WastedEnergy

Slow Drip: A Brief History of Fossil Fuels and the Economy

What is the definition of “modernity?”  The notion may be best defined in terms of the economy, a monolithic summary of billions of transactions wherein we exchange paper and ink, or electrons, representing value in the form of debt, for “goods and services.”  Economists, who theorize about the functioning of both this monolith and the various cogs in the machines that make it work, have advanced their practice to the point that they hold many positions of authority in the world today.  The reasons are obvious to even a casual observer: the economic engine is what powers the authority of governments, backed by militaries supported by revenues drawn from the tax base that is a product of productive economies.

So modernity depends upon the economy, which depends upon monetized transactions.  So what powers this economy?  Before we get into answering this question, it is worth examining the history of the beast itself, and how exactly it grew into such a behemoth.

The father of modern “free-market” economics was of course Adam Smith, one of the first theorists to point out the the advantages of specialization in achieving efficient economic outcomes.  Under a feudal system like that which preceded the modern economy in Europe, each peasant bears the ultimate responsibility for her own well-being.  The most important question under such a system is whether my manual labor, given the state of the land and environmental conditions such as weather, is capable of harvesting sufficient sunlight to ensure adequate availability of calories to sustain my own existence.  And that is more or less the end of the story.  Smith pointed out that efforts could be economized and well-being improved, at least in theory, through specialization of work.  In other words, farmers farm, coal miners mine coal, and factory overseers oversee factory operations.  And thus the modern economy was born.

The theories laid out by Smith and his followers were perfected in practice by the illustrious Nazi backer Henry Ford and other industrialists hundreds of years later, who, with the help of the fossil fuel and its ever-so-convenient energy content, were able to take the concept of specialization to its logical conclusion, to reduce human labor to its barest components: literally turning the same cog over and over again, becoming one piece of a vast and complex supply chain.  And it worked.  It was efficient.  But there were unanticipated side effects we never quite managed.  For instance: it made us less than human in the process, convincing us that we could achieve salvation, whether from poverty or from the dreariness of a peasant life, only by paying pieces of our time to corporations as indulgences, demanding that we spend the best part of our days slaving to create products for consumption, or today, even just filling a digital database with fake numbers and moving ever more of said numbers into our own columns so that we can consume said products.  Not just a few of us either, but all of us, or at least as many as possible, must dedicate our lives to building and preserving the city on a hill powered by fossils and run by dinosaurs.  Sound about right?

The slow drip: a preferred method of economic vampirism.

So we have the day to day stacking of paper and copying of TPS reports that has somehow come to form the basis for our well-being, despite the fact that such activity creates little to no tangible value (or in the case of Goldman Sachs and the like, negative value) in the real world.  Think or feel too much, and someone is all but guaranteed to come along and tell you to put a cork in it and get back to work sending invoices.  But what about the stuff that literally keeps the clock ticking, that not only greases but also powers the wheels of the too-big-to-fail economic machine on which we have come to depend?  A significant share of the economy itself is actually devoted to producing the stuff, and not just the hundreds of billions that go to pay for bombs over Baghdad: fully one third of all freight hauled in the United States is oil or coal.  As proven reserves of these things deplete, the share of the economy devoted solely to securing a continued flow of oil and other fossil fuels must continually increase if such a flow is to continue, an inevitable consequence of declining energy return on investment.  But it is worth it, some say, to increase the strength of hurricanes a bit if it means we get to keep putting caviar on the table.  But guess what?  As it turns out, hurricanes are not the only side effect of an overheated economy that can spiral out of control:

The fast leak: not necessarily preferred, but sometimes you just gotta go with the flow…

Oh, sure, you might say, oil spills are nothing new; we can just deal with it the same way we do natural disasters.  We can cope.  And it might be bad news, but it is just the price we have to pay for modernity, right?  After all, we can’t live without oil,  right?

Well (pun intended!)…sort of, but in the end, not really, no.  The real question is probably whether we can live with oil.  A few items are worth pointing out with regard to this particular spill and its context.  First, normal natural disasters, which are no simple matter to deal with themselves, do still continue at the usual background rate.  See that unpronounceable volcano in Iceland if you need some clarification on this point.  Second, some of our activities, particularly those related to obtaining and using oil and other fossil fuels, tend to make those disasters seem less “natural” in the first place. Hurricanes pick up more speed when the ocean is warmer by a few degrees, and they cause more damage when industrial-scale fishing, oil exploration, and the ocean’s rising acid content erode the coral reefs that provide the best protection against strong coastal winds.  Just ask those who lived through Hurricane Mitch and Cyclone Nargis if you need hard evidence; while we were sitting in our offices, they were contending with the consequences of a changing climate in the real world.  And of course, both drought and flooding are exacerbated by warmer air temperatures, which helps to explain why your food prices have skyrocketed: unpredictable and changing weather patterns make it harder to grow crops reliably.  So where we tend to assume a more complex and interconnected world has made us more resilient in the face of disasters by making us less dependent on local resources, a growing body of evidence shows that we have actually made ourselves quite a bit more vulnerable to the natural workings of our home planet.  In a world of expanding political, economic, and environmental instability, such interconnectedness and broad-based interdependency, in the end, just means we will all crash and burn together.

And third, it is worth noting that, left to its own devices, oil tends to remain underground.  Five thousand barrels’ worth leaking out of the ground all in the same spot each day for months at a time (assuming the leak is plugged when officials are telling us it will be, but can we trust them?) is a pretty unusual occurrence, geologically, which is why we, you know, drill for the stuff, instead of just scooping it off the Texas dirt.  And this leak is coming from someplace a lot deeper, and from a much larger reservoir, than the leaks we are accustomed to fixing.  After all, the more we deplete the easy-to-get oil (there’s a reason most of the pictures of gushers are in black and white) the more we have to go after the deeper, tarrier, harder-to-extract-and-refine stuff.  So in the leak created by the Titanic energy sink that was Deepwater Horizon, we are dealing with a fundamentally different animal than, say, the Exxon Valdez, where we knew exactly how much oil was in a single tanker and how much cleanup effort would be needed (and we are living with the effects of that spill even today).  This one is not only leaking more oil, but also doing so in one of the world’s most productive fisheries and a highly populated region, as if the Gulf Coast needed any more of this kind of trouble.

So let’s talk about blood, and whose hands it is on.  It would be easy to point the finger at British Petroleum, or possibly at Rex Tillerson, forked-tongued CEO of ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company and something on the order of the seventh largest economy in the world were it considered as such.  After all, oil and other fossil fuels form the largest part of the unsustainability problem with our “business as usual” scenario, overdrawing both the Earth and the souls of its human residents for “productive” purposes to continue business as usual while training us that we have no alternatives available.  And since these corporations bear the most direct responsibility and profit the most directly from extraction and combustion of the devil’s excrement, you will get no disagreement from me if you believe they deserve the largest share of the blame.

In the end, though, does not the junkie, and not merely the dealer, bear some of the responsibility for his predicament?  (I use the male possessive here because it is worth pointing out that a disproportionate share of both those in positions of power and those economists reassuring us that they are doing a fine job are male.)  It is easy enough to point fingers at the corporations most directly responsible for the stain spreading through the Gulf of Mexico and the dark heart of the economy it embodies just a bit too well.

So what about that economy?  Time to revisit that favorite dead white patron saint of capitalism Adam Smith for a moment.  The largest systemic problem with a too-big-to-fail global free-market economy is the fallacy that humans are informed and rational decision-makers acting with maximum freedom to enhance their own interests.  In the end, we are not Bayesian utility maximizers, and expecting us to behave as if we maximize utility causes big problems.  We are, in fact, primates acting on arbitrary and oft-shifting desires ingrained into us through hundreds of millions of years of evolution.  And we live in a world increasingly abstracted and disconnected from the evolutionary basis of these desires, which helps to explain why we vainly seek satisfaction in purchasing luxuries and gadgets, or why we attempt to drown our ennui in sex, drugs, and rock music.

So what is the answer?  Should we return to feudalism?  Most would argue, and I would agree with them, that such a de-evolution of today’s hypercomplex and interconnected economic system would be neither feasible nor desirable.  Sure, back in the day, each peasant had a direct stake in his or her work and a sense of place in the world, but that also meant that place was limited to the immediate countryside.  And most of us today would find such an existence tedious and dull, perhaps as much as working in coal mines.  Furthermore, it does us little good if we merely move from implicit repression back to explicit repression, particularly if the powers that be condone and support with force some violent means of keeping us little people in our place.  Can we find something better?  Are there aspects of our modernity that are worth salvaging?  I would say so, but we need to reorganize politically to make it happen.

I believe we can find parts of the answer in a system of social organization that emerged long before feudalism: the hunter-gatherer clans that roamed the planet for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the establishment of semi-permanent agriculture-based civilizations.  No, I am not suggesting we can or should go back to a life based primarily on hunting game and picking berries, particularly in a world where we have already driven most large game to near-extinction populations and where there are few berries left for the picking.  (I am also not suggesting that it is not legitimate to say we should go back to hunting and gathering).  What I advocate is a new ethos for our civilization and for our economy wherein we highly value egalitarianism and freedom, but without taking such extreme positions that we put our continued existence at odds with the laws of the universe.  So what I mean is freedom to live, to love, to eat dinner; not freedom to drive a Yukon on a subsidized highway and melt the permafrost in the Yukon in the process.  We must make it clear that such excess and waste have no place in the new world, and we should point out those who demand such “freedom” to impose their consumption patterns upon others as the deceivers and sophists they are in twisting such ideals for their own selfish purposes.  Remember that, in the end, we must all live on the same rock, and that means it is best if we all get along rather than adopting me-first political philosophies.

In the meantime, though, there is still time enough to hold accountable those who bear the greatest responsibility for our business-as-usual scenario and the catastrophic trajectory resulting from its failure to tackle (or even acknowledge) the twin crises of climate change and imminent oil supply shortages.  If aliens arrive on our planet millions of years from today and find the ruins of our civilization, I want them to find evidence also that there was a real challenge to the status quo, just like they would find evidence of resistance to the Nazis in the form of residue from molotov cocktails in the Warsaw ghetto.  And that means accountability not just for the oil companies and utilities most directly responsible for soiling all over the planet, but also for those slick businessmen and politicians who knew or could have easily learned the truth and acted on it, but who instead chose short-term profit, pleasure, or convenience rather than doing what would eventually need to be done anyway.  Every day that our political economy has failed and continues to fail to adapt to the incontrovertible laws of physics that govern every aspect of energy is a missed opportunity and makes it that much more difficult to adapt tomorrow.  Every molecule of carbon dioxide we emit into the atmosphere today will be with us for generations to come, and demand for each new barrel of oil today only sets us up for a larger crash tomorrow if we fail to acknowledge and rectify the unsustainability of our activities.

I’ll go ahead and warn you: walking the walk is more difficult than talking the talk.  But it’s not that hard.  If I can get my monthly power bill below ten dollars and live a car(e)-free life, I bet a lot of other people can do it too.  Even better: you can show up me and the other know-it-alls by doing things we didn’t know were possible.  Every idea has to start somewhere, so don’t think that your actions today won’t matter.  The greatest enemy of viable solutions is cynicism.  Nothing frustrates me more than those who think cutting back on wasted energy and building a renewable society are someone else’s job, except perhaps those who fall back on lame excuses like the Jevons Paradox in vain attempts to justify high-consumption, low-reward lifestyles.  After all, what good is a six-figure paycheck if you are so drained and your spirit so wiped out by your workday that you no longer have the time or energy to celebrate your own humanity, the little-recognized miracle of your very existence?  What good is that paycheck in a world where you’ll never be able to spend that money because of hyper-inflation caused by skyrocketing energy and dollar costs for new oil barrels?  Hell, what good is a six-figure paycheck, period?  Anyone can get by on far less without sacrificing anything meaningful, especially in a world where you will be forced to sacrifice anyway due to peak oil and the economic collapse it will bring with it (and don’t you dare say I didn’t tell you so).

And so I implore you to make this cause something you will fight for by my side.  If you think it is not your battle, if you think you do not bear some responsibility both for the problem and for coming up with its solutions, if you think you exist outside the monolith somehow, you are not only wrong, you are the deadliest form of dead wrong ever conceived. Turn the unmitigated disaster that is this oil spill into a concrete opportunity to demand accountability from those who would otherwise ask you to keep quiet and pay your dues.  Use it as a chance to question the value not just of oil drilling, but of everything powered by its slimy product, including the powers that be.  Make it clear that you will not be satisfied until the evidence of change is real and tangible and that lip service simply will not do.  Alone each of us is vulnerable in this task, but together we have power in numbers, which is why I ask that you join and support me.

Make this new world your own to build.  Devote your life to the cause; nothing could be more rewarding.  The stakes could not be higher: not just the survival of civilization and of so many forms of life on this planet, but the very heart and soul of humanity.  And you won’t be alone.  I promise I will help, and you will find other friends to help as well.  We may not make headlines every day, but together we can gather enough steam to begin taking business-as-usual scenarios with a grain of salt.  When the sun finally rises over Cape Wind in another year or two, let us view the project not just as the seed for real, viable, scalable energy solutions that it is, but let us also see it within the context of building a new civilization that acknowledges and fixes the problems with the old one, where we can be full beings rather than merely drones of a fossil-powered hive mind.

And once we do that, it may yet turn out that we are, in the immortal words of Daft Punk, Human After All.