Shifts and Devices

The limits of ‘Just in Time’ delivery systems are becoming apparent in the form of empty shelves in the rice sections of local supermarkets, as the knock-on effect of global shortages is amplified by the lack of resilience in our food distribution system.

I suspect a combination of factors are in play that may make our food system far less stable and reliable than we believe:

• Just in Time delivery means that there is no redundant supply on hand to buffer runs on a particular food item. Shelves empty, and don’t refill until the next truck arrives.
• Globalized food speculation, production and distribution systems mean that food staples are not regionally insulated from each other. Shortages in the Asia rice markets cascade through to the Texas/California growing regions far more rapidly than in the past.
• Information and communication technologies, including both web and legacy media (WSJ, CNBC) propagate knowledge rapidly and effectively, giving more people in more places the ability to act rapidly on accurate and important information.

The combination of these factors forms what Thomas Homer-Dixon calls a tightly coupled network or system, prone to brittleness and rapid cascading failure.

The current shortage cycle is initially driven by heavy users of rice, such as extended families, small restaurants, and small retailers attempting to insulate themselves against rapid price rises by stocking up in advance, based on the information they have about future price and availability. However this creates a positive feedback loop, with medium and small users of rice picking up an extra bag to ensure they have enough for their family needs. Not a big deal in a storage-based system – but a serious problem in a JIT system, where every surge of purchases empties the shelves, and sets the stage for the next round of shortage.

Shortage in one staple creates concern about others, and with all grains in short supply worldwide, the ‘rice run’ could easily jump the shelves to create repeated runs on flour, pasta and other staples.

The result is a crystal-clear example of the pursuit of capitalist efficiency through ’JIT’ leading to a brittle and failure-prone system where any contraction at all in of the system inputs leads directly to cascading failure.

The solution is also clear: we need a less efficient (more redundant, lower-velocity, less tightly integrated) food system. And the same applies to any life of our support systems: When it comes to the things that really matter for survival, efficiency is the enemy of effectiveness.

Here is an excerpt from the ‘Archdruid Report’, looking at the impact cheap energy has had on the development of our culture and technology over the past 25 years. The part below touches on the Internet, which has evolved into a far different, more complex, and perhaps more brittle, structure than the original ARPAnet designers intended.

For a 25-year interval [1980-2005], by reckless overproduction of rapidly depleting resources pursued for short term gain, the cost of energy was driven down to artificially low levels that had never been seen before – and, barring a whole concatenation of miracles, will never be seen again. The resulting glut of energy fostered ways of doing things that make no sense at all under any other conditions.

The explosive spread of the internet [was] a product of the era of ultracheap energy. The hardware of the internet, with its worldwide connections, its vast server farms, and its billions of interlinked home and business computers, probably counts as the largest infrastructure project ever created and deployed in a two-decade period in human history. The sheer amount of energy that has had to be invested to create and sustain today’s internet, along with its economic and cultural support systems, beggars the imagination.

Could it have been done at all if energy stayed as expensive as it was in the 1970s? It’s hard to see how such a question could be answered, but the growth of the internet certainly would have been a much slower process; it might have moved in directions involving much less energy use; and some of the more energy-intensive aspects of the internet might never have emerged at all. It remains to be seen whether a system adapted to a hothouse climate of nearly free energy can cope with the harsher weather of rising energy costs in a postpeak world.

Full Text: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/02/back-up-rabbit-hole.html

A synopsis of Canada’s oil supply bifurcation by Gordon Laxer:

Canada needs Strategic Petroleum Reserves – short-term stores of oil that can be released during supply shortages to meet regional needs.

Canada is a producer and net exporter of oil. Yet this national status masks an important regional divide; Eastern Canada is a net importer of oil, receiving up to 90 percent of its oil from overseas, much of it from OPEC countries like Algeria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Eastern Canadians are vulnerable to global oil supply shocks. … There is not enough east-west oil pipeline capacity to transport western oil to Eastern Canadians in times of supply shock.

Unfortunately, unlike in most industrial countries, Canadian governments in recent years have not prioritized domestic energy security. Canada exports 67 percent of the oil it produces to the United States, and NAFTA’s proportionality clause prohibits Canada’s government from reducing this proportion, even in times of crisis.

Laxer goes on to propose a Strategic Petroleum Reserve and other specific measures, to give at least some resiliency to our dangerously brittle oil supply system, which currently holds only between 8 and 21 days of supply in Eastern Canada at any one time.

Full Text: http://www.straightgoods.ca/ViewFeature8.cfm?REF=70

I’ve been mucking around with vegetable gardening for a decade, without showing any real talent for it, but this year I’ve decided to focus hard on the humble potato, and see just how many pounds of them can be grown more or less organically in 4 x 8 raised beds.

I spent several weeks in November running around the neighbourhood with a wheelbarrow collecting the leaves people here bag up for disposal every fall, and stacking them in growing frames, with the hope that the leaves will have partially composted by spring, when I will get some seed potatoes and plant out several beds.

I plan to try some different techniques for growing spuds in each bed, and see which yield the best results in these small raised beds.

If some of these urban spud experiments work, by next year I might have a reasonable system down that I can share with others, and maybe help friends and neighbours grow some healthy calories in small spaces built of scrap wood.

Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson has a long interview on BLDGBLOG, that is well worth the read. An excerpt:

… if you think about sustainability, then you can start thinking about permaculture and what permaculture really means. It’s not just sustainable agriculture, but a name for a certain type of history. Because the word sustainability is now code for: let’s make capitalism work over the long haul, without ever getting rid of the hierarchy between rich and poor and without establishing social justice.

Sustainable development, as well: that’s a term that’s been contaminated. It doesn’t even mean sustainable anymore. It means: let us continue to do what we’re doing, but somehow get away with it. By some magic waving of the hands, or some techno silver bullet, suddenly we can make it all right to continue in all our current habits. And yet it’s not just that our habits are destructive, they’re not even satisfying to the people who get to play in them. So there’s a stupidity involved, at the cultural level.

BLDGBLOG: In other words, your lifestyle may now be carbon neutral, but was it really any good in the first place?

Robinson: Right. Especially if it’s been encoding, or essentially legitimizing, a grotesque hierarchy of social injustice of the most damaging kind. And the tendency for capitalism to want to overlook that – to wave its hands and say “well, it’s a system in which eventually everyone gets to prosper, you know, the rising tide floats all boats, blah blah” well, this is just not true.

We should take the political and aesthetic baggage out of the term utopia. I’ve been working all my career to try to redefine utopia in more positive terms – in more dynamic terms. People tend to think of utopia as a perfect end-stage, which is, by definition, impossible and maybe even bad for us. And so maybe it’s better to use a word like permaculture, which not only includes permanent but also permutation. Permaculture suggests a certain kind of obvious human goal, which is that future generations will have at least as good a place to live as what we have now.

Robinson’s thinking in many ways parallels that of John Michael Greer at The Archdruid Report, one of the most thoughtful and challenging of the blogs examining the prospects for ‘post-carbon’ civilization.

The US antiwar group Code Pink has adopted the basic concept of Activist Thresholdware in their current tax pledge campaign:

War tax resistance is far from a new idea. But there is a bold initiative brewing that has an elegantly simple new angle: There is safety in numbers. The idea is to get people to sign a pledge that they will engage in civil disobedience by withholding a percentage of their taxes, but only if a critical mass of 100,000 signers is reached by April 15, 2008.

Activists have spent long hours pushing for election reform, marching in the streets, and engaging in other forms of civil disobedience against the Iraq war with seemingly no effect, so clearly a different tack is needed. The “I’ll jump if you will” approach to war tax resistance just might work.

My friend Jodie Evans, cofounder of Code Pink, is one of those people who live on the barricades, sleep little, and dedicate most every waking moment to social change. [...] But Jodie is also at home in the most rarefied strata of power. Thanks in no small part to her, the pledge list will be seeded with participants from business, Hollywood, and other influential enclaves, and the initiative will be backed by a strong communications strategy.

Campaign URL: www.dontbuybushswar.org

Or, more generally, into open source Content Management Frameworks (CMFs).

Back in 2004, Mike Gifford from Open Concept Consulting and I co-wrote an essay, Top 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism, that presented a roundup of the then-hot tech tools for online organizing.

Much can change in 1000 days, and the original article is badly in need of a reprise, taking into account the rapid evolution of open source tools and the web itself.

The original article was written on a wiki, with Mike and I chipping in to iteratively write chunks and massage the prose into final form, to the extent that I doubt if either of us could remember who wrote any particular word–a great form of collaboration that I would recommend to any co-writers who are in alignment on the general direction they want to take a text.

When reviewing the article, I was struck by the fact that many of the tools in the various sectors discussed have not so much evolved or been displaced, but that the sectors themselves have become blurry and blended.

Where before, strong single-purpose open source applications addressed well defined problems, now the problems themselves seem far mushier, and the solutions are often not dedicated single-purpose applications, but instead are built with the tools and modules of a CMF.

The sectoral software dinosaurs that evolved to solve specific problems are falling rapidly to weaselly little CMFs – furry little generalists with opposable thumbs that cross sectors without a backwards glance, leaving even the most elegant of the dino-apps gasping in the dust like an analogy gone bad.

By CMFs, I mean those content management systems that are flexible and easily extended with modular add-ins to take on tasks that have traditionally been done by specialized web applications. Drupal, Joomla and Plone all come to mind as examples of easily extensible content management frameworks that can solve the kind of specialized problems that were best handled by dedicated applications in the depths of the past. The first three recommendations in the original 2004 Top Ten Open Source Tools for eActivism article act as examples of the extent and limits of this shift:

• For online magazine publishing and content sharing, ActionApps was the top contender in 2004. Addressing the same design problem in 2007, I’d start with a CMF – with a special focus on selecting a framework with strong RSS content syndication capabilities – and then extend it with appropriate modules to meet the specific needs of the project. Depending on the exact project requirements any of the major CMFs might be the basis of a good solution: For example, a glossy magazine-oriented site might begin with Joomla and extend with the Joomla Magazine component, while a site oriented to content sharing between related sub-sites might choose Drupal and the Organic Groups Sites module.
• In what we described as the the slash/forums space, PostNuke was top of the heap due to widespread use and support. Again, approaching the much more developed ‘social/news-sharing software’ space of 2007, I’d start with a CMF and customize with membership and peer-rating modules to meet the specific needs of the project.
• We positioned Drupal as a top blogging tool – a focus that several readers pointed out ignored the versatility inherent in Drupal. Today, for a pure and simple blogging solution I’d go with WordPress or another dedicated blogging package, but for anything more complex, such as a multi-user blogging community site I’d again take advantage of Drupal’s extensibility, utilizing its well-developed Taxonomy and Organic Groups modules to build the exact features required by the site.

… and so on through the list. Many of the strongly specialized sectoral apps of 2004 are coming under challenge by content management framework solutions in 2007. I’d expect that only very elegant and flexible applications in specialized areas – such as phpBB for discussion forums – will hold their reptilian ground against the swarming attacks of these warm and fuzzy CMFs.

Here is a little precursor of something I expect to see a lot more of in the near future: A highly specialized ‘knowledge worker’ contemplating the impact of peak oil and energy descent on his specialized area of expertise.

The Greening of Entertainment Tech by Mark Fleishman. A couple of excerpts:

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my future. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about what an energy-scarce future might mean for my career as a writer and my chosen subject matter. I write about the audio/video universe: surround sound, big-screen television, and all the other products and issues that attend them. These things are products of an expansive age of cheap energy, an era when bigger is better, whether it’s your 7.1-channel audio system, your 60-inch TV screen, your McMansion, or your SUV.

There is ample evidence suggesting that this happy-go-lucky age is beginning to wind down, largely due to something called peak oil … So a lot of the things we take for granted are about to become prohibitively expensive, if not downright impossible, including industrial farming, large homes with central AC, capacious SUVs, a landscape optimized solely for private vehicles, discount air travel, the Wal-Mart retail environment, and–oh, yes–all that home theater stuff I write about for a living.

Here’s what our [future] home entertainment systems may look like…

Mark goes on to discuss details of the impact of energy scarcity, noting particularly a switch to locally manufactured speakers, simpler configurations – the rebirth of stereo instead of surround sound – and an acceleration of the move to iPod-based low-energy and off-the-grid systems, saying:

There’s nothing smaller or more self-sufficient than a flash-memory player that can operate for long periods off the power grid. You’ll need it for company on the tram, or during all those long walks you’ll be taking to the grocer, the school, and the church.

I’d go further than Mark – or perhaps just look a couple of decades further ahead – and add notes on on wind-up and solar audio devices, repair and resale of salvaged components, recycling for parts, and the rebirth of local acoustic music in the post-peak-oil world.

I think we can all expect to re-examine the trajectory of our lives and careers in the face of global warming and peak oil, and it is good to see the process starting now.

I have run across several thinkers lately that draw the Open Source rabbit out of the black hat of current affairs, offering free/libre software culture as a model for future political and social organization. A couple of examples:

The Upside of Down –Thomas Homer-Dixon

Thomas Homer-Dixon delivers a well-crafted presentation covering creative responses to environmental crisis and energy descent. He focuses on collective action under the impetus of “catagenisis” – catastrophically induced creative system change. There is a very interesting comment on Open Source Democracy in the questions at the end, a theme that is expanded in his book.

Presentation Link: http://wacsf.vportal.net/?fileid=4658
Book: The Upside of Down: http://www.theupsideofdown.com/

Software and Community in the Early 21st Century – Eben Moglen

Another great online presentation viewing the world in broad terms – and directly from an open source perspective – delivered at Plone Conference 2006 in Seattle, by Eben Moglen.

It is a brilliant and idosyncratic synthesis, positing the free software movement as the fundamental transformative technology of the new millennium. Eben draws on an eclectic mix of history, socialism, free-market and post-market economics. His thesis is flawed only by the minor inconvenience that software is not the fabric of reality–unless you are attending a Plone conference.

His view is that in the 21st century production happens not in factories, but in collaborative communities, and that this fundamental shift in the control of the means of production changes everything. Eben goes further to hypothesize that the forces that have confronted each other over social justice for generations are now more evenly matched than ever before, based on the efficiencies of open source community-based technologies, and the emergence of information and education replicated freely, without proprietary ownership.

Presentation Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NorfgQlEJv8
Review: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives//005626.html

The Design Imperative – Jeff Vale
And an excerpt from Jeff Vail’s recent essay:

If we choose to pursue technics as a means of maintaining or improving our quality of life, how should we organize this pursuit? I have three suggestions: decentralized, open source, and vernacular.

Let’s start by taking discrete examples of places that produce a quality of life seemingly disproportionate to their energy consumption. There are countless examples, but because it has a long tradition in this area in American popular culture, I’ll choose the Tuscan village.

…

How is the Tuscan village open source? Tuscan culture historically taps into a shared community pool of technics in recognition that a sustainable society is a non-zero-sum game. Most farming communities are this way – advice, knowledge, and innovation is shared, not guarded. Beyond a certain threshold of size and centralization, the motivation to protect and exploit intellectual property seems to take over (another argument for decentralization. There is no reason why we cannot share innovation in technics globally, while acting locally: in fact, the internet now truly makes this possible, leveraging our opportunity to use technics to improve quality of life.

URL: http://www.jeffvail.net/2007/04/design-imperative.html

An overview of the state of the electrical grid, with a look ahead to the construction of a future digital-quality grid. Here is an excerpt:

Consider the wastage inherent to the electrical system bringing the image of this report to your computer screen. Roughly two-thirds of the energy produced to power your computer was lost as waste heat in the centralized generation of electricity; it was simply vented into the atmosphere. Of the remaining third, line losses during transmission and distribution misplaced another roughly seven percent bringing the electricity to your wall outlet. And finally, half of that energy was lost as waste heat converting the 110-volt alternating current to the 12-volt direct current your computer (and countless other digital devices) needs in order to operate free of the even minor power fluctuations that can adversely affect digital circuitry. So in this example for every 100 watts of electricity generated, only about 16 actually get used. Imagine the waste attendant to the server farms of the five largest search engines in the US, which combined are estimated to continuously operate more than 2 million servers.

That is not to say the Digital Age will entail a shift from alternating current to direct current. Rather, the shift will be from an inefficient, slow, outdated mechanical switching to a focused, faster, more intelligent system employing electronic devices to improve monitoring capabilities and load capacities while smoothing fluctuations and increasing the reliability of the existing alternating current.

Read the whole story, written largely from an investor’s viewpoint, at http://www.safehaven.com/article-7298.htm
This makes a cheery counterpoint to Odulvai Gorge Theory, the “Electrical Engineering as a Dismal Science” approach that focuses instead on the difficulties of maintaining a complex and chaotic grid into the future:

The theory is defined by the ratio of world energy production (use) and world population… It states that the life expectancy of Industrial Civilization is less than or equal to 100 years: 1930-2030.

World energy production per capita from 1945 to 1973 grew at a breakneck speed of 3.45 %/year. Next from 1973 to the all-time peak in 1979, it slowed to a sluggish 0.64 %/year. Then suddenly – and for the first time in history – energy production per capita took a long-term decline of 0.33 %/year from 1979 to 1999. The Olduvai theory explains the 1979 peak and the subsequent decline. More to the point, it says that energy production per capita will fall to its 1930 value by 2030, thus giving Industrial Civilization a lifetime of less than or equal to 100 years.

Should this occur, any number of factors could be cited as the causes of collapse. I believe, however, that the collapse will be strongly correlated with an ‘epidemic’ of permanent blackouts of high-voltage electric power networks worldwide…

From the aptly named Dieoff.org web site at http://dieoff.org/page224.htm. See Wikipedia for an overview and additional links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olduvai_theory