Was it just my imagination, or was the New Year’s
celebration just past even more halfhearted than those of the last few years?
My wife and I welcomed 2013 with a toast, and breakfasted the next morning on
the traditional good-luck foods—rice and beans, corn bread, greens and
bacon—that I learned to enjoy back when I was studying old-fashioned Southern
folk magic. Outside our little house, though, the midnight air seemed
remarkably quiet; the whoops, horns, and firecrackers of New Years past were
notable mostly by their absence, and the next day’s hush seemed less a matter
of hangovers than a not unreasonable dread of what 2013 might have in store for
us all.
No doubt some of that was a function of the media panic
about the so-called Fiscal Cliff. The New Yorker scored a
palpable hit by headlining a piece on the subject "Washington Celebrates
Solving Totally Unnecessary Crisis They Created," but there’s more to it
than that. What, after all, was this "fiscal cliff"? A measure that
would have repealed some of the tax breaks and hikes in Federal spending put in
place since 2000, and thus reduced the annual Federal deficit by a modest
amount. All that yelling, in other
words, was provoked by the possibility that the US government might have to
take a few steps in the direction of living within its means. If the frantic struggle to avert that outcome
is any measure of the kind of statesmanship we can expect from the White House
and Congress in the year to come, it’s no wonder that hiding under the mattress
has so much evident appeal just now.
There’s more involved in the evident lack of enthusiasm for
the new year, though, than the latest clown acts playing in the three-ring
circus that is today’s Washington DC. A
great many of the comforting rationalizations that have played so large a role
in justifying a continued reliance on the unsustainable are wearing very
thin. Consider the claims, retailed by
the media at ever-increasing volume these days, that recent upturns in the rate
of domestic petroleum production in the US offer a conclusive disproof to the
idea of peak oil, and herald the arrival of a new age of cheap abundant
fuel. Courtesy of Jim Kunstler’s latest
blog post, I’d like to offer a chart of US petroleum production, from 1920 to now, that puts those claims in
perspective.
See the tiny little uptick in production over there on the
far right? That’s the allegedly immense
rise in petroleum production that drives all the rhetoric. If that blip doesn’t look like a
worldchanging event to you, dear reader, you’re getting the message. It isn’t a
worldchanging event; it’s the predictable and, by the way, repeatedly predicted
result of the rise in oil prices from around $30 a barrel to between three and
four times that, following the 2008 spike and crash. Triple or quadruple the price of any other
commodity, and sources of that commodity that weren’t economically feasible to
produce at the lower price will suddenly become paying propositions, too. (Yes, that’s spelled "Bakken shale"
in the present tense.) If the price of oil were to triple or quadruple again
over the next few years, we’ll probably see another increase on the same very
modest scale, too. That increase still
won’t be a worldchanging event, though the economic impact of another round of
price increases on that scale might be.
More generally, we’ve got a real shortage of worldchanging
events just now. There are good reasons
for that, just as there are equally—well, equally strong, if not equally
good—reasons why so many people are pinning all their hopes on a worldchanging
event of one kind or another. Therapists
like to point out that if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always
get what you’ve always gotten, and of late it’s become a truism (though it’s
also a truth) that doing the same thing and expecting to get different results
is a good working definition of insanity.
The attempt to find some way around that harsh but inescapable logic is
the force that drove the prophetic hysteria about 2012, and drives
end-of-the-world delusions more generally:
if the prospect of changing the way you live terrifies you, but the
thought of facing the consequences of the way you live terrifies you just as
much, daydreaming that some outside force will come along and change everything
for you can be a convenient way to avoid having to think about the future
you’re making for yourself.
With that in mind, and with an eye toward the year ahead of
us, I’d like to attend to three New Year customs that haven’t gotten as much
attention here on The Archdruid Report as they probably
should. First, I’d like to go over my
predictions for the year just finished, and see how well they did; second, I’d like
to offer up some predictions for the year to come; and third, I’d like to make
some suggestions for what my readers might consider doing about it all.
My 2012 predictions appeared in the first
January post here last year.
Here they are:
"I’d like to suggest that when we take a backwards look
in the early days of 2013, we will most likely see that that’s what happened in
2012, too: a slow worsening across a wide range of trends, punctuated by
localized crises and regional disasters. I’d like to predict, in fact, that
when we take that backward look, the US dollar and the Euro will both still
exist and be accepted as legal tender, though the Eurozone may have shed a
couple of countries who probably shouldn’t have joined it in the first place;
that stock markets around the world will have had another volatile year, but
will still be trading. Here in the US,
whoever is unlucky enough to win the 2012 presidential election will be in the
middle of an ordinary transition to a new term of office; the new Congress will
be gearing up for another two years of partisan gridlock; gas stations will
still have gas for sale and grocery stores will be stocked with groceries; and
most Americans will be making the annual transition between coping with their
New Year’s hangovers and failing to live up to their New Year’s resolutions,
just as though it was any other year.
"Official US statistics will no doubt insist that the
unemployment rate has gone down...but the number of people out of work in the
United States will likely set another all-time record; the number of people in
severe economic trouble will have gone up another good-sized notch, and public
health clinics will probably be seeing the first wave of malnutrition-caused
illness in children. If you happen to
have spent the year in one of the areas unfortunate enough to get hit by the
hard edge of the increasingly unstable weather, you may have had to spend a
week or two in an emergency shelter while the flood waters receded or the
wreckage got hauled away, and you might even notice that less and less gets
rebuilt every year.
"Unless that happens, though, or unless you happen to
pay close attention to the things that don’t usually make the evening news, you
may well look back in the first days of 2013 and think that business as usual
is still ongoing. You’d be right, too, so long as you recognize that there’s
been a stealthy change in what business as usual now means. Until the peak of world conventional
petroleum production arrived in 2005, by and large, business as usual meant the
continuation of economic growth. Since then, by and large, it has meant the
continuation of economic decline."
No countries left the Eurozone in 2012, and if
malnutrition-caused illness in children has had a notable uptick in America, I
haven’t yet heard of it. Other than
that, I think it’s fair to say that I called it. I’d like to put on my sorcerer’s cap,
furthermore, and gaze a little deeper into the mists of futurity; I thus
predict that just as 2012 looked like a remake of 2011 a little further down
the curve of decline, 2013 will look a good deal like 2012, but with further
worsening along the same broad array of trends and yet another round of local
crises and regional disasters. The number of billion-dollar weather disasters
will tick up further, as will the number of Americans who have no job—though,
to be sure, the official unemployment rate and other economic statistics will
be gimmicked then as now. The US dollar,
the Euro, and the world’s stock markets will still be in business at year’s
end, and there will still be gas for sale in gas stations, groceries for sale
in grocery stores, and more people interested in the Super Bowl than in global
warming or peak oil, as 2013 gives way to 2014.
As the year unfolds, I’d encourage my readers to watch the
fracking bubble. Yes, it’s a speculative bubble of the classic sort, one that
has soaked up a vast amount of investment money over the last few years, and
the glorious future of American energy independence being touted by the media
has the same function, and the same relationship to reality, as the glorious
future of endlessly rising house prices that got waved around with equal abandon
in 2006 and 2007. I don’t expect the bubble to pop this year—my best guess at
this point is that that’ll happen in 2014—but it’s already losing air as the
ferocious decline rates experienced by fracked oil and gas wells gnaw the
bottom out of the fantasy. Expect the
new year to bring more strident claims of the imminent arrival of a shiny new
future of energy abundance, coupled with a steady drumbeat of bad financial
news suggesting, in essence, that the major players in that end of the oil and
gas industry are well and truly fracked.
I’d also encourage my readers to watch the climate. The tendency to focus on predicted
apocalypses to come while ignoring the reality of ongoing collapse in the
present is as evident here as in every other corner of contemporary culture;
whether or not the planet gets fried to a crackly crunch by some more or less
distant future date, it’s irrefutable that the cost of weather-related
disasters across the world has been climbing year over year for decades, and
this is placing an increasingly harsh burden on local and regional economies
here in the US and elsewhere. It’s
indicative that many coastal towns in Louisiana and Mississippi that were
devastated by Hurricane Katrina have never been rebuilt, and it’s probably a
safe bet that a similar fate waits for a fair number of the towns and poorer
neighborhoods hit hardest by Hurricane Sandy.
As global warming pumps more heat into the heat engine we call Earth’s
climate, the inevitable result is more extreme weather—drier droughts, fiercer
storms, more serious floods, and so on down a litany that’s become
uncomfortably familiar in recent years.
Most of the infrastructure of industrial society was built
during the period of abnormally good weather we call the twentieth century. A fair amount of it, as New York subway riders
have had reason to learn, is poorly designed to handle extreme weather, and if
those extremes become normal, the economics of maintaining such complex systems
as the New York subways in the teeth of repeated flooding start to look very
dubious indeed. I don’t expect to see
significant movements out of vulnerable coastal areas quite yet, but if 2011’s
Hurricane Irene and 2012’s Hurricane Sandy turn out to have a bouncing baby
sibling who decides to pay a visit to the Big Apple in 2013, 2014 might see the
first businesses relocating further inland, perhaps to the old mill towns of
the southern Hudson valley and the eastern end of Pennsylvania, perhaps further
still.
That’s speculative. What isn’t speculative is that all the
trends that have been driving the industrial world down the arc of the Long
Descent are still in play, and so are all the parallel trends that are pushing
America’s global empire along its own trajectory toward history’s dustbin Those things haven’t changed; even if
anything could be done about them, which is far from
certain, nothing is being done about them; indeed, outside
of a handful of us on the fringes of contemporary culture, nobody is even talking
about the possibility that something might need to be done about them. That being the case, it’s a safe bet that the
trends I’ve sketched out will continue unhindered, and give us another year of
the ordinary phenomena of slowly accelerating decline and fall.
That, in turn, leads to the question of what my readers
might do about it all.
My advice hasn’t changed.
It’s a source of some amusement to me, though, that no matter how
clearly I try to communicate that advice, a fair number of people will hear
what they want to hear, or perhaps what they expect to hear, rather than what
I’m saying. Over the course of this last
week, for example, several people commenting on this post on one of the many
other forums where it appears insisted with some heat that I claimed that
activism was worthless, while one of the commenters here on The
Archdruid Report took me to task for what he thought was a rejection
of community in favor of an unworkable go-it-alone approach.
Not so. What I’m
saying is that any meaningful response to the crisis of our time has to begin
on the individual level, with changes in our own lives. To say that it should begin there doesn’t
mean that it should end there; what it does mean is that without the foundation
of personal change, neither activism nor community building nor anything else
is going to do much. We’ve already seen
what happens when climate activists go around insisting that other people ought
to decrease their carbon footprint, while refusing to do so themselves, and the
results have not exactly been good.
Equally, if none of the members of a community are willing to make the
changes necessary to decrease their own dependence on a failing industrial
system, just what good is the community as a whole supposed to do?
A great many people like to insist that changing your own
life isn’t enough, and then act as though that means that changing your own
life isn’t necessary. Again, not
so. If industrial society as a whole has
to stop dumping excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, dear reader, that
means among many other things that you, personally, have to stop contributing
your share of that excess. Equally, if
industrial society as a whole is running short of fossil fuels, that means
among many other things that you, personally, are going to have to get used to
living without them. That being the
case, why not start with the part of the problem about which you can actually
do something—your own consumption of fossil fuels and your own production of
carbon dioxide—and then go from there?
Political activism, community building, and a great many
other proposed responses to the crisis of our time are entirely valid and
workable approaches if those who pursue them start by making the changes in
their own lives they expect other people to make in turn. Lacking that foundation, they go nowhere.
It’s not even worth arguing any more about what happens when people try to get
other people to do the things they won’t do themselves; we’ve had decades of
that, it hasn’t helped, and it’s high time that the obvious lessons get drawn
from that fact. Once again, if you
always do what you’ve always done...
That being said, here are some suggested New Year’s
resolutions for those of my readers who are interested in being part of the
solution:
1. Caulk, weatherstrip, and insulate the place
where you live. Most Americans
can cut between 5% and 25% of their total annual energy use by weatherizing
their homes. None of the work is rocket science; your local hardware store can
sell you everything you need for a very modest amount of money, and there are
plenty of sources in print and online that can teach you everything you need to
know. The sooner you get to work, the
sooner you start saving money, and the sooner a good chunk of your share of
excess carbon dioxide stops messing with the atmosphere.
2. Make at least one commute or run at least one
errand a week on foot, by bicycle, or by public transit. A great many Americans don’t actually need
cars at all. A good many of those who
do, due to a half century of idiotic land use planning, need them a great deal
less often than they think. The best way
to learn this is to experience what it’s like to travel by some other means. It’s long past time to ditch the "yuppie
logic" that suggests that it’s a good idea to drive a mile to the health
club to get on a treadmill and get the exercise you didn’t get by walking to
the health club. It’s also long past
time to ditch the equally false logic that insists that getting there faster is
the only thing that matters.
3. If you take a vacation, take the
train. Traveling by train uses
a small fraction of the fuel per mile that a plane needs, and the trip is part
of the vacation rather than an ordeal to endure between one place and the next.
Give it a try. If you live in the US,
you might also consider supporting the National Association of Railroad Passengers, which lobbies for expanded passenger rail service and
offers a discount on fares for members.
4. Buy it used. This applies to
everything from cars, should you actually need one, to the cheapest of
trinkets. By buying a used product
rather than a new one, you save the energy cost of manufacturing the new product,
and you also keep things out of the waste stream. Used computers are particularly worth your
while; if you live in a tolerably large urban area in the US, you can often get
more computers than you need by letting your circle of friends know that you’ll
take used but working devices off their hands for free. You won’t be able to play the latest computer
games on them, sure, but if you’re obsessed with playing the latest computer
games, you don’t need a computer; you need a life. Speaking of getting a life...
5. Turn off the boob tube. Better still, if you can talk the people you
live with into it, get rid of the thing altogether. Commercial television exists to fill your
brain with emotionally manipulative imagery that lures you into buying products
you wouldn’t otherwise need or want.
Public television? Replace
"products" with "opinions" and you’re not too far off.
(Huge rapacious corporations spend millions of dollars to fund public TV programs;
I hope none of my readers are naive enough to think that these corporations do
this out of some vague sense of moral obligation.) You don’t need any of that stuff cluttering
up your brain. While you’re at it...
6. Take up
an art, craft, or hobby. Once
you turn off the TV, you’re going to have the one luxury that nobody in a
modern consumer society is ever supposed to have: actual, unstructured free time. It’s worth luxuriating in that for a bit, but
pretty soon you’ll find that you want to do something with that time, and one
of the best options is to learn how to do something interesting with your
hands. Three quarters of a century ago,
most people had at least one activity that gave them something creative to do
in their off hours, and a good many of those activities also produced useful and
valuable things. Unless you’re at least
seventy years old or come from a very unusual family, you have no idea how many
arts, crafts and hobbies Americans used to pursue, or how little money it takes
to get started with most of them. By the
way, if you think you’re too old to take up playing the guitar or doing some
other seemingly complicated skill, you’re
not.
7. Do without something this year. This is the scary one for most people in
today’s consumer society. To be able to
have something, and choose not to have it, challenges some of the deepest of
modern taboos. Give it a try. The point isn’t to strike an assumed pose of
ecological virtue, by the way, so don’t tell anybody what you’re doing without,
or even that you’re doing without something.
Nor is this about "being good" in some socially approved
manner, so don’t choose something that you’re supposed to want to do without.
Just quietly neglect to make something part of your life, and pay attention to
your own emotional reactions. If you’re
like most people in today’s America, you’ll be in for a wild ride, but the
destination is worth reaching.
So there you are. As
we head deeper into the unknown country of 2013, have a happy and sustainable
new year!
************************
A couple of notes might be worth placing here for fans of my
writing. First of all, my latest peak
oil book, Not The
Future We Ordered: The Psychology of
Peak Oil and the Myth of Eternal Progress, is available for
preorder. Karnac Press, the publisher,
is a specialty press publishing mostly in the field of psychology; the book is
primarily intended for psychologists, therapists, and members of the healing
professions, who will need to know what they’re dealing with as the
psychological impacts of peak oil take their toll, but it may also be of
interest to peak oil readers generally. Much of what’s covered in Not
The Future We Ordered hasn’t appeared here or in any of my other
books, so it may be worth a look.
