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- An excellent article over on Resource Insights Blog. Kurt Cobb writes some good stuff and I’ve had his Blog listed in my Blogroll for some time.

- The point he’s making here is one I’ve thought about for years. Though I would have said before that we might rise and crash two or three times in succession until we figured out how to either establish a steady-state relationship with the biosphere or until the resources were too depleted to support another rise.

- After reading his piece, I think I’m in the “we have just one change to get this right” camp now.

- This sort of thinking has been around for awhile. Here’s a quote from Sir Fred Hoyle in Of Men and Galaxies, 1964:

It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only.

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By Kurt Cobb

Could we start industrial society from scratch today? The answer is probably not. While such a question seems merely hypothetical, its answer has important implications regarding the prospects for a sustainable industrial future.

The reason it would be so difficult to start an industrial society from scratch today is that most of the natural resources associated with advanced societies have been drawn down to a point where it would be difficult to extract what’s left without an up-and-running industrial system. It is worth quoting at length Harrison Brown, author of “The Challenge of Man’s Future,” writing on this point in 1954:

Our ancestors had available large resources of high-grade ores and fuels that could be processed by the most primitive technology–crystals of copper and pieces of coal that lay on the surface of the earth, easily mined iron, and petroleum in generous pools reached by shallow drilling. Now we must dig huge caverns and follow seams ever further underground, drill oil wells thousands of feet deep, many of them under the bed of the ocean, and find ways of extracting the leanest ores–procedures that are possible only because of our highly complex modern techniques, and practical only to an intricately mechanized culture which could not have been developed without the high-grade resources that are so rapidly vanishing.

As our dependence shifts to such resources as low-grade ores, rock, seawater, and the sun, the conversion of energy into useful work will require ever more intricate technical activity, which would be impossible in the absence of a variety of complex machines and their products–all of which are the result of our intricate industrial civilization, and which would be impossible without it. Thus, if a machine civilization were to stop functioning as the result of some catastrophe, it is difficult to see how man would again be able to start along the path of industrialization with the resources that would then be available to him.

What Brown is really describing is a lack of resilience in modern industrial civilization. It lacks the redundancy built into agrarian cultures because the whole system has become so specialized and interdependent. For example, rare earth minerals are critical to the functioning of modern electronics, in the making of strong magnets useful in such things as hybrid cars and as catalysts in chemical processing. Some 90 percent of these elements currently come from China. Any cutoff could prove difficult for the rest of the world. There are other known deposits of rare earth elements, but it would take time to develop them and start up production.

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An internal report put together by the World Bank and leaked to the Guardian claims that biofuels may be responsible for up to 75 percent of recent rises in food prices. Even environmental groups haven’t gone that far in their estimates.

With soaring food prices high on the agenda for next week’s G-8 Summit in Japan, World Bank President Robert Zoellick has been clear that action needs to be taken. “What we are witnessing is not a natural disaster — a silent tsunami or a perfect storm,” he wrote in a Tuesday letter to major Western leaders. “It is a man-made catastrophe, and as such must be fixed by people.”

According to a confidential World Bank report leaked to the Guardian on Thursday, Zoellick’s organization may have a pretty good idea what that fix might look like: stop producing biofuels.

The report claims that biofuels have driven up global food prices by 75 percent, according to the Guardian report, accounting for more than half of the 140 percent jump in price since 2002 of the food examined by the study. The paper claims that the report, completed in April, was not made public in order to avoid embarrassing US President George W. Bush.

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R.,

A few more thoughts along the same lines I talked about previously.

All of humanity’s history has been a series of incremental advances along multiple paths; business, social organization, military, agriculture, technological, etc. In all of this, the thought has primarily been to advance, empower and grow.

Now, for the first time in humanity’s history, we have filled the planet and have begun to hit various unyielding limits; water, food, oil, pollution, as well as limits having to do with how much impact we can have on the biosphere without causing huge shifts in the demographics of various species and even causing their extinctions.

It is clear, if humanity wants to continue to live indefinitely on this planet, that we are going to have to shift from a growth and advance strategy in all we do to one predicated on establishing a steady-state and sustainable balance with the biosphere around us.

We cannot use renewable resources faster than they can regenerate. We cannot occupy more of the planet’s surface than is consistent with allowing the rest of the planet’s biology to exist and flourish. These both imply that our population has to come down to some sustainable number and be held there. We have to come up with ways to govern ourselves that are consistent with establishing and maintaining these essential balances. Nation against nation, system against system is not compatible with long term survival. The ultimate goal and purpose of government in an enlightened world should be to secure all of our futures (we and all the rest of the planet’s biology) and maintain the balance.

We could, if we cut our population to sustainable levels and learned to live within a sustainable footprint on this planet, exist here for tens of thousands of years and maintain a decent quality of life for all those who are alive at any specific point in time. We do not have to give up comfort or technology - we just have to dial our impact on the planet back to sustainable levels and stay with in those levels.

Anything that the Gates Foundation or any other forward looking organization works on that does not include long term goals like these is likely in the big picture to just be a shuffling of our problems from one place to the other rather than a real indefinite-term planet-wide solution to how our species is going to solve the problem of learning to live here without fouling our nest for ourselves and all the other species that depend on this planet’s biosphere.

- Here’s my take on what’s going on in the Middle East at the moment. Like so much going on around us now, it is in almost everyone’s best interests to keep things stable. But, on the other hand, entire forests can be lost to just one careless match.

- I correspond a lot with friends off on the side from this Blog. The following is my half of a recent exchange with a friend of mine who lives in Europe.

- All food for thought in a changing world.

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M.,

I share your concerns about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. And I agree that Turkey, Pakistan and Iran are certainly centers of deep concern.

I saw a lot of news a week or so ago on the topic of whether or not Israel might ‘whack’ Iran. And those, plus your E-mails alerting me to your concerns, certainly got my attention.

On the other side, I also saw an article that looked at the probable consequences if the U.S. or Israel attacked Iran, and it concluded that these consequences were so bad, that an attack would be unlikely.

Of course, this latter article had no answer for the longer term conundrum of if Iran is not taken down now, she will have nuclear capabilities later and that will be the worst of all possible outcomes for Israel.

In talking against the likelihood of an attack, the article pointed out that attacking Iran would result in them shutting the Straits of Hormuz and that, in turn, would cut the world’s oil supplies by almost half and the economic chaos would be colossal.

Then there was the likelihood of Iran lofting missiles into the main producing Saudi oil fields, into Israeli cities and into the large US bases in Iraq where U.S. troops are known to be highly concentrated.

And, in the end, the efforts to eradicate Iran’s nuclear facilities might very well fail due to their intentional wide distributions, hiding and hardening.

And, finally, one possibility that none of the articles mentioned but which I think is highly likely: To date, so far as we know, rogue governments with enriched nuclear materials haven’t released such materials into the hands of the suicidal Islamic Jihadists. Such governments would probably prefer not to send such loose canons into the world where their control, thereafter, of how things unfolded would not be under their control.

But, if Iran is attacked, their nuclear ambitions thwarted and much of their nation damaged, just think how easily they could play that card to hurt the west. Think what just one dirty bomb loosed in Washington, D.C. or Manhattan might do to the U.S.

All of this is extremely ugly and I believe that the major players can all see the likely outcomes and all are holding back from acting because one event could trigger huge consequences for everyone. The only ones who want to act immediately are the Jihadists who are eager to pass into paradise. But, the Israelis are also thinking very hard about where their best options lie. And for them, indefinitely inaction could be fatal.

It looks like a fatal embrace to me.

It’s no secret that Big Pharma has been providing doctors with special perks in return for prescribing their products. This has been going on for ages. But to get a better grip on why the costs of healthcare have been increasing dramatically we need to understand about the massive networks that Big Pharma is involved in. Believe it or not, Big Pharma is connected to everything. The AMA, the FDA, the financial markets/big business, the insurance industry, law and politics; these are all affected by Big Pharma.

Recently it was reported that there are more Americans addicted to prescription drugs than illegal drugs. An article in The New York Times stated that “An analysis of autopsies in 2007 released this week by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission found that the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined.” That’s a pretty hefty number. I know quite a few people who became addicted to prescription drugs. Some said tranquilizers and painkillers were harder to quit than illegal drugs. Prescription pain killers have become the “new heroin”, and are increasingly becoming a major problem in the school system.

Not only are the doctors getting “perks” from the drug companies, but the professors and the research facilities of major universities have been the recipient of “special benefits” as well. Recently “three influential psychiatrists from Harvard Medical School seem to have been caught with their hands in the drug-laced cookie jar, and now they’re in big trouble. Two days after it was alleged that the three doctors failed to report a collective $4.2 million in payments from pharmaceutical companies, Harvard and the affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital have launched an investigation into the doctors’ behavior.” Big Pharma = Big Money.

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- research thanks to: Bruce S.

By Bob Herbert

Thursday was the 21st anniversary of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

It was also the same day that two Bush administration lawyers appeared before a House subcommittee to answer questions about their roles in providing the legal framework for harsh interrogation techniques that inevitably rose to the level of torture and shamed the U.S. before the rest of the world.

The lawyers, both former Justice Department officials, were David Addington, who is now Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and John Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. There is no danger of either being enshrined as heroes in the history books of the future.

For most Americans, torture is something remote, abstract, reprehensible, but in the eyes of some, perhaps necessary — when the bomb is ticking, for example, or when interrogators are trying to get information from terrorists willing to kill Americans in huge numbers.

Reality offers something much different. We saw the hideous photos from Abu Ghraib. And now the Nobel Prize-winning organization Physicians for Human Rights has released a report, called “Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” that puts an appropriately horrifying face on a practice that is so fundamentally evil that it cannot co-exist with the idea of a just and humane society.

The report profiles 11 detainees who were tortured while in U.S. custody and then released — their lives ruined — without ever having been charged with a crime or told why they were detained. All of the prisoners were men, and all were badly beaten. One was sodomized with a broomstick, the report said, and forced by his interrogators to howl like a dog while a soldier urinated on him.

He fainted, the report said, “after a soldier stepped on his genitals.”

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- This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, a friend of mine suggests the website bugmenot.com as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.

The replacement of traditional fuels with biofuels has dragged more than 30 million people worldwide into poverty, an aid agency report says.

Oxfam says so-called green policies in developed countries are contributing to the world’s soaring food prices, which hit the poor hardest.

The group also says biofuels will do nothing to combat climate change.

Its report urges the EU to scrap a target of making 10% of all transport run on renewable resources by 2020.

Oxfam estimates the EU’s target could multiply carbon emissions 70-fold by 2020 by changing the use of land.

The report’s author, Oxfam’s biofuel policy adviser Rob Bailey, criticised rich countries for using subsidies and tax breaks to encourage the use of food crops for alternative sources of energy like ethanol.

“If the fuel value for a crop exceeds its food value, then it will be used for fuel instead,” he said.

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JALANDHAR, India — With the right technology and policies, India could help feed the world. Instead, it can barely feed itself.

India’s supply of arable land is second only to that of the United States, its economy is one of the fastest growing in the world, and its industrial innovation is legendary. But when it comes to agriculture, its output lags far behind potential. For some staples, India must turn to already stretched international markets, exacerbating a global food crisis.

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- Research thanks to Rolf A. 

- This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, a friend of mine suggests the website bugmenot.com as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.

This worrisome research article has appeared in a peer reviewed journal. It’s not telling us anything that we didn’t already know, but it does catalogue the situation and help us steer clear of the hyperbole.

Environmental scepticism denies the seriousness of environmental problems, and self-professed ’sceptics’ claim to be unbiased analysts combating ‘junk science’. This study quantitatively analyses 141 English-language environmentally sceptical books published between 1972 and 2005. We find that over 92 per cent of these books, most published in the US since 1992, are linked to conservative think tanks (CTTs). Further, we analyse CTTs involved with environmental issues and find that 90 per cent of them espouse environmental scepticism. We conclude that scepticism is a tactic of an elite-driven counter-movement designed to combat environmentalism, and that the successful use of this tactic has contributed to the weakening of US commitment to environmental protection.

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- One of the news sources I read daily is the Daily Brief from the Council on Foreign Relations. They put together an excellent summary of the significant foreign events of the day and, for the most part, I recommend them.

- However, today, the Daily Brief had a collection of stories about Iraq and Oil that I found to be a bit surreal. Most of us who understand the implications of Peak Oil, understand that one of the major reasons why the U.S. is in Iraq is to secure oil for its future. Modern industrialized nations absolutely depend on adequate supplies of oil - if they want to continue to be modern industrialized nations.

- There were several things that struck me as disingenuous. One was the following statement about the decision making of the Iraqi government as it considers letting foreign oil companies into the country again:

“Offers by the Western companies-Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, BP, Chevron, and a handful of smaller firms-reportedly prevailed over bids from companies in Russia, China, and India, and a new deal is expected to be announced on June 30.”

- Did anyone seriously expect that the U.S. would allow Russia, China or India to gain effective control over the vast supplies of Iraqi oil in today’s world? Does anyone really imagine that the U.S. is really leaving such decisions to the current Iraqi government?

- As a further irony, here in the U.S., the Bush administration and McCain are both flooding the media with calls to resume oil exploration/drilling (read ANWR). This, in spite of the fact that it is widely agreed that it will take years for any oil produced from such drilling to hit the market and that when it does, it will only make a very small contribution to solving a very large deficit.

- So, what do I think is going on?

- Well, the stories about the decision making regarding which companies are going to get to process the Iraqi oil are simple PR. In a world where many of the players (read nations) are essentially democratic, such PR is effective because democracy’s weakest point is that its decisions are largely made by those in the middle of the norm curve. And those folks rarely analyze things in more than a cursory manner. So PR spun to them is effective in blunting the responses of those nations by confusing their voters who are the ones who ultimately motivate their political decision makers.

- As for the current push to resume oil exploration in the U.S., I think it is driven by the fact that oil companies here in the U.S., which have an inordinate affect on the decision making processes in the U.S. government and the mostly business driven Republican Party, see significant profits in the exploration itself. The fact that after the work is done and we’ve trashed ANWR and built a huge amount of oil infrastructure, we won’t have much to show for it in terms of oil delivered to the market is irrelevant. Between now and then, the companies involved will show many profitable quarters as the work is done and that’s the bottom line in such decisions.

- I was, and am, a bit disappointed that the Council of Foreign Relations chooses to report these things without a deeper analysis of why the decisions are being made but then I suppose they see their mandate as simply describing the important decisions as the public largely perceives them rather than rendering a deeper analysis of why they are being made. In this, I think they either underestimate their audience or they’ve become a mouthpiece for those who create the spin to obscure the substance.