Future - Post-Peak Adaptive Skills

These are skills that I think might be useful to learn now - both because you will literally be able to use these skills in a more chaotic post-peak situation, and/or because learning them would indirectly prepare you to better deal with our new realities, and because they would be immediately fun, beautiful, or otherwise beneficial.

1. Learn to grow food. Start with sprouting. Then maybe potatos, which are apparently really easy. Then some vegetables. Then plant a fruit or nut tree.

2. Learn co-counseling - http://cci-usa.org/CCI-USA_what.htm - In general learn group dynamics, leadership techniques, massage, and conflict resolution. Because lots of people are nuts, and we have to deal with them, and we are too. People are dangerous and we're all interacting anyway, so you might as well learn to do it well. They are your species.

3. Learn to speak another language and spend time in another culture. This will help you get over the fundamental ethnocentrism of "my way is God's way" bright-red kool-aid that we all drank deeply when our parent(s)/guardian(s) told us that we were bad for doing something they didn't like, which we now reflect back at the rest of the world.

4. Go backpacking in the wilderness. Your daily ritual will be totally destroyed - you will have to figure out new ways of waking up, making breakfast, shitting, walking, dealing with time, sleeping, etc.

5. Someone smart suggested that you should learn to dumpster dive. That could challenge some deep taboos around issues of food, hygiene, and private property. I have heard that Panera's is a particularly good first site - and it is definitely better tasting than most other bread you're likely to find. But on the other hand, I wouldn't advise you to do anything illegal or immoral. A guy I knew in college spent time in Indonesia, and learned to eat rotten raw meat. I imagine he sees food a lot differently now.

6. Learn to make fire, but not in your apartment.

7. Learn to brush your teeth well, or learn how to pull teeth.

What else do you think is crucial? Should we do a part of a class on permaculture?

Future - Interesting Links

Here are some links that I thought some of you'd be interested in -
A pretty hopeful and cool look at a post-peak tribal culture -
http://art.afterculture.org/

A post about the power of role-playing games and storytelling to create new possibilities in the transition -
http://anthropik.com/2006/05/the-fifth-world-manifesto/

And my favorite online blog by someone who isn't in our class
http://ranprieur.com/

Social Change - Marx on Base & Superstructure

"The ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the dominant material force in society is at the same time its dominant intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production."

"In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of reality--the real foundation, on which legal and political superstructures arise and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness."

What does this mean for efforts to create voluntaristic social change, and especially systematic or revolutionary social change?

Future Course - Sheep Look Up! readers

For readers of the Sheep Look Up, do parts of this summary of the this week's news sound familiar?

WEEKLY REVIEW

The Iraqi Defense Ministry announced that on average one person per hour was being killed in Basra. In Baghdad, 19 people were killed in attacks, including four U.S. soldiers, and a tae kwon do team was kidnapped. Gay Iraqis were fleeing the country to avoid being killed by militias. American troops were using lasers to "dazzle" Iraqi drivers who do not stop at checkpoints; if used properly, said a Pentagon spokesman, the laser light will not blind its target. The Nepal House of Representatives declared the King of Nepal to be powerless, and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked newspapers to refrain from publishing pictures of women. Plague was found at a campground in Utah. A 4.3-million-square-foot mall opened
in the Philippines, and thousands of people protested against affirmative action in New Delhi. Fidel Castro denied that he had a fortune worth $900 million. "Why would I want money," he asked, "especially now that I'm going to be 80 years old?" His doctor said that Castro was in excellent health and could live another 60 years. In Louth, England, a group of youths kicked a pet rabbit to death. White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said that he would prefer not to hug a tar baby.

While acknowledging that Khaled al-Masri "deserves a remedy" for allegedly being tortured by the CIA, a federal judge dismissed al-Masri's case because allowing it to proceed would expose government secrets. There was a riot at Guantanamo Bay. A study found that only one in four United States teenagers knows the names of all four broadcast TV networks, and another study found that one out of every 136 Americans was incarcerated. A kennel was ordered closed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, after a cockapoo was found with yeast in both of its ears. At least 18 people fell ill in Dallas after eating tainted muffins. A man with no legs climbed to the summit of Mt. Everest, and the mayor of Scottsdale, Arizona, was offended by a new restaurant called the Pink Taco. In Santa Ana, California, a homeless man was arrested after he told five boys he would cast them in a television commercial, then licked their feet. A camel ran amok on the Trans-Israeli Highway, and a rogue elephant was on the loose in Rwanda. In Alaska an elephant named Maggie was refusing to use her $100,000 treadmill. The Hershey Company opened a new health center to study the benefits of cocoa, and Ray Nagin was re-elected mayor of New Orleans. A British-Ugandan team of scientists said that the glaciers of the Rwenzori Mountains in East Africa, which the Greek geographer Ptolemy called "the mountains of the moon," could melt within the next two decades.

Scottish scientist Klaus Zuberbuhler found that Nigerian putty-nosed male monkeys say "pyow" to warn of leopards and "hack" to warn of eagles. "Pyow," said a monkey. "Hack hack pyow hack hack." A patent was filed for a Pentagon-funded "controllable launcher for propelling a payload" that can shoot SWAT teams onto the roofs of tall buildings. A Honduran teenager who stole an anti-immigration protest sign in New York was facing deportation, and the Senate passed a bill that would make English the national language. It was revealed that in 2004 a group of Republican lawmakers wrote letters to the IRS calling for a probe of the NAACP. Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly warned that "many far-left thinkers believe the white power structure that controls America is bad."

Iran, despite reports to the contrary, was not making non-Muslims wear badges. About 2,000 gallons of Sunny D concentrate leaked into a river in England, killing fish and turning the water bright yellow. A South African ice cream company sprayed a ton of ammonia gas into the atmosphere, sending 100 schoolchildren to the hospital; afterwards, the company held an assembly for some of the children and gave them free ice cream. "They've been reading words like 'toxic' and 'poisonous' and obviously got quite a fright," said an engineer. "We want to enlighten them about how ammonia can be used constructively." Finnish horror rock group Lordi (whose most recent album is "The Arockalypse") won the Eurovision Song Contest, and President George W. Bush promised to uphold "the tradition of the melting pot." Scientists in Germany said that apes can plan ahead.

-- Paul Ford

Future Course

Scenarios Continued

Cheery Scenarios

Bartlett Presentation On Arithmetic, Population, and Energy (watch the video if you have real player, otherwise, read the transcript)

Social Change - Action Research Sequence

I've added a step to the one I demonstrated today on the whiteboard.

Action Research Project – A sequential breakdown

1. Arena
2. Background
3. Focus
4. Goal
5. Component Goals
6. Action Plan
7. Action
8. Data Collection & Analysis
9. Evaluation
10.Revised Action Plan

Future Course - Additional Reading Assignment

Those who did not complete the previous assignment by the due date provided and were not able to demonstrate their strong understanding of the Hirsch Report in the in-class assessment have currently lost a significant portion of their accumulated credit in the class. In order to repair the damage, those students should publish their strong analyses of either;
The Sheep Look Up by Brunner
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn or
Ecotopia by Callenbach

in terms of possible scenarios for a peak oil future.

I strongly recommend that the students who DID complete their assignments by the due date and DID demonstrate strong understanding of the Hirsch Report ALSO read one of these novels, and use it as material to analyze in your blog.

Future Course - Hirsch Report

Please flesh out one of the likely scenarios discussed in class for your blog. Discuss individual, psychological, economic, social, political, and/or military aspects.

The Hirsch Report, was commissioned by the US government's Department of Energy and written by Robert Hirsch. Please read it in its entirety, take notes, and post an analysis on your blog of the implications of this report for likely scenarios over a 5, 10, and 25 year period.

Social Change - Most common techniques

Following up on today's class, I thought it might be helpful if I tried to rank the collective action techniques in the contemporary U.S. repertoire in approximate order of ubiquity, in my experience.

1. Letters to Power Holders
2. Petitioning
3. Electoral campaigning
4. Demonstrating/Protesting
5. Flyering
6. Boycotting
7. Public Workshop
8. Commercials
9. Postering (including Graffiti, Wheatpasting, Stickering, etc)
10. Public holidays
11. Creating a Film

I'll be interested to see what techniques and issues you each choose to experiment with.

Examining the Skeptics Arguments

Michael Lynch
http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/features/fex52520.htm
-
Oil discovery forecasts are doomed


by Michael C. Lynch 28-05-05 Since the early Greeks speculated that the Trojan War was started by the gods to reduce overpopulation, many have feared resource scarcity. The obvious finite nature of non-renewable resources such as minerals combined with occasional shortages and an inability to be certain of future supplies has made this a recurring theme in political economy.
The most obvious modern analogy has been the work two centuries ago by Thomas Malthus, who made a simplistic (and incorrect) calculation of growth trends in population and food supply, and continued by Paul Ehrlich, who continually foresees imminent mass starvation.

His counterparts in the oil business are no less in error for mistakenly analysing production and discovery data as representing geological processes without political or economic components, and can thus be as safely extrapolated as the orbits of the planets. This is a part of the long debate that began with Plato and Aristotle over whether numbers hold an inherent truth, independent of physical reality, or if the meaning of the numbers cannot stand alone from what they represent.
As our reporter Barrie McKenna wrote in his cover story on oil, M. King Hubbert looked at the numbers and correctly predicted the peak in US oil production. But Mr Hubbert incorrectly assumed that falling natural gas demand in the 1980s reflected geological scarcity rather than a response to higher prices.

More recent work has falsely assumed that low discoveries in the Middle East mean a lack of oil in the ground, rather than a lack of drilling activity, which is primarily the result of a large glut of discovered oil fields. Some of these “scientific” analysts graph production and assume a bell curve, seeing an unending decline after any peak, when in fact, countries often peak, decline, then improve their fiscal regime to attract new investment and raise their production again.
Others fit a curve to discoveries by size, and extrapolate it to an asymptote, mistakenly thinking that discovery size could be gleaned from estimates by geologists, and that sequenced oil discoveries reflect geology, rather than being influenced by political decisions as to where and when drilling will be permitted.

Though both these approaches often yield what appear to be solid “fits,” they are descriptive rather than predictive. Oil discoveries are much more human-influenced than the orbits of the planets, which can be predicted by simple observation, and efforts to forecast them are doomed to failure as was curve-fitting of the stock market.
The world contains abundant oil resources to meet demand for decades to come, with the amount of drilling historically outside North America a fraction of what the United States and Canada have experienced, and well productivity running 30 to 500 times that seen here. (This hardly guarantees that it will be available at any given time.)

Current warnings about the inability of the market (and industry) to perceive the coming peak are no more credible or scientific than those that led so many -- including Canada -- astray in the 1970s, when billions were spent on synthetic fuels and frontier drilling; governments negotiated sweetheart contracts with oil-exporting countries; and a thriving industry was devoted to explaining the coming peak in oil production.
The primary development since then in studies of “peak oil” has been the new availability of graphics software that enables unsophisticated analysts -- knowledgeable of geology, perhaps, but not statistics -- to make and misinterpret graphs. And, of course, the media delights in warnings of catastrophe, because stories about business continuing as usual are hardly news.

Michael C. Lynch is a US-based consultant and is affiliated with MIT.

Exxon Op-Ed Advertisement (a pdf - should open directly in Safari or Firefox, but may require Adobe in other browsers)
www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/ Files/Corporate/OpEd_peakoil.pdf

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists site includes this article examining the Exxon 2030 (see below) publication by Alfred J. Cavallo.
http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=mj05cavallo

Social Change - Volunteering In NYC

Volunteer Sites for NYC
Mayor's Volunteer Center
New York Cares

On Philanthropy
Singer Solution to World Poverty
Wikipedia Article on Philanthropy
Jesus Talking About Our Responsibilities As He Saw Them

Service Learning
Service Learning

Future Course - Peak Skeptics

From the Economist (fairly short)
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6823506

From Exxon (fairly long)
http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/Citizenship/Imports/EnergyOutlook05/index.html


Please read these two sources and analyze them. What leads them to adopt different conclusions than the other analysts you've read? Do they rely on different evidence, do they proceed from different assumptions, do they interpret the same evidence differently? Which of the perspectives seems more credible to you, and why?