"C" stands for consciousness

125: Apocalypse, Not!



KMO welcomes Toby Hemenway to the program to talk about the virtues of rural and urban living. Does living in the boonies do Gaia any favors, or are rural homesteads basically just suburban McMansions with bigger yards and longer commutes? Listener email, music from Andy Warren, and a preview of a talk given by Fred Alan Wolf at the Coalessence Festival.

Links tomorrow.

This morning I recorded interviews for the next two and a half episodes of the C-Realm Podcast. I spoke first with James H. Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. After that, I recorded a conversation with Dmitry Orlov. He also gave a reading from his upcoming book, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. After that I set up a Skype Conference call that gathered me, Dmitry and Albert K. Bates, author of The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times, into one imaginal room in the C-Realm.

Every time I use Skype to record an interview, I roll the dice. That's to be expected in the world of the shoe-string podcasting. With this roll of the dice we had me on Skype using my laptop and decrepit Plantronics headset on public wifi at the Bentonville Public Library, Dmitry on his cell phone from his boat, and Albert on the land line at the Eco-Villiage Training Center bookstore.

We ended up with a situation in which Dmitry and Albert could hear one another, and I could hear each of them, but they could barely make out what I was saying. I managed to get the first question out. They didn't catch it all, but they caught enough of it to set off in the general direction in which I had pointed. After one more communication from me in which I told both men that I planned to hang back and that they should carry on without an intermediary whatever thread connected me to the evolution of that conversation broke. Thereafter Dmitry and Albert could hear each other, but they couldn't hear me, and they carried on for 45 minutes.

I tried to exert some influence by sending text messages to Albert on his cell phone. He didn't seem to get them, so I just kicked back and played fly on the wall until it got close to the 50 minute mark, which has proved to be the critical file size beyond which I go only at the risk of loosing the entire recording. (That's happened.) I called Albert on his cell phone at that point and asked him to wrap things up. He tried to ask Dmitry one last question, but at that point the audio had degraded further and Dmitry couldn't make out Albert's question. I killed the Skype conference call and called each of them on my cell to explain what had happened.

When I got back home, I found that Albert had sent me a link to a dispatch from the Earth Policy Institute which consisted of an excerpt from a book by Lester R. Brown called Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition.
It a nutshell, it reminds us that in times of war the United States has staged massive reorientations and re-tooling of the economy in ways that would strike the contemporary observer as too radical to contemplate in our present circumstances. For example, Lester R. Brown reminds the reader:

We must move at wartime speed, restructuring the world energy economy at a pace reminiscent of the restructuring of the U.S. industrial economy in 1942 following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The shift from producing cars to planes, tanks, and guns was accomplished within a matter of months. One of the keys to this extraordinarily rapid restructuring was a ban on the sale of cars, a ban that lasted nearly three years.

Brown goes on to list real world examples of people doing things that if adopted on a larger scale would do much to moderate the impact of climate change. It'll be a tough slog, but if we all pull together as a team (or "like an economic/industrial giant preparing to go to war") we can get the job done. The Doomer in me rolls his eyes at that last part.

In his most recent post to his blog, Albert wrote:

There is an on-going theme in the Peak Oil and Climate Change communities — the difference of opinion between the doomers and the fixers. Increasingly, as the fixers realize the full scope of the challenge and watch in disbelief how little is being done, they eventually gravitate more towards the doomer position.

Hard-core doomers think in terms of die-off, and see the process as a violent struggle that will envelop the world in brutality. James Lovelock, for the climate doomers, believes humanity will devolve to a few struggling tribes in the very high latitudes. Matt Savinar, heir apparent to Mike Ruppert on the Peak Oil doomer side, sees wilderness bunkers stocked with food, water and ammo.

Soft-landers, such as myself, have a tough sell.

I then checked in at the C-Realm Forum over on theGrowReport.com and found a new thread started by a forum participant who goes by the internet handle Psygnisfive. It starts out like this:

My first comment is that global warming is in no way an indicator of overpopulation. There's no causal link between overpopulation and global warming, since global warming is caused solely by greenhouse gas output which is a combination of any number of things, only one of which is population. It's just as much caused by the efficiency of our energy production methods or the inability to filter greenhouse gasses from the gaseous byproducts of energy production. To say that we clearly are overpopulating the planet because we have global warming is in error.

Psygnisfive then goes on to prescribe a plan of action that involves clustering humans into mega-cities and feeding ourselves by means of skyscraper-sized greenhouses that run continously on nuclear reactors and provide micro-climate-control. Psygnisfive did not use the word "archology" in his post, but I took him to be invoking the concept. He concludes by asserting that the path he has laid out is the only possibility for achieving sustainability.

You can read his entire post here:

http://www.thegrowreport.com/Forums/showthread.php?p=11786#post11786

Psygnisfive's vision runs directly counter to a point of view articulated on the C-Realm Podcast by such guests as Bill McKibben, Albert Bartlett, Nate Hagens, Dmitry Orlov, James H. Kunstler, and Albert K. Bates. So, I forwarded Psygnisfive's missive to each of them and invited them to write something in reply.

Dmitry Orlov was the first to respond. Dmitry wrote:

Ugh!

First of all, I don't want to live in this listener's world. I would
rather die, and I am sure that many others would want to join me
rather than him. I've had a good life so far, so why mess it up? I
generally prefer animals to humans, and wild animals to tame ones. The
nice thing about animals is that they are exceedingly unlikely to
build breeder reactors, giant space mirrors, vertical farms, and other
industrial abominations. They are safe: even when they overpopulate,
they don't start playing dirty tricks on other life-forms, stacking
them in boxes, for instance. I think that there is a certain amount of
value to each species and breed: diversity is very valuable.
Monoculture, such as you have on an industrial farm, or a large human
population, is not so valuable. Doubling the human population does not
increase its value to the ecosystem as a whole, so the whole
undertaking of supporting an ever-increasing human population is of
dubious merit from the view of the ecosystem of which it is part.

Secondly, I would suggest that he and his breeder reactors and
vertical farms build down rather than up, constructing a vast,
underground techno-hell in mine shafts and underground caverns. If he
is serious about preventing environmental discharge of greenhouse
gases and other industrial pollutants, he will build a closed-cycle
system that doesn't even have any vents, so I won't even have to be
aware of his existence.

Thirdly, I would suggest that the billions of people he would be
"saving" in his techno-hell could be packed far more efficiently if
they are kept in a coma most of the time, to be awakened periodically
for cleaning and feeding. Perhaps they could be kept in boxes like
they have in morgues, or the coffin-like compartments in those crazy
Japanese "hotels," or stacked in folding cots like they have on
Russian "platskart" trains. He and other techno-lovers like him seem
to like boxes anyway, choosing to spend most of their lives inside
"cubes" and other box-like contraptions.

Lastly, I am a big believer in technogenic catastrophes like
Chernobyl, and so to me it seems inevitable that his underground
breeder reactors and vertical farms, (which I imagine will resemble
George Lucas's movie THX 1138), will at some point undergo a
catastrophic meltdown. This is where putting his infrastructure deep
underground will really pay off: it will all just melt into the
earth's magma and not pollute the biosphere. Better yet, those of us
who choose to live above-ground and roam free with other animals will
be blissfully unaware of their demise, experience no remorse, and go
on with our lives, albeit in limited numbers, drawing our unlimited
inspiration and limited sustenance from wild nature.

Later, Albert K. Bates provided the following:

A C-Realm Listener (whom I have almost no respect for) writes:

> That aside, the issue of sustainability is very real, and the comments
> that we're using more resources than the planet can reliably provide
> for a long period of time is very true. I'll address three specific
> issues, the first is power, the second is food, and the third,
> somewhat related to the second, is land.

I would say that since fossil fuels are on the way out, both of the others are integrally tied to land.

> The rest of the world has to
> deal with less-than-ideal conditions, and as such these resources
> simply won't cut it for the planet as a whole.

The limiting factor may not be site abundance but natural resources for components. Most sites have _some_ renewable resource in adequate quantity, if only deep geothermal or the cold of space at night. Then it depends on what you want to do with that.

Vince Matthews, Director of the Colorado Geological Survey, gave a talk at the ASPO Meeting in Houston in which he showed slides of dramatic resource price increases, signaling a growing gap between supply and demand. For instance, since 2003, zinc is up 497%, lead 705%, tin 198%, nickle 650%. What do you need to make windmills? Aluminum, up 144%, Titanium, up 600%, Chromium 286%. How about solar cells (and computer chips)? Cadmium up 341%, Tellurium up 636%, Copper 454%, Indium 1079%, Germanium 259%, Selenium 1620%, Vanadium 2060%. You can come to the same conclusions for hydrogen fuel cells, lithium hydrate batteries for plug-in hybrids, or most of the other technofixes currently being spouted by both Republicans and Democrats on the campaign trail. Those materials are all getting scarce, and that is not a function of lack of will or lack of money. It is a function of exponential population growth on a finite world.

Of course the same constraints apply in spades to nuclear or other proposed non-renewables. Fission reactors, assuming the 441 now operating could be secured from terrorist attacks, will exhaust the world's known and projected uranium reserves in 2040. If the present 32 reactors under construction are completed, nuclear utilities will begin experiencing fuel shortages by 2015. Technophiles speak blithely of fusion reactors, ignoring the simple truth that it takes 30 years under optimal running conditions for a fission reactor to produce 20 kg of tritium, the fuel for a fusion reactor. A commercial scale fusion reactor (1 GWe), if one could even be built (50 years in the future), would "burn" through 20 kg in 19 weeks.

>
> The real three renewable energy resources we do or could have are
> these, in order of attainability: 1) Nuclear breeder reactors that
> generate their own fuel from their radioactive by products (France
> produces something like 80% of its energy from this process) and can
> last the Earth 20,000 years or so,

Actually, according to Michael Dittmar of ETH Zurich, CERN, France's 20-year dalliance with commercial breeders like the Super-Phenix proved precisely the opposite, that you can use fission reactors to either produce electricity or to breed plutonium, but they cannot do both. Moreover, the Super-Phenix was an environmental disaster and any serious examination of the MOX (mixed oxide) fuel cycle will find that it is extremely dirty on the one hand and extremely dangerous from a proliferation and sabotage standpoint on the other. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission published a study of the MOX fuel cycle that concluded it entailed at least double the commitment of cancers and genetic effects in the general population compared to the once-through fuel cycle. And they estimated the once-through cycle currently produces about 1.7 million cancers and birth defects worldwide, assuming it operates without accidents and waste disposal is solved. That study, in combination with discoveries about nuclear toxicity, put a serious damper on the plutonium economy, which was all the rage in the 1960s.

> 2) Space-based solar power which
> can generate more energy per square meter than ground-based solar
> power and can do so 24 hours a day,

And the mechanism for beaming or bringing that power back to Earth is....?

> and 3) Helium-3 fusion which can
> use the atmospheres of the gas giants to produce enough clean
> radiation-free fusion power to satisfy a billion earths for billions
> of years.

And the mechanism for beaming or bringing that power back to Earth is....?

> These are the only three options that have any viability in
> the long run and don't involve massive depopulation of the planet.
> Indeed, they allow the continued growth of the planetary population
> without any issues regarding power generation.

If that were true we would indeed be screwed.

>
> Now, food. It takes a specific amount of space to produce food for a
> specific number of people. Our methods of growing food are inefficient

That is a point Dmitry made in his book. Small farmers are much more efficient than agribusiness.

> and if you're a vegetarian/vegan, are sometimes abhorrent to your
> ethics (nevermind that countless species, both plant and animal, would
> go extinct were it not for humans raising them as food).

That statement is unsupportable. You actually can count the species humans use for food. What you cannot count are the species that have gone extinct because their habitats have been destroyed in order to produce domesticated animals (including pets, by the way).

> At some
> point, perhaps already, the number of people will exceed the maximum
> number supportable by the land. To solve this problem, perhaps to
> entirely prevent it, there are two solutions. The first is vertical
> farming, which is essentially farming indoors in skyscrapers.

Sigh.
> Not only can you run it 24 hours a day because you control the
> light but you can also micro-control the environment so that nothing
> gets wasted and no insects or anything get in to kill your crops.

Or pollinate them. Or enliven the soil.

> Overall the plan is clear. Since we're not going to reduce energy
> consumption, and since population isn't going to vanish (nevermind the
> possibility of coming medical revolutions that will radically extend
> human life thus making the death rate drop and the growth rate
> skyrocket), we need to figure out how to properly grow while becoming
> sustainable. It's possible and we can do it, but it's not your typical
> plan for sustainability, but it's the right plan, and it's the only
> plan we can use.

We have choices. Like many people, I have been reading science fiction stories since I was about 8 years old. The picture that you paint is not a pretty one. To me it is very dystopian, more Blade Runner than Ecotopia. It is not one I would choose to bequeath to my grandchildren.

What we are about to experience is not a resource crisis so much as a lifestyle crisis. All our lives we have learned how to prosper amidst increasing abundance. We now face a new paradigm - how to survive, and even thrive, amidst energy descent.

The good news is, it is all about lifestyle, and lifestyle is easy to change. What lies on the other side of this crisis is potentially a much better world, in my opinion. We may have less stuff, but we should have a better time.

Recently Colin Campbell and Graham Strouts published a book entitled Living Through the Energy Crisis that provided twelve essential steps to create a low-energy, sustainable lifestyle. They are:

1. Raise awareness and develop a community response
2. Find some allies by forming re-localization groups
3. Approach community leaders and provide them ideas
4. Develop a powerdown charter, integrating an overview of all present and future resource flows
5. Develop energy literacy
6. Perform home energy audits, count your light-bulbs and put yourself on an energy diet
7. Get out of debt and move your assets from financial (paper) to physical and community resources
8. Make a personal resource inventory; where do you get your food, energy, medical care, skills, and money?
9. Switch to renewables, and simple, low-tech devices that are easily repaired
10. Support local food producers and start a home garden
11. Live more locally, travel less
12. Join the Transition Towns movement
The more prepared we are, and the sooner we start, the easier this process will be.

To which I should add that I seem to have been off the mark when I described Psygnisfive as a C-Realm Podcast listener. It turns out he isn't familiar with running themes of the program, and based on the following snippet from a subsequent post to the thread Psynisfive started on the C-Realm forum on the Grow Report website, I'm guessing he won't be listening to many future episodes of the podcast:

I've lost what little respect I had for you and for the podcast now that it's clear that you entertain such insane ideas as tho they were completely reasonable. Orlov, you, and others of similar mindset threaten the very existence of human civilization and the lives of billions. I cannot enter into a dialog with someone who wishes to commit the greatest atrocity in the history of our planet. It's as simple as that.

I will update this post if and when any of the other former C-Realm guests respond to Psygnisfive's prescription for sustainability.

Episode 49 - Part 1: The Dharma of Conscious Creativity



In this episode, KMO welcomes Digital Crusader, Eric Boyd, back to the
program to talk about Transhumanist perspectives on the environment
and sustainable living. Later we hear from Philip Horvath of the
Center for Conscious Creativity, and finally KMO talks with BrainPaint
creator, Bill Scott, about the potential of EEG biofeedback technology
for ADD therapy, meditation, and self-improvement.

Guests

Eric Boyd is a co-founder of Stumbleupon.com, and he shares his forward-looking mindset with brainy readers in his Digital Crusader blog. This is Eric's second time on the show. You can listen to his first outing in episode #34 of the C-Realm Podcast: Principles of Precaution.

Philip H. Horváth, co-founder of the Center for Conscious Creativity and an independent agent, is a multi-talented compulsive creative and synthetic systems thinker. A counselor, coach, and consultant, all his activities are marked by three key components: immersion, integration, and innovation. Complete bio

Bill Scott is the principal investigator and first author of an addiction research project that yielded a 79% success rate with Native American alcoholics. This study was with Dr. Eugene Peniston (in press). An interview with Bill by the Psychiatric Times was published as a feature article. Bill Scott has also presented research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science with Dr. David Kaiser. Bill trained the researchers Dr. John Gruzelier and Dr. Tobias Egner (members of Department of Cognitive Neuroscience and Behaviour, Imperial College Medical School) in the use of alpha-theta protocols. The results of this research project so improved music abilities among Royal Conservatoire of Music students that the Conservatoire has made these protocols a mandatory part of the school’s curriculum. Complete bio

EEG Biofeedback Links:

Bill Scott's Brain Paint technology:

http://www.brainpaint.com/

EEG Spectrum:

http://eegspectrum.com/

Open Source EEG:

http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/