Our Energy Future

So, I got a little tip in the comments from my (now old, in blog years positively pre-historic) post about a post-oil future from July 22nd. Doctor Biobrain (who I once read daily, until I wasn't on my computer daily, so now I read him every couple of days - whenever I can get time on my computer... you know what I'm saying) clued me in on a little secret - and I quote:

Dilithium crystals are created by filtering unicorn farts at high speeds through fusion-induced rainbows

Wow. If only I had known it was that easy, I wouldn't have been so gloomy about this whole Peak Oil business.

But I'm mostly stoked that Doctor Biobrain read something I wrote.

I love blogging.

Coming up for air...

So much has happened. Sorry for the long, looooong pause between posts. Work has started to overwhelm my schedule. No relief in sight, at least for another month+, but I wanted to take the time to make the following observations:

Regarding New Orleans and Hurricane Gustav:

New Orleans is in a geological bowl. Recall that after Karina the water needed to be pumped out because it will never, ever drain on its own. New Orleans is several feet below sea level and that will never get any better since it doesn't rest on "land" as we in the rest of the country understand it. The whole city essentially sits on water-saturated river mud of varying densities and a building will slowly sink under its own weight on that kind of surface, so it only gets worse over time.

Making things worse still is that the Gulf of Mexico is also a gigantic geologic bowl into which the Mississippi River has been pouring sediment for millions of years and thus is itself sinking into the Earth's crust, pulling down the edges of the Gulf with it. Texas has slip faults as far inland as Austin as a result. So the bedrock on which the mud NOLA is sinking into is also itself sinking.

And, third, the Army Corps of Engineers has, since WW2, diked and dammed and leveed the shit out of the river to control flooding, which has had two major negative results: 1.) the protective fresh-water swamps around the city, which soak up storm energy and act as a natural buffer between the salt-water Gulf and the fresh-water inland lakes and streams, are not being replenished with the silt from the Mississippi's once annual floods and thus are eroding at an ever accelerating rate as salt-water from the Gulf kills the fresh-water ecology that maintains the swamp and 2.) the River is dumping silt and sediment farther out into the Gulf than it has ever in geologic history which means it is not replenishing the deep-sea mud "shelf" that shores up the Louisiana coast-line, which also accelerates the erosion process.

As bad as this scenario seems, all of the above assumes everything will simply continue as it always has. If you also factor in Global Climate Change and the accompanying rise in sea level plus the increasing intensity of storms as a result of a warmer ocean, New Orleans doesn't have a prayer. Katrina wasn't The Big One. Katrina was the shot across the bow. It is not a matter of if New Orleans will ever get a direct hit from a Category 5, it is simply a matter of when.

Sadly, I think this jewel of our civic firmament should be abandoned. It was always more of a frontier outpost akin to something on the banks of the Congo or the Amazon than to a proper city anyway - a commercial enterprise that once served a specific economic purpose and now survives simply because it has survived up to now.

Regarding McCain, Gustav & Palin:

I think, as much as it pains me to say it, that McCain and the Rethuglicans are in the right to modify their convention plans. Their reasons for doing it, however, are suspect and deplorable. One, they are doing to it neutralize the baggage the entire GOP establishment carries from the aftermath of Katrina - no "Heckuva job, Brownie" moments this time around. Two, we all know that W will once again allow McSame to step in, act all bossy (like he did a few weeks ago during the Russia/Georgia dust-up) and more or less appear to rubes and nitwits who constitute the bulk of the GOP voting bloc to already be running things as part of that appear-to-be-winning-by-acting-like-a-winner strategy. Also, this is akin in their minds to the idea from any dictatorship (and we know W and the Rethugli-goons do love them some dictatorishness) where the party and the government are seperate, but nevertheless function as one. Think of the Communists in Soviet Russia or the Nazis in WW2 Germany. The government in both cases (and anywhere a country suffers under one-party rule) was kept separate from the party for appearances sake, but was still completely subservient to the dictates of the party.

We're not fully a dictatorship yet in this country, but the police state tactics currently underway in Minnesota (h/t Mr. the Broadway Carl) are in keeping with our slide into fascism. I was in NYC in 2004 for the GOP convention and I remember how much the NYPD, already something of a violent occupying force in this city on a good day, turned into full-riot-gear and machine-guns-and-dogs enforcement mode. This devolution will only accelerate as the actual mechanisms of government and law enforcement are increasingly populated by like-minded people who gleefully and proudly cleave ever tighter to an ever more authoritarian political party. The US Attorney scandal is part of this same seizing of the reigns of power, a politicization of the actual structures of law-enforcement, wherein political opponents are jailed simply for dissent in the name of law & order (Siegelman anyone?), just like a third-world banana republic (which I think they want to turn this country into anyway). This is the country we've become thanks to the thugs, goons, know-nothings and nitwits who constitute America's modern Republican Party

We should henceforce call them Banana Republicans.

In that way, McCain isn't so much a "maverick" really. On the contrary, he's a natural to now take the helm at the GOP. The GOP has been on a relentless march to authoritarian power since the racist Dixiecrats bolted the Democratic party for friendlier territory in Nixonland. One of the weapons in their arsenal during this march has been our collective national memory of the Vietnam War, which they have labored hard to re-shape in the intervening decades, building up a Dolchstoßlegende mythology around it - we could have won, "if only...".

Finally, after all this time, they get a Vietnam vet at the head of their ticket. Not only that, but in fact they get one of the ones who actually believes we could have won that immoral imperial occupation were it not for all the pointy-headed liberals and bleeding-heart war doves and dirty fucking hippies and Jane Fonda, just as the polarizing power of "the Vietnam experience" - when used as a red, white & blue code word to condemn all the purported excesses of the 1960's in the cultural battles of the last four decades - has finally started to fade. Sad, really, and sad that Vietnam vets are getting too old to even seek the job anymore. Just got one in under the wire, I suppose.

Whatever.

Vietnam has been the GOP's cudgel to beat the Democrats into meek submission for 40 fucking years. In so doing, they have successfully shifted the center of gravity in American politics oh-so-slowly to the right, ever more militaristic, authoritarian and plutocratic, to the point that even though our military budget is larger than all the other nations on the planet combined, nobody deemed "serious" in either party would even consider raising the slightest objection to that kind of spending on the machinery of death - if only on fiscal grounds, much less moral. The Dems have let it happen, sure, but the cultural turmoil of the 1960's that so upset the Establishment and the good (white) people of Main Street America and sent the whole herd flailing and fainting into the greasy hands of Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun in the 1980's simply don't matter anymore. The Boomers are dying off and the college campus battles they carried from their youth all the way into retirement are finally dying off with them. It is a new century and the GOP's bullying and beating of anyone to the left of Pinochet stops right here, right now, laid at Johm McSame's mangled feet with a toe-tag marked "I was a POW."

If anyone had any doubt about this dawning of a new age, Obama's speech last week should have sufficed to awaken them. More on that in a moment.

In the meantime, I will make the following prediction: Sarah Palin will drop out before the election. She will get him through the convention, shore up his Dominionist credentials with the drooling Jesus freaks, score him a few free points with the PUMA's on the other side of the aisle, then she will cite family concerns, drop out and go away. The Man Called Petraeus will retire from the Army and join the ticket with McCain sometime in early October. That will be the October Surprise, 2008-style.

Regarding The Speech, Barack Obama and What It All Means:

What can I say that hasn't already been said? Electric. Intergalactic. Dazzling. Wish I'd been there.

It is the most amazing political speech I have ever seen and will likely ever see, even if I live to be 103 (a lady in my building died this weekend at the age of 103, so that number sorta jumped out at me). The tone of the speech generally conveyed the idea that this Democrat is not going to take it from those guys anymore.

I loved it.

I dearly wish he could become our next president, but I don't think the plutocrats will let him have it. America has a way of robbing us of those who really give us sincere hope and no one has lifted our hopes like this since the men cut down by assassin's bullets during those hated 1960's. Remember, Stalin once said that it is not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes. This one will be "close" in "key" districts in "key" states, but will ultimately, somehow, magically break for McCain. If it starts to look like Florida 2000 again, Obama will be persuaded (like I'm certain Kerry was in 2004) to bow out gracefully or else. Obama seems tough enough to test the "or else" which I fear will not be pretty.

I hope I'm wrong, but eight years of this criminal enterprise known as the "Bush Administration" has kept a lid on so many putrid kettles of K-Street fish that a government run by an opposition party intent on shining a light on every cockroach in Washington can simply never be allowed to happen. Ever. Too much money at stake, to say nothing of jail time.

But even if all that doesn't happen and the McCain/Petraeus ticket is somehow allowed to lose, the Cheney Administration will likely launch a war with Iran sometime in December or early January, just to make sure that either the Obama Administration is hamstrung by a national emergency from its first day in office or to construct a pretext for suspending the results of the election until the emergency has passed - sort of like those guys in Gitmo held until the war is over, except that we've declared war on an idea "terrorism" and not a state or government who can surrender, ergo: endless war. Sorry, Abdulluh.

Hell, even if they do manage to steal it for McCain/Petraeus, Cheney will still probably launch a war with Iran to keep McCain toeing the party line (for there is nothing like a fresh, shiny new war to keep the press jingoistic and the public stoked, dude), McCain will cite age-related health reasons early in 2009 and resign and we'll have General Petraeus as our Commander in Chief before next summer. I expect him to deliver his first address as C-in-C in full general's regalia so that we can finally end this charade that we are a free country and the Pentagon can assume it's regularly scheduled take-over of our government.

Regarding that Big Picture:

Which brings me to where I think we are now. We are at the end of history, or at least so many over-lapping sine waves of historical ontology all converging down into one huge conclusion that it will seem like the end of history. The battles of the 1960's are ended, yes, and the wave that crested with the Reagan Revolution and broke on shore with the Bush EPIC FAIL has mercifully receded to reveal the form of that skinny kid from Chicago. But what kind of country is Obama going to lead (if he is allowed to take office)? A country so exhausted that it cannot revive one of it's major cities nor extricate itself from an intractable resource war half a planet away. We have the smell of death about us, like the British did when the Zulus kicked their ass 100 years ago. When Roosevelt took office, despite the Depression, he took the reigns of a nation still rich in natural and intellectual and human and economic resources that only needed to be nudged into motion again. Granted, it took a war (and the widespread implementation of an oil-based economy) to fully revive the American economy, but there was something there to be revived. What about now? We are saturated with pollution and exhausted of spirit with crashing natural stocks of fish and game, forests that are dying of thirst and burning up due to climate change, a crumbling national infrastructure starved of funding for decades due to an ideological fetish for privatization. Where would a President Obama find the means to rejuvenate a country so bereft of resources on a dying planet?

But yet another subsiding wave of history is what driftglass recently called "The Negrological Constant." Our struggle with racism is far from over - to wit, a clearly qualified, energetic, charismatic young man like Barack Obama is nevertheless neck-in-neck with a gaffe-prone fuddy-duddy who can't even keep his own opinions straight from week to week, much less actual facts and still the pundits are positively mystified that Obama can't close the deal. Whatever could it be, I wonder? What could possibly make some people think twice about voting for someone like Barack Hussein Obama? You know, someone smart and funny and, uh, smart? What is it? What IS it? I dunno. It's a mystery. Must be Obama's fault, somehow. I'm just not sure what it could be.

At any rate, the fact that a black man has finally risen to the candidacy of a major political party says a lot about the continuing power of the racist meme as it wends its way through our collective national consciousness because it took so damned long to actually happen. Were it not for the fucking Electoral College, lo these many years, I don't think politicians would have been as able or as prone or as eager to play the race card to appeal to the rubes and crackers and redneck fuckwits in the third-world shit-hole known as the American South and we could have possibly seen a black man at the top of a ticket sooner than a century and a half after we fought a war to free his ancestors.

Possibly. But maybe not.

We have been amid the last gasp of that way of politicking since the Dixiecrats stampeded to the Party of Nixon. Viewed as the lancing of a boil, we have lived the expulsion of the puss and disease in the form of forty years of coded hate speech that has kept a dying GOP in power as they collapse into a minor regional party centered in the South. Well, you gotta dance with them's what brung ya. The fact that the best the GOP could do this time is Candidate John McCain (and the twittering chorus of disbelief in the ranks at his ascension) says a lot about how shallow their bench is these days. As a party, they represent the end of an era of history that began when the Virginia colonists traded with a Dutch ship for the first African slaves in America in 1619 and ought to have ended when Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but in fact can only be said to have ended once "right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers." A President Obama could one day be seen as just such an historical marker.

Another wave of history is the End of Oil, which drove America's post-WW2 prosperity. But I have argued before that the End of Oil also represents the end of the western dominance of the world. That era began when the first explorers left Europe 600 years ago and began to colonize the world, and specifically the New World, in the name of Christian civilization - which was always and without exception merely an ecumenical pretext for robbing the locals blind. European prosperity - the glamour of Paris, the industrial might of Britain, the soaring beauty of Spanish cathedrals, the refined culture of the Dutch and the Italians and the Germans, et al, was financed by and can be traced directly to the literally tens of thousands of shiploads of gold stolen from the Americas. All those sailing ships shooting at each other in the pirate movies the kids are all watching these days were fighting over stolen gold. America paid for the Europe we so admire today.

So much of our history is embroiled in that Grand Crime. America itself was founded in the genocidal middle of it, which I think blinds us to our place in it. We began as a commercial proposition - the fancy words and high-falutin' philosophy got added later. From the legacy of slavery to rampant corporatism to the echoes of Manifest Destiny we hear in the rhetoric of America as Global Policeman, we are the product of our national DNA. We were born in a whirl of racism, violence and abject greed (with a facade of brittle piety to make it all the more cloying), have never really stopped, and every time we've tried to be honest and come to grips with our origins in some kind of nationwide reckoning, we've usually erupted into a violent cultural spasm that has on more than one occasion devolved into an open shooting war.

In his own way, for better or worse, Obama represents the end of that longer era as well, at least some manner of sea change. Whatever's on the other side, I hope we can get there in one piece.

I'll be on again, off again for a while but I hope I've given you something to talk and think about. Please feel free to comment. In fact, I'm not proud - I'm begging you to comment.

Unicorn Farts

izzy o'rainey asks a very good question in response to my post about walkable cities:

What's your timetable for the Star Trek world where I don't have to work for money and can live in a dense-but-totally-biodegradable neighborhood with recycled-cardboard streetcars that run on rainbows and unicorn farts?

(keep in mind that part of my job is pulling your leg)

Well, it seems to me when I think about Star Trek that whatever else may be said about the lack of conflict in the storylines or the relative androgyny of their creepily-sterile world, my biggest complaint would be that their world seems to take a staggeringly vast amount of energy to run. Which is why the geeks who dream up the technology for the show had to invent a virtually bottomless type of fantasy energy called dilithium to run all the warp drives and "Shh" doors and tri-corders and such. That world isn't running on black gold, that's for sure. And soon enough, neither will ours.

As I look into my crystal ball, I see oil only getting more extravagantly expensive in the coming years. I don't just mean gasoline for our cars. Expensive, depleting oil will drive up the cost of everything since petroleum is used to make, process, transport, heat, cool and otherwise store pretty much everything we see, hear, taste, touch and smell throughout our days. Since so much of our national infrastructure is invested in an oil-based economy, from shopping malls to corner gas stations, our cities will shrink by necessity and what remains on the perimeter (the current-day suburbs) will remain a fairly rich source of partially processed materials to be scavenged for the retooling of the older center cities for decades into the next phase of human history - the post-petroleum future we once thought would look like 2001 (until we actually got there, when it started to look more like Road Warrior).

My guess, and this is only a guess, is that in ten years the scope of the catastrophe will be obvious to even the most obtuse, pro-Reagan, Limbaugh-loving nitwit - who will naturally blame it on Al Gore and the dirty fucking hippies anyway and who will also naturally deny ever having thought Global Warming and Peak Oil were hoaxes - but none of that will change the fact that only the wealthy will continue to own and operate motor vehicles and the very wealthy will actually be able to fly anywhere.

The very wealthy, that is, and the United States military - who will likely use up the very last drops of oil on earth to drive a tank into a ramshackle village somewhere in Iowa to put down a rebellion on behalf of the wealthy overlords who will be nervous about the threat of food riots by the serfs on their land. Although I think that scenario is several decades away, we are nevetheless in Iraq to secure an oil supply for the Pentagon, not for the average American car owner. Fighter jets gotta fly and tanks gotta make tracks and neither can run on re-used french fry grease or unicorn farts.

So, what I was saying in my earlier post was, more or less, that we will have these changes forced upon us. Some places are better positioned to weather the changes than others. If a place was fairly prosperous in the pre-car era, chances are that it may have enough legacy architecture and infrastructure to re-tool and adapt. 19th-Century cities have "good bones" upon which oil-free prosperity can be built. If not, then not. Phoenix, for example, will be unlivable in the post-petroleum future because they can't grow enough food locally to feed themselves, nor have enough electricity without oil to run the air-conditioners and water-pumps needed to keep the place habitable.

In other words, I don't think we're going to find a better, more eco-friendly way to run the world we live in now. Why would we want to? This world needs to change and we had a chance to get ahead of the curve three decades ago, but it was more profitable for the plutocratic class to double-down and stick future generations with the bill and it was more fun for the trogs to make fun of Jimmy Carter to the sound of a revving big-bore engine than to, you know, pitch-in and make a better future by conserving. Conserving is for suckers, nerds and wimps and who wants to be one of those?

Maybe if we'd invested in research when we had a chance, by now we'd have those recycled-cardboard streetcars that run on rainbows and unicorn farts.

Or maybe dilithium.

Not Just For Political Blogging and Porn! - Part 2

So, further clicking around the inter-webs, I found this cool website, walkscore.com, where you can see cool, interactive maps of major cities and their relative walkability.

This is important because as we run out of oil and the world we know right now grinds to a halt, we're going to need those darned cities to be as walkable as possible since it will no longer be economically feasible to drive to a 7-11 to get a quart of milk in Phoenix or Dallas or Jacksonville or any of the other sprawling sunbelt drive-o-topias where voluptuous golf courses and cookie-cutter suburbs chew up arable farmland and suck the water-table dry in the name of green, green lawns and beautifully sculpted 9th holes. Those days are fast running out.

New York City is #2 on the list and the only one with any neighborhood to score a perfect 100. New York had three such 'hoods: Chinatown, Little Italy and SoHo. San Francisco is #1, with a greater number of 90+ neighborhoods than NYC, but no perfect 100s - although I think this system of ranking walkability fails to take into account the fact that those damned hills do impede walkability noticeably. That's why they installed the famous street cars in the first place, not as a novelty but as an absolute necessity. On that score, NYC also out-strips San Fran in the public transportation category, though (in all fairness) this website is about walkability and not car-free mobility.

I do think the two notions are intertwined, however, and are inclusive of not just low-enviro impact transportation options like overlapping regional and city rail systems supplemented by bus routes and bike lanes, but of transforming the public understanding of land use and the arrangements by which we feed and provision ourselves and our cities and towns. Gone are the days of year-round produce - no more strawberries in winter or avocados in the autumn - because we can't truck the stuff cross-country anymore, no more than we can continue to burn petroleum to ship cheap plastic crap (also made with petroleum) half way around the world from China to stock the shelves of the local-economy destroying WalMart. We have to re-think our whole way of doing things.

Electric cars are not the answer. Ethanol cars are not the answer. Solar-wind-biofuel-hamster-powered cars are not the answer. Auto-mobility is going the way of the dodo because we can no longer afford to pollute the planet to keep people able to have their alone-time idling on the freeway, listening to Rush Limbaugh while toxins spew from the tailpipe and the radio, and slowly, inexorably use up all the fuel we have left in the cool, green hills of earth. Our living arrangements will change and the car will not be part of that.

Compact, walkable cities are the answer.


.

We Got Troubles

It has been a few days due to a family situation (of which I'm pretty sure most of you are aware) that required me to fly to a state in the deep, deep south - the poorest, most backward one of all, but which nevertheless somehow has an enviable literary heritage (wink & nudge). The whole experience was like a re-fresher course on why I got as far away from that part of the country as my English-only ass could get, sin el pasaporte.

I will be writing more about what I saw down there (both on the ground & from the airplane) vis a vis Peak Oil, but as for today I want to direct everyone's attention to driftglass who is absolutely on fire in this post from a few days ago that echoes what I and my friends have been lamenting for some time - but much more eloquently - the stranglehold the "Dixie" mindset has on American politics. In the wake of the HRC blowouts in W.Va and Kentucky, all the bobbleheads (including this guy at HuffPost - a Princeton professor) have been yammering away in a thoroughly clinical manner about how vast swaths of the electorate won't vote for a black man and that the Dems need to somehow contend with that.

Racism trumps misogyny afterall, I suppose.

But at no point do they condemn these people for their willful provincial ignorance. Instead, in the collective mind of the village poobahs in D.C., these people become romanticized and elevated as Real 'Murricans, despite the fact that their ideological forefathers wanted to leave this country and we fought a war to prevent them from doing it.

Why do they get a pass?

Why do they get to claim the mantle of patriot?

They lost the Civil War and even more than that, they deserved to lose. And they have been an impediment to progress in this country since DAY ONE. From the earliest days of the republic, even before we were a republic, we've had to accommodate them, their soul-destroying 'peculiar institution' and all the toxic, corrosive cultural tendencies attending it, as well as the resulting inferiority complex and massive chip on their collective shoulder which drives the majority of their politics.

Why do the rest of us have to put up with all this shit?

Driftglass is having none of it.

...I am done conceding one more fucking millimeter to the great- great-grandbastards of an ideology that should have been universally denounced two generations ago and then unceremoniously sealed like Chernobyl under a million tons of concrete.

Instead, far from repudiating ignorance and racism -- burying them at the crossroads with a stake through their rotting hearts -- for as long as I have been alive they have been the Republican’s cash crops; their carefully cultivated political opium poppies.

So rather than denouncing the mutant offspring of our nation's Original Sin, they hire professional race-baiting gunslingers like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove to dog-whistle its shambling electoral corpse back up from unquiet graves in unholy ground every two years with magic conjure words like “Southern Pride”, "Confederate flag” and “state’s rights”.

[...]

But so long as the hunger for their votes means they're pandered to instead of punished...so long as they are allowed to rage unchecked and unchallenged like a disease through our body politic -- decade after exhausting decade -- warping our national debates, demanding that their atavistic values be accommodated...I say fuck ‘em.

Without the guns of the Union Army, the Confederacy would never have fallen. And without the massed might of the federal government, the courts, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens putting their necks on the line, Jim Crow would never have been smashed.

[...]

I have absolutely no reason to believe that, having endured proudly intact century after century, our surviving enclaves of American bigotry will ever “softly and suddenly vanish away” without the aid of a fleet of cultural and political bulldozers.

Anger is a great motivator. Man, driftglass can write. So could Abraham Lincoln (from his Cooper Union Address, New York, New York, February 27, 1860):

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly - done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated - we must place ourselves avowedly with them.

Only the rest of the United States looking like Dixie in word, thought, action, deed and spirit will make them go away. And not even then, because they're so insular and mistrustful because of the ugly, lingering side-effects of the cognitive dissonance of a culture of slaves and slave-owners in a "free" country that they can never seem to get away from the persecution complex that lies at the heart of their brand of politics.

Without Historical Precedent

I, like anyone over the age of 30, have an indelible memory of the Damocles Sword of nuclear annihilation. For all of us in this age group, the end of the world was always nigh. While global thermo-nuclear war was always a very real possibility, in part, it was also just so much hype generated by Saint Ronnie and his national security minions to keep the rubes pissed at all the squishy liberals who thought perhaps that even pretending to be a smidge too eager to blow up the rest of the world just to spook the Ruskies into capitulation was a tad extreme. For Saint Ronnie and his Coterie of Sycophants, those pissed off rubes translated into votes for his toadies, which in turn poured dollars into the pockets of his military/industrial-complex bosom buddies. It was a win-win, really, if you were above a certain tax bracket.

Of course, post hoc/ergo propter hoc, the cackling gremlins who cooked up this fiction about Mighty Ronnie standing astride the world ultimately came to believe their own hype when the USSR folded just a few years after Saint Ronnie left his marbles on the floor of the Oval Office. That delusional and deliberately ignorant reading of history took on epic and mythical power during the 1990's, becoming a kind of manufactured conventional wisdom, a widely believed and accepted general principle that was part of the background information for any discussion of foreign policy, presidential politics or recent world history.

As this deliberate fiction curdled into policy prescriptions written by quacks at heavily-subsidized Reich-wing think-tanks during the reign of the impediment to American Global Hegemony (and adulterer) Bill Clinton, the older neo-cons forgot to impart to the new generation that it had all been a con game to bamboozle the shit-kickers, but that American power did have limits, Realpolitik was still in effect and we had deep vulnerabilities best kept hidden. We were not invincible, nor had we ever really been, but the bedtime story of The Triumph of the Virtuous and Godly United States Over The Wicked and Godless Soviet Union metasasized into an kind of instructive origin tale.

These comforting illusions were pierced rather spectacularly on September 11th, 2001, but unfortunately the people in charge of formulating a response had been politically weened on the poison milk of American Imperium. For them, We The (Chosen) People of the US of Fuckin' A could pretty much do whatever the fuck we wanted, wherever the fuck we wanted, to whomever we fucking wanted, for as long as we fucking wanted and no one in the world could do fuck all about it.

This ugly, 11-year, chest-thumping power trip culminated in the Invade Iraq chorus heard relentlessly following 9/11, 'cuz Saint Ronnie took down the whole goddam Soviet Union by himself, dude! Boo-YA!

All of which was only the military aspect of a pervasive disinformation campaign.

I bring up this little history lesson for two reasons. First, something in me, perhaps at a molecular level, is just used to idea of living with the dread of imminent obliteration, it is programmed into me at a machine code level. I remember duck-and-cover drills. That feeling subsided for a while during the Clinton years, of course, but being in New York City on 9/11 pushed that reset button hard, and now that familiar old dread lies coiled in its usual place down there in my gut (this time with a good reason - the world really, truly, actually is coming to an end). And second, because I believe that once again the rubes and shit-kickers are about to have their illusions pierced or, more correctly, are having their illusions pierced now. Perhaps even shattered. Utterly. And the people responsible for the informational snow job will only suffer in proportion with the rest of us, though that suffering could become - in a phrase - without historical precedent.

I say without historical precedent because today I read the following:

A report from the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia makes clear that, despite recent heavy rains in the eastern Australian breadbasket, years of above normal rainfall would be needed "to remove the very long-term [water] deficits" in the region. The report then adds this ominous note: "The combination of record heat and widespread drought during the past five to 10 years over large parts of southern and eastern Australia is without historical precedent and is, at least partly, a result of climate change."

Think a bit about that phrase -- "without historical precedent." Except when it comes to technological invention, it hasn't been much part of our lives these last many centuries. Without historical precedent. Brace yourselves, it's about to become a commonplace in our vocabulary. The southeastern United States, for instance, was, for the last couple of years, locked in a drought -- which is finally easing -- "without historical precedent." In other words, there was nothing (repeat, nothing) in the historical record that provided a guide to what might happen next.

Now, it's true that the industrial revolution, which led to the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at historically unprecedented rates, was also, in a sense, "without historical precedent"; but most natural events -- unlike, say, the present staggering ice melt in the Arctic -- have been precedented (if I can manufacture such a word). They have been part of the historical record. That era -- the era of history -- is now, however, threatening to give way to a period capable of outrunning history itself, of outrunning us.

Of outrunning us. What an ominous phrase, fraught with images of Frankenstein's monster and Mickey Mouse in the wizard's workshop. Outrunning. Us.

Gulp.

You see, people who actually know things have known that our patterns of consumption and land use are not sustainable, not by a long shot, and versed as they are in disciplines like math and statistics, they could plug the numbers into a chart or graph and see that something had to give. Since the 1970's. In other words, people who ought to know have known our petroleum-driven world was a problem for a long time, but in the decaying citadel of what has only recently come to be called "Red State America," these people have been gleefully dismissed as just a bunch of elites, prissy egg-heads and sissi-fied "One World" liberals who want take away all the things that make America great: Big Cars, open roads and vast, sprawling shopping malls. Oh, and guns, but that's just a piece of ancillary paranoia.

It has sure been fun for these people, these last 30 years or so, flipping the proverbial bird to all those (phantom) dirty fucking hippies who wanted to make all of us live on communal farms, eat granola and ride bicycles everywhere. Yeesh. All those Chicken Littles who tried to put limits on things because just because the oil might run out. Or the atmosphere might get polluted. Don't restrict me, dude. Screw you and your spotted owls. Carter was wrong. There is no energy crisis, you wimp. Saint Ronnie said it was morning again in America, that we're free to consume and drive and eat red meat and he vanquished those godless commies so he must be right, right?

Not right.

Even for Americans, constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start -- even for us, the world looks a little Terminal right now.

It's not just the economy. We've gone through swoons before. It's that gas at $4 a gallon means we're running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It's that when we try to turn corn into gas, it sends the price of a loaf of bread shooting upwards and starts food riots on three continents. It's that everything is so inextricably tied together. It's that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the "limits to growth" suddenly seem… how best to put it, right.

All of a sudden it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth.

There's a number -- a new number -- that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

No, not right at all. Wendell Barry, gentleman farmer and famous Kentucky poet, in "Faustian Economics" in this month's Harper's (behind a subscription firewall - sorry) wrote of those hateful, hateful limits:

"Our national faith so far has been: “There’s always more.” Our true religion is a sort of autistic industrialism. People of intelligence and ability seem now to be genuinely embarrassed by any solution to any problem that does not involve high technology, a great expenditure of energy, or a big machine.

[...]

“. . . It is this economy of community destruction that, wittingly or unwittingly, most scientists and technicians have served for the past two hundred years. These scientists and technicians have justified themselves by the proposition that they are the vanguard of progress, enlarging human knowledge and power, and thus they have romanticized both themselves and the predatory enterprises that they have served.”

Different ways of saying the same thing, really. America is not exempt from the same historical pitfalls that befell other nations, even if Jesus is a Republican. Libraries full of doctoral theses have been written about the reasons, but for me they boil down an unfortunate historical convergence, some 200 years ago, of young-nation exuberance coinciding with and ultimately driving a mechanization of industry that fed on the vast and seemingly inexhaustible resources of a virtually untapped and - as luck, divine providence and reckless genocide would have it - largely uninhabited continent, all of which ultimately led to a perception of limitlessness.

Go west, young man, indeed.

It is this perception, this belief, this Religion that infuses our thinking of limitlessness more than any other single thing from all sides with a faith that scientists will "come up with something." Afterall, they always have, right? It is commonplace these days, and I hear it even from the smartest people who should fucking know better, that the egg-heads will invent something because the Magic Hand of the Free Market will force a solution, presumably in the form of some Michael Jordon-style fade-away 3-pointer jumpshot at the buzzer, but by some nerd in a labcoat having an Edison-style "Eureka!" moment. Then once again American ingenuity will save the day and we can keep on driving our SUV's to Wal-Mart for more cheap crap from China. Boo-YA!

To which I reply: to what end? Are we to keep consuming, chewing up farmland and paving over forests and spewing CO2 and dumping plastic crap in the oceans and blighting entire ecosystems just so we can have ever bigger vehicles and bigger yards and use up even more of the planet's resources? And on and on until the planet becomes a used-up husk? A smoldering cinder drifting inert through space? Where is that logical limit? A certain Englishman thought he found it 210 years ago:

"The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world."

Mechanization, people have argued in the intervening decades, and petroleum-based technologies have rendered Malthus' calculations moot. I think we can all agree that now that assumption has been a mistake. Everything comes with a price and for decades the darker-skinned peoples of the southern hemisphere have been paying it for the prosperity of the lighter-skinned peoples of the northern hemisphere. For them, the 20th Century has been one long lesson in the limits of modern technology, as lesson we are only now beginning to learn in the north. We are learning the hard way that we cannot consume the world and discard it with impunity forever. Everything has limits. Especially this planet, the only one we'll ever get.

I find great irony in a global object lesson in "no free lunch" on a large scale. Our domestic proponents of that creed cling to it in a socio-economic defense of the systemic inequalities of the American Way Of Life, with no understanding that the very way of life they "defend" is most responsible for the mess we're in now precisely because a piper must always be paid somewhere, sometime. It is all about limits.

$4/gal. gasoline will take the optimistic wind out of anyone's sails. Get ready for $8. And $10. What little of that shiny American optimism which some may desperately cling to now will likely evaporate completely in the face of such prices.

From the time of another economic depression (eventually to be less Great than the one we're staring down the barrel of right now), I am reminded of this aching lament from F. Scott Fitzgerald about New York City upon his first ascent into the Empire State Building:

Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits—from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.

Which echoes for me the sentiments behind the image that gave birth to the modern environmental movement, an image from a trip to the top of the world which, like Fitzgerald's experience writ large, reminded the whole of humanity for one all-too-brief moment that this vessel, this fragile blue thing, is the only planet we'll ever have, Spaceship Earth:

Shifting Gears

As most of you know, I worry a great deal about all kinds of things, mostly the future (to which one can reply "what else is there to worry about - the past?" Yeah, well, tell my mother that). By which I mean the things I have been worrying about for a long time, for those of you who have been reading my blog(s) for a while - you already know what these things are: the climate is changing, the oil is running out and everything is about to change completely and forever.

Not to be overly dramatic about it.

And when I really start to worrying, as opposed to just a generalized anxiety, I worry that I haven't taken all the necessary steps to be really ready for what comes next. I have packed "Go Bags" for me and Mrs. Joe, which are useful if the shit hits the fan while we're at home together, but since most of our days are spent not working at home, it won't do either of us much good in most situations. Nevertheless, I have plans for the various scenarios should some immediate disaster like another 9/11 strike the city. I have fairly clear escape plans, or at least semi-developed ideas about where to go and what to do. Living through 9/11 in New York will make a person want to be better prepared for the next, potentially worse one.

If something more drawn-out should happen, the kind of thing for which we could have one or more days of advance warning - something like a Hurricane Katrina hitting the city, let's say - I'm still fairly well-prepared with the materials and supplies I have. I can't live my life as though any particular terrible thing is imminent, but neither can I pretend some large scale disaster is only the stuff of Hollywood movies and paranoids. Again, post-9/11.

But what about something really drawn out, large-scale, long-term and irreversible? What about multiple things? Things that go to undermining the very socio-economic structures I live by? You know, like, such as, Peak Oil and Climate Change? How can I prepare for epic calamities like those? What about money? How will I live? Will I have a place to actually live in? Will I be able to work? Have I taken enough steps to have a marketable skills-set in a post-petroleum economy? Will I be able to feed and defend myself and my wife in a possible world where those systems have broken down? Can I do all of these things and continue to pursue the life and career I enjoy now, without retreating to a cabin in the mountains and living like a paranoid hermit? If so, how?

Perhaps it is in our collective cultural memory that civilizations erode and collapse into anarchy: Imperial Rome collapsing into Dark Ages Europe is of course the reigning catalyst for this idea in our shared history. I think these historical patterns are important because we are again on the precipice of an utter failure of the very engine of civilization as the underlying technology we have chosen to build our entire Flat Friedman World is finite, with deep, powerful side-effects, the scope of which we are only just now beginning to grasp.

As everything begins to break down, the scale of the disaster now besetting us will make itself known in successive waves that, at the time, will each seem like the most horrifying and insurmountable challenge in the history of humankind. Until the next thing overtakes it. Right now, that thing is the housing bubble and concommitant mortgage crisis. But, on deck in the batting circle is the collapse of international credit and the implosion of currency exchange. All of these things have real-world consequences, as many, many people are beginning to learn.

After that, who knows? The end point, though, and each in their own way a driving force behind the other, smaller problems, are (say if with me now...) Peak Oil and Climate Change.

James Howard Kunstler has been banging this drum for years, but his larger point has always been that "suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world."

Now, he doesn't intend to specifically demonize suburbanites living suburbanally in their own right as much as he wants to condemn the essentially wasteful and wholly unsustainable nature of our modern living arrangement, of which American suburbia is the largest, guiltiest and most tragic. In the decades following WW2, in keeping with American tradition, rural life was romanticized as pastoral and authentic but - apart from food production - a kind of luxury, while city life was viewed as gritty and inhuman but vital for economic prosperity. The post-WW2 consensus viewed suburbia as the best compromise between the two. Leave aside the class-based and racist implications that lay below those widely held assumptions for a moment and government and banking policy, while still the primary forces behind the suburban build-out, were only possible because for several decades almost everybody in the country, including anybody who had decision-making power about the allocation of resources in America, saw suburbia as the cure for all ills. Many of those "ills" were of course assumed to be racial in nature, mind you, and the post-WW2 suburban build-out has been part of the unexamined secret behind the Rethuglican rise to prominence since the 1950's.

Once we had warning shots fired across our economic bow during the OPEC oil shocks of the early '70s, though, instead of using these intervening years to develop alternative energy and, more importantly, change our land-use patterns and goods & services distribution systems, we chose to double-down and do more not less of exactly the wrong things. Complex cultural and distinctly non-economic factors drove this knuckle-headed collective choice, but the manufactured Myth of Saint Ronnie and the Cult of American Exceptionalism are major culprits.

So, now that the Democratic race is winding down (finally!), despite the mewling of the Hill-bot Brigades, my posting will be shifting a bit more towards my thought about what's next and how I and everyone I know can fit into this new world emerging around us.

Je Ne Sais Quoi

I will come back to the Peak Oil issue I raised a couple of posts ago, but in the meantime this post from the very wonky and always incisive Matt Stoller over at the (decreasingly so, but nevertheless staunchly) pro-Clinton Open Left just nailed down into words what for me has been up to now that je ne sais quoi that has drawn me inextricably to the Obama campaign.

It's the feeling of change, real change. Big change. Of difference. Of finally being on the winning team. For a dumb 'ol boy from Texas who grew up watching the horrific, inexorable march of the cornpone Nazis grow from a few angry, sanctimonious, Christo-fascist bigots in backwoods rural Texas spread like a cancer to infect first the governing apparatus of the state and eventually the whole country. As I have said many times, I left Texas because it is the kind of place that actually elected George W. Bush - on purpose. Twice.

So, for truly the first time in my entire life, I am seeing the vast, nationwide cultural wave of xenophobia and willful, mean-spirited, Dixie-fied ignorance that - after college in West Texas - chased me first to the true-blue heart of Texas (Austin, yawl) then on to New York City, before the cackling gremlins in the Reich-wing's high command with their army of flying monkeys usurped the United States government, the people's government, in a bloodless coup. Since then, they have blown up the world, grinning all the way to their secret swiss bank accounts.

And all along, the most galling, frustrating thing for creative-class types like me and, well, everyone I know, was that we knew - KNEW - we were smarter, harder-working, more clever and overall just plain better at organizing shit in a dynamic and interactive way than the lock-step goobers we faced every election cycle. Which is why we all retreated onto the inter-webs. The hive-mind of the blogosphere was where we could and would organize, find our voice and our power again.

Barack Obama understands that. It is unfortunate for Hillary Clinton that she and her husband, as I wrote a few posts back, are relics from another age. Prior to Obama's emergence, Hillary was salable mostly because she was an only slightly prickly reminder of better days, those indian summer salad days of Clintonian dot-com-&-SUV's-on-cheap-gas prosperity, before the onset of this dystopian winter of BushCo.

We can appreciate what Bill & Hillary did for us back then, but Obama makes us now see them both, and her specifically, for what they truly are: the compromised remnants of the-best-we-could-have-hoped-for as the hurricane of right-wing Dixie-fied hatred (30 years in the making) finally make landfall on the shores of decent society.

Obama is an entirely new animal. I will quote Matt Stoller at length:

Obama has successfully remade the Democratic Party already, and shown that old partisan Washington politics is over if you are a Democrat. Can he do that with Republicans? By stripping power, money and responsibility from outside groups and opponents, Obama is increasing his control of the party apparatus. He is also, however, putting everything on his own shoulders. When the Swift Boaters come back, and they will, it's all on Obama and his movement to hit back. He's betting that he can strip power from their base just as he stripped power from the old Washington way of doing politics within the Democratic Party.

I do not doubt that he can do this during the general election. McCain is such a weak candidate, and the Republicans are in such disarray, that a solid White House victory, 5-7 Senate seats, and 40-50 seats in the House are clearly possible. House Republicans are especially mean right now; insiders tell me they are going to cause problems with the war funding tactics just because they are so depressed from losing in Louisiana and Illinois. They have no money for the House and the Senate, and a depressed base. I'm curious about Obama's governing philosophy, as that is where the Republicans are going to make their stand in 2009. Without traditional outside groups (and he doesn't want them involved, witness his lobbyist ban in his new administration), Obama is going to be relying on the emergent networks that come from his campaign to buttress his priorities, but since we don't actually know what they are, it's hard to figure out what his governing strategy will be.

As Mike Lux wrote earlier, it's time to get ready for Obama as the nominee. I would amplify this and point out that it's time to get ready for a party that is being taken apart and rebuilt as the Obama movement. It's incredibly refreshing, in a sense, for politics to be completely reimagined on top of the internet and with a strong focus on leadership development, volunteers, and outside of DC leadership disdainful of partisanship and the give and take of politics-as-usual. It's also displacing the anti-Bush arguments of the last eight years and the political dynamic it fostered on the left.

He then quotes dday from over Digbysblog at Hullabaloo:

There's certainly a danger here of relying on projected numbers instead of traditional power bases, though I don't think he'll be abandoning groups like unions and black churches, nor will any progressive movement structures abandon him. But I really think that the Obama campaign is reacting to this demonization campaign from the right by saying "OK, I'll find voters in so many nooks and crannies and make you work in so many states that you won't have a chance to make this narrative work." His response is not necessarily building a progressive electorate; that would be accomplished by plugging into the nascent progressive structures that already exist. Obama appears to want to build an electorate aligned with Obama's principles and values, and fostering greater participation in politics as a means to move the country forward and break the current polarization. Some Democrats would play on the same playing field and try to win it; Obama's building an entirely new field, one where these narratives and negative ads and the need to tailor the entire general election to 10 independent voters in the middle of Ohio won't matter anymore.

I can't say if it will totally work, but that looks to be the strategy. We've been tantalized with these kinds of efforts before; it's actually a very traditional belief that increased turnout is good for Democrats.

I think all of this is exactly right. You should go read the whole thing, but for now I will end with this quote (also from Stoller's post) before returning to this issue tomorrow in discussion of Peak Oil:

I've been in the wilderness all my political life, as have most of us. The Clintonistas haven't, and they know what it's like to be part of the inside crew. We have a leader, and he's not a partisan and he can now end fractious intraparty fights with a word and/or a nod. His opinion really matters in a way that even Nancy Pelosi's just did not. He has control of the party apparatus, the grassroots, the money, and the messaging environment. He is also, and this is fundamental, someone that millions of people believe in as a moral force.

That is why Clinton is fighting so damned hard.  She and her husband's entire political legacy is at stake.  Obama is about to re-make the entire Democratic Party in his image, as Bill did fifteen years ago.  He very well could re-make the entire political system before he's through, like Saint Ronnie did thirty years ago.  Whether that is good or bad I leave to time and history to decide.  Either way, he is a very different creature in very fundamental ways because he has harnassed new technologies and modes of thinking into a movement.  None of this would be possible were it not for Howard Dean's campaign four years ago and more recently his 50 State Strategy.  As The Great Orange Satan says: Barack Obama is Howard Dean 2.0

Al Gore is Fat

I was working on a big, long post about Peak Oil and the end of modern civilization when I came across this post from Tim F. over at Balloon Juice. In it, he sorta nails down the growing sense of unease I feel about where we are as a nation, vis a vis the (completely foreseeable & utterly predictable) energy crisis:

I don’t feel particularly smug when I stand next to my Honda Fit watching some SUV owner near tears as she puts more than $100 of gas into a car she doesn’t need. It just feels sad to think about how long it’s been since it became obvious to anyone who cared to look that we won’t be able to scare off problems like fuel scarcity and climate change by closing our eyes and wishing.

That lead time was an opportunity to make changes. Some would have been painful and some merely sensible, but it would prevent huge numbers of honest Americans get caught with their pants down. Instead we blew it out the tailpipe of cars that average 15 MPG. Now, instead of a planned transition, we get to see what happens when stubborn denial meets inescapable change. It’s simply unsustainable to live in suburban car country with a negative equity on the house, $6-7 gas (wait until you see what that does to property values in outlying suburbs) and expensive SUVs that nobody wants. The saddest thing for me was that most who will get fucked the worst had no idea this was coming. There was that one guy who warned us, but he had a snooty laugh.

I hope those guys with W stickers on the Hummer parked in front of mcmansions that the bank owns enjoyed their beer

But Al Gore is a nerd who sighs too much and Jimmy Carter looks like a wimp in his sweater.

Go Ronbo!!!

More on this topic to come.