On Saturday, October 23, 2004, at 12:39 PM, BobAuler@xxxxxxx wrote:
also, if oil is this high, it will fuel (bad pun) the hydrogen car market and
make that necessary transition...building the stations to service them.
same old story.
Hydrogen is an energy carrier not a source and it's a net energy loser, it takes more energy to make it and compress it for transport than you get from using it in a fuel cell. At the moment most of the world's hydrogen is made by cracking natural gas, it's an oil industry product. The transition to hydrogen also requires a gigantic infrastructure change and no one yet knows if it's a viable alternative to oil or an economic and technological non-starter. There are a lot of hydrogen pessimists around.
Oil and gas are important because they are very cheap stored energy, a natural treasure extracted in gigantic quantities that have allowed us humans to breed to plague proportions and construct a global industrial civilisation. To keep the 'same old story' going we need to find a replacement for oil that is just as cheap and easy to transport but there's nothing else quite like it in nature. All the alternatives are problematic and yield less energy and it looks like the transition to new energy sources and the global economy they support is going to be a very rough ride for humanity, especially if oil extraction is already peaking at the same time as the US widens its current energy wars.
Globalisation is predicated on constant economic growth which basically means the constant growth in energy supply. As soon as our total energy supply starts contracting then growth based or debtor economies become unworkable and the international order fragments into nationalist competitions for dwindling resources. This has already started with the US global war on 'terror' and its oil war of conquest in Iraq. If you factor in the current world water and food shortages, a precarious global economy along with the possibility that we might already be on the threshold of runaway global warming then the gigantism that Heidegger warned us about some 70 years ago may have reached the limits of its constant exponential growth.
Have you heard of the ecological term 'overshoot'? It's when a species experiences explosive population growth through exploitation of a niche resource. Sooner or later the population reaches an ecological carrying capacity limit beyond which its numbers are unsustainable without the limiting resource that allowed it to multiply. If that resource is nonrenewable then once it has been used up the population experiences a catastrophic and rather abrupt decline in numbers, a die off. Sometimes a plague species may even radically change the environment it lives in, adversely effecting the carrying capacity of that environment in which case the population decline can become an extinction. It's a reasonably common natural event geologically speaking and the fossil record is defined by species extinctions.
This is all part of the context I've been researching the last few months in which nationalist military power is predicated on a nation's industrial power which at its base is predicated on energy security. Our modern technological power to transform the earth and bring about a planetary order relies on abundant supplies of cheap energy. I think notions of 'human rights' and 'democratic freedoms' might also be reliant on an energy surplus. But this has been staring us in the face for decades as most of the 'third world' has never had the benefit of our level of energy surplus, all we need to do is look at Africa to see where we're heading. Or North Korea. I personally think Cuba may be the best case real world model for how to respond to energy decline.
It's in this energy decline context that extremist ideologies like neoconservatism start to look a lot like the self-conscious ordering of the 'will to will' that Heidegger uncovers in his critique of Nazism. I'd say we're heading back into Nietzschean territory, into the extreme nihilism of unfettered will to power, and the pace is accelerating like everything else. If peak oil occurs within the next three years then post 2010 all bets are off and the 'same old story' of mid to late 20th century modernity will rapidly become a historical aberrance.
Cheers,
Malcolm
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