Shifts and Devices

Pat Murphy from Community Solutions offers some realistic (and therefore highly unacceptable!) suggestions:

The nation needs fuel efficient cars but we don’t need engineering departments and managers who are not able to build them. It just may not be possible psychologically for American car companies to make the shift away from the SUV. One solution is to buy the designs or manufacturing rights from Honda and Toyota and begin manufacturing high quality Japanese cars in volume in this country…

We are in an emergency situation now and car companies should be required to operate as if this is the case. One way to hunker down is to stop building new models every year. … Even today, Detroit does not design and build a new engine or new transmission each year for every model. Most of a new “model” consists of cosmetic body changes – unnecessary except for styling. If we replace 20 mpg SUVs with 45 mpg Toyota Prius’ and Honda Insights we will use far less material and labor.

What would we do then with the excess capacity of workers and production plants? I suggest they should begin building buses. Mass transit is needed and that can be provided most rapidly by buses. Currently U.S. cars and light trucks (SUVs) use 60% of transportation fuel – buses use less than 1% (.7%). One Greyhound bus takes an average of 34 cars off the road, and achieves 184 passenger miles per gallon of fuel.

How quickly could we do this? GM began building the CCKW, the first version of the so called “deuce and a half” military truck in 1941. The company produced 43,000 CCKWs in 1941, and ramped up to 111,000 in 1942 and 131,000 in 1943. Could all the extra capacity plants in the U.S. deliver 100,000 buses per year after ramping up? Does this mean we could take 3.4 million SUVs off the road each year? Now that’s progress!

We can also lower the speed limit immediately. On October 28, 1942, a War Speed Limit of 35 mph was set. In the first energy crisis of the 1970s the nation adopted a 55 mph speed limit which had the added benefits of significantly reducing deaths from automobile accidents. The fact that we have not already slowed down in response to the current crisis is a reflection of our “fast is best” cultural outlook since that time.

There is much more in the essay on expanding bus service and the bus vs. rail debate for re-tooling the North American transportation infrastructure. See: http://www.communitysolution.org/blog/?p=5 for full text and comments.

Personally I’d support reintroducing the car that we bought used, and then owned and drove for 17 years: The Toyota Tercel. Having recently shopped for a new sub-compact, I believe that there is nothing on the market today that can compare with a 20-year-old Tercel for reliable basic transportation and cargo – Comparatively, the Toyota Yaris is a finicky high-tech toy. In the end, we settled on a Kia Rio hatchback, but a ‘built-this-year’ 20 year old Tercel with some minor efficiency and pollution upgrades would have won hands down if such were available.

Sharon Astyk has a grim and important essay that reminded me again of something easy to turn away from:  IT professionals are up towards the pointy end of a pyramid that is structurally based on oil, food, and poverty. Her view is that the current abstract fincancial crisis is not at all about chattering bits and risk algorithms… the pyramid has instead collapsed from the bottom, not from the top. Some excepts from the full essay:

We might look at the boom and bust cycle of our economy, and indeed, the world economy, as one moved not just by energy, but by new workers (who then conveniently become new consumers and create new markets – remember, 70% of the economy is consumer spending).  Each boom cycle has followed the move of vast numbers of new workers into the economy, essentially creating more money in the form of productivity, and more income to spread around and lubrication to the economic system. [...]

It is worth asking why these low wage workers are so important to each bubble.  There are a couple of reasons.  The first is that even in the booming periods of cheap energy, it was never possible to mechanize or use oil for the majority of jobs – and as energy supplies rose in cost and tightened, it is less and less possible to do so.  The majority of all world farmers, builders and factory workers do use some machinery, but the primary engine of production is human work.  The other thing that matters is while there is a substantial difference in the pay scale of, say, an IT professional over a construction worker or a farmer, and the value of the work of the IT professional in the industrial economy is higher, moving people over to the white collar economy isn’t nearly as effective or profitable as taking people out of the subsistence economy and putting them on the lower rungs of the industrial economy.  First of all, you take a large portion of the productivity of a human being (remember, new industrial workers generally work long, long hours), without any amortized costs to provide him or her with health insurance or education.  That is, the total society investment in someone in the subsistence economy who then moves to working 12 hours a day in the industrial economy is very small, and the amount of work she does is quite dramatically more than what she did to serve the industrial economy when she was a subsistence farmer or a housewife.  Education, on the other hand, is expensive, and white collar workers like things like health care and vacation.  The money is in the new workers. [...]

I wonder, when we peel back the layers of the onion later, and look at the history of this Depression, I wonder if we’ll see that in fact, what happened was that we squeezed out the lifeblood of the very thing we’d built our economy upon – new workers/consumers who could be counted on to grow the economy outwards and upwards.  We could have forseen this – but we chose not to – we chose, as we struggled to keep our lifestyle intact on the backs of the world’s poor, not to see that we stand on their backs, and it is people…all the way down.  In killing them, we killed ourselves. It may be that besides the tragedy of starving millions of poor people, we may also have brought down our own system, simply because we did not see, did not realize that the poor matter more to us than we like to admit.

From: http://sharonastyk.com/2008/09/25/peeling-the-onion-whats-behind-the-financial-mess/

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.

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.