What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth by Wendell Berry, foreword by Herman E. Daly, Counterpoint, 193 pp., $14.95

Wendell Berry is like Howard Stern — you either love him or you have no use for him. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground.

Those who love Berry, from homesteaders and Greenhorns (that’s new farmers to you and me) to community gardeners, find inspiration in the plainspoken moral indignation of this latter-day Jeffersonian who won’t be budged from his conviction that the real America is farms and rural towns, not big cities and suburbs.

By contrast, eco-minded folks from New York to London and Toronto where the overwhelming majority of the industrial world’s population now resides, might be dubious. What could a curmudgeonly farmer from Kentucky have to say to an urban professional who shops at Whole Foods and supports the Sierra Club, but rides the elevator up to her condo on the 78th floor? For goshsakes, the guy refuses to type his own manuscripts into a computer. So don’t expect him to gush about ultra-light polymers for fuel-efficient hypercars run by hydrogen fuel cells or even just to let you know about the latest iPhone ap for freecycling.

As a recent Berry convert myself, I’m hoping that the economic crisis will be a hook to get a broader readership to check out Berry’s 2010 book What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth. With the failure of the Great Recession to respond to the standard prescriptions, from High Tech Uber Alles to Green Jobs for All, Berry’s agrarian-contrarian perspective offers a provocatively old-school response to today’s worst problems.

It’s always Berry season

Though a full half of the volume’s essays appear to be reprints from previous books, there’s plenty in What Matters? to interest hardcore Berry fans who’d rather fight than switch.

Indeed, it might be a selling point for collectors that the book reruns such Berry classics as “The Work of Local Culture” and  ”What Are People For?” The latter asks a question particularly relevant to today’s Great Recession, given that government policy since World War II has been to bring mechanization to agriculture because, as Berry puts it, “there are too many people on the farm”:

When the “too many” of the country arrive in the city, they are not called “too many.” In the city they are called “unemployed” or “permanently unemployable.” But what will happen if the economists ever perceive that there are too many people in the cities? There appear to be only two possibilities: Either they will have to recognize that their earlier diagnosis was a tragic error, or they will conclude that there are too many people in country and city both — and what further inhumanities will be justified by that diagnosis?

Whether economists ever come to their senses, Berry hopes that ordinary citizens will soon realize that the problem is not too many people but rather a false relationship between people and the earth, a mismatch between the little economy of getting and spending and the Great Economy of natural things like trees, fields, air, water and sunshine.

“When humans presume to originate value, they make value that is first abstract and then false, tyrannical, and destructive of real value,” Berry says with his signature lack of either ten-dollar words or any solicitude for the feelings of bankers and other masters of the universe. “Value can originate only in the Great Economy.”

Berry for the bond trader

The book’s most recent essay, “Money Versus Goods” from 2009, sounds like it came straight from the Alternative Economy working group at Zuccotti Park. “The present and now-failing economy is just about exactly opposite to the economy I have just described.  Over a long time, and by means of a set of handy prevarications, our economy has become an anti-economy, a financial system without a sound economic basis and without economic virtues.”

I cheered as Berry then went on to excoriate what the Occupy movement has taught us to refer to as the 1%:

It has inverted the economic order that puts nature first. This economy is based on consumption, which ultimately serves, not the ordinary consumers, but a tiny class of excessively wealthy people for whose further enrichment the economy is understood (by them) to exist. For the pupose of their further enrichment, these plutocrats and the great corporations that serve them have controlled the economy by the purchase of political power.

With a tone that could hardly be more Occupy-tastic, Berry concludes that “the purchased governments do not act in the interest of the governed and their country; they act as agents for the corporations.”

As to pumping more stimulus into the system to encourage spending and create jobs, Berry’s having none of it. “There is no good reason, economic or otherwise, to wish for the ‘recovery’ of the economy we have had…Our airborne economy has turned into a deadfall, and we have got to jack it down. The problem is that all of us are under it, and so we have got to jack it down with the least possible suffering to our land and people.”

Berry doesn’t claim to know how to pilot our Hindenburg economy back to the airstrip before it explodes. Yet, in the spirit of his 1970s poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” (but this time without any insanity defense as cover), Berry offers his own 16-point agenda to put the economy back into harmony with the natural economy. His ideas range from making farming equal to industry, enforcing anti-monopoly laws, helping young farmers to own their own land, ditching biofuels to encouraging small-scale forestry.

He’s a peak oiler too

In another recent essay in the collection, “Faustian Economics” (2006), Berry recognizes peak oil as a key limit on our ability to ever go back to the unlimited growth economy of the past, the end of the delusion of more, more, more and the beginning of clear limits to growth. “To hit these limits at top speed is not a rational choice. To start slowing down, with the idea of avoiding catastrophe, is a rational choice, and a viable one if we can recover the necessary political sanity.”

At age 77, What Matters shows that the Sage of Henry County remains as sharp a critic as ever of the runaway industrialism and urbanization that has beggared America’s family farmers and small-town dwellers for more than a century.

Now that this predatory economy has finally caught up with subway commuters and condo-dwellers, it’s clearly time for uptown girls and country boys to start singing the same song to save the 99%. And I can think of no better DJ to spin the tune than Wendell Berry.

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

But to face today’s historic challenges, we need to empower our families, our civic groups and our businesses to put Staunton First.

We can’t wait for Washington or Wall Street to fix the economy. We need to start right now to create jobs and prosperity from the bottom up, right here. That means making more of our own stuff and providing more of our own services, rather than relying on the globalized market.

We did it in the past. We can do it again. And we can enjoy resilient prosperity that’s not reliant on the ups and downs of the stock market or the price of oil.

Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won't Save Us Or the Environment by Michael and Joyce Huesemann, New Society Publishers, 464 pp, $24.95.

Even to save the planet from climate change or to save the economy from the end of cheap oil, you can’t stop the march of technological progress, we’re often told. Whether it’s the personal car, industrial farming or nuclear power, once the genie’s out of the bottle, you just can’t squeeze him back in.

And anyway, we’re also told, even the most dangerous technologies are morally neutral. They can always be used for either good or evil. It just depends on who’s using them and for what. Thus, the answer to Hiroshima was “Atoms for Peace” and building out civilian nuclear power that would be too cheap to meter.

But today, the real answer to Hiroshima appears to be Fukushima. And the price for nuclear power appears to be somewhat higher, both in money and in safety, than scientists and the industry had originally led the public to believe.

Ditto for other technologies that were supposed to usher in a new age of progress beyond hunger and toil, ranging from cell phones to biotechnology to microwave ovens. If you look at all their unintended consequences, from cancer to climate change, it’s clear that all too often technologies cost society much more than their sticker price.

As people ask critical questions about more and more technologies at the very same time that Occupy Wall Street has drawn attention to the dangers of extreme economic inequality, the moment is perfect for a book like Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won’t Save Us or the Environment.

An inside job

As the public loses ever more trust in authority figures from politicians to priests to pension fund managers, many citizens look increasingly to scientists as the last experts they can trust. That’s why it’s so powerful that Techno-Fix is written not by a humanities-type like my current favorite low-tech guru, agrarian-poet Wendell Berry, but by two PhD research scientists, husband and wife team Michael and Joyce Huesemann.

These environmental scientists know technology from the inside, and they blame scientists and technologists for serving their own egos and profits over the public interest.

The Huesemanns survey technology across society from labor savers that waste time to medicine that doesn’t heal to food that spreads hunger. And they find much technology wanting, especially cars and TV, the latter which they extend out to include the internet (where you’re reading this now!).

The authors bust the myth that science can be “pure” by showing how each major discipline today has a political or economic motivation: physics is aimed largely at enabling more advanced weaponry, chemistry serves the likes of DuPont and biology is mostly in thrall to Big Pharma. Just look at who funds the research. Then look at what they do with it.

The technologies that come out of basic scientific research are, of course, never value neutral. For example, when it comes to TV, the nastiness of the medium trumps any niceness in the message. Whether it comes to staying fit, thinking for yourself or loving your family, no matter what’s on tonight, TV won’t help. And think about this next time you’re watching Animal Planet:

Even if the message on TV is pro-environmental, TV viewing is intrinsically anti-environmental because it provides a substitute for experiencing nature first hand and because it encourages passivity, thereby undermining interest in environmental activism. In addition, because electronic media are able to make consumer products seem “more alive than people,” it is inherently biased toward materialistic consumerism, which is one of the causes of the environmental crisis.

People who love gadgets

But unlike one of those articles in Wired magazine that asks “when the robots take over, will they treat us kindly?” Techno-Fix doesn’t see new technology as unavoidable or somehow powered by its own internal evolution. Instead, the Huesemanns argue that society gets the technologies, and only the technologies, that our particular ruling elites want — those that increase the centralized power of the top one percent.

So, even after Fukushima, at least in the US nuclear power is still in, because it offers an endless supply of interesting intellectual challenges to powerful physicists while making electric power generation even more dependent on big, expensive plants that only the largest utilities can afford. Meanwhile, solar power from photovoltaic panels, which can be installed by a high-school dropout and which could give millions of homeowners control over their own energy, continues to labor against dismissive public policy and outright attacks like l’affaire Solyndra.

Even to save their own skins from eco-disaster or peak oil apocalypse, capitalists have shown that they won’t voluntarily give up profits to keep harmful technologies off the market. So the Techno-Fix authors call instead on their fellow scientists to police themselves and commit to a code of ethics where they would refuse to participate in life-destroying research like nuclear physics or genetic engineering — despite the lure of ego-gratification, prestige or grant money.

“Science has not given men more self-control, more kindliness, or more power of discounting their passions in deciding upon a course of action,” said Bertrand Russell. “It has given communities more power to indulge their collective passions…Men’s collective passions are mostly bad; by far the strongest of them are hatred and rivalry towards other groups. Therefore, at present, all that gives men power to indulge their collective passions is bad. That is why science threatens to cause the destruction of our civilization.”

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

That’s not the only reason we loved Conan O’Brien’s spoof of Paul’s edgy new ad claiming he’d cut a trillion dollars from the federal budget — “that’s trillion with a T!” —  in the first year of his presidency.

We laughed out loud at the parody ad — surely the best campaign spoof video ever — because it reminds us so much of the ads for sports drink Brawndo (“The Thirst Mutilator — it’s got electrolytes!”) in the film Idiocracy.

Watch it here and get your macho on.

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

Lots of books came out on energy, climate and the economy this year. Here are the best ones that integrate all three areas.

Welcome to our second annual list of the top ten peak oil books. Most of them are explicitly about peak oil, while others deal with energy depletion as a significant factor in the economy or the environment. A couple titles focus on responses to the myriad conundrums that Richard Heinberg has dubbed “peak everything” and that are now converging to create a perfect storm for global industrial civilization.

Along with Heinberg, we list books by peak oil stalwarts John Michael Greer and Dmitry Orlov along with a few newcomers. Only one of the books this year is fiction, which we regret, since we think that peak oil writers have underused storytelling as a way to reach a wider audience by making complex and sometimes scary issues more accessible and less intimidating. We hope that next year, more novelists and short story writers will be inspired to take on peak oil. If nothing else, it would make a great premise for a variety of genres, from political thriller to science fiction to horror.

Heck, we won’t be satisfied until we’re at the checkout counter at Rite Aid and see peak oil as the background for a bodice-ripper romance. For now, there’s lots of good reading below. Enjoy.

	The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future Of Our Economy, Energy, and Environment by Chris Martenson John Wiley & Sons, 317 pp, hardcover, $27.95. More than a million people have watched Chris Martenson’s video series “The Crash Course” to prepare for financial collapse. The new book version is even better. Read our review »
	Lethal Trajectories by R. Michael Conley Beaver’s Pond Press, hardcover, 486 pp, $24.95. A political thriller that offers the perfect geopolitical storm for the age of peak oil: threat of war with China, a Saudi coup and economic collapse at home. Read our review »
	The Transition Companion: Making Your Community More Resilient in Uncertain Times by Rob Hopkins Chelsea Green Publishing, 320 pp, $29.95. Despite a heavy focus on the British Isles, the revised version of the beloved Transition Handbook still offers plenty for Americans and others who would re-localize their town’s economy. Read our review »
	The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered by John Michael Greer New Society Publishers, 298 pp, $18.95. A thoroughly engaging and accessible revision of Adam Smith and classical economics that reminds us that wealth from either human labor or financial capital relies on resources that nature provides for free. Read our review »
	Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects by Dmitry Orlov New Society Publishers, revised and updated 2011, 194 pp, $17.95. The latest edition of Dmitry Orlov’s doomer classic sees a Soviet-style collapse coming to the US. We won’t handle it as well as they did. But he finds hope if we can wake up. Read our review »
	The KunstlerCast: Conversations with James Howard Kunstler…The Tragic Comedy of Suburban Sprawl by Duncan Crary New Society Publishers, 320 pp, $16.95. Printed adaptations of more than 100 hours of Crary’s online radio interviews with the colorful author of The Long Emergency and the World Made by Hand novels. Read our review »
	The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World by Paul Gilding Bloomsbury, 292 pp, hardcover, $25. This year’s weird weather from the US Midwest to Pakistan could be the climate disasters that environmentalists have said would end denial once and for all. Or not. Read our review »
	The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg New Society Publishers, 286 pp, hardcover, $17.95. Heinberg, co-founder of the Post Carbon Institute and author of numerous books on peak oil, now tackles the subject of economic growth. He argues our economy will need to learn to live without growth in the future and that this could be the best thing that ever happened to it. Read our review »
	Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living by Rachel Kaplan and K. Ruby Blume Skyhorse Publishing, 304 pp, $16.95. Since most people in the industrial world live in cities, urban homesteading is an increasingly desirable strategy to build household resilience. But it can feel intimidating. What’s it all about? Dig in to this accessible book to find out. Read our review »
	Navigating the Coming Chaos: A Handbook for Inner Transition by Carolyn Baker iUniverse, 201 pp, $25.95. Preparing for the peak-ocalypse involves more than storing cans in the basement. Former psychotherapist Baker provides mental tools for emotional and spiritual preparation.  Read our review »

– Erik Curren

The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future Of Our Economy, Energy, And Environment by Chris Martenson, John Wiley & Sons, 317pp, $27.95.

If you still think professional economists have any authority left to talk about finance, debt and banking, remember that most of them failed to predict the Great Recession of 2008. Then consider how many of those same financial experts have been saying on and off since the crash that the economy has entered a recovery, even if only a “jobless” one.

Recovery? Really?

Sure, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is back up to early 2008 levels. Corporate profits are up too. A few really rich people still seem to be buying yachts. And the Koch brothers apparently have plenty of money to throw at lobbyists and buy right-wing politicians.

But all that says is that the top 1% is still doing well. Heck, maybe they’re doing even better than they did before? With the rest of us poorer, the gap between the wealthiest people and the 99% is bigger than it has been since just before the Great Depression. And while it may be worse in the US, the gap between the rich and the rest has been growing around the world too.

Economists never told us this story of financial inequity. It took the Occupy movement to do that. Even now, most economists still continue to tell us reassuring fairy tales about how economic growth must and will return.

So, who are you going to trust? Start with Chris Martenson, one of the lay financial analysts who did predict the banking collapse in fall 2008.

Despite its home-made look, the online video version of “The Crash Course” available for free on Martenson’s website has been seen more than a million times. It’s well worth the three and a half hours it takes to get through all 20 parts. Watch a 1:47 introduction here.

Now, Martenson has just published this material out in book form as The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future Of Our Economy, Energy, And Environment. The book seems to cover much the same ground as the videos, but with updates on  the economy since 2008 and adaptation to make such topics as money creation through fractional reserve banking, the role of the Federal Reserve and of course, peak oil, more accessible to a wider audience.

Double, double, toil and trouble

I especially appreciated Martenson’s discussion on exponential growth and his advice on how to prepare for the next twenty years that are sure to be very different than the last twenty years.

Al Gore with a hockey stick graph of global temperature rise. Photo: An Inconvenient Truth.

Americans are famously bad at math, and being an English major, I’m surely among the dunces of the dummies. I’d heard about exponential growth before and I understood in a vague way it meant that the expansion of things like world population, sovereign debt and oil demand was worse than we thought. That it could be shown by a “hockey stick” that’s nearly flat for a long time and then skyrockets at the last minute, like the graph of global temperatures that gave Al Gore a chance to stand on a cherry picker in An Inconvenient Truth but has since become a bugaboo for climate-science deniers.

It’s why a petri dish that doubles in population every minute and is merely half full at 11:59 pm will be totally full only sixty seconds later, at midnight.

But it wasn’t until I read Martenson’s chapter “Dangerous Exponentials” that I finally understood all the fuss about linear vs. exponential growth. It’s easy to see, for example, that if you start with 2+2=4, you can keep adding more twos to get six, eight, ten, etc. This kind of growth happens at a steady rate which is simple to plan for.

But the most crucial measures of the economy, energy and environment today are not growing in a straight line. Instead, they’re growing exponentially — and that’s what makes them really scary. “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is the inability to understand the exponential function,” said the physicist Albert Bartlett, quoted by Martenson.

“You happen to be surrounded by examples of exponential growth. And your future, like it or not, will be heavily shaped by their presence,” as Martenson explains. He then gives us the “Rule of 70,” a handy formula to easily calculate the rate at which something growing will double. With exponential growth at a steady rate, the doublings come closer together as time goes on.

Martenson then offers three concepts to help us see why we should make the effort to comprehend exponential growth:

1. Speeding up. Time really gets compressed toward the end of the exponential phase of growth.
2. Turning the corner. This is a very real and extremely important event in systems with limits.
3. More than double. Each doubling equals more than all the prior ones combined.

Exponential growth is why China has used more energy in the last nine years than in all of its thousands of years of history before that. It’s why the global warming hockey stick is actually sound science. And it’s why the US can’t keep doubling its level of government and private debt much longer and why economic growth will soon be a thing of the past.

It’s why we don’t have much time left before something big happens to global industrial society and the modern way of life.

As Martenson quotes Nixon economic adviser Herbert Stein, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” It’s a sign of how screwed up our times are that this obvious statement should come off as deep wisdom. But there it is.

Crashing down and cashing in

Martenson gives three scenarios of what he thinks could happen in the next twenty years given that industrial society is now on a path towards the end of exponential growth:

• A slow tumble where the world economy crawls along much like today and peak oil remains a hidden cause behind an ongoing financial slump, what Martenson calls The Great Destruction and which could make possible the kind of slow planning to re-localize the economies of communities that the Transition movement aims for;
• A hard landing with a quick oil crash where it’s obvious that energy depletion has killed the economy but it’s come too quickly for any mitigation, an apocalyptic collapse similar to the one dramatized in Douglas Coupland’s novel Player One;
• Or a “fall down the staircase” over a period of about five years in which peak oil becomes clear enough to encourage serious action but happens gradually enough for some planning to occur, a scenario perhaps friendly to the kind of voluntary conservation plan that Richard Heinberg proposed in The Oil Depletion Protocol.

Which scenario you believe to be most likely can determine what you do to prepare. But above all, Martenson tells us to “prepare to be surprised” and to try to achieve enough resilience to ride out a variety of future scenarios.

To get to the most resilient place, Martenson recommends actions for the world’s governments that will be familiar from the peak oil and sustainability movements: don’t depend on technological breakthroughs but do push for gadgets that use less energy or help to store energy, such as better batteries; stop valuing fossil fuels by how much they cost today, which is a poor indicator of their overall value, but instead, by the energy they provide compared to alternatives, and conserve the fossil fuels we have left accordingly; slow, stop and reverse population growth voluntarily before nature does it for us in a brutal way.

A resilient household

For individuals, Martenson gives his own decision to relocate his family from suburban Connecticut to a rural area in western Massachusetts as an example.

He wanted to live in a walkable town where neighbors knew and cared about each other surrounded by rain-fed farmland. On the financial side, he got his family out of debt and to protect against inflation, he invested in commodities, especially silver, which he feels has great potential to appreciate in the future because of its limited supply and many uses in manufacturing.

“The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around,” as Sen. Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day, famously quipped. In that spirit, The Crash Course ties in today’s Great Recession with underlying issues of energy and environment, unlike most books on the economy today.

And while most economists are still singing “Happy Days Are Here Again (Soon!),” Martenson is not afraid to give us the bad news that 2008 was the just the beginning. An even worse crash is coming and that there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

The good news? Once we recognize that the growth-economy jig is up, there’s lots we can do to prepare. And the sooner we start, the better. If there’s someone in your life who you think needs a bit of friendly bad news to awake from complacency and a bit of non-threatening good advice to start preparing, The Crash Course could be most welcome under the tree this holiday season.

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

Lethal Trajectories by R. Michael Conley, Beaver's Pond Press, hardcover, 486pp, $24.95.

“I want to go to war with China,” said presidential hopeful Rick Santorum in a recent GOP debate, showing the cavernous lack of any good sense that has become his trademark. Nonetheless, Santorum was probably speaking for many Americans who fear that China may soon overtake the US as the world’s single great power.

By contrast, many of those same Americans probably think of Saudi Arabia, whose obliging princes seem always at the ready to pump extra crude onto the world market to temper oil price spikes, as the American motorist’s best friend.

But what if the tables were turned, and the kingdom became the scourge of the American infidel while the People’s Republic was set to be our biggest ally? That’s the geopolitical premise of R. Michael Conley’s new peak-oil thriller Lethal Trajectories.

Pride and prejudice

Any political thriller needs villains and Conley gives us Mustafa, an Osama bin Laden-like Saudi prince who aims to wage jihad in Riyadh from inside the highest ranks of Saudi society.

Conley — don’t confuse him with Michael Connelly who wrote The Lincoln Lawyer — gives Mustafa enough flesh and blood to elevate him above mere melodramatic bad guy. With “the square-jawed good looks of a young Omar Sharif…[Mustafa] detested the sinful way in which the oil-driven economy picked away at the proper ways of Islamic society.”

To return the kingdom to that old time religion, the pius prince recruits a secretive band of putschists,  including an extremist mullah and a band of military officers, to overthrow Mustafa’s own relatives in the decadent House of Saud, kick out all Westerners and then declare global jihad using Saudi oil as the ultimate weapon of political blackmail.

The conspirators bide their time until the US is distracted by a clash between China and Japan over a disputed oil platform in the East China Sea. Then, while US warships set their course for the Pacific and the White House is stuck trying to quiet saber rattlers in Beijing and Tokyo, Mustafa takes the opportunity to strike in Riyadh.

The result, as Conley puts it, is the “perfect storm” of geopolitical crises that sends the already struggling world economy of the year 2017 into shock. Once established in the palace in Riyadh, the victorious plotters under now-King Mustafa recall all Saudi oil tankers to port. Then, they announce an immediate global embargo and begin to pressure their small, unprotected Gulf neighbors to join them, effectively shutting off most OPEC oil until the world’s nations agree to a series of harsh demands including the isolation of Israel.

As if that’s not bad enough, the storm just gets stormier. Stateside, the US president is dying of cancer while the Pacific crisis remains hot, the domestic economy begins to collapse, gas prices head towards $10 a gallon and right-wing politicians and pundits alike demand the head of the dying president and later, of his successor. Even the climate scientists can’t help from piling on, warning that the world has finally reached dangerous tipping points in the slide towards atmospheric anarchy.

Sense and sensibility

People piling on brings us to the novel’s other main villain, bloviating TV pundit Wellington Crane (clearly modeled on Rush Limbaugh) who sees radio-ratings gold in the nation’s deep distress. As he blasts the White House for going soft on both Communism and Islamic jihad, his popularity soars. But Crane’s own arrogance causes him to step out too far.

One of my favorite scenes is when the over-confident Crane debates the vice president, Clayton McCarty, on a financial TV talk show. McCarty understands energy and the environment, displaying a passion for climate science equal to Al Gore and savvy on peak oil like Rep. Roscoe Bartlett. It’s satisfying to see McCarty  triumph over the obnoxious and ill-informed Crane, who clearly follows the school of Daniel Yergin that peak oil lies many years in the future.

Yes, it’s unrealistic to think that a US vice president could ever be so sensible and well informed on peak oil. But you can’t blame a guy for dreaming.

Crane brings up one theory after another of how unconventional fossil fuels could produce plenty of oil: shale fields in the Rockies, ANWR in Alaska, deepwater oil in the Gulf, etc. Then, McCarty shoots each one down, not for environmental reasons, but because of economics. This allows the vice president to give a wonderfully clear explanation of why the peak oil situation is actually worse than we might think, if you add in the issue of peak production:

What am I suggesting? Just this — unlike the geologic concept of peak oil, peak production reflects both geologic and aboveground constraints such as market conditions, cost of production, geopolitical considerations, availability of deepwater rigs and labor, technological challenges, and the like. When you drill down into ten thousand feet of water and then another twenty thousand feet of ocean bottom to find oil, the cost of drilling, extraction, and processing eventually exceeds the commercial value of the oil…Peak production is like saying ‘I might be able to find new oil at twenty bucks a gallon, but who’s going to buy it?’

Persuasion

Ultimately, the outcome of the story rides on one question: what will happen with China, which remains the US’s largest trading partner despite a budding cold war between the two powers.

Conley, who served as a communications technician in the navy, knows his geopolitics as well as he knows his weaponry, expertise which he demonstrates in 40 pages of notes placed unobtrusively at the end of the book. Yet, for a hard-nosed military man who also worked in insurance, Conley shows a warm heart.

Some of the book’s most engaging scenes take place in the depressed Rust Belt city of Mankato in Conley’s own home state of Minnesota, where Pastor Veronica Larson’s “Life Challenges” ministry brings succor to the financially strapped in the style of a Resilience Circle, with support for the unemployed and ride-sharing for those who still have a commute but can’t afford to gas up their cars.

I know that Conley is an old softie because in the end, those who cooperate with unlikely allies beat out those who merely compete with others for their own self-interest. And that’s a message you won’t find in every political thriller. Nor in every novel on peak oil, so many of which tend to intensely individualistic apocalypse where community quickly crumbles and survival comes out of the barrel of a gun.

Call him naive, but Conley thinks that industrial civilization may be able to save itself from oil-driven collapse if both citizens and world leaders stop thinking with our wallets and start thinking with our hearts.

Citizens may already be there. But, as the Occupy movement has helped us all to admit in the open, our leaders remain bought and paid for by big corporations. Thus, given the power of plutocrats, before we could even elect a Vice President McCarty willing to get America off of oil, first we’d have to dislodge ExxonMobil and the US Chamber of Commerce from Washington.

A big task, perhaps impossible at this stage. But unless you want to throw up your hands in despair, a good start would be to stop listening to guys like Rick Santorum, beating the drum of fearful self-interest and mongering for war, and start listening more closely to guys like Conley. What if our biggest rivals could become our best friends and our biggest challenges, the opportunities that redeem us?

Click here to read an excerpt from Lethal Trajectories.

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

While no one is a bigger supporter of Transition than we are, we welcome an open discussion about how to best help our households and our communities to prepare for an economy that will continue to contract as peaks in energy and other resources make themselves felt.

And we’re also glad to see that Transition groups around the world have made real accomplishments so far. Just take these examples found in a fundraising email that Transition US sent out today. They want us to talk to our families over Thanksgiving about Transition:

• Tell them about the people of Northfield, Massachusetts, who just had a great unleashing of community genius and spawned 14 working groups to develop a tool lending library, barter bank, regional trails network, low voltage radio, a publicly owned water company and much more!

• Tell them about the Folkschools that Transition Sandpoint in Idaho and Transition Whatcom County in Washington have each ignited to provide year round skill-building workshops. Or about the Recession Relief projects Transition Los Angeles has kicked off with food growing and preserving classes, backyard harvest redistribution, the how-to’s of keeping bees and chickens, community currency and clothing exchanges!

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

The Pepper Spraying Cop has now come for peak oil. It's time for honest experts to occupy the public conversation on energy.

How many Saudi Arabias did you say that was?

It’s hard to keep up these days with claims by oil and gas drillers about how many Saudi Arabia-sized reserves of tar sands oil/shale oil/deepwater oil/hydrofracked gas that North America is now allegedly able to access due to the smarts of petroleum geologists and the tenacity of oilmen.

“Because of better technology, notably breakthroughs in drilling, the US all of a sudden realizes it is sitting on a century’s worth of gas supply,” writes Edward Luce in the Financial Times (thanks to Lorne Stockman at Oil Change International for the link). “When Mr Obama came to office, the country faced projections of rising natural gas imports from places like Qatar.”

But now, if you believe what the industry says, the picture’s really brightening up:

The same technology has unlocked ever-growing estimates of once inaccessible “tight” oil lurking beneath America’s rocks. In its immediate neighborhood, Alberta’s huge expanse of “tar sands” contains oil reserves that rank Canada second only to Saudi Arabia. In Brazil, recent advances in offshore oil drilling will relegate Venezuela into second place in the region.

Without any real input from Washington, windfalls just keep dropping into America’s lap. Welcome to a new age of plenty.

While this new cornucopia is bad news for climate change — nations are scrambling to get at Arctic oil ironically made accessible by melting ice caps — it’s great news for US energy independence. “A new era of fossil fuel appears to be upon us and nobody saw it coming,” concludes Luce.

It burns your eyes

This is nothing we haven’t already heard from Daniel Yergin. Or from the American Petroleum Institute. Or from numerous industry front groups in Washington calling on the Obama Administration to get the EPA out of the way and let the drilling begin.

Clearly, the industry has begun a coordinated campaign to convince the public that oil is not running out, but instead, that there’s plenty of it. That would mean that we can rely on oil for years to come and we needn’t bother with hassles like conservation or clean energy.

Why would Big Oil want to lie about or exaggerate the amount of oil they can likely produce? It’s simple economics. Over the last century, oil and gas companies have invested billions of dollars into infrastructure from off-shore drilling platforms to refineries to shipping terminals. Are they just going to let all this expensive equipment sit idle and rust because the easy oil is running out? That wouldn’t look very good on the next quarterly earnings report.

If you only have a hammer

Think about it: if you owned a hammer, and it cost $10,000, you’d be pretty aggressive about hiring it out to pound some nails. But if the world was running out of nails, that would be bad news for your investment. It would just be good marketing to paint the rosiest possible picture of the nail supply to try to keep your customers from panicking about losing a way to hold stuff together and start switching over to nail alternatives such as screws or glue.

And so, from nails to oil, if your business is to pound or to drill and you’ve bought a bunch of expensive machinery to do it, you’re going to try to do that as long as you can. Even if it’s not in the best interests of your customers. Even if you know that, someday, the stuff will be too expensive to use anymore, and those customers will be left in the lurch, having wasted all the time they had to find other options following your false promises of indefinite supply. But that’s not your problem. You just want to keep your equipment busy as long as you can.

So, don’t expect oil drillers to admit to peak oil until it becomes a better business opportunity for them than denying peak oil. And the day that happens is clearly in the future, if ever.

Meanwhile, as the corks pop in Houston, the silence from the peak oil community in the mainstream media is deafening. If we truly believe that cheap oil is running out, then it’s time for the white-hat oil guys from ASPO-US and the Oil Drum to step up and counter the industry’s comforting lies.

Who’s going to say boo to the Pepper Spraying Cop this time? Anyone?

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

Is tar sands really all about jobs?

While attending a conference for solar energy companies from the Mid-Atlantic states held last week in Washington, DC, I picked up a copy of The Hill, a newspaper for Washington insiders that comes out daily when Congress is in session. And I marveled at the full page ads taken out by big government contractors and industry lobby groups and directed at members of Congress and their staffs.

Just another way that corporations act like people — people with huge budgets for issues ads, that is.

Anyway, there’s Lockheed Martin showing off the latest models of bomber plane, aircraft carrier and helicopter to offer “Total situational awareness. Mission-wide connectivity. Fewer casualities.” Then there’s an open letter to committee chairs in the House and Senate from tech companies including Google, AOL, Facebook and eBay, opposing anti-piracy bills they say will stifle internet innovation. But what really caught my eye was a pitch from an outfit called the Partnership to Fuel America, which turns out to be a front group set up by the US Chamber of Commerce. Their ad touts the Keystone XL Pipeline:

America Needs More Jobs Without Delay

The Keystone XL project is good for America. It will create 20,000 well-paying jobs in the short term, thousands more in the long term, and generate $20 billion in spending to benefit our economy. But the Administration has gone back on its word and is delaying a decision for another year, until 2013.

You can argue with that job figure. On the high side, Steven Colbert aired a clip mocking Fox News anchors and guests for making wildly different claims, from “20,000 immediate jobs,” to “118,000 in direct jobs” and finally “a million new high-paying jobs.” On the low side, even TransCanada, the company that would head the project, has said the total jobs created would be far fewer, and an independent report has found that the project could actually destroy more jobs than it creates through higher fuel costs and environmental damage.

A bazillion jobs still wouldn’t be enough

But given what the Keystone XL pipeline was suppossed to do, create a bigger market for dirty Canadian tar sands oil, how many jobs would it really take to make it worthwhile?

You don’t need to go as far as NASA’s James Hansen that tapping the emissions-heavy tar sands would mean “game over for the climate” to conclude that no amount of jobs would justify this monster.

Just stick with simple economics. The industry says that tar sands oil will give America energy security. But because oil is a fungible commodity that can be sold to whoever’s paying the highest price, there’s nothing to stop US oil companies from selling the refined products to customers overseas. Refiners have already been shipping diesel fuel to Europe and Latin America, where it’s in high demand. That of course, does nothing to give Americans energy security.

A pipeline to Gulf ports will make it that much easier to ship tar sands oil abroad. In that case, Midwestern states would take the environmental hit (pipeline spills are common) while much of the energy may go to foreign countries. And if that happens, the American heartland will start to become just another exploited oil exporter like Nigeria.

Oil companies that would fool Americans into thinking that they were getting energy destined for foreign markets are just using and abusing us. And no amount of jobs can transubstantiate that kind of evil into good.

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice