peak oil
The Transition Handbook
August 27, 2008 - 04:45 — bhugaThis wasn't really what I expected. Rather than being a ton of lessons of what you, personally, can do for you, it's a game plan for organizing a small community into a resilient one. It's much less about actual resilience technologies than it is about community organization.
That's not so bad, and truth be told, he does a pretty bang-up job at the community part. He does spend a bit of time quoting the doom and gloomers, but its the tiniest bit, and he then charges in and gets his hands dirty. It's all here, from how to get a community to allocate land to local gardens to goofy little trust-building exercises at town hall meetings. Even if the book isn't something I was looking for, I have to commend Hopkins on providing a lot of real-world advice.
It's not all spot-on, of course. He creates a local currency in the town he uses as his example throughout the book, and what he writes about that currency makes any economist cringe. But as the book is really less about the details of what you do and more about how you get it done, this comes off as an unimportant tangent.
It's Hopkin's worries about peak oil that cause him to focus on local resilience, which is the opposite of keeping your options open. Oil is one of many potential catastrophes in the next 25 years, and I would put my efforts not into making a local community resilient against oil loss but in keeping flexible. It's a bit like our misguided anti-terrorism policies: focusing on one attack, we forget to make our responses flexible. But just a bit--a resilient community as Hopkins attempts to create is flexible against any number of non-catastrophic shocks: financial, energy, transportation, and the like. It really does represent a step forward. And he does not encourage gun-nut turtling, as many of the gloom and doomers do: his communities communicate with each other and the outside world, its just that the basic goods of day to day life don't need to.
It's not a bad book, but not for me and not for anyone I know, really.
Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil
August 17, 2008 - 13:44 — bhugaHighly recommended.
This is a sort of well-referenced diary of a journalist traveling to most of Africa's oil-producing countries. He interviews everyone involved, from oil execs to the maimed soldiers of wars fought over it, and keeps a very balanced view, while making sure to put out all of the numbers as he goes. Much more interesting than the numbers themselves, but not discounting the overarching statistics for the sake of a few friendly faces he meets, the whole thing comes off as an exceedingly well done overview of oil in Africa.
It seems almost impossible for a journalist or writer these days to write about anyone that's poor without blaming the rest of the world, and Ghazvinian avoids all of that. When he's done, you can certainly sympathize with Nigerian oil thieves, and you see that such a line of work, even counting the risk of criminal prosecution, is the most rational way not just to get ahead, but survive at all. But they are not freedom fighters fighting against the man, and the man is not there specifically to exploit them. He doesn't go off on a single anti-globalization bender, and even takes the time to note that such an argument is not really relevant to the question of what to do with oil money. If only there were more people writing like this; I could be interested in politics again.
I learned an awful lot from this: how no country but Norway has really turned oil wealth into a boon, why that happens, and why it seems unpreventable. Just how little influence China really has in Africa, but why that might explode. How much Africa really has (about as much as Saudi Arabia), and why its so much more expensive (corrupt governments, wars, nationalizations).
Of note is that this book mentioned some of the programs I work for. They were not presented in a particularly glowing halo. I didn't realize all of the countries we're suddenly concerned about suppressing terrorism in are now small-scale oil producers.
On the whole, it made me want to visit some places in Africa. There's a lot of freedom left there, from a certain point of view. Little chocolate plantations on little ex-Portuguese colonies, where their owners live out their lives doing more or less what they want, as long as they don't piss anyone off by hurting someone. Not a bad gig...maybe I should consider working a year in Ghana or São Tomé.
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.
