Nowhere, has given him in a small town in New York.  It’s an idyllic world of writing and painting in an almost car-free cocoon.  He should enjoy it with a clear conscience.  He, at least, has jousted with the beast and urged reform.

But we are unreformable, and it seems certain that any such modest reforms as humanity would swallow will only delay the inevitable by a few years.  And so, as I understand it, a global economic crunch of epic proportions, one that stands to debase much of our current wealth and render much of our current infrastructure valueless, lies just over the horizon sometime in the next century.  The economic tremor of the early ‘70s was but a mild hint of the times to come.  Once again humanity is going to demonstrate Voltaire’s little maxim: “History teaches us that history teaches us nothing.”

Jim Minter, Editor

 

Some notes. 

(1) Minter thought we’d never make it to 100 million barrels per day of global oil production.  In 2014, we were at 89 million barrels.  Nobody was fracking in 1996.  Fracking is an extremely expensive and low net energy process that has no long term future.

(2) He foresaw the Petroleum Age beginning to sputter in a decade or so (i.e., 2006).  A barrel of oil was $30 in 2004.  In 2008, it was $147 — at which point the global banking system suddenly melted down, and the sky was filled with fat cats leaping off tall buildings.

(3) He mentions that shale oil is resource that will never be used.  This is accurate, because he is referring to shale that contains carbon-rich kerogen, a precursor of petroleum, which cannot be profitably extracted and refined into oil.  Today, the fracking industry is working different shale beds, in other regions, that actually contain petroleum, which can be profitably extracted only if the market price of oil is very high.

(4) Minter’s essay has gone extinct on the current internet.  It can be accessed via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.  Use it to search for: http://fcn.state.fl.us/fdi/e-design/online/9612/joyride.htm

(5) His essay was produced by e-design, part of the Florida Sustainable Communities website, run by the Florida Design Initiative.  This endeavor went extinct around 2000, when Republicans gained control of Florida government, and declared that Sustainability was “a socialist plot.”

(6) Minter was a former Miami Herald reporter, a bureau chief, daily columnist, and editor at the Tallahassee Democrat, a freelance investigative reporter in Washington, D.C., and Florida’s “Energy Czar.”  He’s over 80 now.

And… Our Plundered Planet, by Walter Youngquist (1921-2018), is an excellent 8-page essay that updates the nonrenewable resource story as of 2014.  He was one of the grandfathers of the Peak Oil movement, a top level petroleum geologist, and a university professor.  See pages 4-5 to learn about the limits of fracking, and the daunting reality of sharply diminished Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI), which almost all joyriders are completely ignorant of.  Download the PDF [HERE]

Peak Horse



In the early 1900s, automobiles, trucks, buses, and tractors were becoming very trendy.  The human population was two billion and growing, while the horse population peaked and declined.  Model T Fords did not require five acres of good grassland to fuel them, an area that could feed six to eight people.  While grassland was, in theory, a renewable resource, there was not an infinite supply of it.  Pasture could be degraded or destroyed by overgrazing, drought, plowing, or urban sprawl.

Of course, motor vehicles are dependent on a wide variety finite nonrenewable resources.  The global production of conventional oil peaked around 2005, and now we’re briskly advancing toward the peak of unconventional sources — tar sands, shale deposits, and deep-water — the fossil energy that’s far more difficult and expensive to extract.  When we pass Peak Oil, production will begin a continuous decline, and prices will rise.  Some estimate that this will begin around 2030.

Life is solar powered.  Plants have solar panels that use light to create carbohydrates.  Plant eating animals acquire these nutrients by feasting on the greenery.  Meat eating animals consume the flesh of plant eaters.  Legions of wee organisms extract the nutrients from biomass and build topsoil.  Solar energy is also embedded in coal, oil, and natural gas — carbon that was sequestered millions of years ago.

Throughout the three million year era of our ancestors, muscle power was the primary energy for moving people and things.  Muscle power is highly versatile, able to run on a variety of edible fuels — meat, eggs, fruit, nuts, roots, insects.  More versatile than horses, human muscles can move people and stuff through dense rainforests, up rugged mountains, and across deserts.  Horses are poorly adapted for hot climates and arctic regions.

Pita Kelekna noted that humans have a long history of acquiring stored solar energy via the consumption of horse flesh.  At the Roche de Solutré site, near Mâcon, France, archaeologists found a 2.5 acre (1 ha) bone bed, up to 29 feet (9 m) thick, containing the bones of up to 100,000 horses.  Neanderthals hunted horses there 50,000 years ago.  Later, humans hunted them from 37,000 to 10,000 years ago. 

Around 9,000 years ago, the last horse in the Americas died in Patagonia.  The once plentiful wild horses of Western and Central Europe’s river valleys were apparently eliminated by overhunting 8,000 years ago.  To the east, large numbers of horses managed to survive on the wide open Eurasian steppes, where trapping animals was less easy.

Horses were domesticated about 6,000 years ago.  Kelekna described how nomadic pastoralists became skillful horse parasites.  “The Mongols lived off the horse; as they traveled, they milked and slaughtered for food.  They consumed a steady diet of milk and yoghurt, drank the horse’s blood, and mixed dried milk paste with water, dried meat, and millet.”

Eventually, clever folks realized that horses were not just a tasty form of solar energy — they also had more muscle power than humans.  If properly enslaved, they could be used to pull stuff, haul stuff, and carry riders.  Four legged slaves enabled a tremendous expansion of soil mining, forest mining, mineral mining, bloody empire building, and economic growth.  They unlocked the gateway to industrial civilization.

Around 25,000 years ago, the mammoth hunters at the Dolní Věstonice site in the Czech Republic heated their mammoth bone huts by burning the solar energy embedded in two fuels: mammoth bones and black coal.  By the mid-1500s, English forest miners had nearly succeeded in eliminating the ancient rainforest.  This created an energy shortage that inspired a large scale transition to coal burning.  In the late 1800s, the oil industry emerged, and the war on the future became turbocharged.

As the age of mechanical horsepower accelerated, the long era of four legged horse power rode off into the sunset.  My grandparents witnessed the advent of Peak Horse, and my parents saw work horses largely disappear from farms and cities.  Physicist Albert Bartlett calculated that children born after 1966 will see the world consume most of its oil during their lifetime.  Industrial civilization has an expiration date.  So, we’ll just have to go back to horse power, right?  Well, umm, there are some challenges.

Eric Morris wrote a fascinating essay to help us remember life in the Peak Horse era.  By 1898, big city streets were jammed with horses, carriages, and wagons, squishing through a deep layer of manure and urine, past rotting horse carcasses, amidst dense clouds of flies and overpowering stench.  Cities were rapidly growing, as hordes immigrants moved in to enjoy miserable industrial jobs, while living in crowded, filthy, disease ridden slums. 

Each horse emitted 15 to 30 pounds (7 to 14 kg) of manure daily — 3 to 4 million pounds in New York City every day.  In 1800, farmers would pay haulers to bring manure to their fields.  By 1900, there was way too much poop, and it piled up on empty lots.  Some heaps were 60 feet high (18 m).  Clouds of flies picked up pathogenic microbes and brought them to your kitchen, spreading typhoid and other fecal-oral diseases.  In 1880, 41 horses died each day on the streets of New York.  The average horse weighed 1,300 pounds (590 kg).  Carcasses were often left to rot, making it easier to dismember them, so they could be hauled away.

Horses were jammed into filthy, poorly ventilated stables — excellent disease incubators.  In 1872, the Great Epizootic Epidemic struck, as huge numbers of horses were infected by the equine influenza virus.  Coughing spread it from one animal to the next.  Typically, they recovered in two to three weeks, but severe cases could immobilize an animal for six months.

During the epidemic, available horse power was drastically reduced.  Folks had to use wheelbarrows and handcarts to transport goods.  The postal service was hobbled.  Freight piled up.  Coal deliveries stopped.  Food distribution wheezed.  On farms, plows and other equipment fell idle.  Boats quit moving on the Erie Canal.  Horse-drawn fire engines and street cars did not move.  When a big fire roared in downtown Boston, firemen had to pull their heavy equipment from the station by hand.

Almost certainly, there are people alive today who will see the peak of motor vehicle production, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some (or many) will experience the extinction of motor vehicles, and the lights going out on civilization as we know it.  Bye-bye railroads, air travel, refrigerators, elevators, irrigation, mining, supermarkets, and so on.  Sewage treatment plants, municipal water systems, and digital technology will blink out.  Vast areas of cropland will cease being plowed, planted, and harvested.  The age of obesity and cell phone addiction will end, but we might see the screw-brained revival of wood-fueled motor vehicles.

Kelekna, Pita, The Horse in Human History, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2009.

Olsen, Sandra L., “Pleistocene Horse-hunting at Solutre,” Johnson, E., ed., Ancient Peoples and Landscapes, Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock, 1995, pp. 65-75.

Dolní Věstonice webpage with awesome illustrations.  [LINK]

Morris, Eric, “From Horse Power to Horsepower,” Access, Number 30, Spring 2007.  [LINK]

Bartlett, Albert A., The Essential Exponential, Center for Science, Mathematics & Computer Education, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 2004.   [LINK]