Why I don’t have much respect for Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria
These two writers are very popular these days, writing as they do in an intelligent manner about things like globalization and Iraq and the Middle East in general. I think, however, their popularity springs, not from some special insight they have, but rather by their lack of any special insight. In other words, I think they are popular because they are saying things that lots of people can now see on their radar, and so a lot of people get to feel smart with them as they describe these near objects. But globalization got started a long time ago - sometime shortly after WWII, probably effectively heralded by the Bretton-Woods agreements and the Marshal Plan. Some would push it’s beginnings back to the Spanish-American war. The point is, however, that the time for special insight into globalization was 50-60 years ago.
However, writing about globalization, about a “flat earth” and outsourcing, about a post-american world would not have been accepted in the 50’s. Not because they would be wrong - our present shows us how prescient such views would have been - but rather because they’d have been describing things so far off most people’s radar that they would not have been understood. Their profound insight would have been lost on most and thus they would not have been popular. Perhaps respected in certain small circles, but not generally. Most likely they would have been marginalized and considered to be on the “fringe”. But they would have been deserving of my respect had they been writing about these things 50 years ago.
And even now it wouldn’t be so bad if the trends of globalization were set to realistically continue for another 50-60 years. Then we could say these writers were doing a bang-up job of describing the present and extrapolating out a reasonable future. But globalization as we know it is not likely to continue its present course. There are forces set to derail globalization that need to be acknowledged and dealt with, else they will deal with us, and harshly. Energy problems are at the heart of these forces, but it can be generalized to a broader spectrum of resources (mostly those that depend on fossil fuels), whose shortages are going to cause some severe problems. Global climate change is also likely to play a large role, but I will not pretend to understand anything about what it will be.
Of course, it is always hard to identify changes in direction and trends before they become obvious in hindsight. As they say, peak oil will never be conclusively identified except in the rear-view mirror - that doesn’t mean that attempts at prediction are fruitless, though. Peak conventional oil is a fact - oil fields in fact deplete, and, with the best of technologies, show a depletion curve that looks something like a bell curve with a long right-side tail. But this simple fact is obscure for a lot of people nowadays for two reasons: one is the rise of non-conventional oil (ie, tar sands and shale oil), and the other is an overly market-based economic worldview. These represent two veils that are preventing most people today from seeing the underlying realities of oil depletion.
Writers writing sagely about how peak oil will change the world, will derail globalization, will change current relationships forever are out there. Some of them even have a healthy degree of popularity (though, as in the case of Kunstler, it comes more from his style of prose and his background then from being particularly insightful about energy matters - he is a latecomer to it and latched onto it because it meshed well with his hatred of suburbia, which is where he began). But none are as well respected as Friedman and Zakaria who are predicting current trends will continue.
Friedman and Zakaria appear to me especially blinded by a market-based economic worldview that says, in its most simplistic form, that as the price of a commodity rises, more of that commodity will be produced in response, and thus the price will then decline, or, if the commodity cannot be produced, and adequate substitute will be produced, and similarly, the price will then decline for both the substitute and the original. In this worldview, more oil will be found and produced as the price of oil rises. We are having shortages today, not because of a lack of oil, but rather because of a lack of investment in finding new oil - especially from the 80’s and 90’s when oil was very cheap. Too cheap to stimulate much discovery. Of course, discovery peaked in the 60’s for the world, and in the 30’s for the US, and the oil crisis of the 70’s did nothing to change that fact.
However, if confronted with such basic facts about oil discovery and production, most followers of this economic worldview will simply assert that a substitute will be found. For example, it is often heard that OPEC doesn’t want the price of oil to get too high because then research into alternative energies will find cheaper alternatives than oil and OPEC will lose customers. We’d just go solar, or hydro, or biofuel, or wind and solve the problem that way. And so it is with Friedman and Zakaria, who, when not talking about the importance of succeeding in Iraq or about the rise of China and India, can sometimes be seen advocating alternative energies. No mention of the irony that, Iraq being essentially about control of oil, if we successfully developed alternative energies, we’d have no particular need to succeed in Iraq. And since it seems highly doubtful we can afford both strategies, I often wonder why no one is pointing out this basic inconsistency in their writings. Obama the presidential candidate suffers the same inconsistency. And McCain is just insane, but that’s neither here nor there.
But of course, the situation is worse than just an inconsistency of strategy. It remains highly unlikely that any of these alternatives will be able to save us and successfully replace oil. Neither solar nor wind can be built out fast enough or cheaply enough, and neither generate a dependable baseload of power. We can all agree they are wonderful sources of energy, but it is too little too late. Nuclear has the capacity, but it is also expensive and requires an enormous commitment. And still these solutions only solve half the problem - the generation of energy itself. The other part of oil is that it serves as a fantastic store of energy as well as a source of energy. Storing electricity is hugely difficult. Some tout hydrogen, but when you add up all the inefficiencies of hydrogen (electricity to hydrogen, hydrogen loss in transport and storage, then hydrogen back to electricity), it becomes a non-solution - at least for long term energy storage for transportation. It might be useful for on-site short-term energy storage for a solar or wind power plant.
And batteries are heavy and cumbersome, expensive, toxic, and require precious metals in short supply. Still, a better solution than hydrogen, but the cost of moving to an electric/battery world involves the costs of new power plants to supply the electricity, the cost of billions of batteries, and the cost of upgrading our electricity infrastructure to handle the additional load. These are daunting costs that dwarf previous large projects like the Manhatten Project or going to the moon. If you look at the debt we’re in currently, it doesn’t appear that paying for such a large conversion to a substitute for oil is in the cards. It is more likely that an economic collapse awaits that will reverse the trends of globalization and increase the chances of violence and war.
The Green Revolution bound our production of food to our production of fossil fuels - most notably oil and natural gas. Natural gas is used to create fertilizers and oil is used to create pesticides, and both are used for energy that runs our farm equipment, ships our food thousands of miles, and mines the potassium and phosphate that plants need to grow. In the past eight years, our stores of grains worldwide have fallen, and in 2008 are lower than they have been since around 1950 - ie, before the Green Revolution. Increasing population, eroding soils, and weather problems have diminished our ability to produce enough food. Additionally, the use of food to create biofuels competes with the use of food to feed us, and thus we see the prices of food rising dramatically and in parallel with energy. Of course, we are more than willing to fight wars to secure energy supplies. That we would do the same for food goes without saying, though it does need to be said that while we wouldn’t kill our neighbor for energy, we probably would for food.
Even if we find a sustainable way to live, it will involve a return, at least to some extent, to locality - locally grown and made. Less energy intensive, less dependent on distant parts of the world. Globally available products and services will be the province of the rich more and more and the poor and middle class less and less. Possibly we will reinvent things with new sources of energy, like a revamped electricity based infrastructure, but that will take time (our oil-based infrastructure has been over 100 years in the making), and we might emerge 100 years from now with a new globalization, but what that will look like would take more than a special kind of insight.
