In the new American Conservative, Caleb Stegall reviews (favorably) Bill McKibben's new book Excerpt from Caleb's excellent piece, which makes me want to run out and get the book:
In 1947, two titans of 20th-century economic theory, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, met in Röpke’s home of Geneva, Switzerland. During the war, the Genevan fathers coped with shortages by providing citizens with small garden allotments outside the city for growing vegtables. These citizen gardens became so popular with the people of Geneva that the practice was continued even after the war and the return to abundance. Röpke was particularly proud of these citizen farmers, and so he took Mises on a tour of the gardens. “A very inefficient way of producing foodstuffs!” Mises noted disapprovingly. “Perhaps so, but a very efficient way of producing human happiness” was Röpke’s rejoinder.Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben is essentially a book-length recapitulation and exploration of the Mises-Röpke exchange. McKibben’s task is first to demonstrate the failure of established economic theory to provide an adequate and sustainable account of human well-being and second to develop an alternative paradigm that offers a more durable way forward. On the former count, Deep Economy must be considered a rousing success. On the latter, more difficult score, it is disappointing. McKibben provides valuable insight and important stories of resistance, but he would have benefited from a more thoroughgoing appreciation of the insights of the communitarian Right.
Deep Economy begins with some simple questions: What does it mean to be rich? Is more necessarily better? Why aren’t we happy? McKibben argues that while our preoccupation with utilitarian economics has produced unprecedented growth and material wealth, it has faltered when it comes to providing human happiness and satisfaction.
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>>> "Killing SUV's, using public transport, living closer to cities, walking/biking, cutting back on consumption - these will all just happen naturally as the market forces oil prices up"
M_David,
You make it sound so painless, so bloodless. Do you really fail to envision any of the darker consequences of very expensive oil?
M_David definitely doesn't get it:"if by "peak oil", you mean that consumption exceeds what we can suck out of wells at any given time."
No, peak oil is the peak in global oil production, when we're pumping as much as we can and the sum total no longer rises.
And it's not just the touchy-feely liberals who "get it." Dick Cheney gets it, that's why he invoked executive privilege about those Energy Task Force meetings. And that's why we will have a US military presence in the ME until Kingdom Come.
Cheney in 1990:
"We're there [Iraq] because the fact of the matter is that part of the world controls the world supply of oil, and whoever controls the supply of oil, especially if it were a man like Saddam Hussein, with a large army and sophisticated weapons, would have a stranglehold on the American economy and on — indeed on the world economy."
Cheney in 2007:
"But if you look down the road a few years and speculate about the possibility of a nuclear armed Iran, astride the world's supply of oil, able to affect adversely the global economy, prepared to use terrorist organizations and/or their nuclear weapons to threaten their neighbors and others around the world, that's a very serious prospect. And it's important that not happen."
Will,
Your "peak oil production" is the same thing as what we can suck out of the ground at any given time. That's called peak oil production.
Peak oil is when you have reached your maximum production, irregardless of your reserves. Therefore, how fast you can suck it out is indeed a factor in peak oil. The immediate problem today is that we have not drilled enough holes to get it out as fast as we are consuming it. Hence, peak oil is here, even though it is unlikely we have consumed half the world's reserves.
I log oil wells for a living. I've studied peak oil. Read dozens of books on it. I hang out with geologists, geo guys. I get it fine.
And before you freak out too much: we hit peak oil in America 50 years ago, and yet we could, through conservation, easily get by with what we produce in our own backyard right now and not import a drop. We just need to conserve and move to nuclear and some coal (natural gas is running out too). Yes, it would change our way of life. For the better.
Further evidence that M_DAvid really does not get it: "we hit peak oil in America 50 years ago, and yet we could, through conservation, easily get by with what we produce in our own backyard right now and not import a drop."
We hit PO in the states in the '70s - Hubbert got that part right. Right now, almost 2/3 of oil consumed in the US is imported. At our current rate of consumption in the US, we have about 5 years of reserves under the 50 states. If that sounds like a scenario that could be easily overcome with conservation, you really don't understand Americans.
"we hit peak oil in America 50 years ago, and yet we could, through conservation, easily get by with what we produce in our own backyard right now and not import a drop."
One other thing and I'll let this nag expire - conservation is vitally important, no argument there. It's just that Americans have become dependant on oil. Americans use 20 percent of the world's oil production, but we make up only 5 percent of the population. We are the largest oil hog at the trough. As Americans, virtually every enterprise we undertake requires oil and it's by-products gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, etc.
Americans could rise to the occasion IF their leaders were to tell them the truth about oil. And not one of the major contenders is talking about it. Here's why, from the real leader of the free world, Dick Cheney: "conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."
So for those of us who understand the need for conservation, we may have to accept that virtue is indeed its own reward, while the rest of country drives and spends just like before, egged on by BushCo and the fourth estate.
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