“Austerity measures”

My own austerity measures: The first sacks of things to throw away before moving to the smaller place. More sacks to follow.

I have written a few times about the near future, after peak oil and peak metal and so on. What I have sketched is not a disaster scenario. Disaster scenarios are good for selling books, and I agree that if we act like complete morons, we can make a disaster out of it. Then again we can make a disaster in paradise itself, as the Jewish creation mythos so beautifully explains. This tendency lies in us all and must be watched.

Seeing pictures of Greeks rioting in the streets not only brings home this human tendency to make a mess of things, but also an even more ingrained human tendency: To never give up something you already know from experience that you can live without. This is not a pure evil: It is kind of helpful for a marriage, for instance, that you won’t give up on your spouse at the first bump in the road, even if you survived for several years before even meeting them. But for the most part, it is people torturing themselves.

I am going through my own austerity measures these days. Getting less for the same money is the trend of the future, and I have started (somewhat unexpectedly, in my case) since I have to move from a house to half a house for the same rent. In the process, I am once again going through the things I’d like to bring along, and sorting out things that I won’t realistically have room for. The thing is, I started my adult life with much less than this. It took many years before I even had my first bookshelf. It is like my material riches have increased by 1000% and now I have to go back to 800%. Not really something to riot over, I think.

I can see how people who planned to retire at 50 will be upset that they can’t. The whole thing I am going through now is an exercise in how to (not) react when you find out that people break their promises if they have the power to do so. That is unfortunate, but when the promises were a bit too good to be true, when we were living our dream, simply going back to reality should not be the end of the world.

Retiring at 50 or even 55 is certainly dreamlike, at least if you have a job you hate. But the best response to that is to either get a job you like, or like the job you have. Almost all jobs consists of helping other people (because that is the only thing people are likely to pay for, if they have a choice). So by rising your love to a very high degree, you can usually find satisfaction in any work that is not contrary to law or decency.

I have every intention of working till 75 if my health holds up. That is not a certain thing, of course. But as far as I see it, retirement is not natural. It should not really exist. Rather, people may get disability pensions when they are no longer able to work, whether it happens at 20 or 90. If you want, you can of course quit your job at any time, but I don’t see why one should be rewarded for that. The way Europe at least has organized this, people have paid for other people’s retirement for decades, so it stands to reason that they want to get their money’s worth. But that money is not saved anywhere. It is already spent, on other people’s retirement. So it is not like you can give them back the cash. Given that we all face a period of austerity, I think it is more important to support those who are actually ill, over those who are actually lazy.

When the money is gone, it is gone. The tooth fairy won’t bring it back even if you break somebody’s teeth. It is like that with all things. The only certain thing about anything on earth is that it will end. As the Buddha said: “All things that have form are subject to decay.” I hear even the protons will decay some hundred billion years from now. We should salvage the happiness we can find during our journey through time, collect the good memories and learn from the unpleasant. For each of us there will come a time when we won’t get any more memories from Earth. There is more joy to be had from austerity than from rage. Believe me, I have tried both.

The VAT is coming! Buy books!

My self-sim still read paper books, but then again he does not have to physically move every object he owns from house to house every couple years.

Starting July 1st, the ever helpful Norwegian government will start collecting 25% VAT (a form of sales tax) on electronic services from abroad, such as subscriptions to online games. And, notably, e-books.

This is contrasted with one of the rare holes in the Norwegian VAT, for paper books. For some reason the same does not apply to e-books. The most likely reason is that the government does not want to appear anti-cultural by suddenly taxing books, but e-books were so rare when they were first classified as services rather than books, only a few of us bothered, and nobody important to the public. To extend this to e-books from Amazon is just a matter of harmonizing with EU rules, the European Union has already for some time tried to collect tax from America.

It is not a big deal really, those who think this tax is unfair can simply steal every fifth e-book. Buying them is after all a matter of conscience in the first place, since the Pirate Bay has (as I already mentioned) e-books I could not  buy from Amazon, Barnes&Noble or Google Books.  At least when it comes to the kind of books pirates like to read. Probably not so great a selection of the type of books on my Amazon recommendation list: Aristotle for Everybody by Mortimer Adler, On Grace and Free Will by St Augustine, Holiness is Always in Season by Pope Benedict XVI, and a few more of similar beach lecture level.

Now, buying that kind of books seems extremely dignified for someone such as I. These past 12 years have not exactly been an unbroken triumph march of dignity, piety and deep thought, do you think? Still, the books should be within my reach to enjoy, though it may take its sweet time. In fact, that is somewhat the point: The books I buy before the end of June should ideally tide me through until the US$ has devalued by another 25%, which will likely take several months, if not the whole year.  It may go faster if Congress and the White House cannot agree on the debt ceiling and the government stops paying its bills in September. I certainly don’t think it beyond them.

Since some of these books are likely to be a bit above my pray grade, they may require two or more readings, which should also help make them last. Most likely they are also slow going. But again, that is not necessarily a bad thing. It is not like he who dies with the most books wins. Probably not.

Food and money

No, generally speaking people in the third world are not starving because you eat too much. It is not like there is a fixed quantity of food in the world. It may have some small effect, but more on you than on them, I would say.

In most of Europe and North America, there is little connection between income and diet. People with more money to spare may eat out more at restaurants, but they generally don’t eat more and they generally don’t eat more meat than people with lower income in the same countries.

In the so-called “Third World”, on the other hand, food is a large part of living expenses. If there’s not enough money, there is not enough food. (This is a bit different for those who grow their own food, but if the crops fail, they generally don’t have much cash to tide them through until the next season.) Those who are a little better off can afford as much staple food as they want (such as rice or maize) but may only eat fruit and some vegetables when they are in season, and meat and fish only on special occasions.

As more and more people have made the move from abject poverty to lower middle class in countries such as China and India, the demand for meat especially has increased. This has put some pressure on the prices for staple foods also:  Pigs eat much the same food as poor people, and cattle need at the very least grazing land that might have been used for growing food for humans. Where cattle ranchers can afford it, they also tend to feed their cattle some grains and vegetables for faster growth.

My point here is that there is not a fixed amount of each kind of food that you just parcel out among the world’s population. Increasing food production is pretty simple, and we do it all the time. We could easily feed 10 billion people on this planet, but it would be expensive if they were all eating meat virtually every day, as is common in America and parts of Europe.

That is not to say that we could not do it even then. The problem is not that food is too expensive: It is not expensive compared to most things. The problem is that some people are too poor.

This problem can not be turned into “some people are too rich”. There is again not a fixed amount of wealth that we can distribute. Rather, wealth is continually generated by human work and thought. The world today holds many times as much wealth as when my grandfather grew up. Not only are there several times as many people, but the average earthling is far more wealthy. This does not happen because a planet has a fixed trajectory of increasing wealth that we can simply distribute: It happens because people have had the freedom to generate wealth and the incentives to do so, the main of these incentives being “not being robbed and killed if richer than others”.

I am not opposed to rich people sharing their wealth with the poor. Far from it! That is a commendable thing to do. But even more commendable, for those who can, is to invest their wealth in such a way that it creates opportunities for the poor to use their own talents to generate even more wealth, for themselves and others. If we were to simply give all the wealth of the rich to the poor to use for food, this would like eating the seeds. Any sane farmer knows that you don’t eat the seed grain unless you are going to die anyway. We should have the same level-headed attitude to all forms of wealth.

There are some who are happy to contribute to emergency food aid to the starving poor, when drought or flooding or volcanoes have destroyed their livelihood. That is nice. But if we were more eager to contribute to schools, libraries and vaccines, there would be fewer people who were on the verge of starvation anyway. Even if there is drought in California one year, you don’t see a million Californians sitting on the ground covered in flies with a beggar bowl in their hand.  Are Californians created in God’s image and the people in certain other places are not?  No, but some people have currently more resources than others.

But the one most important foundation for any progress is PEACE. There is no point in building schools when they are bombed the next day, just as there is no point in planting crops that will be raided in the harvest. Once peace is broken, it is hard to put back together. I think we should all consider this. Even in the rich world, war is possible if we too readily believe in flattery at the cost of others. Before our culture wars reach the point where people start arming themselves “just in case”, we should consider that the end of this path is certainly poverty, starvation and pointless death. But if we live to be of help to others, everybody wins, including (and especially) ourselves.

Political Donaldism

We worry about people who take Scripture too literally, but what about those who take Disney comics too literally? (Picture from Wikipedia.)

Looking at political debate these days, I wonder how much of it is based on the Disney universe and its character Scrooge McDuck, whose most famous attribute is the giant Money Bin, in which coins and banknotes are stored like grain in a silo.

The things we pick up when we are children tend to stay with us through life, if we don’t actively reflect on ourselves and change our perceptions. Even then they continue to influence us subconsciously for a while.

In the real world, the “super rich” don’t actually store their money that way. The money is, except for that used in personal consumption, invested in various ways. The super rich may own entire businesses, which they have either founded or bought out later. They may own property which they rent out either to businesses or housing. They may have money in various financial institutions. But mostly their capital is invested in the stock market and in bonds.

The difference between the money bin and the stock market is pretty clear when we come to the effect of taxation. If the government were to somehow manage to siphon some money off from Scrooge’s money bin, chances are that they would put it to better use than being used for a rick man to dive in.  But if the government withdraw the same amount of money from the stock market or bond market, they better have a VERY good reason, as they are undercutting the future production of society.

This aside from the question of “whose money is it anyway”, which is a separate problem.

Not saying it can’t be done, but let’s just realize what is going on. You are not taking “passive” capital and injecting it in the economy. You are drawing money out of the productive economy because you have some purpose you think is more important. This has always been the case, of course. Even a very conservative nation would have a military, police and probably public roads. There are certainly various purposes that tax money can be used for.  But it is not true that this money is just lying around now. It is currently being invested in various of the things we like, and these will become scarcer – and therefore more expensive – as we withdraw resources from production.

So just keep that in mind, and try to consciously correct for the subconscious influence of Scrooge McDuck.

Ironically, Carl Barks who invented this character and his money bin, was himself pro-capitalist. “I feel that everybody should be able to rise as high as they can or want to, provided they don’t kill anybody or actually oppress other people on the way up.”

Ah, the marvels of unintended consequences.

The future of work

Those who like what they are doing, would presumably still do it even if others got money for nothing. But within limits, I suspect.

I recently read a short, but interesting essay titled “Jobs Are Bad, M’kay?“. In this, the Young genius argues that people should work only if they produce Stuff (which of course includes services) that cannot be produced better without human labor.

This is eminently logical, and true from a materialist point of view. It ignores the fact that work is a form of love, but then again it is common today to think of love as a very private thing, so this is understandable.  But even without a spiritual perspective, I think his conclusions are very worrying. Not so much wrong as sinister.

A Swedish study a few years ago concluded that approximately a quarter of the population would not be employable in the information society. The numbers are probably higher here in Norway, since salaries are higher than in Sweden; in the USA the numbers may be lower now. But the really disturbing part is that the proportion  is going to change for the worse, and fast.

The children who are born today will not be in the workforce until 20 years from now, at best.  In that time, the performance of computers will increase literally a hundredfold, if Moore’s Law holds up, as it has for the past few decades.

When I was little, manual labor was still common in the countryside. These newfangled digging machines were just starting to take over the digging of trenches, but there was still plenty of other hard work to do.

When I was 20 and had just begun in my first job, we had a whole crowd of former housewives who were sorting documents, putting them in folders in the archive, and retrieving them. I also did my share of this, for it was an entry-level job.

Twenty years later this was gone. All the sorting was done by computers. We did not get woman-shaped robots running to and from the archives, but the housewives were replaced even so. The future comes while we look another way.

That was ten years ago. At the time, speech recognition (as in dictating to a computer or giving it orders with your voice) was expensive, unreliable and really only an option if you could not move your arms and legs. This year, there was a question on the NaNoWriMo forum whether such software was considered cheating, since it was so much faster than typing.

What will you teach your child, that a robot will not be able to do 20 years from now?

When the time comes when only 25% of us are employable, as opposed to 75%, what will we do? Logically speaking, as the Cerebrate points out, there will be more stuff to each of us if we just pay them to stay home rather than building offices or workshops for them to pretend working in. But how will they feel about that? How will those who CAN work feel about that?

For me, work is an act of love. If I can do a job that is actually needed, I will do it even if I get paid the same for staying at home writing novels. (At least unless my novels get better than they are now!) But I don’t think most people look at it that way.  I think they will demand more and more money for going to work at all, knowing that half of their income goes to people who can sleep in and then enjoy a leisurely lunch in their PJs.

And the more you pay the people who actually do work, the greater the incentive to develop robots that can replace them. It is a spiral without an end. Or rather, it seems likely that it will all come tumbling down before we reach the logical endpoint.

The only solution, in my view, is to change from a civilization based on maximizing Stuff to a civilization based on maximizing Happiness. Because numerous studies show that once the median income of a nation go much above $10 000 a year (in the exchange rate of  around year 2000), happiness does not continue to climb with increasing income. In some case, notably the USA, the happiness actually becomes less over time. (In Europe, happiness is still increasing, but very slowly, and this rise may be because of gradual dismantling of old national monopolies and thus increased freedom rather than increased money.)

A huge amount of the stuff you people buy is used to impress your neighbors. If we had a happiness-centered civilization, you would not need to do that. And because the greatest source of happiness is to give happiness to others, everyone would “work” in the sense that they would try to do something for others, no matter how small and simple. And for the directly productive minority, it would be much easier for them to share their Stuff with people who were trying to do some good, even if they were not very good at it, rather than with people who just sit on their ever growing backside and demand more Stuff.

That is what I think, but at least I think at all. How about you?

America’s election

In this world, there is something called an accident. This election comes to mind.

So, lots of Republicans in Congress now, from what I hear. Big disappointment (but not entirely unexpected) for much of the educated classes, from which most of my online friends come. I don’t think they really understand what is going on, but then most of them are still young and also don’t have much time to listen to the silence. So, public service announcement here!

This election does not show that America has finally realized that Sarah Palin was sent by God to restore the World’s Greatest Nation to its former glory and purity. It is just a natural, almost mechanical, fluctuation in the voting masses to restore equilibrium. In a democratic society, people really and with a vengeance dislike one-party rule. And it hasn’t been this one-party for quite a while. With the Democrats in control of Congress, Senate, Presidency and Supreme Court, it was no wonder people got cold feet. This is simply not natural, and I mean that in the most mechanical sense.

Let me illustrate with an example from my native Norway. The political constellations are a bit different: The Supreme Court is less politically active, the King not at all. The cabinet is in practice chosen from the majority of the parliament.  The current center-left coalition came into power replacing a center-right coalition. The non-socialists had delivered 4 years of rapid personal income growth, increased economic liberty, lower taxes AND budget surplus. Despite this, they were voted out.  It makes no sense to those who think general elections are some kind of referendum on the success or failure of the government. But that is only part of the truth, you see.

The other part is the modern equivalent of the ancient Jewish tradition of laying all the sins of the people on the head of a goat and chasing it out in the wilderness – the origin of the word “scapegoat”.

With the Democrats everywhere, there was simply no chance of finding a goat elsewhere. Well, they could have started a war, but it is not really their forte. So, the sins of the people are laid on the head of the incumbent congressmen, and they are chased out in the desert.  Just like their Republicans predecessors were less than a decade ago. People seeks some deep meaning in this, but people sought some deep meaning in the goat as well, no doubt. In reality, it is an almost mechanical mass reaction in the collective psyche.

If the election results end up being as first reported, a kind of balance is restored: The Democrats can blame the goddamn idiots in Congress, and the Republican can blame the goddamn idiots in the White House and Senate. There will no doubt be further oscillations in the years to come, if any. But the important part is that everyone now has someone to blame, so can continue their dysfunctional behavior until the next goat-scaping season.

Big pharma or small minds?

I’m biking too… just more slowly. ^_^

In my somewhat medical entry earlier this week, I portrayed the lung specialist as an incarnation of Big Pharma.  Even as a snapshot of the moment this is not quite as nuanced as my real feelings, and in perspective even less so.

Then again, regular readers will know that I cannot even use the phrase “Big Pharma” without irony, for it is a concept typical of a very different subculture.  It goes along with a thinking that is not just mythical, but pure fantasy firmly believed to be literal truth.  It is a mainstay of progress haters, vaccine dodgers and people who think everyone can get the green light at the same time with no ill effects. And of course envious socialists, who cannot abide the thought that someone may earn money on other people’s illness.

While I eagerly support people’s right to choose shamanism and witchcraft over modern medicine, I am torn about seeing them expose their children to the same experience in applied Darwinism, and I definitely require them to wear a plague flag in public.  As for the Socialists, their intentions are as always good; it is just their realism that is faulty, as usual. Having worked for the State for 30 years, I know that it has great perseverance but very limited creativity. If you rely on the State for medical progress, you better have a long natural lifespan.

With incorporated pharmaceutical companies, of course, the problem is sometimes the opposite:  Things go entirely too fast.  I personally think there should be more nuance to this. When it comes to treatment for illnesses with a high mortality (including most cancers), side effects should not really be a major concern.  Is it really a problem that 5% die from the treatment if 95% die without it?  But the opposite is the case for what I would call “convenience medicine”.  It is unacceptable to have people die from low-level painkillers, for instance, or breast transplants for that matter. There should not be the same rules for these opposites.

***

In any case, do not mistake me just because of my brevity.  I don’t see doctors generally or this particular lung specialist as just greedy salespeople.  I know enough health personnel to realize that most of them are driven, deep down, by a deep urge to help others.  In general, they are better people than me, in the motivations for their work.  (Although I am working on that.) As the Russian journaler Coldheels (I think it was) wrote:  A medical student dissects many frogs not because her heart is cold but because it is warm with love.  (Sorry to mangle the quote, but it has been 10 years.  Feel free to correct me, but I know I got the spirit of it right, because I feel that way too.)

So I do not want to cast aspersion on her motivations.  But she does live and work in the middle of a milieu of “better living through chemistry”.  She went through a long checklist of diagnosis, certainly more advanced than the script of a McDonalds worker, but still very much a script.  Who has written it?  What are the assumptions you make while following it?  It never occurred to her to ask:  “You are a 51 year old man and you are not overweight, but you are not exactly muscular either.  Are you keeping in shape by exercising regularly, or are you simply not eating as much as others?”  (And I did not interrupt her to tell, although to my defense it was only minutes since I thought I would be treated for a chronic throat infection or some such.)

The point for that deviation from the script would be when there was no improvement in my lung function 15 minutes after taking a standard bronchidilating drug.  Hmm… reduced lung function but not disastrously low, no response to common drug, none of the common allergies… childhood asthma….  could it be that this guy simply has spent 45 years meticulously avoiding any strenuous activity, to the point where his lungs simply never grew to the same capacity as the average male?

While I do seem to have some degree of exercise-induced asthma, it is entirely possible that most of my reduced lung capacity as shown by the test simply comes from a life of slow motion, of walking fast but never running, biking but not too fast, always making sure to not get winded.  What does that do to a human lung?  How much is genetics and how much depends on practice?  I know my heart is beating as slowly as an athlete, but I am not an athlete. The heart speed seems to be genetic – in fact, I get the impression that my brother is even more that way than I – but that does not mean lungs follow the same pattern.

I would like to have such thoughts at least considered before committing my only body to a treatment that may be utterly pointless.  (And taxpayer money for the foreseeable future, since this is Norway  and we have socialized health care that Obama can only dream of.)

Not being able to think outside the script is obviously worse if your script is a medieval fantasy, but even a scientist is not immune.  We need to broaden our minds and see things from an ever higher perspective.  This is the path of true progress.

Socialism & the gospel of Satan

It is that time of the year again!

It is the time of the year to mock Socialism again.  Not the socialists, many of them are good people at heart.  They are just misled by a false belief. Of course, you may say that so am I.  The proof of the pudding, however, is in the eating.

As I have said before, there are two gospels in the modern world. The gospel of Jesus Christ is “IT IS MORE BLESSED TO GIVE”.  The gospel of Satan is “YOU DESERVE BETTER”.  I think it is pretty obvious what side socialism is on.

The New Testament says: If anyone has two shirts, he should share with him who has none.  Socialism says: If anyone has no shirt, he should take one from him who has two.  To the casual observer, this looks much the same:  They still end up with one shirt each.  But in one case they also end up as friends, in the other case as enemies.  When they die, the shirt remains on earth but their friendship or enmity follows them to the next world. Therefore, socialism only makes sense if you are also a materialist and an atheist in the strictest sense, who has no belief in anything higher than the world of animals.

Now, without Christianity – or something very similar – socialism could not have arisen in the first place. The shirtless would simply not have had the hope of getting that shirt, much less the conviction that they deserved it. Only if the practice of sharing shirts were common enough that people started to expect it, but not common enough that everyone actually got one, would there be room for the rise of a reverse Christianity based on forced charity.

We Christians can blame ourselves – collectively, I mean, it may not apply to you personally – for not having shared voluntarily.  If we did, back when most of the nation consisted of Christians, there would have been no room for socialism, since we would already have a more egalitarian society without the bureaucracy and bitterness that follows with an intrusive state taking on the role of God.

Even now that we are living in a partially socialist state (and I don’t think there is any nation in the world that does not fit that description anymore), we should not give in to bitterness. Otherwise we will become like those who strayed before us.  It may be that we could have used our money more wisely than bureaucrats – how much does that take, really? – but most of it is still used for reasonably harmless purposes, some even outright good and useful. The nation may have gone astray – and I would claim that it did so before it turned to the Left as it did – but we still need not have the spirit of envy in our heart.

It may not be obvious, but the “capitalist” consumer society is actually powering the Left. Day after day people’s minds and souls are filled with needless desires from the relentless onslaught of advertising.  Using every trick in the book, experts in psychology are making you feel that you need and deserve something you don’t have.  As long as there are rich people, this desire will make you envy them and wish to take what is theirs, unless you consciously choose to immerse yourself in love that gives and fasten your eyes on that which lasts beyond this lifetime.

Of course, we could just “eat the rich”, but history shows that this is not a good way for a nation to feed its populace.  When socialism is taken to the extreme, poverty ensues for the whole people. This should come as no surprise. Socialism is based on blaming the successful for your failures. When the successful are removed and only the failures remain, things are going downhill fast.

Conversely, if everyone was looking to make others happy already in this life, then the whole nation would rapidly become prosperous. Why is that? Because we would be looking out for what other people needed, and fulfilling needs is what creates prosperity. To use a worn old metaphor, baking the cake rather than dividing it.  We can neither be happy nor prosperous by everyone taking from each other, this is obvious.  But when people compete in giving the best service and the highest quality, the wealth of a nation rises rapidly.

Sure, we can compete based on greed, as long as we get to keep enough of the reward (as opposed to have to share it equally with others). But competing to do good from a loving heart makes you happier.  Try it and see for yourself. It actually is pretty blessed to give, especially when you can do it voluntarily.

Heroes and history

If Thomas Edison had not invented the phonograph, would we still have MP3 players today?  Or would there have been no gramophones, no tape recorders, no cassette players, no CDs, a world where canned sound remained as unimaginable as it was to the Founding Fathers?

I think this may be a matter where the world looks very different depending on whether you are a conservative or a socialist. And since most of these have little or no ability to peek over the fence, I shall take it upon myself to give you something at least a bit closer to the truth.

In the conservative view, history is for the most part a result of a few well-known people who have changed its course in one way or another.  Mao, Stalin, Hitler.  Churchill, Lincoln, Washington.  Jesus, Buddha, Moses.  Einstein, Newton, Archimedes. Remove any of these or various other “main characters” and history flows in a completely different direction, leading to a world mind-numbingly different from today.

To the socialist, history is a more or less predictable flow of micro-events adding up, driven primarily by economic conditions. Never mind that Marx’ own predictions were about as accurate as weather forecasts by a five year old. After all, Marx himself was limited by the extreme scarcity of information at the time, thus proving that everyone is a child of their own time. In theory it should still be possible to make a fairly good model of how history unfolds under varying general conditions.

One socialist author wrote with sarcasm about Alexander the Great conquering the known world:  “Did he not even bring a cook?”  The point is, of course, that Alexander would not be able to conquer even a tiny village alone, much less the Persian empire, Egypt and much of India and Afghanistan. This is true enough.  But it is equally true that the thousands of men, whether soldiers and cooks, made no serious attempt at establishing a Hellenistic empire before Alexander showed up.  What he did was give them a focus, a vision, a direction for their abilities.  They did not simply flow like water – someone had to break the dam that held them.

You could say that the most typical political hero is a vessel for the aspirations of the people, acting to contain and concentrate them, directing them toward a goal they may not have been aware of but generally agree with.  This also holds true for the political villain, only with different aspirations.  The difference is not always easy to see if you are very close.  In any case, the aspirations alone are not enough to create the hero. There must also be a vessel of the required stature.  Even with tragic flaws, it is required that you be larger than life.

Cultural heroes seem to be even less predictable than military and political ones. Sometimes they seem to embody a particular age, sometimes to usher one in.  Why do a bunch of them suddenly appear at the same time and in the same cultural area, like in the Renaissance?  What kind of social engineering do you plan to do to create a larger number of people like Mozart or Michelangelo? How do you produce an Einstein? (Apart from having a number of Jews around.)

The thing is, you must be a fool to think history-changing heroes just conveniently appear when the economic “realities” dictate it, kind of like fools of the past believed that flies and rats were spontaneously created in rotting food.  (Pasteur, another hero, proved this wrong.) Then again, you are definitely not going to conquer the world without a cook. And even the greatest teacher of philosophy or faith is of little worth if there is no one to hear. It is the interplay between the guides and the guided that make history advance.  More about that later, perhaps.  It was actually that I wanted to write about, but you see what happened.

Debating when it’s over

di091128

The very existence of your future dinner probably has very little to do with what politicians think about global warming. I’ll explain why.

The magazine The Economist (of which I generally hold a very high opinion) says in a recent article: “The stakes in the global-warming debate, however, could scarcely be higher. Scientific evidence that climate change is under way, is man-made, and is likely to continue happening forms the foundation for an edifice of policy which is intended to transform the world’s carbon-intensive economy into one which no longer spews greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. A lot of money, and many reputations – both academic and political – are involved.” (The article may not be available for non-subscribers, but can also be found in its print issue for this week at your local library.)

I hear a lot of this, how important the global warming theories are for our economy. I disagree. This is a fairly uncommon thing between me and the highly respectable magazine, although our differences have increased somewhat in recent years as it has moved slightly to the left and I to the right, politically. Facts, however, ought to be facts. But if they were, we would not have that particular debate in the first place, would we?

My point however is that it matters little. The carbon economy is temporary in any case, and its decline is imminent, if it has not already begun. Certainly the seeds of its destruction is sprouting, and global warming is but one of them. Even if we actively wanted a warmer world, we would not be able to keep it up. There simply is not enough of our favorite fuels to sustain the current way of life.

Do you guys remember a couple years back, before the economy panicked? Do you remember the gas prices? And even then, the oil companies actually sold at a loss, to smooth out what they hoped were a temporary surge in crude oil prices, at times over $140 a barrel. Well, it was temporary, but this has brought no joy. If you know any of the Americans who were publicly praying to God for lower oil prices, today is a good time to go thank them. They sure got what they asked for, if not what they hoped for.

Technically, the recession has ended, at least in America, in the sense that there was nominally a small increase in GDP last quarter. But we all know that this was caused by government intervention that is not sustainable. On the contrary, the flow of money must at some point be reversed. And even with this, we just got a break in the fall. Obviously we are not back to the previous level of economic activity. Just ask the millions who are out of work. But this is also the reason why gas is cheap again. We simply use less of it, because we drive less.

Should the economy pick up again, to anything near its previous level, then we will face the same problem again: There just is not that much oil left for easy taking. And most of it is in one country, Saudi Arabia. The rest of the oil in the world is rather harder to get at, and the price reflects this. The reserves, as they are called, the oil that is not currently being tapped, are mostly even harder to get at. They are deep underwater, deep underground, or in the Arctic, or several of the above. In short, oil is getting expensive, and after that, scarce. We are not going to be driving gas-guzzlers in 2050, or even 2030. It is doubtful that most people will even be driving gas-powered cars by then.

Well, at least there is enough coal left for two centuries, right? Er… that’s what the major coal producers say. However, these fall into two categories. One is the nations of Russia and China, where the government in practice controls this resource. Strangely enough, their coal reserves have not changed at all for the last couple decades, despite pretty heavy mining. If they let on that they don’t have unlimited energy, the governments would lose prestige. In the western world, it is subtly different. If coal mining companies did not exaggerate their reserves, their stock would fall, and that can not be allowed.

An article in New Scientist a couple years ago estimated that the world’s coal reserves may only last two decades, not two centuries. That is probably exaggerated, but there is no real audit of these things and the official truth is completely in the hands of people whole livelihood depends on lying.

In any case, coal is not oil. It can be burned to produce electricity, but here it is facing competition from new technologies of renewable energy. Wind power has already reached the mass of industrial production. The technology is still improving a bit, but mainly it is now a matter of churning out more windmills and placing them in the terrain. This goes on every day. It is still a small fraction of our energy needs that are met this way, but it is growing steadily.

Solar power, meanwhile, is still in its infancy. Photovoltaic cells are, like most electronics, becoming increasingly smaller and more efficient. Each year they are a little better than last year. Meanwhile there are various forms of solar thermo being put in practical use. These use cheap metal mirrors to focus the sunshine on a container of liquid, heating it and producing steam like you would in a coal factory. Except that the sun is expected to not run out for another 5 billion years or so. By melting salt and using this to heat the water, solar plants can continue operating through the night, as the melted salt can be stored underground and lose very little heat until used. These technologies are slightly more expensive than coal, so currently tend to depend on government subsidies (or taxes on carbon). If however the recession ends, the price of coal will go up again. The price of sunshine will not.

This is the point: We have non-carbon technologies that either are competitive today or will be so whenever the recession ends. Even if it never ends, the easy reserves of fossil fuel will, and in a few years. Meanwhile competing technologies are becoming cheaper.

Even if we WANTED to heat the planet with carbon, we can’t afford to. It is that simple. Renewable energies will price carbon out of the market in 10-20 years. Mankind is suspended between the furnace of the sun and the furnace of Earth’s molten core, each of which could supply us with clean energy for billions of years if we manage to not kill each other in the meantime.