Question Everything

Extinction

Extinction

Possibilities

Every individual organism that ever lived, except those alive right now, has died. And every species of the multicellular organisms, at least, except the ones currently alive have gone extinct. It should therefore be uncontroversial to say that the species Homo sapiens will go extinct. Even so, I suspect the majority of people belonging to this species would not believe that possible even when they know no one lives forever. Well, it is tough to contemplate your own death. You do it because you imagine your children or others you care about will still be here to think about you. It's a little different to think about extinction. It seems more frightening to consider a world where there will be no one around to care about anything.

When confronted with the inevitability of species extinction applied to our kind most of us will naturally look at our cleverness and assume we have the ability to persist endlessly. How often have you heard someone proclaim that evolution doesn't apply to us anymore because we have technology. The near-sighted can still hunt because we have glasses. But there is now ample evidence that rather than us rising above mere biological evolution, that our species has been evolving, and possibly at an accelerated clip. But we need to be careful here. We've found quite a lot of evidence for micro-evolution, subtle shifts in the frequencies of alleles that are under selection pressures. I have half jokingly suggested that assortative mating, for example, is underlying what appears to be a divergence between political progressives and political conservatives. Look at how the Congress works today (or rather doesn't work) and you would have to admit the divergence is real enough. Birds of a feather not only flock together they tend to mate within their flock (statistically speaking of course). Blue states, red states.

Micro-evolution can work at a pretty fast pace when the selection pressures are high. It mostly works on the diversity of alleles already in the population rather than on radical mutations. And with some mixing the effects can be masked for a while. Dominance vs. recessivity also clouds the picture. But it turns out in cases that have been well studied, e.g. Darwin's finches in the Galapagos islands, major shifts in allele frequency, with measurable anatomical or behavioral consequences in the population, can occur in tens to hundreds of generations. It doesn't take thousands of generations for a trait to take over if the selection pressures are high enough.

The working of micro-evolution creates some difficulties for defining what we mean by a “species” in the first place. For example, the usual definition of a species involves reproductive isolation, where the individuals cannot mate successfully with members of a different species, even if they look and act very similarly. As a rule this definition seems to hold up. But it isn't rigid. In systems terminology this is a “fuzzy” boundary condition (as well as a porous boundary!)

If the progressives and conservatives are truly diverging and there is a genetic basis for it, perhaps we are witnessing sympatric speciation in real time! I bring this up because, getting back to extinction, there are two basic ways a species can go extinct.

The Branches of the Phylogenetic Tree

Notice how there are many branches on the tree that just abruptly end? In reality we do not have anything like a complete picture of the full history of evolution. If we did what we would see is not a tree but a very densely branched bush. But the point is that branches do come to an end. This could either be because the species at the end are still alive (like little new growth shoots popping out around an otherwise perfectly trimmed hedge). Or, for most cases, it is because the species, or genus, or family, or... have come to the end of the line (to mix branching metaphors). One form of extinction is that the last creatures in the species dies without having produced any branches that might carry on, perhaps due to massive changes to the habitat for which the species simply couldn't adapt. That is what most people think of extinction. Think dinosaurs.

But there is an alternative. What if one species gives rise to a new species? What if there is a branching before the parent species bites the dust? The new species carries on some or even most of the traits of the parent species. They are still descendents, just different. This is actually the story of human evolution. There have been many genuses and species, even within Homo. Only one remains today, probably because as humans along the line leading to sapiens out competed those that remained. Homo neanderthalensis may have lasted many thousand years after sapiens moved out of Africa and into the Mideast, Europe, and Asia. There is even genetic evidence suggesting that cross-breeding was possible (so much for the species designations!) In the case of Homo there appear to have been several branchings with species co-existing for long periods of time. We know of three relatively recent branches, sapiens, neanderthalensis, and floresiensis. The last may have survived in isolation until as little as 13,000 years ago! The Neanderthals made it to maybe 35,000 years ago before losing out to sapiens in Europe. That would seem to leave just one Homo left and not that many Hominidae in total.

Then there is an interesting case of Homo sapiens idaltu, a more primitive form of Homo but still considered sapiens (our current version of “sub-species” is really called Homo sapiens sapiens which might make some people think we are twice as wise as our predecessors). Clearly sub-species can evolve from pre-existing species. And both sub-species can occupy the same range if there is a sympatric mechanism keeping them from inter-mating. From the picture of hominid evolution that has emerged in the last decade it appears we (hominids) are really good at doing this sort of thing.

Our Descendents?

As ever I expect the combinations of massive climate change and the loss of our exosomatic power sources are going to lead to some pretty nasty times in the near future. And that means very strong selection forces will be at work on our kind. Given that humans are now occupying almost every environment on the planet and the stochastic (chaotic) nature of climate shifts, some are bound to be located somewhere less harsh than others. Also given that we are omnivores and capable of majestic feats of affordance, I strongly feel there will be survivors. And after every previous die-off there follows a period of rapid speciation (adaptive radiation) which puts us back to how rapidly micro-evolution can occur. With so many rapidly developing niches, it seems life is absolutely exorbitant in creating new species, genuses, and so on. But we will go extinct. The question is will we have descendants in the form of new species of Homo. If so, what will they be like? How will they behave? Will they remember us?

Let's speculate a bit. I think the vast majority of people who contemplate this die-off believe that the harsh conditions will select for harsh beings. Those stuck with the “nature red in tooth and claw” vision of evolution (and believing that what Darwin gave us was the last word on evolutionary mechanisms) easily come to this conclusion. But as the evidence for the role of cooperation in evolution, and how it seems to be more strongly selected for when conditions are particularly harsh, see a different scenario playing out. No one will know for sure what will happen. But I prefer to think that should some survivors of the only extant species of Homo get through the bottleneck and be exposed to those future conditions, that they will continue evolving toward greater cooperation.

As for sympatric speciation, I do think it is already underway. If we had more time, say several hundred more generations, we would see the emergence of many incipient sub-species of our genus showing both anatomical and behavioral distinctions. If assortative mating were given a small boost, or at least an advantage, say through an Internet dating service, then it is possible we could accelerate that process somewhat. Why not? If already very cooperative-feeling people find each other more attractive then we might help evolution along! I'd like to believe small groups of highly cooperative (eusocial) people provide a head start to that future evolution.

Invariably someone thinks this is the same as eugenics and the emotional responses come out. I received a few hate e-mails from several people who had heard Mr. Emerson raise this on his Doomstead Diner pod-cast interview of me a few weeks ago. I suppose it is inevitable that people have a strong emotional reaction to any hint that their reproductive rights are somehow being threatened. But I maintain staunchly that what I am talking about is not some form of coercive mating scheme. It is simply recognizing an already existing natural process and simply applying a little grease to the skids so that good things happen before the bottleneck arrives. If I'm wrong about the occurrence of more eusapient genes in the pool and therefore we can't identify those who would become wiser as they age, then so what? I am definitely not talking about cutting off the balls of any male who doesn't have the right brain capabilities (in my opinion). For all I know I might end up suffering that fate myself. Besides that would be an awful lot of surgeries! No the point is that people who share common traits tend to match up (statistically, of course) and the suggestion is that if we did manage to identify higher sapient individuals at a young enough age, we simply introduce them to one another and let nature take its course. So please, can we cease this talk about eugenics and the nasty-grams? Just take some time to think it through.

The Oil Drum Demise

Goodbye to a Friend

Many readers here are probably familiar with the sad fact that the web site, The Oil Drum (TOD) has announced its retreat from active publishing article on its core topic, peak oil. It will remain live as an archive of past articles but will turn off all commenting. Many people who are watching the energy situation are saddened by this, as am I. Several of my energy-related posts were picked up by TOD during a time that the editorial staff seemed willing to broaden their vision of what the “energy problem” actually was about. My chief interest was and continues to be net energy available to do economic work (useful or not). It is net energy, especially net energy per capita, that is the governing factor in economic health. In my opinion, it has turned out that focus on peak oil has been a distraction from the core of understanding what is ailing the world. Most of my articles were about this.

Here is a list of the articles (also to be found here at QE).

• Work, Exergy, the Economy, Money, and Wealth
• Can we solve two problems at once - unemployment and preparing for power down?
• Peak Oil: How Supply Crunch Can Lead to Lower Prices (for a while!)
• The Future of Capitalism - Profits and Growth
• Energy Flow, Emergent Complexity, and Collapse
• Bottleneck by William Catton - A Review

During this time, and unbeknownst to me, there were some philosophical counter currents in the staff in terms of what TOD should be and what its mission should focus on. In the end some of the longer-term editors decided that technical issues with peak oil were the raisons d'être for TOD and they would no longer consider what were for them side issues, e.g. the economic implications of energy, energy return on energy invested, and very definitely collapse of civilization. Several editors who had been responsible for posting articles in these arenas, including hosting my guest posts above, found themselves in a reduced influence status and subsequently have faded from active posting. Some have gone to their own blog sites.

There have been a few explanations by the remaining staff for the shut down. Read the announcement at: Live Until August 31st, Oil Drum Successors Discussion, and User Profiles posted by Rembrandt on July 12, 2013. Just prior to the announcement a number of long-time commentators disappeared from the comments to articles and the Drumbeat (posts of media articles of relevance to energy). The latter regular feature attracted a lot of people who were advancing the notion that peak oil would mean the collapse of society and they posted many comments to this effect. No one seems to know for sure why these regulars ceased posting on TOD, but it was an ominous portend.

We may never really know what was behind TOD's shut down. But another ominous portend seems to be emerging because of it.

An Insidious Result

There have been several media articles reacting to the TOD shut down, in effect saying, “See this means peak oil is dead!” See: To Forbes - A Gentle Cough of Correction at TOD's end posted by Heading Out on July 21, 2013.

There has been so much hype about the surge of oil from shale deposits (tight oil) that have heralded a new era of energy abundance. The business community is gleefully pointing to the fact that this new oil “proves” that peak oil was a flawed theory and prosperity is just around the corner. The shut down of TOD is being taken as the last nail in the coffin of peak oil. Interestingly, other than complaints about the high price of gasoline and diesel there is very little media attention to the continuing high price of crude oil in spite of this supposed abundance!

Indeed, it is easy to understand this reaction. The general public and the profit takers in particular do not want to hear that energy is going to run out. They will grasp at the smallest straw as proof that their cherished beliefs in boundless and endless growth of wealth will go on for ever and ever. TOD is unfortunately playing right into their memes.

And there will definitely be a final nail in a coffin, but it won't be peak oil, it will be that of society's. Releasing a sigh of relief, the capitalistic, profit-motivated neoclassical economic system will continue to try its best to work. It can only do this by borrowing heavily from the future. And that bubble will burst taking the whole of civilization with it. What the combination of shale oil (and gas), which will be of very limited duration by the way, and the TOD's demise will have done is take the international consciousness off of the looming problem that really exists. Peak oil is only a secondary phenomenon, not the real cause of economic problems. The real problem is the energy cost that we are paying to eke out these last accessible drops of fossil fuels (and this goes for coal as well). The net energy (gross energy, such as barrel equivalents of oil, minus the energy costs) is in decline because the work needed to get the hard stuff out is starting to exceed the benefits. The peak oil phenomenon clearly exacerbates the problem. With the global population continuing to increase and the UN's Millennial Goals creating an increasing demand for stuff (produced by energy) the net energy per capita is THE single most important energy problem in front of us.

I do understand that the technical editors at The Oil Drum know most about oil and its extraction issues. It is natural that they see it as problematic, of course it is. But, unfortunately, it is only a part of the energy dilemma. Their decision to pull back from hosting articles of a broader social impact, economic, and net energy nature was probably the beginning of the end.

Even so I wish the staff well and hope they land somewhere where their expertise will benefit the public. May TOD RIP. Now I wish someone with the resources would take up the mantle of educating the public re: peak net energy per capita. It has already passed and can be tied directly to the global economic malaise. But very definitely a lot of resources will be needed. Charlie Hall, Professor Emeritus at SUNY-ESF has struggled for years to get funding and attention for EROI with only minimal success. He and his associates have managed to do solid scientific work in spite of this. But the education of a scientifically illiterate public takes quite a bit more than even doing the science.

If any of you billionaire readers want to kick in, I would certainly know how to start the process and the people who could keep it going. Imagine something like the Huffingtonpost for energy and the economy (biophysical economics). It couldn't be funded by revenues from advertising because what advertiser would want to associate with such a dismal message? We couldn't ask for donations from readers or membership fees. Too little revenue to support the kind of effort needed. No I think it will take someone who has the resources and still sees the problems to step up and pay the bills. I believe that if the public were educated about the role of energy in the economy and began to understand the true energy picture they would be in a better position to wind down their consumption-based lives. Perhaps we could somewhat ease the pain of a collapse. We can't prevent it. But we might be able to modulate the rate.

Anyone know any truly wise and knowledgeable billionaires?

Is Science Another Failed Institution?

The Greatest Intellectual Feat of Mankind

I love science. All science and sciences. I've spent a lifetime reading every popular science book I could get my hands on in every imaginable discipline. And in fields in which I was intensely interested I read the textbooks and the journal articles. Science as a way to understanding has been my passion. It therefore gives me great pain to entertain the possibility that the institution of science is yet another failed institution of Homo calidus.

The recognition of the process of science and, in particular, the scientific method has to stand as humanity's greatest intellectual success. The notions of objectivity, observation, empirical methods, data, analysis, and provisional interpretation as the only reliable means of gaining knowledge have been woven into a beautiful tapestry of process that has proven its value over and over again. Ideologies (beliefs without actual verification) and religious dogma served a purpose to hold groups together by sharing common ideas and beliefs when our species emerged from the basic biological nexus as sentient, social self-conscious beings. Some purely practical beliefs took their origin in observations of nature that were repeatable and therefore the basis of prediction. Where the game could be found, when the rains would come, where the predators lurked, all of these kinds of regular happenings were the basis for repeatability. Each foray out to hunt was an experiment testing the hypothesis of that belief. But the existential questions that came with self-consciousness were not answerable by observations of nature. It would take the discovery of Darwinian evolution by natural selection before we could even begin to approach such questions.

And therein is the reason that ideologies and religions still exist today; that and the likelihood that the further evolution of eusapience was stymied after the invention of settled agriculture.

Even so, agriculture provided a significant boost to what would one day become science. Observation of many variables associated with plant and animal husbandry, and the application of those observations in controlled ways was incipient science at work. Large-scale agriculture gave rise to number systems for accounting, and, eventually, writing — using abstract symbols to express speech. Both were essential for codifying knowledge gained. Number systems and accounting (plain arithmetic) gave rise to mathematics when architects were commanded to build complex monuments and cities. Science (observing and interpreting) and engineering (exploiting knowledge to design and construct artifacts) were already developing as practical but unconsciously performed practices. As civilization progressed it enabled more areas to come under scrutiny and, in turn, allow civilization to progress further. Astrology (an attempt at answering existential questions) morphed eventually into astronomy and enabled long-range navigation and exploration.

The greatest accomplishment for humans was the eventual recognition of the process and its formal codification, transforming it from natural philosophy into a rigorous disciplinary method for obtaining knowledge. There were many steps in this process over a number of centuries. Aristotle had advocated what would become the empirical methods of observation. Roger Bacon, in the 13^th century would advocate further for empirical observation as the basis for gaining truth. In the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries the Scientific Revolution crystallized and science emerged as a recognized process distinct from philosophy or religion.

And what a revolution it was. Mostly in terms of the pickup of the pace. Discoveries and exploitation came at accelerating rates. The invention of the printing press made it feasible to get it all recorded and disseminated. The institution of science would rapidly evolve.

Today science is an established institution overlaid on universities, government agencies, foundations, and industry. Money flows to researchers who conduct peer-reviewed projects with definite goals laid out. The granting institutions decide what the worthy pursuits will be and the investigators compete to show that their projects are relevant and likely to succeed. If a neuroscientist pursues an National Institutes of Health grant to study some aspect of brain function, she is required (if she wants a chance to win) to mention how her research could lead to a better understanding of Alzheimer's disease. Failure to delineate how a line of research is going to lead to solving the energy crisis or cure cancer is a death sentence in the highly competitive fields of the modern practice of science.

The line between science and engineering has become blurred. Today engineering PhDs need to do research, ostensibly applied, to push the boundaries of what artifacts they can develop and what those artifacts can do. As in the above paragraph, scientists doing ostensibly pure research are obliged to mention the practical applications. The gaining of knowledge has come down to a gaining of new forms of wealth and wealth creation, not of gaining understanding of nature. If that happens from time to time it is a by-product, not the main goal. Put simply the funding model has changed the purpose of science and turned it into Über-engineering — finding solutions to problems. Science is now an industry^*.

The universities, for their part, are producing copious PhDs in sciences and engineering even while the corporations complain that there aren't enough. There aren't enough of the Über-engineers based on the fact that the level of competition in innovative product development is staggeringly high. Today what counts as science is a discovery of how to cram more transistors on a chip of silicon.

And as often happens when you over produce a product you turn it into a commodity. The crops of PhDs and Master's degreed people coming out of second and third tier universities have flooded the markets. They look for jobs as adjunct “instructors” or lecturers rather than full time, tenure-track positions in departments with active research agendas. Thanks to the societal meme that everyone should have a college degree, the subsequent rapid expansion of higher education institutions, and the demand for instructors, this has resulted in a positive feedback loop that produces stamped out of the mold products (PhDs) who then take whatever job they can get. A PhD in a science is no longer about science or the level of intellectual sophistication that it had been at the beginning of the 20^th century.

A Two-Edged Sword

Science has been used for good and evil for its whole history as a human endeavor. I count evil as those acts of violence such as wars that make humanity worse off. Science has given us medicines but it also gave us the means of maiming soldiers so that they would require those medicines. Radioactive isotopes and atom smashers have been extremely useful in medical and investigative work but nuclear bombs have been a curse. And now, industrial grade agriculture is feeding billions (though some not so well) it is also poisoning our bodies, our soils, our air, and our waters. And not just our species is suffering.

Up until the mid 20^th century science was mostly perceived as a force for good and progress. Very few people could or would question this proposition. But a few started to wonder about the negative effects that they began to suspect and later observe. Rachel Carson and her “Silent Spring” is a poster child of this thinking. But there were others and many even before Ms. Carson. The sword had become that of Damocles to them. We enjoyed the benefits of science and engineering, but most people were either ignorant of or simply ignored the threats hanging just over their heads as they sat on the throne of progress.

Unfortunately the warning voices were drowned out by the din of exclamations about the wonders of science. As I was just coming into more adult-level awareness, having been brought up on Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and (later) Star Trek, the Brussels World's Fair (Expo 58) was a site where adulation of our knowledge of atomic energy was on display. I had been born exactly on the day the first atomic bomb had been used to kill people in Japan 13 years earlier. So I found myself conflicted over the science of atomic energy; on the one hand producing such horror, and on the other producing what seemed, at the time, like a promise of prosperity. By my senior year in high school and continuing in my first years of college, I wondered how this could be. What kind of creatures were we that we could do this to ourselves?

Ironically I would come to live in Seattle, WA. less than a decade after the Seattle World's Fair where the expectations of progress and the great promise of science was the major theme. I had grown up reading mostly science fiction tales about space travel. Men had landed on the moon just before I came to Seattle so it looked like we were on our way to the Gordon/Rogers/Trek era. The optimism surrounding what would be possible given our mastery over science was palpable throughout the western world (as long as you could suppress thinking about the Cold War and nuclear Armageddon). To this day I like to visit the Pacific Science Center on the grounds of that fair, with the towering Space Needle a constant reminder of the notion of progress. I still love science, with its ability to produce meaningful knowledge of how the universe works. But I have developed considerable doubts about its payoff for humanity given our propensity to see that knowledge as only valuable if it increases our profits or helps us kill our enemies.

The Failure

Science itself, as a means for gaining knowledge, is not a failure. As a process it is not inherently a two-edged sword. It is not evil. It is the use of science that has turned evil. I hinted at this above.

By evil I don't mean in a spiritual sense. I mean in the effect on human life sense. As a species we are bound to protect our interests in survival so anything that does so in the evolutionary framework is good, anything that threatens us is evil. Unfortunately in mankind's exploitation of the knowledge we gained from science we find increasingly more evil than good. The knowledge itself is, of course, neutral. It is just knowledge. The problem is that we do not have the meta-knowledge of how to use knowledge for the long-term benefit of humanity. We have, instead, learned to exploit science, through engineering, for immediate gains without thinking about the long-term consequences. So knowledge of heat engines is used to engineer machines that propel us rapidly from point A to point B. We individuals in the here-and-now “profit” by getting places faster. Our time is then in surplus, our personal energies conserved. Why should we worry about the consequences of burning fossil fuel to achieve this short-term profit? Isn't it easy to believe this trend will go on and on forever, that our children, and their children, will have even more profit from science and technology?

Knowledge of how to use knowledge for the long-term good of humanity is wisdom. That knowledge is not explicit nor are we necessarily consciously aware of it when it influences our intuitions. It just comes up from our subconsciousness as a feeling about the right path to follow, the right thing to do. Wisdom is also veridical knowledge. It must be valid, consistent, holistic, and morally motivated. It comes only from the experiences of a lifetime that consolidate into mental models of deep reality. It is knowledge ultimately based on evolutionary truth. It cannot be otherwise since evolutionary fitness objectively requires the species to be operating in accordance with the rules of the environment.

Evolution itself is the wisdom of ordinary biology. For every prior species that has ever existed evolution made the strategic decisions through variation and natural selection. Species improved in fitness until the environments changed radically enough to require new strategies. Variation in the genetic pools provided the raw material for selection to cause both incremental improvement, to adjust the phenotypes to shifting environments, and novelty, when needed to launch a new line, so to speak. And if the changes in environments were too extreme, as in a major die-off, evolution started over with whatever remained — the rest went extinct.

Humans emerged as a species with an expanded capacity to imagine the future by taking into account environmental changes that were possible and feasible. They began to formulate their own strategies and improve their own fitness. They figured out how to control fire, how to make artificial fur out of animal hides. They learned how to survive in inclement climates. Cultures became the new ‘species’ (or sub-sub-species). But as with any emerging property or behavior, strategic thinking started out fairly weak and only a few variant members of a population ever achieved anything close to what would eventually be needed as the cultures continued to evolve. Group selection is now being recognized as the selection process that deepened our eusocial nature, but also promoted the ascension of a few wiser leaders in early human tribes. The tribes with the most dominance of cooperation and with the wisest elders were more fit than those who were less cooperative or failed to have sufficiently wise elders.

The basis of eusociality, primarily empathy and language, along with strategic thinking ability are the roots of sapience and wisdom. Stronger sapience (i.e. genetic variants that boosted expansion of the necessary brain components in fetal development) led to more successful groups, which in turn favored the increase in sapience. But it just didn't progress far enough or fast enough to build the kind of wisdom — knowledge of how to use knowledge — needed to manage the growth and use of simple knowledge.

Ergo here we stand today, overrun with some knowledge of the natural world (including ourselves) and lots of knowledge about stuff (the human-built world) and we haven't a clue as to how to use it appropriately to bring balance between the two realms. What passes as science today is a mere shadow of what it was and what role it played in discovering how the universe works. There are still, fortunately, a large number of scientists who keep to the old ways. But they are generally the older members of the community. Often they are the ones who have gained wisdom. They are the ones who tend to write books about what the science they practice means in the larger sense. But their voices are barely heard at all against the clatter and banging of the modern industrialized, politicized institution we call science.

Science, as it originated, still stands as an ultimate intellectual achievement. As a method for gaining knowledge, when practiced with wisdom it stands unsullied. It is the process that uses science, the low-sapient human society, that is failed. Society creates institutions that process information and use it for supposed human uses. Something has gone terribly wrong in the institutionalized science of modern times, and that something is the lack of wisdom in humans themselves.

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* Lest I be accused of painting with too broad a brush I should hasten to point out that there are still many scientific fields that are pursued for the sake of gaining knowledge without a profit motive. I'll name one, cosmology. I don't think cosmologists and astronomers need to justify their grant proposals with anything immediately profitable or curing a disease. However, it has been getting harder and harder to get sufficient grants as national budgets are strapped and priorities increasingly focus on “practical” work. Ask any Republican congressman if he/she thinks it valuable for the NSF to fund a project to find out if there is life on other planets and see how they respond. Ask the same person how valuable it is to research the next major weapons system and you will likely get a totally different response. My feeling is that whatever funding is going toward pure research in these fields is on the basis of momentum and tradition more than choice.

Doomstead Diner Podcast

Doomstead diner website organizers RE and Monsta interviewed me regarding many topics I cover in this blog and are in common with their interests. The full interview time was something like three hours! This first part covers living situations after collapse, energy and biophysical economics, and money. The second part will cover topics relating to psychology, especially sapience, evolution, and systems science.

Doomstead Diner Podcast Part I

The Doomstead Diner blog is: http://www.doomsteaddiner.net/blog/

Happy dining!

 

How Long Will it Take for the Egyptians to Realize...

... that Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were not the root cause of their problems? Now he is out and the military has taken over. They are claiming they want new elections so are still convinced that a democratic government can somehow fix their broken nation. They still think there is a politcal solution to a physical problem. If only people are free to make choices and live their lives as they want. If only political stability were to return then investment money would come flowing in and tourists would return to the pyramids.

If there was enough time those magical wishes might actually start to come true! After all there are still much richer people in the world who are always looking for an angle to make a buck or have discretionary funds to go on vacation - at least for a while. Unfortunately I don't think they have the time. People on the ground are already hurting and need relief now. It takes a long time to set the wheels in motion for establishing a truly stable government, time I don't think their society has.

It is probably the case that both Mubarak and Morsi made matters worse in being so autocratic at a time when people were expecting some more "freedoms". But you can't blame their failures strictly on their incompetence, which extends to corruption and cronyism; those surely didn't help. But as I said in my prior post Egypt's and the whole MENA region's troubles go much deeper than lack of democracy. In fact, ironically it is probably an autocratic rule, which does not automatically mean corruption, etc., that would lessen the woes. Democracies have a great deal of difficulty making timely decisions in this crises world. Look at the US Congress as a prime example of what happens when you let a lot of very foolish people with big egos try to agree on important decisions.

Autocrats, if they are competent and wise, can get the right things done in a more timely fashion. But since there are no philosopher kings in the waiting room... This is what makes this predicament intractable. There are no solutions that don't involve massive population reductions in short order. If a region cannot support its own population and has absolutely no skills that would add sufficient value to what other regions that can produce food need, well, put bluntly, they are screwed.

How long will it take the Egyptian people to discover that things are not getting better? How long will they, and the rest of the world, continue to blame it on a "stalled revolution?" How long will they continue to belive that democracy and a stable government would save them?

So, keep your eyes on Egypt and carefully observe what transpires. You may be looking at your own situation within the next decade if things devolve at an accelerating rate.

 

MENA - A Model of the Future?

Political Unrest - Why?

It is interesting the way the MSM characterize the unrest going on in Egypt. The typical perspective is that the people of Egypt are unhappy with the way the Morsi government has turned out to be almost as autocratic as the Mubarak regime had been. Morsi was elected in the first “democratic” election in the country's history, but he recently declared himself to have powers that were not part of the bargain. He is from the Muslim Brotherhood movement, a supposed Islamic political party-like organization that supports Sharia Law as the foundation of governance. A large majority of Egyptians appear to prefer secular laws and thought originally that Morsi would honor that position.

Thus to the MSM the unrest is political in nature. They focus on the notion that the Egyptians want democracy and that Morsi has failed to deliver. But what this perspective fails to take into account is that politics ultimately come down to who controls the resources. The irony in Egypt is that they really haven't got much in the way of resources. They cannot sustain a program of development because they have nothing to develop and nothing to drive such development (e.g. net energy). So Morsi is actually incapable of delivering any of the demands that the people are voicing. What is more important to the people of Egypt than whether their governance is based on Islamic doctrine or not is that they need to eat. They need to have shelter and some income. And there is no regime that can deliver that. Even if Morsi capitulates and a new government is installed, or perhaps more likely, the military takes over again, the needs of the Egyptian people will never be met.

The unrest is not about democracy. We only characterize it that way because we, in the west, think that we have democracy and that it the reason we've been so successful economically. If the MENA states could have democracy, the reasoning goes, they too would become economically successful. What remarkably shallow, indeed empty, thinking this is. Democracy did not produce food on the table and shiny new cars. The fact that communism failed to do so is not a proof that it did. Growing net energy per capita did that. It is easy to support something that looks like democracy and free markets when you have oil gushing out of the ground.

We are observing a model for collapse unfolding as country after country depletes whatever resources they had. The entire North African, Middle East, all the way to Afghanistan and Pakistan, are facing the exact same forces. Political unrest derives from physical stress. What other part of the world with significant populations better fit this model? I suspect that India, parts of China, and Mongolia are close behind.

Unrest Moving West, North and South

The US's and Europe's problems appear to be financial because these countries were part of the industrialization growth of the 19^th and 20^th centuries where rapid developments of fossil fuels mirrored that going on in the US. Indeed England led the pack with the use of coal even earlier. But as the net energy per capita available from fossil fuels started first to decelerate in growth and then, around the 1970s peak, the reliance on debt to finance production took over. During the period of rapid growth in industrialization we observed that wherever one was in time one could reasonably expect that even more wealth would be produced in the future, enough extra to pay back the principal along with interest (rents paid for using the capital). So borrowing against the future made sense. What nobody paid attention to is the fact that this experience of growth was based on increasing net energy flows and that the majority of that net energy came from fossil fuels, particularly oil. Also what everybody lacked was an understanding of the fact that the extraction and processing of fossil fuels would become increasingly expensive (in terms of usable energy required). Nor did most pay attention to the well understood and predicted peaking in gross production due to depletion of finite resources. The latter has accentuated the problem with declining net energy per capita.

The western nations are stagnant or in deep recession with unacceptable (by earlier standards) unemployment rates. The blame is being put on financial institutions, corporations, governing bodies, all of the usual suspects have been lined up. I suppose this is a failure of imagination to think there might actually be a deeper and more dangerous cause. Ignorance must play a major role as well.

Unrest is popping up in the Southern European region. Whereas in MENA states the blame is supposed to go to non-democratic governance, in the west it goes to finance and political battles between conservatism (austerity required) and liberalism (Keynesianism required). The US Federal Reserve Bank has been trying to put a band aid on the financial system by buying bad paper (quantitative easing) and thus creating money, essentially. But this is only going to cause the crash to be more severe when it comes. The underlying cause in the west as well in MENA states is fundamentally the same. We are running out of net energy per capita at an alarming rate. The MENA states had a slight advantage over the west in that their populations had very low net energy per capita needs (same story for China and India where jobs were shipped from the US to save labor costs). They were more in touch, as it were, with the physical realities and did not have this veil of financialization to confound their thinking. Right now they very much realize that they are at the precipice and being pushed off.

States to the further east are soon to follow. China, using their low energy requiring citizens as enticements and some healthy savings, has succeeded in convincing their population that they SHOULD want to consume more energy! And now that work force is starting to demand more in wages so they can do so. Unfortunately China's leaders did not really understand the net energy per capita source problem. When they became vaguely aware of it they started scrambling to import oil and coal from other regions. Instead of realizing that depletion would soon render that strategy moot, they blindly go ahead with their ambitions because they are trying to avoid the political unrest that will ensue when their people, promised the “good life,” realize they not only won't achieve that but that life will get worse (especially for the many who gave up farming for the cities).

Russia has never really recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin probably has dreams of glory but he has no investment stream to put into developing what resources they have. Russia does have richer biological and mineral resources but in climate and terrain-challenged areas that would require substantial capital for development. Their oil exporting appears to have peaked and if they allow foreign oil companies to participate in further development they have to realize their revenues from export will drop. They are between a rock and a hard place. Their only possible advantage is that the people have already been through a collapse/contraction and probably don't have the same kinds of expectations that the Chinese and Indian people have for the future. They may simply resign themselves to a worse future.

Will the Earlier Collapse of MENA Trigger the Rest?

Since ME states like Saudi Arabia are still supplying oil to the west it is very possible that major troubles in that region could disrupt the flow of an already declining one. Any sudden shutting off of the spigot is likely to have devastating effects on the western nations.

A lot of people in the US think they are buffered from such a catastrophe. There is a meme floating around the MSM about how the US (with Canada's help, of course) will achieve energy independence. The tight oil and gas reserves along with the tar sands in Alberta are touted as providing us with huge energy sources into the future. President Obama is making noises about investing in alternative energies, especially to reduce coal-fired power plants to reduce CO₂ emissions. It is all wishful thinking. The production profile on tight oil and gas wells suggests (strongly) that they will never produce the abundance being promised. Moreover all of these non-conventional sources have terrible EROIs that cannot be sustained long. Already the companies exploiting these resources are running into financial problems. They cannot fund further development out of profits because their profits are being squeezed tightly. Costs of development are too high — a reflection of the low EROIs. As long as they can hype the investment community they might eke out a little more working capital, but that will not last very much longer.

There is nothing supporting our huge bubble. All it will take is a trigger event, either like the collapse of MENA states, dragging Europe along, or an internal event in the financial markets. My favorite scenario is that graduates who cannot find meaningful employment will simply stop paying back their education debt. That will burst a 1.2 trillion dollar bubble and could take the rest of the financial system down with it.

It is somewhat ironic that Greece was one of the first EU countries to experience severe hardships and the start of collapse. It gives new meaning to the phrase “Greek Tragedy” that the whole world is now embroiled in a demise crafted by our own flaw in character. We are not bad as a species. But we are clearly merely biological when it comes to trying to obtain more resources and grow. We evolved great clever brains that enabled us to do so with abandon. We did not evolve adequate sapience to moderate that cleverness and dampen the biological mandate. That is the flaw — lack of wisdom in pursuing our future. Now we have none, for the most part.

I still won't make any predictions as to timing of, say, major events that would be clearly signs of collapse well under way. I think collapse is starting and is gaining momentum as we witness unrest spreading around the globe. Some regions, like MENA, will likely collapse very rapidly, possibly taking others with them in a domino effect. Other regions may drag it out a bit as oh-so-clever masters of the universe try more tricks to keep the dream alive. But they can't do it forever.

All I will say is that if you want to see what collapse looks like on the ground (and this is for every region eventually) watch what happens in Egypt. And for you American readers, enjoy your celebration of the Fourth of July commemorating winning your democracy!