Here in the homeland, we peaked in 1970 and we extract relatively little oil on land or at sea. BP’s 100-million-barrel reservoir off the coast of Alaska — er, rather, on a BP-constructed island, and therefore not offshore at all — will meet U.S. demand for less than a week. Meanwhile, long-time swing supplier Saudi Arabia is turning off the tap. So much for satiating our infinite desires with limitless oil from the Middle East. Even the International Energy Agency forecasts demand in excess of world supply.

As world oil supply has fallen, the price has exceeded $80 per barrel twice in recent history. Both events were followed shortly thereafter by sovereign-debt crises in several countries. We’ll likely cross the $80 threshold again soon, even as the industrial economy continues to nosedive. Considering the debt-related economic pain in Europe despite throwing money at the issue (i.e., papering over the economic mess), Keynesian economics makes no sense at all. The printing press hasn’t been sufficient in the U.S., either, and it’s the one-size-fits-all solution of the Obama/Bernanke team. This is the typical government approach: If it ain’t broke, fix it until it is.

I’m not suggesting the debt-based approach hasn’t been broken for a long time. But every attempt to “fix” the industrial economy represents a boondoggle atop a boondoggle, with every one destined for failure at a faster rate than the prior one. Helicopter Ben has created half the U.S. money in history within the last four years even as the money supply continues to crash. On one hand, states want more federal stimulus (i.e., keep the presses running) as the head into a second-half economic tsunami with no clue how to deal with it. On the other hand, pressure is building to stop or slow the printing presses, but it’s already too late: We cannot possibly pay off the current U.S. debt, so — from the perspective of Bernanke and Obama — there’s no point in slowing the presses now, despite ludicrous, vacuous threats from various factions of the tea party. Meanwhile, the sheeple are growing frustrated as they wonder where the jobs went and why the industrial economy remains in the abattoir. Nobody in a position of influence has the guts to tell them about energy decline and its economic consequences; even if anybody with the ear of the people were talking about it, the hyper-indulgent sheeple wouldn’t have the guts to listen, much less act on the knowledge.

Hyperinflation might be on the way, despite the crash in cash. At the very least, the near future will bring increased volatility and a host of economic woes.

The water is boiling around us and, like frogs, we’re failing to notice. Unlike frogs, we have the ability to see what’s going on, and how it’s killing us, but we prefer the culture of make believe over reality. So we pretend we’re immersed in an imperial spa. Fever? What fever? I just need another drink. Apparently the cancer of industrial culture removes cognitive capacity before it kills the host.

Continuing to pretend won’t help the dire situation on the housing front. As it turns out, housing and energy definitely are not too big to fail. Despite out best efforts to ignore reality, echoes of the Great Depression abound. As housing prices continue to decline, Americans lose the ability to use their homes as ATMs. As oil prices continue to increase, aftershocks continue to rumble through the system, with more quakes on the way.

And it’s not just housing and oil. The collapse in commercial real estate is fully under way, banks are withholding information from the federal government because they dare not open their books in the light of day, another credit crunch lies right out the corner because nothing about the financial system has changed since the last crisis of confidence, and bond vigilantes are coming to America and therefore to the world’s reserve currency.

Plenty of people here in the empire think there are alternatives to oil, thus failing to distinguish derivatives from alternatives. These derivatives will never pay their way, of course, much less serve as anything resembling a comprehensive substitute to crude oil. And without abundant liquid fuels, we cannot grow the industrial economy.

Other folks believe hydropower will keep the lights on in their neighborhood, without working through the consequences of capitulation of the stock markets. Why would the engineers and technicians keep showing up to run the electrical plant if they aren’t getting paid, either because all the banks fail or their employer’s stock is worthless?

Too little, too late, Bill Gates is urging us to spend billions on an energy revolution. But he’s not spending his billions on it, probably because he knows the fossil-fuel party is over.

As a result of running out of inexpensive oil on the way to passing the world oil peak in 2005, we witnessed an oil shock in 2008 that nearly brought the industrial economy screeching to a halt. Chief Executive Officer of insurance giant Lloyds warns of another price spike headed our way, and I cannot imagine the industrial machine of planetary death surviving oil priced at the expected $200 per barrel.

Source: EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2009

But I’m an optimist, as I’ve pointed out before. I think we can terminate the industrial economy before we move the assault from the Gulf on our southern border to the wholesale destruction of interior lands on our northern border even as it becomes increasingly clear the tar sands will not meet expectations. The events in the Gulf of Mexico illustrate an important point: As my detractors have been saying for years, we really are awash in a sea of oil. Are you happy now?

The disaster in the Gulf provides a perfect opportunity for the dead hand of Ronald Reagan to rise in the form of judicial activism. This pattern is blatantly apparent in the Supreme Court and all lower courts and is consistent with the notion that the right-wing thought police have taken over this country.

In support of my omnipresent optimism, historian Niall Ferguson has added his voice to the large and growing chorus predicting the collapse of U.S. empire by the end of 2012. If we cease to kill the industrial economy, it will continue to kill the living planet and all of us who depend upon it. Either way — with imperial collapse or reduction of Earth to a lifeless pile of rubble — we can stop worrying about power politics. As should be evident to any reader by now, I prefer a robustly living planet over a dying or dead one. As should be equally apparent to any sentient being, I don’t have much company on this particular point.

The economic endgame is rearing its head. The stock markets are headed down — way down — with a monster shock headed their way. One plausible scenario has collapse of the bond market following collapse of the stock markets. But at Dow zero, you’ll be a lot more worried about feeding your children than the rate of return on your bonds.

Meanwhile, out in the dying murdered Gulf of Mexico, BP has claimed success. Calls for a boycott will fade away and clueless Americans will continue to display an inordinate capacity for cognitive dissonance as they continue to demand abundant cheap oil even while throwing the occasional tantrum at Exxon-Mobile BP corporations providing our drug of choice. You might go so far as to call this yet another example of American psychosis.

Will human life be wiped out by events in the Gulf of Mexico? In a word, no. We’re taking quite an impressive toll on the entire planet, but destroying our entire species with only the tools we’ve developed during the last two centuries will take more than a few years, our vaunted technological prowess notwithstanding. The Titanic of ecological overshoot has crashed into the iceberg of limited oil, leading to a painfully slow descent of the industrial economy. The descent is painful because it allows us to keep the current game going, re-arranging the deck chairs as we head straight for a rapid decline in the human population in the wake of a devastated Earth.

There is a better way. We know what it is. It’s time to give up our childish dreams and act like responsible adults. Is that too much to ask?

Indeed, Prescription for the Planet promises to save the planet. But instead, it develops a prescription for furthering the industrial economy and therefore killing the planet. Saving? Killing? Apparently some people think these words are synonymous.

Ultimately, Blees’ plan boils down to two “solutions,” both of them extremely suspect. First, he claims we can we can ramp up production of renewable energy systems and also fourth-generation nuclear reactors to keep the power on. Indeed, Blees claims our lives depend on electricity. As such, he dismisses the first two million years of the human experience. If our lives depend on electricity, it’s because we’ve abandoned a viable, durable set of living arrangements in exchange for endless opportunities to destroy the living planet. Second, Blees promotes the notion that boron-powered automobiles will keep us on the highways. And he thinks that’d be a good thing. After all, boron seems to be essentially limitless on this world. Just as crude oil seemed, not so long ago.

First, let’s consider and dismiss Blees’ electrical option. Figures on energy supply and efficiency are readily available for renewable systems, so it is relatively simple to evaluate Blees’ map to determine whether “alternative” energy sources can fill the void at the scale of a world with nearly seven billion people.

They can’t. And it’s not even close. I don’t know a single energy-literate individual who thinks we can replace fossil fuels with alternatives by 2030. Most people who write about energy issues have concluded we’ll be firmly in the post-industrial Stone Age well before 2030. I’ll not run the numbers here because I’ve run them many times already, and so have a lot of people a lot smarter than me. But I’ll start by picking a few nits, then I’ll move on to the big-picture moral issues we try so hard to avoid in our national conversations.

And, I’ve written about one kajillion times, all electrical power is derived from oil, even nuclear power. We use plenty of oil to transport nuclear materials (even the stuff Blees discusses). And also for maintaining the grid. And then there’s the massive mountain of concrete needed to build cooling towers for nuclear power plants. As a result, nuclear plants become carbon neutral only after about 20 years in operation, at which point we start shutting them down for safety reasons.

And what about those cars? Building a planet’s worth of boron-powered cars will require a lot of oil. My Prius uses less energy than the cars Blees writes about, but it still requires more energy to construct than a Hummer. I seriously doubt we have enough oil in the world to make enough cars to replace the U.S. fleet, much less get a billion Chinese cars on the road. And then there’s the issue of financing, in a world where credit is drying up faster than Lake Mead. Who will be able to buy a $40,000 car with cash?

If all goes according to Blees’ plan, the first fourth-generation nuclear power plant will be producing electricity in 2015. I strongly suspect, and hope, that we’ll be in the new Dark Age by then. This Dark Age will cause much suffering and death among industrial humans. And I think it’s our only chance to save the living planet, and our own species.

Further along Blees’ road to ruin, by 2020 plasma energy will fulfill 5% of our energy “needs” and boron-powered cars will be filling the roads. I cannot imagine a scenario in which we will avoid landing in the post-industrial Stone Age by then.

And even further along the route of Blees’ nuclear wet dreams, we’ll have all the nuke plants we need to satisfy the world’s demand for electricity by 2050. If we come even remotely close to that goal, there will be no humans on the planet to use the electricity. The latest (ultra-conservative) projections indicate extinction of our species by mid-century.

And that’s just the small stuff. The moral issues are much more daunting.

The further we go into ecological overshoot, the worse the outcome will be for every species on the planet, including our own. Maintaining the ability to produce more cars, and more babies, is a prescription for the planet, all right: a prescription for disaster. There are limits to growth. I strongly suspect they’re driven, in this country, by the price of oil. If not, rarity of other materials will force our hand.

Hopefully, our hand will be forced in time to prevent our extinction. It won’t happen, though, if we return to the American lifestyle of happy motoring. We certainly do not need to export car culture, and its many attendant consequence, to other nations.

Meanwhile, against Blees’ backdrop of fourth-generation nuclear ambitions, Barack Obama is pushing for an older version of nuclear dreams. He’s committing serious bling to build nuclear reactors in all the wrong places, ignoring the fact that nuclear power is the twentieth century’s most expensive technological failure. Even Time magazine knows this bet won’t pay off, that the nuclear dream is really a nightmare. Even as Obama pursues failed technology in the homeland –- while denying other countries the same option — he wants to maintain or expand our nuclear arsenal in the name of security (sic).

Fortunately, the next great economic crash is right around the corner. After the China bubble pops, the human population bubble surely will follow. It’s time to grow accustomed to chaos as an everyday event.

As usual, you can count on me for the good news associated with life in the doomosphere. Soon enough, we won’t be threatening the entire living planet with extinction via carbon dioxide emissions. Or by flooding the atmosphere with methane. Soon enough, we won’t be spending all your hard-earned tax money on oil, much less on securing that oil at the point of a bazooka. Soon enough, Afghanistan will be a distant memory instead of a broad expanse of imperial killing fields. Soon enough, Obusha will not be able to order the massacre of civilians on a whim. Soon enough, the world’s largest companies will not be able to cause $2.2 trillion worth environmental degradation each year. On the other hand, it’s time you started thinking about how to spend your own money, while sellers still think it has inherent value.

I know my message is not the one desired by industrial humans. We want our children to have more stuff than we had. Instead of more stuff, I want them to have more of the living planet, if only to insure their own survival (and that of our species). In contrast, Obama’s dream is the same as Ronald Reagan’s dream: economic growth at all costs, including obedience at home, oppression abroad, and the devastation of the planet and all non-Americans (with the possible exception of Israelis).

Western civilization is omnicidal. We need to stop murdering the living planet on which we depend, instead of attempting to extend the reach of western civilization. And we’re running out of time. Fortunately, the conquest of the living planet has turned into a war. And now, finally, this war has two sides. Which side are you on?

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This essay is permalinked at Island Breath.

If Ben Bernanke and the fools at the Fed actually thought the industrial economy was recovering, they’d jack up interest rates. When the prime rate is up around 5%, you’ll know the industrial economy is back on track. Alternatively, you can monitor the extinction rate of non-human species.
The Keynesian approach favored by the Obummer administration is working about as well as pissing in an inferno. Those 640,329 new jobs created by the stimulus package came at a cost of $323,739.83 per job. We’ll never pay that tab, of course, because most of us aren’t working any more. Hell, half the kids in the country are on food stamps. Furthermore, the latest insult is a drop in the bucket compared to the 2009 deficit, which exceeds $450,000 per U.S. citizen.
We’ve long used our homes as ATMs, but those days are behind us. Housing prices are expected to continue their decline, dropping a staggering 90%. Suddenly that $6,900 house in Detroit isn’t looking so sweet, or so unusual. And commercial real estate is on the leading edge of a huge crash, as you’ve known for a while if you’ve been reading this blog. Or, for that matter, any other source of economic news beyond the mainstream media.
The housing mess isn’t the only offal stinking up the industrial economy, either. The markets look like the big bubble you blew with an entire pack of Hubba Bubba. And here’s a surprise: The recent rise in GDP is a mirage, just like Dow 10,000. As if the stock markets have any relation to reality, now or at any point in the past.
And just when you thought things couldn’t get any more entertaining, the feds would like to make the big bank bailouts a permanent scar on your grandchild’s checkbook. There’s nothing new about this turn of events: It’s a classic example of socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor (record-setting bonuses at the end of 2009 will add to the ever-growing list of examples). And if you think Obama is your friend, and will assuage your wounds, you’re still drinking the “progressive” Kool-Aid of wishful thinking and ignoring his drive for unlimited power, here and abroad. When questioned, he undoubtedly will perform the infamous act of amnesia we’ve come to expect from our “leaders” in Washington. Alas, Edward Abbey was correct: “Government should be weak, amateurish and ridiculous. At present, it fulfills only a third of the role.” At this juncture, the U.S. cannot even maintain hegemony in Afghanistan because the Taliban will not agree to a backroom power-sharing deal.
The current administration is hardly the first to lie, cheat, and steal from the citizens they claim to serve. Over time, the extent of the immorality has become unbearable. Consider this minor, personal example: I asked for a testimonial regarding my skill as a public speaker from a dear friend and former graduate student who currently works the National Parks Service (which is part of the executive branch, for those of you who missed school that day). After speaking with her supervisor in Washington, she declined. I’m reminded of a line from E.M. Forster: “If I were forced to choose between my country and my friend, I hope I would be brave enough to choose my friend.” Here’s another relevant line from Edward Abbey: “I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them.” Sadly, damned few among us are as principled as Forster and Abbey.
The “solutions” to our energy predicament are clogging the airwaves. As if algae will save our dreams of happy motoring. As if building nuclear power plants will provide free electricity. As if algae, plutonium, and uranium come problem-free. As if Transition Towns will allow an orderly, peaceful transition to a trouble-free future. As if maintaining industrial culture in smaller form will magically stop destroying the living planet.
Industrial civilization is hardly the first civilization to outstrip resources critical to human life, thereby committing cultural suicide. But it’s the first to make a serious run at murdering the entire living planet, and American Empire is coming to a close far sooner than most people thought possible. Soon, the lights go out, which brings down every aspect of western civilization.
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This post is permalinked at Counter Currents.

I’d like to subvert in advance the notion that we can give peace a chance. Industrial humans possess “freedoms” only because our governments employ a massive, non-stop war machine to keep us “free.” And don’t give me that “love it or leave it” crap. I stopped loving this country a long time ago, so I tried to make it better. A quick look around reveals how well that worked for all of us. At this point, the only escape from American Empire involves feeding on beetle juice in the caves of Tara Bora, and I’m having too much fun seeing the industrial economy give way to nature’s patience to jump off the imperial ship at this late juncture. Put simply, peace (i.e., the absence of war) doesn’t stand a chance. As Ran Prieur points out in the superb documentary film What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire (I’m paraphrasing): From the perspective of any particular location, the dominant paradigm of oppression and hierarchy always wins. If a peaceful people occupy an area, and a violent tribe comes along to conquer them, there are three possible outcomes: (1) the peaceful people leave, thus committing the area to the dominant paradigm of oppression and hierarchy, (2) the peaceful people fight back, thus committing the area to the dominant paradigm of oppression and hierarchy, or (3) the peaceful people choose to become slaves to the violent tribe, thus committing the area to the dominant paradigm of oppression and hierarchy. Give peace a chance? Not on this planet. And that’s just our relationship with other humans, about whom we actually claim to care.
Back to the point, then: It’s too late for half measures. Perhaps it always was. Half measures will not save the industrial economy, as Barack Obama is discovering with each gargantuan new bailout. The bailouts, perceived as necessary to keep the industrial economy lurching along, barely manage to keep the trucks running and the water flowing out the taps, and only by passing to future generations the bill that will never be paid. Half measures certainly won’t save the living planet, despite the pleas, petitions, and calls to arms issued by mainstream conservationists for the last several decades. These conservationists are making a decent living in the industrial economy, fiddling while the planet burns. But they are patently ineffective at saving anything except their way of life. And they’re the good guys.
If the middle way is no way at all, what’s left? I propose getting rid of the omnicidal monster called western civilization, and sooner rather than later (thanks to Derrick Jensen for coining the perfect word). We’ve already had enough globalization, enough just-in-time delivery of meaningless baubles, enough sight-seeing and food-tasting and basking in the “good life” at the expense of every life form on the globe. We really do not need every American high-school student making the obligatory trip to Rome and Florence to see another culture [sic].
Instead of extracting an easy life from fossil fuels and human slaves, while taking our life-support system down into the bowels of hell with us, let’s try living as our predecessors did on this land. Never mind abandoning our beloved cars: In North and South America, we’ll need to give up the wheel.
I’m willing to give up every single piece of industrial civilization to see it all come down. An electromagnetic pulse (an “e-bomb”) would be a fine start. Yesterday would be the perfect time, but tomorrow will suffice. Indeed, I’ll gladly die if that’s one result of civilization’s fall. Personally, I suspect both will happen within the next few years. But I look upon this exciting, once-in-a-lifetime event as a chance to substantively experience the world around me, perhaps for the first time. It’s also a personal challenge and a superb opportunity for personal growth, all without purchasing a round-trip ticket to Rome.
By way of a thought experiment, what elements of industrial culture would you choose to save? I’m not suggesting you have a choice, mind you. Rather, I think the ongoing collapse of industrial culture will remove most of the choices for all of us, hopefully before 2012 as the price of oil approaches $225 per barrel. And, as infamous war criminal Henry Kissinger fondly pointed out, “the absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.” But let’s beat Henry to the post-industrial party, shall we? Let’s imagine what we can get along without, even before it’s gone.
I’ll get us started by assuming we want to save electricity (i.e., continue killing every part of the living planet so we can comfortably read our Harlequin Romance novels). The following back-of-the-envelope calculation illustrates part of the costs needed to build solar panels to run the U.S. electrical grid:
The total energy requirement to produce a PV panel is about 1,000 kWh per square meter, and there’s about 1,700 kWh in each barrel of oil (alternative source here). My math skills aren’t what they used to be, so please point out all errors in the following calculations.
In the U.S. alone, we use about 4 trillion kWh for electricity annually. I’ll generously assume 30% efficiency of solar panels. The solar constant is 1.4 kW per square meter, so we need slightly more than 2 billion square meters of solar panels to satisfy current U.S. electrical demand (i.e., the 4 trillion kWh): 1.4 kW per square meter * 12 hr/day sunlight, every day * 0.3 {the efficiency conversion} * 365 days/yr = 1,840 kWh/yr, and 4 trillion Kwh divided by 1,840 kWh/yr = 2,174,385,736 square meters.
It takes about 1,000 kWh of energy to manufacture a single square meter of PV panel. So we need a tad more than 2 trillion kWh of energy to manufacture the solar panels needed to keep the grid going.
Because each barrel of oil contains about 1,700 kWh of energy, we need about 1.3 billion barrels of oil to manufacture the solar panels needed to keep us supplied with electrical power in this country. We use a little less than 20 million barrels of oil each day in this country, so we could forgo oil for about two months to stockpile the oil we “need” to keep the grid running (except, of course, that we haven’t accounted for shipping, installation, storage of electricity, or maintenance of the panels or the grid). Draining the strategic petroleum reserves (SPR), which currently contain 727 million barrels of crude oil, would provide a little more than half the 1.3 billion barrels needed to make the panels.
Skipping oil for a month or two, much less draining the SPR, would destroy the industrial economy almost overnight because traders on the world’s stock markets would hit the panic button. Needless to say, I’m completely in favor of the idea.
If you foolishly prefer the nuclear option for electricity, consider these points: (1) Nuclear is more expensive than fossil fuels, so I have a hard time believing Americans will willingly pursue this route; (2) We have no idea how to deal with the waste, despite decades of talking around (vs. about) this issue; (3) Nuclear power plants do not become carbon neutral for at least two decades because cement production (and use) is so carbon-intensive (and after 20 years or so, we start shutting the plants down because of safety concerns); (4) Energy too cheap to meter, if it ever comes, will reduce the living planet to a lifeless pile of rubble within a generation; (5) I seriously doubt the industrial economy has time to build many, if any, nuclear power plants; (6) The economic impact will be minimal, regardless — the industrial economy runs on oil, which is required to maintain the electrical grid (and nuclear power plants); and (7) we’re past peak for nuclear sources.
I’m sure I’m missing several salient points and I haven’t addressed many, many other issues. What elements of industrial culture will we lose when the industrial economy completes its collapse? Which of these elements do you value more than life itself (the lives of others, of course, not Americans)?
Think of the benefits associated with all of us giving up every aspect of western civilization. Goldman Sachs unable to manipulate the market, as they’ve done since the Great Depression. More importantly, the Milky Way shimmering in the night sky. The absence of suffering (Schopenhauer’s version of happiness) as we realize we are no longer witnessing the only mass extinction our species has ever seen (and the only mass extinction caused by a single species). No more bad news about our destruction of the living planet. No more good news about economic collapse. No news at all, except the kind delivered by a smiling neighbor on foot.
But that’s my dream. What’s yours?
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We received a batch of day-old chicks during the middle of the week, and we put them under a heat lamp 24 hours a day. By Friday night, the combination of the heat lamp and the massive electrical use by the power tools I was using to build a goat shed had drawn down the batteries on the solar system. We noticed when the power went out at about 11:00 p.m.
About that goat shed: It will hold two milk goats, starting this summer. Stunningly, given my lack of skills with all things non-academic, I built is myself. It’s fully insulated, the same size as the office I’ve occupied at the university for 15 years, and protected from predators. It has a poultry-netting sub-floor beneath the dirt floor, just in case we want to use the pen for a second flock of chickens (which is a good idea, especially when younger chickens are about to be introduced into an existing flock). The pen has an east-facing window and a west-opening Dutch door. Obviously, I’m as proud as a new mother. But I digress.
Back to the Friday-night power failure: It took us a while to figure out we couldn’t solve the problem without more sunlight hitting the solar panels. By that time, it was approaching midnight under a moon that was nearly full on a beautiful summer night. Since the six-year-old was sleeping soundly, and the adults were all fully awake, the next step was obvious: time to eat.
As we know, man cannot live on bread alone. Occasionally, there must be a beverage.
So, we ate, drank, kibitzed, and communed in the light of the monster moon at the edge of our breezeway. Several hours later, drunk on conversation within and about nature, I collapsed in a satiated heap of fatigue produced by a long day of honest work. The incident reminded me that electrical power is a nice luxury — we’ll all have a difficult time without it, for sure — but the absence of electricity, at least temporarily, has its own rewards.
As regular readers are aware by now, I’m Mr. Silver Lining, the ultimate optimist.
Meanwhile, a dear friend and colleague sent me a note about a forthcoming documentary film. Blind Spot will be shown by Sustainable Tucson this week (it can be viewed free of charge here).
According to the film, we have put ourselves at a crossroad, which offers two paths with dire consequences. If we continue to burn fossil fuels, we face imminent ecological collapse. If we cease burning fossil fuels, the industrial economy will collapse. The film then goes on to offer a choice: your money or your life. As if we you and I have the opportunity to make that decision. As if we have free will. As if, even if we chose economic collapse to save the planet and our species, the world’s politicians will go along. As if.
As should be clear by now, industrial humans — or at least our “leaders” — have chosen not door number one (ecological collapse) and not door number two (economic collapse), but both of the above.
Later this week, I’m headed out for a personal research excursion. I’ll be visiting the heart of the Renaissance, peering straight into the birthplace of western civilization: Florence, Italy. And also to Venice and Rome. I’d like to see where it all got started, before it all comes down.

The book opens with a quote from Emerson’s Nature along with one from Tom Waits’ song, Earth Died Screaming: “The earth died screaming / While I lay dreaming …” After the opening quotes, we dive right into the miserable existence of Tyrone (Ty) O’Shaughnessy Tierwater, 75-year-old caretaker of the a misbegotten menagerie of nearly extinct animals owned by a wealthy music star still revered years after his glory days.
Clogged with nine billion people trying to eek out a life worth living, the world of 2025 as portrayed by Boyle is simultaneously hauntingly realistic and overly optimistic. The realistic portion concerns the weather: The rainy season in the protagonist’s region is comprised of several months in a hurricane, complete with roof-ripping winds and incessant downpours. When the hurricane turns off, the weather promptly switches to achingly arid, with temperatures rarely dipping below 90 F.
I appreciate Boyle’s portrayal of the climate and weather in 2025, but I think he is entirely too optimistic about the future of food: It’s difficult for me to foresee so many people obtaining enough food to persist well into their second century of life in a world with few remaining species and even fewer remaining forests. When ecosystems collapse to the extent portrayed in A Friend of the Earth, you can forget about insect-pollinated plants in the heartland of any continent on this planet.
I’ll admit that describing the planet’s future, and the role of humans in that presumed future, is a daunting task. Nonetheless, I think James Howard Kunstler’s World Made By Hand and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road both offer far more plausible scenarios for our prospects in 2025. Ultimately — and perhaps paradoxically — both books are more apocalyptic and also more hopeful about our future than A Friend of the Earth. On the other hand, Ty’s loneliness in a crowded world, induced by his intellect and his passion for the planet, reminds me of an email message I received a few months back from a brilliant former student. It included this pithy line, which expresses, better than I ever have, my oft-felt sentiment: “Despite overpopulation I find the world a lonely place.”
There is much to appreciate in this book, and not simply due to the reminiscent pleasure of my email in-box. Consider this line as Ty prepares to sabotage a large electrical project in the early 1990s: “All it took was public awareness — if they only knew what electricity ultimately cost them, if they only knew they were tightening the noose round their own throats, day by day, kilowatt hour by kilowatt hour, then they’d rise up as one and put an end to it.” Every thoughtful conservation biologist and friend of the planet knows the feeling and hopes education is sufficient. And yet, by now we all know it isn’t working and almost certainly won’t.
This brief passage reminds me that novels contain truth deeper than works of non-fiction: “Revenge fantasies got you nowhere. Despair did, though. Despair got you to submit to the gravitational force and become one with the cracked leather couch in front of the eternally blipping TV in a rented house on a palm-lined street in suburbia.”
Later, our protagonist reflects on a life in the trenches on behalf the planet’s non-human species: “Friendship. That’s what got me into the movement and that’s what pushed me way out there on the naked edge of nothing, beyond sense or reason, or even hope. Friendship for the earth. For the trees and shrubs and the native grasses and the antelope on the plain and the kangaroo rats in the desert and everything else that lives and breathes under the sun. … Except people, that is. Because to be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people.”
Maybe that’s why my in-box has all that hate mail. To be fair, though, I would modify the final sentence in the preceding paragraph thusly: “Because to be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the majority of people of the industrialized countries.” After all, extant non-industrial cultures and future people will thank friends of the earth for bringing down the industrial economy despite the best efforts of the collective masses who are insanely destroying the planet. Assuming, of course, the industrial economy does not persist through 2025, thereby ensuring there are no future people alive to thank contemporary friends of the earth.
Like Nietzsche, I write for future humans. And, like Nietzsche, my ego allows me to believe future people will appreciate my efforts in ways contemporary humans don’t.
Fast forward to the dry season of 2026, driving through northern California: “Of course, there are the inevitable condos. And traffic. This was once a snaking two-lane country road cut through national forest lands, sparsely populated, little-traveled. Now I’m crawling along at fifteen miles an hour in a chain of cars and trucks welded into the flanks of the mountain as far as I can see, and I’m not breathing cooling drafts of alpine air either — wind-whipped exhaust, that’s about it. Where thirty-five years ago there were granite bluffs and domes, now there is stucco and glass and artificial wood, condos banked up atop one another like the Anasazi cliff-dwellings, eyes of glass, teeth of steps and railings, the pumping hearts of air-conditioning units, thousands of them, and no human face in sight. Am I complaining? No. I haven’t got the right.”
Ouch. Like a knife in my left lung.
Ty struggles until the very end, even as he realizes the futility of his efforts. When asked, in the book’s final pages, what he accomplished through passion and hard work that landed him in prison and cost him his health, his marriage, his daughter, and nearly his life, he responds: “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
Ouch. There goes the other lung.

If you’re paying attention, though, you’re nervous when the CEO of General Motors starts pushing peak oil as a reason to buy electric cars, as he did at the massive Detroit auto show earlier this month. (Talk about irony: Didn’t GM kill the electric car, not so long ago?) Not to mention George W. Bush’s admission, from Saudi Arabia last week, that we’ve passed the world oil peak:
“I would like for them to realize that high energy prices affect the economies of consuming nations. And that if these economies weaken, those economies will eventually be buying fewer barrels of oil. And having said that, there is not a lot of excess capacity in the marketplace. What’s happened is, is that demand for energy has outstripped new supply. And that’s why there’s high price.”
BushCo has a backup plan, though. The military is preparing for the end of the electrical grid, as well as gearing up for the occupation in Iran. And Dubya can declare martial law at any time, for any reason he invents.
As if these tidbits aren’t enough to strike fear into the hearts of reasonable people, how about this one: Dubya wants to give you money. Seems Hank Paulson and the Boyz at the Federal Reserve Bank (Benny and the Inkjets) have convinced the CEO-in-chief we need to pump more “liquidity” into the system. The market has failed. That’s quite an admission from the cabal that promotes the so-called “Free Market.” So Dubya and his neo-conservative lackies in Congress are willing to risk another Weimer Republic to keep the Dow Jones Industrial Average riding high for another day. Actually, we’ll be lucky to have hyper-inflation, instead of government-induced chaos, within Dubya’s term.
Except for all the terrible news, which I’ve come to expect even though I can hardly stand it, I had a great weekend. I gave an invited address to 250 archaeologists, helped facilitate a talk titled God: The Failed Hypothesis, and was asked to help develop a screenplay about the collapse of civilization.
My talk to archaeologists focused on peak oil and the associated collapse of civilization. Turns out archaeologists love to study the collapse of civilization, with a minor exception: They aren’t particularly keen on hearing about the collapse of their own civilization.
The talk by Victor Stenger was sponsored by the Center for Inquiry. We reserved a venue large enough to accommodate twice our maximum audience to date, and it was about half the size we needed. Fortunately, Stenger repeated the talk, so about three-fourths of the initial audience got to hear it, although a third of them didn’t hear it until a couple hours after they’d planned.
Finally, a New York Times bestselling novelist discovered my earlier entry about the collapse of civilization and extinction of Homo sapiens, and he’d like to write a screenplay about the former. He describes the proposed film like this, in an email message:
“One that scares the shit out of people. A BLAIR WITCH like movie that begins in 2012 when the first city suffers the first blackout. Everything first person, shot from a family’s perspective. The blackouts become more frequent, and still no response from the herd. The Government makes up their pet excuses, then the gas lines begin. Then one day everyone makes a run to the grocery store … and the looting begins. And the lights go out.”
“Chaos.”
“Okay, you know where I am going, since you and I have already lived it in our heads a thousand times. So let’s SHOW IT in theaters. Let’s give Americans and the rest of the rats in the race a preview of what’s down the road.”
Pretty exciting stuff, I’d say. I can hardly wait.
For the screenplay. Not the chaos.