Technological Narcissism: Pay No Attention To Those Bumps In The Road
For those of you still unfamiliar with M. King Hubbert and his now-famous theory of "peak oil," do look up Wiki entries on his name and theory. If you don't, not only will this entry seem curious (if not completely unhinged), but so will reality.
If you're still curious about what this might mean for, well, everyone on earth, you need not look too very far. The economic crisis might have had its antecedents in the Great Depression, but essentially any economy structured as ours is must grow to function. If it stops growing, it will catastrophically deflate. Sadly, that's just the nature of the game.
(One day I'll get into more detail backing up my pretty audacious statement about growth or crisis, but today is not that day. Soon, I promise, I'll get to that. Today's post strikes closer to home, too close for me to ignore.)
The phrase opening the post title is a favorite of author James Howard Kunstler, best well known as a critic of shoddy urban and insane sub-urban design and of energy resource issues. He maintains (and is in good company with those who maintain exactly the same thing) that as our petroleum reserves deplete, that the complex society we have created with oil will simplify whether we wish it to or not. The many tasks we today accomplish with our thirsty technology will tomorrow either be done with less energy-intensive means . . . or not get done at all. To wish otherwise by fabricating a future with endless energy supplies-along with those personal jetpacks we were promised in the '50s-is, according to Kunstler, an act of "technological narcissism," a personal projecting of the infallibility of mankind's technological wonderment triggered by an act of pure cognitive dissonance.
In less technical terms, once most people realize what the world might be like without cars and the goodies they provide us, most people simply cannot accept that, for the first time in 500 years, our standard of living is necessarily going to decline; so we dream of a future world where machines will once again save us.
Ah, but here I am to note that even if we could dream up machines that would soften the bumpy ride our lives will take on the ride down Hubbert's Peak, the fact that our economy is inextricably tied to the fuel we cannot extract fast enough means that the money to make this technologically narcissistic world vision a physical reality won't be around to save the day.
Let me explain.
When I'm not goofing off on the computer, I'm usually working. Right now that means driving transit buses. About six months ago, I qualified on some new equipment, the Orion 40-foot coaches powered by a series hybrid diesel-electric drive. There are many types of combustion-electric hybrids out there; they are not all created equally. My employer, for example, first got hybrids almost 8 years ago (maybe longer, I'm not sure). The maker of that drive system, Allison, promised some pretty spectacular mileage improvements . . . that never panned out. At best, they bumped miles per gallon about 3%, doubtfully covering the added cost of the drives verses the conventional alternative.
(Don't look for this number online. GM, Allison's parent company, is pretty tight-lipped about the actual numbers their drive gave their first customers, since the slightly more improved drive is now offered as an option on some of its smaller trucks. Worse, my employer was pretty pissed about how poorly the drive performed, and about Allison's lack of what proved to be developmental, not just product, support, a lack that led to some nasty back-and-forth that I can't divulge in a public forum. I got the number from inside the org and on the QT.)
Orion buses, by stark contrast, are so far almost doubling the miles a coach can travel on a tank. Thanks to the fact that the diesel engine driving them is half the size of a conventional bus's, they are also quiet enough for the driver to hold a conversation with a passenger on the freeway without either raising their voices. Oh, and don't let that small engine fool; they move up hills faster than the conventionals. These buses are nice.
And they are going to be needed. As the financial crisis deepens, more and more are riding the bus. A financial analyst stumbled upon probably the best graph yet for visualizing the present perhaps post-peak world, one I shared back in late October. Luckily, I took a screen shot of his original October 24, 2011 graph.
Bigger, anyone?
Here we see the nation's average miles driven per person, smoothed on a 12-month rolling average. (Keep in mind that the analyst, Mr. Short, probably had a typo on his graph. His mark of June, 2006" should read "June, 2005"; it does so in the original article, which seems no longer to be available.)
A few months later, I was delighted to find he had updated his numbers. Here's the same rolling per-person average from December:
Anyone? More bigness?
And now, just as I must, I head over to his site and find another update:
Again, Bigger!
Oh, dear.
Oh, and lest you get all excited about that tiny tick upward from month 79 to month 80, let me remind everyone that an increase in economic activity will stimulate demand for fuel . . . which will increase the price of fuel . . . which will dampen economic activity. I call it The Gas Ceiling. Our economy will grow to the size of the available fuel supply, and stay there.
Let's talk about what "technological narcissism" really means. In his original article from October (I originally quoted here), Mr. Short said:
The population-adjusted all-time high dates from June 2005. That's 74 months - over six years. And since the latest data is the lowest reading since the all-time high, the best we can hope for is that August "might" have been the trough.
Good thing he qualified his accounting with those scare quotes. Either Mr. Short didn't know about Hubbert's Peak, or he just ignored it. Call it a graveyard whistle.
Oh, I forgot to mention. The fact that Mr. Short's "population-adjusted all-time high dates from June 2005" follows another interesting date: "the all time high crude oil production of 74.30 million b/d reached in May 2005." (How could I not embolden that?) Of all the technological narcissists, investment analysts tend to be the most shiny-minded of the positive thinkers, wouldn't you say?
Of course, they aren't alone. Lots of people are still pursuing that wily cold fusion. Many are brave to simply note its continuing possibility on forums dedicated to peak energy issues, the brave souls.
Ah, but let me toss my final monkey wrench into those brave thoughts. Remember my excitement over the new Orion coaches? One of their chief investors in the hybrid technology, Daimler, has decided that increasing bus fuel mileage is simply not profitable:
Daimler Buses North America no longer will manufacture buses at its Orion facility in the Oneida County Industrial Park, officials announced Wednesday. . . .
“Daimler Buses considered all possible options for reconfiguring our transit bus operations in North America,” said Harmut Schick, head of Daimler Buses. “But at the end of the day, Orion is facing a situation where the cost position is not competitive, the local market is in a continued slump and growth opportunities are not available from selling the product overseas.”
It's not because these buses won't prove cost effective in a future with ever-rising fuel costs. That's not it at all. It's because an era of ever-rising fuel costs will force everyone to reorganize their expenditures. Businesses that rely upon cheap fuel will cut back or go out of business, and closed and/or downsized businesses can't pay as much in taxes.
Taxes pay for buses.
So just when they need to cut back on their own travel expenses, many workers will see a shortage of buses available to get them to and from work.
So the world simplifies, one swirl around the bowl at a time.
I don't mean to be all gloom and doom. It's just easy, given this information. There are ways to prevent an economic ride down the energy slope from getting so bumpy that the shocks just break up society (a very real possibility, one with historical precedent). We can restructure our economy to allow for funding needed changes to our infrastructure without adding costs to taxpayers. Doing so would gore some pretty sacred cows; but not doing anything will lead to an every bumpier ride down from the peak.
If you're still curious about what this might mean for, well, everyone on earth, you need not look too very far. The economic crisis might have had its antecedents in the Great Depression, but essentially any economy structured as ours is must grow to function. If it stops growing, it will catastrophically deflate. Sadly, that's just the nature of the game.
(One day I'll get into more detail backing up my pretty audacious statement about growth or crisis, but today is not that day. Soon, I promise, I'll get to that. Today's post strikes closer to home, too close for me to ignore.)
The phrase opening the post title is a favorite of author James Howard Kunstler, best well known as a critic of shoddy urban and insane sub-urban design and of energy resource issues. He maintains (and is in good company with those who maintain exactly the same thing) that as our petroleum reserves deplete, that the complex society we have created with oil will simplify whether we wish it to or not. The many tasks we today accomplish with our thirsty technology will tomorrow either be done with less energy-intensive means . . . or not get done at all. To wish otherwise by fabricating a future with endless energy supplies-along with those personal jetpacks we were promised in the '50s-is, according to Kunstler, an act of "technological narcissism," a personal projecting of the infallibility of mankind's technological wonderment triggered by an act of pure cognitive dissonance.
In less technical terms, once most people realize what the world might be like without cars and the goodies they provide us, most people simply cannot accept that, for the first time in 500 years, our standard of living is necessarily going to decline; so we dream of a future world where machines will once again save us.
Ah, but here I am to note that even if we could dream up machines that would soften the bumpy ride our lives will take on the ride down Hubbert's Peak, the fact that our economy is inextricably tied to the fuel we cannot extract fast enough means that the money to make this technologically narcissistic world vision a physical reality won't be around to save the day.
Let me explain.
When I'm not goofing off on the computer, I'm usually working. Right now that means driving transit buses. About six months ago, I qualified on some new equipment, the Orion 40-foot coaches powered by a series hybrid diesel-electric drive. There are many types of combustion-electric hybrids out there; they are not all created equally. My employer, for example, first got hybrids almost 8 years ago (maybe longer, I'm not sure). The maker of that drive system, Allison, promised some pretty spectacular mileage improvements . . . that never panned out. At best, they bumped miles per gallon about 3%, doubtfully covering the added cost of the drives verses the conventional alternative.
(Don't look for this number online. GM, Allison's parent company, is pretty tight-lipped about the actual numbers their drive gave their first customers, since the slightly more improved drive is now offered as an option on some of its smaller trucks. Worse, my employer was pretty pissed about how poorly the drive performed, and about Allison's lack of what proved to be developmental, not just product, support, a lack that led to some nasty back-and-forth that I can't divulge in a public forum. I got the number from inside the org and on the QT.)
Orion buses, by stark contrast, are so far almost doubling the miles a coach can travel on a tank. Thanks to the fact that the diesel engine driving them is half the size of a conventional bus's, they are also quiet enough for the driver to hold a conversation with a passenger on the freeway without either raising their voices. Oh, and don't let that small engine fool; they move up hills faster than the conventionals. These buses are nice.
And they are going to be needed. As the financial crisis deepens, more and more are riding the bus. A financial analyst stumbled upon probably the best graph yet for visualizing the present perhaps post-peak world, one I shared back in late October. Luckily, I took a screen shot of his original October 24, 2011 graph.
Bigger, anyone?
Here we see the nation's average miles driven per person, smoothed on a 12-month rolling average. (Keep in mind that the analyst, Mr. Short, probably had a typo on his graph. His mark of June, 2006" should read "June, 2005"; it does so in the original article, which seems no longer to be available.)
A few months later, I was delighted to find he had updated his numbers. Here's the same rolling per-person average from December:
Anyone? More bigness?
And now, just as I must, I head over to his site and find another update:
Again, Bigger!
Oh, dear.
Oh, and lest you get all excited about that tiny tick upward from month 79 to month 80, let me remind everyone that an increase in economic activity will stimulate demand for fuel . . . which will increase the price of fuel . . . which will dampen economic activity. I call it The Gas Ceiling. Our economy will grow to the size of the available fuel supply, and stay there.
Let's talk about what "technological narcissism" really means. In his original article from October (I originally quoted here), Mr. Short said:
The population-adjusted all-time high dates from June 2005. That's 74 months - over six years. And since the latest data is the lowest reading since the all-time high, the best we can hope for is that August "might" have been the trough.
Good thing he qualified his accounting with those scare quotes. Either Mr. Short didn't know about Hubbert's Peak, or he just ignored it. Call it a graveyard whistle.
Oh, I forgot to mention. The fact that Mr. Short's "population-adjusted all-time high dates from June 2005" follows another interesting date: "the all time high crude oil production of 74.30 million b/d reached in May 2005." (How could I not embolden that?) Of all the technological narcissists, investment analysts tend to be the most shiny-minded of the positive thinkers, wouldn't you say?
Of course, they aren't alone. Lots of people are still pursuing that wily cold fusion. Many are brave to simply note its continuing possibility on forums dedicated to peak energy issues, the brave souls.
Ah, but let me toss my final monkey wrench into those brave thoughts. Remember my excitement over the new Orion coaches? One of their chief investors in the hybrid technology, Daimler, has decided that increasing bus fuel mileage is simply not profitable:
Daimler Buses North America no longer will manufacture buses at its Orion facility in the Oneida County Industrial Park, officials announced Wednesday. . . .
“Daimler Buses considered all possible options for reconfiguring our transit bus operations in North America,” said Harmut Schick, head of Daimler Buses. “But at the end of the day, Orion is facing a situation where the cost position is not competitive, the local market is in a continued slump and growth opportunities are not available from selling the product overseas.”
It's not because these buses won't prove cost effective in a future with ever-rising fuel costs. That's not it at all. It's because an era of ever-rising fuel costs will force everyone to reorganize their expenditures. Businesses that rely upon cheap fuel will cut back or go out of business, and closed and/or downsized businesses can't pay as much in taxes.
Taxes pay for buses.
So just when they need to cut back on their own travel expenses, many workers will see a shortage of buses available to get them to and from work.
So the world simplifies, one swirl around the bowl at a time.
I don't mean to be all gloom and doom. It's just easy, given this information. There are ways to prevent an economic ride down the energy slope from getting so bumpy that the shocks just break up society (a very real possibility, one with historical precedent). We can restructure our economy to allow for funding needed changes to our infrastructure without adding costs to taxpayers. Doing so would gore some pretty sacred cows; but not doing anything will lead to an every bumpier ride down from the peak.