peak oil

Excerpts on exhaustion

Copyriot quite recently proposed a general theory of exhaustion. Well, would it be possible, or make anything clearer, to make a connection between peak oil and brain drain in relation to present day crisis capitalism? Here goes some excerpts on exhaustion, in order to make to put our cognitive capacities to work…

exhaustion |igˈzôs ch ən|

noun

  1. a state of extreme physical or mental fatigue : he was pale with exhaustion.
  2. the action or state of using something up or of being used up completely : the rapid exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves.• the action of exploring a subject or options so fully that there is nothing further to be said or discovered : the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives.

    • Logic the process of establishing a conclusion by eliminating all the alternatives.

ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from late Latin exhaustio(n-), from Latin exhaurire ‘drain out’ (see exhaust ).

– Oxford American dictionaries

The restrictions on flow that affect fossil fuels are the product of geology and economics, not bank regulations, but the principle is the same. It’s simply not possible to extract more than a certain amount of oil from a given oil field per year – the amount varies from field to field due to fine details of geology – and trying to do so is a good way to exhaust the field prematurely, losing the chance to get some of the oil you might have had by doing things the right way. Despite all the ballyhoo about high-tech methods of extracting oil from the ground, in practice, those turn out to get about the same amount of oil as the old-fashioned method, just a lot faster; in practice, that means that the field keeps production at a higher plateau for a while longer, but runs dry sooner. The limits to coal and natural gas production are a bit more straightforward: neither one is cheap to produce, and the faster you want to produce it, the more it’s going to cost you and the sooner you run out of good places to dig or drill.

– John Michael Greer, “Energy Funds, Energy Flows”

Today psychopathy reveals itself ever more clearly as a social epidemic and, more precisely, a socio-communicational one. If you want to survive you have to be competitive and if you want to be competitive you must be connected, receive and process continuously an immense and growing mass of data. This provokes a constant attentive stress, a reduction of the time available for affectivity. These two tendencies, inseparably linked, provoke an effect of devastation on the individual psyche: depression, panic, anxiety, the sense of solitude and existential misery. But these individual symptoms cannot be indefinitely isolated, as psychopathology has done up until now and as economic power wishes to do. It is not possible to say: “You are exhausted, go and take a vacation at Club Med, take a pill, make a cure, get the hell away from it all, recover in the psychiatric hospital, kill yourself.” It is no longer possible, for the simple reason that it is no longer a matter of a small minority of crazies or a marginal amount of depressives. It concerns a growing mass of existential misery that is tending always more to explode in the center of the social system. Besides, it is necessary to consider a decisive fact: at the time when capital needed to suck in physical energy from its exploited and from its slaves, psychopathology could be relatively marginalized. Your psychic suffering didn’t matter much to capital when you only had to insert screws and handle a lathe. You could be as sad as a solitary fly in a bottle, but your productivity was hardly affected because your muscles could still function. Today capital needs mental energies, psychic energies. And these are exactly the capacities that are fucking up. It’s because of this that psychopathology is exploding in the center of the social scene.

– Bifo, Precarious Rhapsody, p. 42

Traveling the circuits of social communication, the erotic object is multiplied to the point of becoming omnipresent. But excitation is no longer the prelude to any conclusion and multiplies desire to the point of shattering it. The unlimited nature of cyberspace endows experience with a kind of inconclusiveness. Aggressiveness and exhaustion follow from this unlimited opening of the circuits of excitation. Isn’t this perhaps an explanation of the erotic anxiety that leads to de-eroticization and that mix of hypersexuality and asexuality that characterizes post-urban life? The city was the place where the human body encountered the human body, the site of the gaze, contact, slow emotion and pleasure. In the post-urban dimension of the cyberspatial sprawl, contact seems to become impossible, replaced by precipitous forms of experience that overlap with commercialization and violence.

– Precarious Rhapsody, p. 90-91

The good side of teaching is that I’m doing Capital for the first time in years (not the whole thing but more of it than I’ve done in the past). The challenging side of teaching is my digital networks class. It is completely labor intensive–extra layers of interaction on top of the regular class format, layers that are supposed to help students connect to and comprehend the readings but which don’t seem to be having that affect. Together the two classes make me think about how much of a neoliberal subject I am, how I’ve incorporated the ideology that tells me that the more I am working the better I am, even when this is obviously false. I’m not better–I’m exhausted, disconnected, distracted, and confused.  Also, the amount of work I do doesn’t influence my pay and I have tenure. So I work out a sense of commitment, professionalism, all those things that bourgeois ideology convinces us are important.

– Jodi Dean, Dispersed and distracted

Oljan åstadkom 1900-talet och sex miljarder hjärnor

Efter att ha jobbat en hel del med hållbar utveckling och sociala medier inom ABF en tid så har jag haft anledning att tänka en del på relationen mellan dessa två fält. Jag tänkte dela lite weltschmerz med er så sluta läsa nu om du inte orkar med det.

För den som tänker från vänster känns det främmande att sätta arbetets roll i historien och samhället inom parantes. Marx har lärt oss att modernitetens utveckling får kraft ur konflikter mellan arbete och kapital. Kanske måste vi ändå göra det en stund för att begripa situationen. Genom arbetet brukar vi jordens resurser, råvarorna och jorden. Men att människan skulle forma jorden med sitt arbete är en kraftig överdrift. Marx gjorde samma misstag som hans samtida kollegor, t ex Smith. I en tid av kraftig expansion och kolonialism så var det lätt att förtränga betydelsen av ändliga resurser.

Arbetet kräver bränsle, det kräver energi. De senaste 150 åren har en övervägande del av denna energi bestått av fossila material: först kol, sedan i högre grad olja och naturgas. Människan har format jorden med kraft av en intensiv förbränning av sådana resurser. Arbetet har riktat detta flöde mot olika mål; mot åkermarkerna för att öka spannmålsproduktionen, mot jorden för att hämta upp mineralet och mot infrastrukturella projekt för att bygga hus och transportvägar.

Under nittonhundratalet sexdubblades världens befolkning. Hälften av oss flyttade in i enorma städer. En intensiv förbränning av olja möjliggjorde denna utveckling. Jordbruk och transport fick oväntat bistånd från den olja som lagrat tusentals år av solenergi. Det är inte orimligt att beskriva århundradet som en explosion. Oljan har utgjort ett oersättligt drivmedel för modernitet, globalisering, urbanisering och allmän befolkningstillväxt. Denna urladdning är oåterkallelig.

I backspegeln framstår 1900-talet som extra sorgsamt. Den våg av billig energi som svepte över vår koloni på jorden skapade förutsättningar för nästan vad som helst. Vi kunde flytta berg. Bataille tänker sig att denna urladdning var fullkomligt ohanterlig för vår kultur, energin var tvungen att omsättas och vi visste inte hur. Förstoppningen ledde till slut fram till andra världskriget, ett monumentalt globalt projekt för förslösande av fossil energi och mänskliga liv.

Jorden står nu som värd för sex miljarder mänskliga kroppar med tillhörande hjärnor, många av dessa står i daglig kontakt med hundratals andra hjärnor dessa med hjälp av kiselbaserade maskiner och fiberoptik. Vid tjugohundratalets början är ungefär en miljard människor direkt uppkopplade mot samma världsomspännande datanät, men indirekt står alla människor under direkt inflytande av dessa nätverk. Många av de hjärnor som inte är direkt kopplade mot dessa nät föddes på 30- och 40-talet och jag tänker att det är synd att de inte kommer hinna dela med sig av sina kunskaper och erfarenheter från modernitetens utveckling. Å andra sidan framstår denna generation tidvis som extremt ignorant förblindade av att deras liv bestått av konstant tillväxt. De verkar inte begripa att de lämnar efter sig en värld som står och spanar ut över en förkastningsbrant.

En aldrig tidigare skådad mängd hjärnor (fler än i resten av världshistorien totalt), tänker så tillsammans genom temporära kopplingar och fragmentariserade impulser. Det sägs ju ibland att summan är större än helheten i såna emergenta nätverk. Låt oss hoppas på det för vi har en del bekymmer framför oss och en del kanske kan lösas med tankekraft, medan andra problem är av mer materiell karaktär.

Många av världens stora oljefält har nått det såkallade oljekrönet. Vi närmar oss motsträvigt en punkt i historien då oljan kommer skifta karaktär och börja definieras i termer av brist snarare än överflöd. Konsekvenserna är att allt blir dyrare och mer komplicerat; produktion, transport, jordbruk, osv. Detta innebär också början till slutet på den globaliseringen och den ekonomiska tillväxten.

Så vad skulle vänstern kunna spela för roll i ett sådant förändrat landskap? Kanske måste allmänningen sättas i centrum för det politiska projektet för att kunna hantera minskande resurser. Genom fildelningsnätverken ser vi redan hur det håller på att hända, den moderna kulturhistoriens mångfald och rikedom framträder idag för oss på ett sätt som aldrig tidigare varit möjligt. Det är ingen räddning, men plåster på såren.

Vid vilken punkt kommer den kognitiva och tekniska utveckling som möjliggörs av nätet möta resursbristen som uppstår efter oljekrönet? Det kommer antagligen att vara avgörande för vår möjlighet att möta de utmaningar som vi har att vänta.

“Enjoy it while it lasts”

All three books for the nordic live action role-playing (larp) conference Knudepunkt i now online as PDF. Each book has different approach, one of them being academic, another one documentary and a third one with more of a conversational style. I’ve contributed to the latter of them, with a short essay trying to read post-apocalyptic role-playing through the glasses one gets from peak oil studies. Since the editor cut out the references I might as well add them here.

Image from U.S. Coast Guard

Enjoy it while it lasts

«In all our projections, future oil production by 2030 will have decreased from present levels. The world appears most likely to have passed the peak of global oil production and to have entered the descent phase.»
(Aleklett, et al. 2009)

In 2007 food prices doubled in many parts of the world. In 2008 a financial crisis hit the western economies. At that time the price of a barrel of oil had raised to a price of 147$, six times more than what was predicted by the international energy organs a few years earlier. The American industry and economy could not handle such high energy prices and we went into recession, which is still going. United States is completely dependent on cheap oil due to their way of life in suburbia and the extensive interstate highway system. Europe is not as bad off, we can tap the veins of mother Russia’s «natural» gas for some time – but still, oil is absolutely necessary to our transportation, industrial production and food system.

According to recent research from Uppsala University’s Global Energy Systems it is quite probable that those days in the summer of 2008 was historical. We reached peak oil, which means that more or less half of the world’s oil supplies has been depleted. The heydays of cheap, easily accessible energy are over. During 150 years of oil usage we have multiplied the world population by six, using energy condensed from thousands of years of sun energy input.

Oil is the blood of the modern society, it made globalisation and everything else we take for granted possible. In live role-playing there is a tradition of dismissing modernity. I have written extensively on this in «We Lost Our World», trying to outline the anti-modern aesthetics of (pre-modern) fantasy and (post-modern) sci-fi scenarios. Fantasy larps effectively makes us go back to basics, putting handcraft, shelters and making food centre stage. Post-apocalypse is of course just another take on how to escape the dull and repressive features of our modern societies. Post-apocalypse means post-modernity, post a collapse of our petroleum based industry, transportation system, agriculture and housing. It resembles a fear for a situation where we can no longer sustain our present living conditions. That kind of fear is not unmotivated.

Peak oil does not necessarily mean Apocalypse. There is plenty of more to burn off and although disastrous global warming is at the threshold chances are good that we burn all accessible fossil fuels (oil, coal, gas) before we stop. It just has to be done (in the name or profit). But the question is for how long it’s profitable to extract it. Peak oil means that we have reached a point where growth is not ensured the way it has been since mid-19th century. It’s sad when you think about the 20th century from that point of view. Humanity had access to almost free energy, that enabled almost any fantasy to come true, but still spoiled the situation in every possible way.

So I’m not saying that Apocalypse is coming, but everything will turn more expensive, all travels will be harder, social stability (whatever we had) is over. So if we had trouble to create a nice community pre-9/11 it will be a lot harder from this point. Some practise could do.

People are very unprepared for this gradual decline of the material conditions for life. Our christian culture has two modes of thinking: progress or apocalypse. Slow but certain destabilisation and decay for the rest of our lives does not seem probable at all to us. (see Kunstler, 2005) But the long term consequences of peak oil might not turn out very different from the results of space invaders, meteor impacts, nuclear war, zombie famines or what have you roaming around in the cultural production.

Thinking and practicing a post-industrial, post-sustainable life in the safe and playful context of live role-playing might give us an idea of how social life can evolve without the welfare state and the consumerist bonanza of global capitalism. The ship is losing altitude; let’s take it down in a smooth way.

References

Aleklett, Kjell et al. (2009): «The Peak of the Oil Age  – analyzing the world oil production Reference Scenario in World Energy Outlook 2008» in Energy Policy, 2009-11-09

James Howard Kunstler: The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century (Grove/Atlantic, 2005)

Widing, Gabriel: «We Lost Our World and Made New Ones: Live Role-Playing in Modern Times» in Playground Worlds

Published in Talk Larp – Provocative Writings from KP2011. Claus Raasted (ed.), Rollespilsakademiet, Copenhagen, Denmark