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Apocalypse: Peak Oil

One of the entries on my fun list of "paths to apocalypse" was "Peak Oil crisis."  I've been following (loosely) the peak oil debate for some time now.  If you haven’t, the issue is when will the amount of oil pulled out of the ground around the globe each month stop rising and begin to head down? And, what will the consequences of that be?  (See this excellent Q&A on the subject.)

Peak oil means not only that the supply curve will turn downward (even as the demand curve keeps rising), but that all the low-hanging fruit (cheaply extractable oil) will have been plucked, leaving only reserves that (even independent of supply/demand issues) will cause prices to rise because they cost a lot more to extract.  We don’t actually have to run out of oil to have big problems.  When it takes more than an oil barrel’s worth of energy to get a barrel out, very little will be extracted (this is a concept known as “Energy Returned on Energy Invested”).

On consequences, pessimists point out how EVERYTHING in modern life depends on oil, from consumer products to imported goods to plastic baggies to the modern agriculture that supports our population. The optimist camp argues that the adjustment period will be gradual and give us plenty of time to adjust our lifestyles, assimilate alternative energies, etc.

The optimists also say the peak oil moment is further in the future, that we'll keep making new discoveries, and inventing new extraction technologies, so we'll have more time to adjust, and have a "soft landing."

The pessimists think it's happening soon -- like, yesterday -- and that we're in for a very rude shock.  Even most of the optimists seem to say that oil production will peak between 2011 and 2020, which I’m old enough to regard as not that far away. 

In 1956 a guy named M. King Hubbert  predicted that domestic U.S. oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970.  This prediction was widely scoffed at by the scientific community –- until, what do you know, in 1970 he turned out to be right.  (Domestically, the U.S. has never produced as many barrels of oil as we did in 1970, and we haven’t produced as little oil as we now do since the 1940s.)  In the same paper, Hubbert predicted that global Peak Oil would hit in “about half a century.”  That would be, uh, 2006. 

In addition to the U.S., production peaks have already hit in most of the rest of the world, including the North Sea, Venezuela, and China.

The main hope for a reprieve seems to be Saudi Arabia, which is the only nation that claims it still has enormous reserves.  There’s just one problem.  No one really knows how much oil the Saudis are sitting on.  The Saudis are secretive about it and don’t permit independent scientists to study their fields, and there is apparently a fair amount of evidence that they don’t have nearly as much as they claim, and some serious political incentives for them to exaggerate.  When the Saudi government took over the company Aramco in 1980, it doubled the size of the reserves it claimed to possess (which just happened to allow them to produce more under OPEC quota rules). Some say we may find out within months just how full of it (oil that is) the Saudis really are.

I hope our intel agencies aren’t spending all their time chasing potential terrorists, and are working on this question for us.  (Of course, whatever they find out, probably wouldn’t do the public any good since they would inevitably keep it secret in their typical mindless fashion.)

Anyway, there’s a huge amount of discussion of Peak Oil on the Internet and in books.  It seems to strike a chord in the same manner as the JFK assassination and the like.  Some commentators, like James Howard Kunstler (whose book Geography of Nowhere I really admired), seem to take just a little too much satisfaction in what they think is the coming apocalypse, seeing it as an eschatological confirmation of their anti-modern aesthetic and environmental critique of American suburbia (not that I don’t agree with the critique, but I distrust the surety with which its comeuppance is predicted).

The real question is, if you think this is coming, what does an average American do about it?  We’ve chosen to live in a location where we have a fair amount of freedom from dependence on our car.  I’m not sure what else to do – it’s not like I can store a lifetime supply of petroleum in my garage.  The bottom line is that, autonomous American individualists though we might be, we need to take action on the level of the nation, not the individual.  And for the past 7 years we have done squat.

West Nile Virus - hype or real risk?

Arlington County Virginia, where I live, announced today that they were going to be spraying pesticides in my neighborhood because local mosquitoes have been testing positive for West Nile Virus, and a human case has emerged. (They're also keeping all the children at my kids' elementary school indoors during some of the most beautiful weather we've had in months.)

I wonder about this. I’m curious about the cost-benefit calculations, and suspicious that, as is so often the case these days, the calculus is all whacked because of media-driven hysteria over a novel phenomenon with an exotic name that has led to a perception of risk out of all proportion to reality.

The security expert Bruce Schneier likes to say (to paraphrase) ‘if you read about it in the newspaper, you shouldn’t be afraid of it.’  The fact that it’s in the media is a sure sign, he says, that the danger in question is unusual or freakish –- while its the things like slipping in bathtubs or falling down stairs that really get you.  Or the flu.

Is West Nile Virus really dangerous enough to warrant the dumping of god knows how much pesticide into our community (grass, plants, soil, water tables, insects, animals’ bodies, insects again, rivers, etc)?  (The authorities claim the pesticide is “safe” – another question is how much faith to put in that claim, but that’s a separate matter, even if for me it’s not a whole lot.  It ain’t safe for mosquitoes anyway, I guess).

I turned to the CDC to see what I could find out. There I read that “approximately 80% of people who are infected with West Nile do not show any symptoms at all.”  I read that about 1 in 150 of people who become infected will develop “severe illness,” and that of that 0.66% who get severe illness, “case-fatality rates range from 3% to 15%.”  If my calculations are right that means between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 5,000 of people who are infected will die.

How does that compare to the flu?  The CDC says:

Each flu season is unique, but it is estimated that, on average, approximately 5% to 20% of U.S. residents get the flu, and more than 200,000 persons are hospitalized for flu-related complications each year. About 36,000 Americans die on average per year from the complications of flu.

5% of the US population of 300 million is 15 million; If 36,000 of them die, then that would be ~1/4 of 1%, or 0.23%, or 1 in 417 people.

20% of the US population would be 60 million; if 36,000 of that number die, that would be ~1/20 of 1%, or 0.06%, or about 1 in about 1667 people. 

So according to the CDC’s figures, the death rates for each range from

• West Nile: 1 in 1000 to 1 in 5000
• The Flu:  1 in 417 to 1 in 1667

Maybe I’ve made a mistake in here somewhere or am missing some other key factor, but it looks to me like West Nile Virus is considerably less dangerous than the flu.

One thing that would be interesting to know in the case of both types of virus is how many of these fatalities are cases where a sick person who is on their last legs anyway gets dealt their final death blow by the virus.  I suppose if the flu was mostly knocking out the vulnerable, while West Nile was striking down the healthy, that would make West Nile more dangerous if viewed in terms of “expected years of life cut short,” which would strike me as a legitimate way of evaluating a risk.  But, the CDC does say that West Nile fatality rates “are highest among the elderly.”

I wonder if our public health authorities have sat down and seriously thought this through (hopefully with some ecologists at the table) or if they are just responding to hysterical constituent calls.

I wonder if they would dump pesticides and shut my children up in school to prevent a slight risk that someone would get the flu.

Injury! Mystery!

I got a bad injury recently. After a 16-mile run that I ran a few weeks ago in preparation for the NYC Marathon, I got a stress fracture in my fibula (the smaller bone between the knee and the ankle - not the shinbone, but the bone that runs up from the anklebone on the outside of the leg – see my nuclear bone scan image below, showing bright spot above my left ankle).

The obvious question that a lot of people have been asking me is, don't you think the fact that you're running BAREFOOT might have something to do with this??  Is this barefoot business perhaps just a lot of Internet-fed foolishness after all?

The answer is, could be. But, at this point I still don't believe it is. Here's why:

First, stress fractures are an extremely common injury (among top five) among runners, affecting 5-30% of runners annually. If barefooting was the cause of my injury, then what is causing all those OTHER injuries out there among runners with shoes that have become far more well-cushioned in the past 10 years than shoes have ever been cushioned before in history of the species? Is it more likely that whatever caused those injuries also caused mine, or that it was the barefooting?

Second, I had a less severe version of this same injury last year after running my first Half Ironman race – in shoes. (It went away after about two weeks on its own that time, and never got this severe.)

Third, I had a very bad ankle twist in 2001, which some tell me can permanently stretch out your tendons (which supposedly are like rubber bands that help your joints spring back into position & unlike muscles which you don't want stretched). Being stretched out can create additional stresses on the bone.

Fourth, studies have found that actual measurements of impact on runners' legs are actually no greater when barefoot, because, the theory goes, people use what they feel with their feet (our soles having more nerve endings per inch than any other parts of our bodies other than our hands and our sex organs, a doctor friend tells me) to adjust how they run, with the result that greater cushioning just leads people to land harder, and also with the result that running injuries have not declined in recent years even as cushioning as greatly increased.  Evidence for the benefits of cushioning in preventing injuries is apparently "missing" and despite conventional wisdom injury rates are unrelated to training surface.  These things are rarely conclusive and could all be wrong, but put it all together and it's pretty persuasive.

Fifth, it didn't happen on a 3-mile run, or even a 13-miler – it was a 16-miler, and in running it, I violated a cardinal rule among runners, which is never increase your mileage by more than 10% a week. This was my third marathon and I figured I didn't need to worry about that so much any more.  Whether I ramped up too fast based on my previous running experience, I have no idea (I keep logs of my runs and here is a graphic showing all my runs since I started doing them, if anyone should have any opinions on the matter). I do know no doctors batted an eye to hear I got a stress fracture after a 16-miler, even not yet knowing about the barefooting.  Apparently, for me, at least, it was too much.

So for now my operative assumption is that I just need to build up more gradually and strengthen my bones. Our bones, I have learned, are just like our tendons and muscles: when stressed, they break down, and then rebuild themselves stronger. But if you keep stressing them the damage can outrun the healing and eventually you get a fracture (or tendinosis, in the case of tendons).  Runners have stronger bones than non-runners, exactly because of the additional stress placed upon them.

I'll tell you one thing, though:  if I do conclude the barefooting caused this, I'll put shoes back on faster than you can say "the natural is not always better than the artificial."

Seven paths to apocalypse

“Hi, professor ____?” It was me, calling up one of my favorite teachers from college to ask for a grad school recommendation.

“Yes?”

“Hi, it’s Jay Stanley. . .”

“Jay! How have you been? Are you still worried about spontaneous global eco-collapse?”

Okay, it was true. When I was in college, I was fond of talking about the danger that our global ecosystem might die, not gradually, but suddenly and catastrophically. It was done with an eye to the reaction that I would get, but it was also an expression of real fears.

Admittedly, I have a fondness for the apocalyptic. Maybe it started when I was in high school and I became convinced that the Reagan administration was going to blow up the world with the kinds of moves it was pulling like its insane, still-baffling decision to place Pershing missiles in Europe (thereby lessening the time a Soviet launch commander would have to distinguish between a genuine incoming missile warning and a flock of birds to 10 minutes from 30.  If he thought they were real missiles, he'd  launch at us -- brilliant move, Ronnie).  The possibility of nuclear war seemed VERY real to this suburban Californian kid in 1984 and 1985. For one thing, where I lived was ringed with military sites – March Air Force Base a couple of miles away and other bases nearby in San Bernardino etc. A few times I remember seeing contrails heading up into the sky and wondering if the end were 27-32 minutes away (or whatever -- at the time I knew precisely). Fortunately they turned out to be just missile tests or jets flying vertically or something.

Was my preoccupation with apocalypse crazy?  There are rational reasons for it. Unlike those who expect the end because of their reading of the ambiguities of the Bible or Nostradamus, or the ravings of a cult leader, it made sense in 1984 to worry about thermonuclear holocaust, because it was probably more likely to happen then than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

True, people throughout time have predicted apocalypse nearly constantly. Eventually someone will be right I guess, but it is a form of narcissism, to believe that of all times when people could live, WE are alive in the special end-time.  Even to think that there’s a God who has a special antipathy for us is narcissism (why should He really care about our particular debaucheries more than those of all the other times in history?)  Of course, fear of nuclear war or eco-collapse need not be religiously based -- they are perfectly consistent with the view that we are alone in a meaningless universe where nothing is too bad to happen. But perhaps there is still an echo of such narcissism. Perhaps there is also an element of boyish wishful thinking that something so –- well, exciting will happen –- combined with the youthful sense of fearlessness and certainty that *I*, somehow, would survive it.

Of course there are also powerful psychological drives to minimize the possibility of apocalypse.  The psychologist Robert Jay Lifton became famous for his series of books taking apart our collective denial and avoidance strategies when faced with the real possibility of nuclear holocaust.  Those same theories can now be applied to the environment and other threats.  People who live comfortably find it hard to conceive that their world could collapse (the enjoyable Spielberg movie Empire of the Sun has a good portrayal of this: 1941 British colonists in Shanghai living in denial as the Japanese close in on their privileged lives).  People are often stubbornly resistant to accepting the reality that they're living under a level of danger and insecurity that they find psychologically intolerable.  Perhaps all those Republican Senators prattling on about global warming being a hoax aren't just shilling for corporate interests; it may also be an expression of the deep-seated cowardice of the conservative (more on that another day).

Anyway, say what you may about however crazy or rational my fears may be, the result is that I’ve kept an eye on the subject.  Here are seven ways that the end of life as we know it could take place.  They're in no particular order.

• Spontaneous global eco-collapse
• Peak oil crisis
• Nuclear terrorism or accidental discharge or launch or war
• Meteor!
• Global pandemic, natural
• Global pandemic, artificial
• Gray goo!

I plan to post a blog entry on each of these in coming weeks.

Wanted: McMovies

When I saw this story today headlined “Animation for the Masses,” I was very excited because it seemed that someone had actually carried out an idea I had some time ago.

My idea was that somebody oughta design a software program using all the 3-dimensional software that is now available in computer games – and constantly getting better – that would allow anyone to create their own animated movie.  You could sell a software package that would include a basic suite of customizeable sets, locations, backdrops, characters, costumes, props, sound effects, etc., and let the creator of the movie – or feeeeeeelm if you’ve got aspirations – record the voices and program the visual action using the software’s physics and motion programming.   

You would control your characters like the protagonist in a first-person shooter, or like a puppet, and layer the actions of different individuals in the same scene, like a music sequencer, program the actions of inanimate objects, and record "scenes," which you could then edit and stitch together to tell a story. 

Of course some would inevitably scoff at the product of this software as “McMovies” –- anytime an exclusive realm is opened to the masses, elites try to put it down -- but with enough customizability built in, the creative potential need not be any more limited than any real motion picture.   An art-director-oriented or serious filmmaker could devote as much effort as he or she wished to creating a visual masterpiece, while those who were interested more in just telling a story could use the defaults. 

Either way, I bet a couple of things would happen.  First, you would see a veritable explosion of creativity comparable to the explosion of blogs.  Of course something like this already exists – Flash animation – and we have seen an explosion of creativity with that format.  But this would allow for more fully realized, complex, quasi-photo-realistic dramas to be portrayed on-screen, and hopefully built more easily.

There would also spring into being a market for the sale of additional sets, costumes, designers, and all the rest, just like I hear they do on “Second Life.”

However, the "Animation for the Masses" article I saw is actually about is giving consumers access to really high-quality graphics. That's great -- but not nearly as exciting as the idea above IMHO.  Better graphics are nice but you always gotta get back to the difference between a movie with a good story, and a movie with good special effects:  the latter is empty without the former, while the former is compelling no matter how primitive the effects are.  And that is exactly why genius would sprout if my product ever came to life (though like all genius, it would flower amid a vast field of manure).

Who knows if it's doable or if it would be used.  But, movies are the art form of our century, and everybody wants to be in show biz, right?  Anyway, I predict that sooner or later we'll have this. (But it still won't be any easier to come up with a good original story!)

Finding the smooth path

I have a really stiff aluminum frame on my bike, so when I go over bumps its really uncomfortable.  Much more than the old flexible steel-framed bikes, or the newfangled expensive carbon-fiber frames.  So I’m always looking for smooth paths – especially on my way to work & back, where there is a lot of poorly maintained pavement. 

There’s one spot along the route (the Route 50 service road in Arlington) where the pavement is especially bad. This winter, I started riding home after dark, and riding through this patch, when I couldn’t actually see the pavement clearly*, I discovered that by curving off to the right through this patch, I got a much smoother ride.  I discovered this in the dark, when I couldn’t actually see the pavement; in the daylight, the whole width of the road looks equally horrendous, and if I wasn’t riding in the dark, I never would have discovered that there was actually a path through the road that, while it looked just as cracked and torn up as the rest, was actually far smoother on the tires.  Ironically, by being in a sense blinded, I actually discovered far more about the road.

This is a perfect metaphor for some really deep things in life.  (Of course you can work out what they are on your own, what fun would it be for me to spell them out?)

(*BTW when I ride at night I use lights – a lot of them, I’m lit up like a Christmas tree actually – but mostly to be seen; this spot is nearly the only one on my route where surrounding streetlights don’t provide enough light for me to see the road clearly).

The culture of shoes & politics of bare feet

What do shoes really protect us from?

Since I started running barefoot two years ago, I’ve really enjoyed it and find myself more and more reluctant to put on shoes, and itching to kick them off when I am wearing them.  This has led me to do some thinking about why we wear shoes.  Plainly, if I can run miles (16 is what I've worked up to so far) on asphault in bare feet with nary a blister, as I do regularly (and many others regularly run marathons), then, in the vast majority of situations, I don’t really need to wear shoes for safety reasons in the course of daily life, except for cold weather & a few other special situations, just as I don’t need gloves most of the time.

The real thing that forces me to wear shoes most of the time of course is social pressure and conformity.  It seems clearer than ever to me that shoes are for the most part nothing more than a fashion item, required by custom not nature.  Fashion is of course by its very nature utterly irrational and tribalistic, and has at best a distant relationship to practical functionality. 

Once you realize this about shoes, and begin to discover how enjoyable it is to go without them, they begin to annoy you a lot more than they ever did before. 

The fact is, our Western society, despite its supposed rationality and scientific enlightenment, has a lot of arbitrary, tribal rules that are not really questioned by most people.  For example, when engaged in many activities you must display a phallic strip of cloth hanging from your neck as a sign of respect if you are male.  To get into some restaurants, or attend other formal occasions, you have to wear a coat, or a suit or other clothing that was well adapted to northern Europe in the 17th century -- even when you're in, say, Miami in the 21st century.

Shoes, it seems clear, have a specially enduring social function of demonstrating social rank, and more specifically an absence of poverty. Shoes demonstrate that you are not among the poorest group in society.  Even though that group (which was once a majority) barely exists any more, this became deeply ingrained in European culture over the course of recent centuries, and although we are barely conscious of it, this cultural bias has come down to us, and that is the reason that it remains embarrassing for most of us to appear in all but the most casual situations without footwear. 

Of course, people often suffer greatly to show their superiority.  I came across a good example of this kind of irrationality:  the British planters who lived in Jamaica, Barbados and other Caribbean islands during the 1600s.  They

tried their best to transfer English modes of diet, dress, and housing to the tropics.  Scorning to imitate the Spaniards, the Indians, or the Negroes, who were all experienced at living in hot countries, they clung determinedly to their own North European styles and standards.  (Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves [1972], p. 263)

The English wore linen when they could afford it, but “much of their clothing was woolen and worsted.”  For military infantry drills, for example, the white men of the islands were issued red coats and black hats.   

What idiots!  Parading around in the Barbados in woolen coats, just because that was what people were wearing up in London and Amsterdam?

Dunn explains,

The Caribbean planters, like all Europeans in the seventeenth century, conceived of food and clothing in hierarchical terms.  Each rank in the social order, from aristocrats at the top to beggars at the bottom, had its own distinct style of dress, diet, and habitation.  (p. 263)

When it came to clothes in particular,

The clothes a man wore in the status-conscious seventeenth century identified his social position more readily than the food he ate.  Every occupation had its own designated wardrobe.  The rich took care to dress richly, and the poor were expected to dress poorly. (p. 282)

According to Dunn:  “very rarely did field Negroes wear hats or shoes” (and overall “wore little clothing”) while the next people up the ladder, white servants, “generally used shoes and stockings.”  (pp. 283-84) In fact,

Unencumbered by layers of sweat-drenched clothing, the slaves probably kept cleaner than the white servants, and since they liked to wash more than Englishmen thought necessary in the seventeenth century, they very likely kept cleaner than their white masters.  Dr. Sloane remarked on their odd habit of bathing “in fair water every day.” (p. 284)

It’s easy to laugh at these rigid Brits walking around in wool coats in Barbados and Jamaica, trying to maintain the standards and propriety of a culture and couture that was adapted to foggy London town.  But face it:  we’re just as stupid today, walking around in suits in Washington, DC in August, and wearing shoes all the time, turning our feet unnaturally white, soft and flabby even as we pad around carpeted office buildings, mostly clean smooth streets and other environments that, I can tell you from personal experience, are much easier on the feet than any stick-strewn forest, pebbly field or other “natural” surface. 

Unlike many fashion impositions that are just burdensome and annoying, shoes are probably actively unhealthy (most foot problems are caused by shoes, experts say).

An irrational custom that is annoying, uncomfortable and unhealthy is bad enough.  It's worse when it's a way to say, “I’m better than you” (or maybe “I’m no worse than you”).  Let's face it, a suit and tie certainly serves no other purpose.  Although shoes have become standard enough now that they alone do not denote status, their absence still screams, “I’m poor and desperate!”

Check out this passage from Adam Smith in his 1776 Wealth of Nations.  In making a distinction between necessities and luxuries, he writes that

By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England. The poorest creditable person of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without them. In Scotland, custom has rendered them a necessary of life to the lowest order of men; but not to the same order of women, who may, without any discredit, walk about barefooted. In France they are necessaries neither to men nor to women, the lowest rank of both sexes appearing there publicly, without any discredit, sometimes in wooden shoes, and sometimes barefooted. Under necessaries, therefore, I comprehend not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people. All other things I call luxuries, without meaning by this appellation to throw the smallest degree of reproach upon the temperate use of them. Beer and ale, for example, in Great Britain, and wine, even in the wine countries, I call luxuries. A man of any rank may, without any reproach, abstain totally from tasting such liquors. Nature does not render them necessary for the support of life, and custom nowhere renders it indecent to live without them.  [Book five, Chapter II, Part 2, Article IV]

This offhand cultural report from his day sheds a lot of light on the origins of our attitude towards shoes today:

• Notice Smith’s report that in the 18th century, it was common for the "lowest rank" in France (and in 18th century France, that was a big group) to “walk about barefooted.” 
• Notice how Smith, who probably lived among a lot more barefoot people than anyone today, puts shoes squarely in the category of custom.  He makes no suggestion that they might actually be necessary –- instead, with no discussion of the matter, as though none of his contemporary readers would disagree, he groups them with the fashions of clothing, and specifically NOT in the category of things that nature renders “necessary for the support of life.”
• Smith says that the lack of shoes in England denotes “that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct.”  Here Smith is reflecting the old view that financial success was a mirror of moral rectitude – that good morals would lead to financial success, and that poverty was an indicator of poor character.  This view was held through the 19th century (and perhaps continues to hold some sway in some circles today).   If you're barefoot, you're not only poor, but you're of low character and morals too (or why else would you be poor?)  It’s important to keep this view in mind in order to recover the full extent of the disgraceful cultural associations that bare feet carry, which have come down to us to this day.
  

Perhaps at some point in the future we will outgrow this obsession with unnecessary footwear, and most people will begin going barefoot most of the time.  I have a vision of people in the future watching our science fiction movies of today, and laughing because in our portrayals of the future, we quaintly show everyone wearing shoes.  (As if Thomas Jefferson had made a movie about the 20th century, and showed everyone wearing powdered wigs.  Or like 1950s science fiction, where the characters are jetting around on spaceships, flying between the stars at the speed of light – and then when it’s time to do some calculations they whip out their slide rules.)

Well a guy can dream can't he?