The Bullroarer - Friday 22nd January 2010
Posted by aeldric on January 21, 2010 - 6:35pm in The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand
Next week's Bullroarer may be late. I am rapidly turning into a "Doomer" :-( I will be spending next week vapourising my remaining debt, then touring the country, looking for locations that would do well in hard times.
aeldric
SMH - We've already sacrificed too much to the suburban dream
Under our current economic model, food production, packaging and distribution contribute to more than 20 per cent of our energy use. With most of the cost of food taken up by packaging and distribution it is easy to see how rising food prices, an inevitable consequence of peak oil, could be alleviated by localising and intensifying food production. This is the "Transition Town" notion of decoupling food from oil.
The Gisborne Herald - Post-peak oil scenarios bleak
If world governments neglect to take action on this matter local governments will at least need to pave the way for a more gentle transition.
On December 21, 2009, Bloomington issued a press release fully endorsing a report into post-peak oil scenarios
Stuff.co.nz - Four Reasons Why Copenhagen Failed
The Copenhagen global summit on climate change in December was ''the worst international conference I have ever attended'', says Climate Change Negotiations Minister Tim Groser.
He predicts there will be no agreement on a new global climate deal, while the current negotiating structure is in place.
Groser says Copenhagen failed for some basic reasons that had always made him doubtful it could succeed. That's despite there being consensus among the world's largest developed and developing countries that a global deal on climate change is vital.
''You have to say that the frustrating thing about Copenhagen was the complete inability of the political process to capture that high-level consensus,'' he said.
Coffs Coast Advocate - Those against new development
“This is a complete contradiction of the council’s commitment to mitigating the effects of climate change and peak oil.”
The Daily Reckoning - Goldman Calling For US$100 oil by 2011
But life is not a textbook. And finding oil and producing large deposits of oil cheaply is not an academic exercise. The 'Peak Oil' theory is often deliberately mischaracterised by its opponents as concluding that the world is "running out of oil." But that's not the case.
The world is running out of cheap, easy-to-find, inexpensive to produce, and easy to refine oil. There is plenty of oil. But is it "economic" oil? Well the answer to that is no! Whether it's political risk (where supply is artificially tight because of regimes unfriendly to U.S. or Western interests), or it's just several miles under the surface of the ocean, finding and pumping oil to meet the world's 85 million barrel per day demand is not an easy task.
Stock and Land - Peak phosphorous: mankind's latest threat
SOME believe that dwindling supplies of potable water is humanity's great resource challenge; others think it is the imminent prospect of "peak oil".
But an equally important milestone in modern history will be an inevitable tightening of global supplies of phosphorus.
Inside Waste - The organic base
The issues of ‘peak oil’, of ‘peak phosphorus’ and other matters of assumed criticality are all indicators of our humble human need to replace one problem with another by addressing only the symptoms of our disease.
In the same way that ‘peak oil’ tells us that we have been too reliant on an unsustainable supply of oil, ‘peak phosphorus’ tells us that we have relied for too long on industrial chemical farming.
Reseller News - Legal developments in store for IT in 2010
Welcome back to work. As for happy new year, if you thought 2009 gave us a number of legal developments that affected the IT industry, then you ain’t seen nothing yet. 2010 is likely to see even more law, new legal developments and reviews of existing laws that impact on the IT industry.
[.....]
Neither is global warming, together with the various schemes that attempt to deal with it. Media coverage of the 2009 UN Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen shows that emissions trading and climate change are issues that will continue to impact all industries including high-tech manufactured goods. Local development of laws regulating carbon emissions and regulating trading of rights to emit carbon will continue. It will affect us all, directly or indirectly.
Radio NZ - Bidding open for oil and gas exploration
The Government is offering six new permits to drill for oil and gas across the Reinga Basin, off the northwest coast.
The Australian - Greens propose $20bn tax on carbon
THE Greens have called on the government to back a two-year $20 billion interim carbon tax proposal to start cutting greenhouse gas emissions before a decision on the emissions trading scheme or any global agreement on targets.
Adelaide Now - PM tilts towards Green scheme
KEVIN Rudd has indicated the Government may swing its hopes to the Greens to get an emissions trading scheme through, now that the Opposition has switched to Tony Abbott's hardline climate change policy.
In Adelaide yesterday, the Prime Minister said he would look at a proposed compromise plan put up by the Greens for a partial emissions trading scheme to begin on July 1
Courier Mail - China's economy headed for bubble
FEARS that China's booming economy will overheat continue to mount after the Asian powerhouse cast off the shackles of the global recession and returned to double-digit economic growth.
While most developed world economies shunted into reverse and Australia's GDP growth just held its head above water, China yesterday posted growth of 8.7 per cent in 2009.
ABC - Energy company asks for permission to increase power prices
Energy distributor SP AusNet says customers should not be left out of pocket by its plans to charge more for power over peak summer periods.
The company is asking for permission from the energy regulator to charge customers 42 cents per kilowatt hour during periods of peak demand.
Customers currently pay just eight cents per kilowatt hour.
ABC - Fears energy target to cost jobs
Portland's Keppel Prince is calling on the Opposition's energy spokesman, Nick Minchin, to convince the Federal Government to change the Renewable Energy Target, which it says is threatening jobs.
Go read the lilies of the field.
http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_on_how_technology_will_transform_u...
http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_announces_singularity_university.html
The man understands the exponential function. It is morally neutral. It can good or bad.
I think we concentrate too much on the outcomes of bad exponential consequences.
There is a race going on between negative exponential results and Positive exponential results.
Between Good and Evil, if you will.
My money is on the positive. But I prepare for the negative.
Armageddon and Ragnarök.
Sorry Arthur, but this guy Kurzweil understands very little. Most of what he says is either wrong or wrong-headed. For the last 30 years, from Alvin Toffler onwards I have listened to a constant stream of visiting American techno-carpetbaggers spruiking the future and its glorious wonders, usually coupled with a good deal of neo-liberal and cornucopian dangerous nonsense.
This dude, in spite of his considerable technical IT abilities, is just one more on the long line.
As Frank Zappa said " Data is not information, information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom."
Kurzweil is still at the information stage of intellectual development.
Or he is just another entrepreneurial Yankee con-artist like the 'smartest guys in the room' who conned us into the USA-FTA.
His predictions for around 2010 - i.e. NOW- are all wrong.
Why? Because he relies on his stupid logarithmic graphs rather than looking at reality and the natural limitations of the real world. Like all cornucopians and (nearly all)economists he extrapolates endlessly into the future from a few lucky breaks in the past and turns this into the techno-cargo cult of the invisible hand.
You run across a busy 6 lane freeway 5 times and dont get hit. From this you extrapolate an iron law that you can run across as long as you like and you will NEVER get hit. Wrong! Similarly, the fact that transistors then ICs were found to improve on valves does not mean that this process of substitution will continue forever. He is like the guy who deduces an eternal law that he will never be hit after running across the freeway only twice!
His frequent mentioning of Moore's Law is an embarrassment. Moore's Law is already dead and buried and all the rabbiting on about quantum computers which we hear from other techno-carpetbaggers can not change this.
Never once does he look beyond his Gordon Gekko cityscape to notice that the complexity of the biosphere of the planet he is living on is steadily declining in spite of our increasing 'knowledge about' the human genome. He will be left staring at a virtual tree, not realizing that the last real tree has been felled.
He fails to see that we -with the 'opposable thumbs'- are the problem, not the solution. The chimpanzee, in spite of his claim that it does not possess a properly opposable thumb, is not the species which is destroying its and our habitat.
Never once does he seem to grasp the finite nature of the resources with which we are messing. Where is his mention of energy except his false prediction about solar panels? Does he seriously believe that we will all be sitting around in virtual reality lounges like in a sci fi novel ( as spoofed in Red Dwarf) with the vast currently impoverished masses of humanity enjoying similar entertainments in their respective countries? Can he not see that we would need several more Earth planets to achieve this? And why would we want to live in a virtual world anyway? Surely it is better to enjoy the pleasures of the real world while we have the chance? The low-tech pleasures of interacting with other real people rather than in Second Life etc.?
He claims that the people of the world are moving out of poverty in their billions. He implies that Evolution has a direction ( upwards) with us at the anthropocentric top. All of this is wrong wrong wrong.
When I was in school, in the 1970s, they showed us models of townships under glass bubbles ( like in 'Total Recall') which would be built on the moon by 1987. Where are they now? Come to think of it, when was the last time a man even walked on the moon? Too long ago to remember?
The truth is that our current use of technology is part of the problem and not the solution and the modes of thought of the Kurtweils of the world are a dangerous form of techno-Valium which can only confuse, frustrate and delay the reframing of our understanding of the world which we must necessarily make in order to adapt to reality.
Im so glad Im not alone in poo pooing the reverance some have of the so called "Moores Law".
I wonder if it's because computer science has so few "laws" that they cling to this folk lore.
The highest density chips now are memory chips. Was this what Moore was initially talking about?
People.
Moores law initially stated something like 'the number of transistors/gates/whatever on a chip would' la di da di daaa.
ie objects per unit area
The current incarnation of this is i think something like 'the number of processes per second' or tera flops or whatever.
ie transactions per unit time.
These statements are not the same thing.
YES I am impressed by the increase in computer power ... but this is not a law. It's more a guideline.
One thing is sure, the energy cost to do this has not decreased.
Personal debt vapourisation is a good thing whether the world ends tomorrow or not. Well done Aeldric.
Maybe not a doomer ,aeldric.Maybe a realist.Debt is a killer and well done on exiting that.Good luck with the search for a better place.Take your time and do it properly.The meltdown is not here yet and who knows when.
I have just heard on ABC radio that Abbot The Rabbit is supporting Pollyanna Rudd on wanting a BIG Australia re population.Jesus wept,there really is no hope for this nation with braindead vermin like this running the show.
Excuse me while I just go out and check the readiness of my pitchforks.
Why the conversion to full doomer aeldric ?
Nothing wrong with being debt free of course, but what has made you think things are about to get bad all of a sudden...
Hey Gav,
I'm not a full-on doomer yet - not buying the full doomstead (yet).
But here is a thought for you. Think back to when you first started on this journey - how would you have reacted if somebody described the last 18 months to you?
For me it started about 5 years ago. I concluded that we faced a complex emergency of interacting problems - a financial crisis (around 2010) followed by a Peak Oil crisis (around 2020) and then the commencement of environmental issues (around 2030).
How surprised would I have been if you had told me then that in less than five years we would have experienced:
- A market crash that threatened to melt the financial system of the entire world.
- Oil prices hitting $147 then oscillating wildly
- Firestorms in Victoria. Ice melts in the arctic, the first ships through the North West Passage, and a prediction of an ice-free arctic within a few years.
I would have been shocked, and I would have assumed that the world had entered into a flurry of crisis-response activities to mitigate this flagrant evidence of impending catastrophe.
The writing is on the wall and we have done..... almost nothing. If you had told me, I flat-out would not have believed you.
A quick review - what we have done:
- We have responded to the financial crisis by doing exactly the same things that caused the crisis (run up more debt, using money based on fiction rather than production).
- The response to Peak Oil has mostly consisted of various governments forming committees that investigated the risk, concluded it was real, and recommended mitigation. Then nothing was done because mitigation costs money and no government wants to do that.
- The response to the environmental threat was .... errrr.... Copenhagen. :-(
I am getting out of debt and moving because my house was chosen with a view to weathering a mild downturn, with more severe problems as a remote contingency, not a planned-for eventuality. I've changed my mind about the level of threat. I'm not ready to prepare for TEOTWAWKI, but I am preparing for a significant dislocation as a likelihood, not a contingency.
Three years ago I said that Australia is the place to be. I still think that Australia is the place to be, and we are going to come out of this well. But the longer we do nothing, the more "ouch" we are going to feel.
The clock is ticking. We are now locked into an ouch so significant that I don't want any exposure to risk. Debt is a possible exposure.
As usual, I am being conservative in my response to possible scenarios - getting out of debt may not be a good idea in all scenarios. If we are entering into a hyperinflationary period, but the resources boon continues to ensure high levels of employment in Australia, then a debt is not bad. I can't guarantee that scenario, so I'm cutting my exposure to risk.
I think that we are in for a long, grinding ouch. We will bounce back, but this is gunna hurt.
aeldric
"A long,grinding ouch" - I agree. "We will bounce back" - I'm not so sure.
We might bounce if the right decisions are made by those who have the power.These people may have a sudden conversion on the road to Damascus but more likely they will be compelled by events or,hopefully,citizen pressure.
But bounce to what? Don't expect a return to the present system.It is not sustainable in so many different ways no matter how much effort is put into inflating bubbles.
We are on the cusp of a paradigm shift.What that paradigm will be is anybody's guess,but what an interesting time to be alive.
True. I don't know what the future will look like, but it will be different. Things change - change is the only constant.
Yup. Interesting times.
RE "PM tilts towards Green scheme"
Except that even a few months ago, you wanted nothing to do with The Greens.
The fact that 90% of Labor voters in the recent by-elections (uncontested by Labor) were happy to vote Green suggests that they are quite relaxed about Greens policies, 'extreme' though they may appear to the 'dig-it up-and-sell-it' crowd occupying the halls of Labor and Coalition party offices.
The 7:30 Report is having a week-long series of reports on The Population Debate. The transcript of the first report is here.
Also, the Lane Cove Tunnel is now in receivership, having amassed over a billion dollars in debt.
See now the good thing is that even after the financial dust clears, at least we still have a tunnel. As opposed to the "stimulus payments", where afterwards we're left with nothing.
If we're going to blow billions, let's at least have something to show for it afterwards. I'd rather something other than a fricking road tunnel, but...
Well - if the doomers are right and we won't have any cars going through it one day, at least it will make a nice sheltered bikeway for hot or wet days :-)
Man oh man, that underground slalom in the Lane Cove tunnel would be a real buzz cycling home from work... I'd almost (ahem!) pay a toll to give it a try!
;-)
Matt recently put in a blinder about the Lane Cove tunnel here - the point was possibly a little lost on the global TOD audience but for Sydneysiders it's great stuff.
If nothing else, it'll make for good stormwater storage.
We all know that's not how Governments work. ;) :(
Much better to do a half-arsed job, then, in two elections time, promise to 'fix' the problem yet again. The Queensland State Govt has it down to an art.