energy
Brave New War
August 26, 2008 - 05:09 — bhugaFantastic!
Robb elegantly puts together a summary of the concepts of 4th-generation warfare and how to deal with it. It's easy to read, not longer than it needs to be, and has lots of nifty anecdotes to follow the numbers. The style is good.
The gist of the book is that the nation-state is on the way out. Centralized governments and services are simply too complicated for terrorists not to find a weak spot to attack. He's got example after example after example of this in Iraq, as insurgents cause a half-billion dollars worth of damage for about two large and other such shenanigans.
The last third of the book are actual suggestions on what we need to do--something the other disaster-hawkers have precious little of. He talks about turning our infrastructure components into platforms, decentralizing security and disaster response, and doing away with large swaths of government.
This book was unnecessarily cheerful for me--for all the drab future it portends, the light on the other end of the tunnel--governments less involved in our lives--is an important one to me. Maybe the thousands of unaffiliated terrorist groups, together, will force us into a more productive societal mode after a few states collapse under the weight of their knee-jerk police states. We'll have to see.
I also had one very grim thought reading this. A big part of 4GW and the treatise of this book is superempowerment: individuals have much, much, much more power than they ever did before. Robb, who evidently has a good deal of experience as a military analyst, remarks on this trend, and notes that it is true for both sides. That's not a traditional military viewpoint, not by a long shot. The question, and the thought I had: is individual or employment-based conscription something we'll see on the nation-state's way out? China recently told airplane pilots that they'd be liable for a year in jail if they quit their jobs to get better deals elsewhere. The US military already kind-of practices this with 'stop loss'--the most valuable profession they could draft right now are people with military experience. On the other hand, the increased use of private military forces and contractors says that the need/acceptability for actual conscription should remain low.
Robb talks a lot about how public relations is a serious part of winning wars--particularly on the home front. He's taken a step back from the whole thing and spends a lot of time talking about how we are at much greater risk of financial apocalypse from over-spending in an attempt to contain terrorism than from terrorism. One of the things involved with that is public opinion, and its strange--although 100% correct--to see someone write about it so plainly thus.
The Long Emergency
August 15, 2008 - 03:27 — bhugaWhat drivel!
This one is just awful. The book is less a useful collection of information than a poorly-disguised rant about the author's personal dislike for big box stores, shopping malls, and in particular, suburbs. It's got all of the usual complaints I've come to expect from the anti-globalization crowd: wastefulness, ignorance, mass cultural disease. All at the hands of evil, autonomous corporations. All at the hands of insensitive American consumers. It's your fault!
The author's sole claim to fame appears to be a collection of writings bemoaning modern life. Here's a gem from the 'eyesore' page' of his site (the page is static html and appears to be updated monthly so that link won't be accurate forever; this entry is labeled 'August 2008'):
The [tatooing] activity taking place [in this shop], however, is a symptom of the growing barbarism in American life. Tattooing has traditionally been a marginal activity among civilized people, the calling card of cannibals, sailors, and whores. The appropriate place for it is on the margins, in the back alleys, the skid rows. The mainstreaming of tattoos (on main street) is a harbinger of social dysfunction.
If you want to say that, at least just say it. I'll disagree with you and move on. This book, though, is worth stopping to mock. It's a collection of pseudo-scientific claims proving the inevitability of the forthcoming disassembling of modern civilization, which the author is clearly looking forward to. The books subtitle is 'Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century'. The book is 300 pages. Of those, 70 are devoted to 'Living in the Long Emergency'. 40 more are devoted to a chapter on disease, water shortages, habitat destruction, and sundry other maladies. The rest are peak oil, done badly. He never really comes up with survival tips.
Huge portions of the book aren't really saying anything at all. They are just long, rambling descriptions of history with a tone that reaches condescending whenever our hapless forbears make another short-sighted decision to move away from focusing their lives anything 15 feet past their farm doors (that they built themselves, of course). I almost put this book down in about 5 different places; as it is, I skipped large parts of it; my time is better spent elsewhere. When I saw him paraphrase other authors I've read, and do it such that he completely missed their main points, I about lost it.
The author's personal plan for surviving the forthcoming apocalypse is to live in his upstate new york small town, with his woodworking tools and his buckshot, and to start a local newspaper. Life in the future without oil will be intensely local, you see, and he wants to be ready to cultivate that.
Of course he does. In fact, every one of his 'the sky is falling' dangers is accompanied by a prediction with a curious silver lining about community. Oil too expensive to ship clothes from China to Atlanta? Not to worry--the local textile industries will thrive again, even though they were already driven out of existence based on their own inefficiencies. We'll all become farmers again, teaching us the lay of the land. Kunstler takes time to worry that we've lost our cultural knowledge for how to manage farm animals. Well, I can't handle a horse, but I can read a book, and I'm sure someone has bothered to write it down. I'm sure I'm not well practiced, but it's not like these ancient arts simply disappear. In fact, when knowledge does disappear, it becomes a devil in the mind of people who can't stand the idea: a lot of people spent a lot of time recreating Damascus steel after it was lost, and we still haven't figured out how they made chainmail (unless they did it the hard way). These are definite exceptions, not rules.
Kunstler, for one, welcomes our new peasant communities. Have fun with that; I'll be in Switzerland, reading any book but this one.
Beyond Oil
August 15, 2008 - 03:07 — bhugaPeak oil from a point of view that is not Chicken Little's. In fact, from a very respectable point of view; the author's resumé is extensive. The entire book is from a geologist's perspective, and has scientific slant; almost nothing is assumed.
The book was a balanced view of peak oil, and in particular, examining the currently available alternatives. It's very well done: balanced, exceedingly well researched and cited, and accessible without being patronizing. The guy really knows his stuff. He knows just what it would take to make several different energy sources profitable, and mentions that they are billion dollar ideas if you want to try. He lists further reading.
He doesn't even have the religious 'peak oil is fact' thing. He shows how the American peak was predicted, how the math behind it works, and is very clear about the assumption one has to make for the formulas to hold. It's an easy axiom to adopt, and several resource peaks have shown it works.
He's also good about not mentioning his personal views on the topic. He only takes a tiny minute of your time for 3 or 5 pages at the end to mention how he feels about the whole thing. Decisions are yours to make: just the facts, ma'am. Fantastic.
This is easily the book I will give people on peak oil. I think there's a chance the apocalyptic crowd will be proven right, but I think it's vanishingly small. For all of the reasonable people, this one is the way to go.
