43 thoughts on “Procurement Office rejects contract targetting Big Wind opponents”

1. Richard Gozinya November 20, 2011 at 9:18 am

   “No studies have been done to determine even if Moloka’i winds are sufficient.”

   Oh well, what could go wrong with that?

   I really want to like this wind power alternative but the more I learn, the less I like what my neighbor calls “Bird Cuisinarts”.

   It has that unmistakable feeling that comes when somebody is trying to pull wool over our eyes. I had the same feeling with the Aina Koa Pono biofuel project which turned out to be more about an investment scheme to enrich the few rather than an initiative to reduce or slow our petroleum consumption.

   As a start, could we at least check the wind speed and reliability?

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2. NOT SPAM November 20, 2011 at 9:58 am

   If you want to really shed some light on this, solar is the way to go (disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with nor do I benefit by any solar ventures, aside from the benefits we all receive by using clean energy).

   Further, it makes more sense, and I believe is more pono, to decentralize and scale down as much as possible, our future energy sources, at least away from major inter-island transmission of electrical energy.

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3. Aaron Stene November 20, 2011 at 10:18 am

   I asked the owner of the abandoned Kama’oa wind farm, which was cited in that video, when will they dismantle this facility.

   I posted his response here:

   http://aaronstene.com/2011/11/10/8520/

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4. skeptical once again November 20, 2011 at 11:06 am

   I wrote:

   But the general tone of the arguments coming out of Molokai do not seem to have been vetted through a team of attorneys or professors or journalists. The arguments seem incoherent.

   You wrote in response:

   How about those last two sentences. Is that a joke? Public comments need to be filtered through “a team of attorneys or professors or journalists” to be heard? And, if that’s so, who is responsible for the translation? Individual community speakers? The public officials soliciting the comments? Concerned onlookers?

   But the next thing you do is to refer us to a rather slick website from the group “I Aloha Molokai” that seems to have been produced by professional “symbolic manipulators” (filmmakers, academics, etc.) that opposes the Big Wind. I do not know just how valid their criticisms are. (Will the turbines really be decommissioned after only 20 years?) But those are excellent rational arguments presented by what seem to be white-collar professionals.

   If you read my comment, my point is that the arguments made in public against the Big Wind by Lanai and Molokai residents published in Civil Beat articles come across as so self-indulgent and feeble that they backfire. The gist of the arguments came across to me like “Any visual impacts on the horizon will destroy our culture.” Wow, that’s a pretty fragile culture. It made me think of Italian and Jewish and Greek and Chinese culture, elements of which stretch back thousands of years despite countless wars, invasions, occupations, genocide, famine, plagues, etc.

   This reminds me of an incident in class when I was in college. In discussing European history, our professor, who was Jewish, asked the class if Jews have a disproportionate influence on public decision-making in the US, and if so, why? All of the (supposedly progressive) students — even the Jewish students! — started to complain about Jewish influence, about how the Jews had so much money and were pulling the strings behind the scenes and how Jews controlled Hollywood and Wall Street, etc. The professor smiled to himself and said that he agreed that Jews did have disproportionate levels of power in the US, but that it was almost entirely based on the ability to articulate themselves rationally in public. Jews might be affluent, but that affluence was gained through education (not in the oil fields of Texas), and that money gets plowed back into education above all else. Jews have a culture of rational argument, and that gives them huge influence (and an educational advantage) especially in a democracy; but because they have a culture of argument, they cannot agree on anything, so there is no global or national Jewish conspiracy. (The students groaned in defeat after he made this very rational argument.)

   I am afraid residents on Molokai and Lanai do not have a strong ethos of education. They have a nice small-town culture that wants to keep things the way they are. Their arguments sound like “We have our own way of doing things, and we will change at our own pace. We don’t want outsiders coming in here and imposing their alien ways on us….” But that is exactly the kind of argument that white people in places like Alabama made 50 years ago in the face of the civil rights movement. In itself it is not a valid argument.

   Of course, this was the impression I got from the Civil Beat article, which concluded with a lament about how hard it is to accomplish big projects in Hawaii. That sentiment might betray a pro-capitalist bias that might lurk beneath Civil Beat’s seemingly progressive exterior. If you remember the Aloun Farms slave labor case, the erstwhile conservative Hawaii Reporter took the side of labor, while Civil Beat reported from the perspective of the owners. Very curious.

   Another issue is the persona of David Murdoch. He is frequently referred to as a “greedy California developer”. But the Civil Beat article stated that Murdoch was losing $40 million a year on Lanai. I’ve heard Murdoch described as a deluded romantic, travelling around Lanai in a khaki outfit like the great white benevolent bwana, and that might better explain his behavior and interest in that island. His corporation is now selling their interest in the island. For the people of Lanai, this could be a case of “Be careful of what you ask for….” It could be that they have yet to see pure greed, and what they experienced in the past was merely relatively benign delusion.

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5. Taxpayers November 20, 2011 at 12:06 pm

   I don’t trust special interests’ consultant blogs. They come with different names. They are paid to lurk and occupy the social media space for profitable purposes. It’s never for the public interest.

   By the way, I wonder why the University of Hawaii is placing recruitment media ads on TV. It’s a waste of taxpayers’ money. The only people who gain are the media consultants.

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6. Warren Iwasa November 21, 2011 at 5:23 pm

   Skeptical’s comments are another reason for reading Ian’s blog. A lot gets said here that eludes the other media.

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7. skeptical once again November 21, 2011 at 8:59 pm

   With regard to your recent post on whatever happened to the light rail option, this might warrant the creation of a new category to add to that of “court”, “environment” and “politics” on that post.

   That category would be “big projects”, and it could encompass the Big Wind as well. And despite the frequent lament that Hawaii is not good at big projects, let’s just observe that outside of Dubai, Hawaii is one of the most rapidly developing societies in the world, and in that sense Hawaii is itself a big project. (E.g., when the UH Manoa first began, there were farmers in loin clothes living in grass shacks on campus.) Hawaii was always engaged in big projects and Hawaii has been plenty good at them for the most part.

   When we put Hawaii in that light, we see that this society was founded on big projects — like the plantations, military bases, tourism — that were both hugely successful and morally problematic. This shifts the terms of the debate. The question then is, Which of these big projects benefits the society? Or, What are the motives of a particular big project? And, Are we addicted to big projects?

   Some of the big projects might be motivated by corporate greed. But some of the motivation might be irrational, like:

   1) A quasi-feudal company-town mentality that imagines that “Uncle Dan” and the federal government are going to take care of us forever and ever. (Alternatively, there is the sense that we are somehow entitled to those goodies as part of some compensation for some past wrong and that mainland Americans “owe” us, and that anyone who says otherwise is a racist and an elitist and a foreigner.)
   2) A feeling of inferiority. Governor Burns once stated that even middle-class people in Hawaii have an inferiority complex, and this is why (according to Burns) Hawaii needs to be “number one” in all things (public education, athletics, etc.). Now, that’s a very expensive form of therapy. But how does this backfire because Hawaii is always playing someone else’s game on someone else’s terms and imitating someone else? And what happens when we compete and lose because we don’t have the resources to be Number One in doing things that have nothing to do with Hawaii — especially in terms of big projects? Wouldn’t that deepen the inferiority project and exacerbate the sense of resentment?

   Another alternative question might be, Why is Hawaii so bad at engaging in small projects? It would seem that at least in the mythology of Silicon Valley, small tech start-ups are really the engine driving the US tech industry. (New houses in Silicon Valley often include large garages so that the owners can later point to a photo of the garage and claim that that is where they started the business.) Is there that kind of dynamic, creative small-business culture in Hawaii? What’s it like running a small business in Hawaii? And isn’t this the kind of lament that one reads in the “Disappeared News” blog in terms of alternative energy, that there is a strange proclivity in Hawaii toward gigantomania in energy policy?

   In terms of rail, the City’s own pro-rail website (the last time I looked) gives examples of successful rail projects that are at-grade light rail spurs that only venture a few miles outside the downtown business district, fostering Transit Oriented Development. That makes sense I guess and sounds plausible, but the City has a 20-mile elevated plan instead.

   My guess is that after one mile of this rail system is built on the west side, buyer’s remorse will set in when the rail system is no longer an ideal dream but a concrete (literally) reality. After two miles are built, funds will run low, and City workers will have to be laid off (the City might even face bankruptcy). After three miles are built, Dan Inouye might not be in office and it will finally dawn on the public that Honolulu is on its own on this one. Before the fourth mile is reached, the City will have burned through one billion dollars, and the grim reality of it all will come home that IT IS A SYSTEM THAT NO ONE ON THE WEST SIDE WANTS TO USE TO GO TO WORK.

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8. skeptical once again November 22, 2011 at 6:41 pm

   You might also want to add the category “Development”.

   Here’s a relevant NYTimes blog entry on a small town about to be paved over with suburbs. I think the photographic aspect would be something you could relate to.

   http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/in-indiana-a-hometown-soon-to-change/?hp

   The problem in my mind with regard to development is not tighter rules or the need to build and finance rail projects, but for the government to cease building highways and stop offering tax breaks to (affluent) home buyers.

   The federal highway system was a military project by Eisenhower to help evacuate cities during war and move troops. Considering the nature of modern war (that is, NUCLEAR war), it was an obsolete project. Building suburbs was a mistake, although it is usually taken for granted today.

   Here’s a graph displaying the rising cost of highway subsidies since the 1950s.

   http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/01/the-ever-rising-cost-of-americas-highways/68949/

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9. skeptical once again November 22, 2011 at 6:49 pm

   You will also note that the SA has a section on the new movie The Descendants, which revolves around the ambivalence surrounding land development in Hawaii. Yet there is no mention of land development issues in the articles on The Descendents in the SA, and it treats only the family drama.

   Looks like the SA knows which side its bread is buttered.

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10. skeptical once again November 25, 2011 at 4:38 pm

    If you recall the debate within the comment section of your blog on an entry on the rail project, Doug Carlson kept harping on about how an elevated rail system will help prevent at-grade traffic collisions.

    The irony here is that a slew of commenters offered excellent reasons for having an elevated rail system, which include improved speed and carrying capacity (heavy rail) and the ability to automate the system. (Actually, I offered those reasons.) But Carlson ignored those reasons and continued to go on about traffic accidents. Some commenters finally just dismissed Carlson — and, unfortunately, insulted his intelligence.

    I too found Carlson’s performance rather poor. In fact, it was rather depressing.

    But it gets worse.

    Figures bandied about in public on how much the City alone has spent on public relations (propaganda) for the rail project run into nine digits. Even if the actual figure of how much has been spent is a fraction of that number, that’s still a lot of money. It seems as if Carlson is the premier front man for this project, and that could mean that he has potentially earned millions of dollars. But for what? To alienate the most educated segment of the population on a blog like this? It that all they’ve got?

    It gets worse.

    One commenter came to the defense of Carlson, saying that of all the people in Hawaii that he has met, Carlson has a superior understanding of energy and transportation policy, as well as the best communication skill refined as a journalist.

    Now that’s really depressing if it is true.

    That means that the general population of Hawaii, including the elite, are really incompetent, and that in terms of transportation, energy and journalism, Hawaii is almost in a kind of free fall into failure. All of these grandiose projects are going to fail. In fact, perhaps even modest projects might fail if Carlson represents what is best and brightest in Hawaii.

    What I find odd about PR people like Carlson — and I mean the nice ones, because Mr. Carlson does seem like a nice guy, and a bright one — is that the 1960s never seemed to have happened for them. For the average citizen in the 1960s and since then, there was a revelation that one cannot just work for Dow Chemical or the CIA and everything will work out for the best for everybody. The corporation and the state do not necessarily advance the interest of society or the human species. All of one’s hard work might be counter to the best interest of human beings. (This was, in fact, one of the lessons of World War II.) This does not seemed to have sunk in at all.

    It’s all so depressing.

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11. skeptical once again November 27, 2011 at 8:41 am

    In regard to the corrupting influence of college sports, a deeper question is how sports (namely football) has taken over university life and American life. First, as jobs become harder to come by, more people are compelled to go to college, and as more people go to college, college becomes high school.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/magazine/changing-rules-for-success.html?hp

    Second, and related to this, at a small college or elite university, sports are somewhat beside the point, but at a big state university, it’s the glue keeping the campus together. There’s just no way around that. So at a state university, it’s a big business one just deals with. More people are going to college, and that means that the role of sports grows like a cancer at state universities.

    Hawaii never really diversified economically. So a college degree in Hawaii in a way means less than it does already in other parts of the US. That affects the way the university is dealt with, and how students perform in the educational system. It also might mean that the corporations and unions and the government might be expected to push for more big projects just to keep the money coming in. So it’s a chicken-and-egg issue: there is no economic diversification, so there’s a retrenchment toward less support of education and more support for big projects. That includes big sports.

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12. skeptical once again November 29, 2011 at 9:14 pm

    We might begin to ask ourselves what the energy implications are of Abercrombie’s vision of a ‘third city’ stretching from Diamond Head to Kalihi.

    For instance, Manhattan is rather compromised in air quality, but it perhaps the most energy efficient locale in the world.

    But what would an urban Honolulu look like as a third city? Would there be more traffic or less, especially with peak oil prices looming and a greater commitment to mass transportation in a high density area where people will use it, as well as a commitment to have those who use roads pay for them through fuel fees? Could cars be done away with altogether in some areas of town? Will there someday be entire generations of families who do not know how to drive a car just as there are in New York City?

    Another questions is, What are the first two cities? Like Los Angeles, Honolulu outside of Waikiki and downtown is not a true city but rather a collection of suburbs. Abercrombie’s “third city” will really be the first true city in Hawaii.

    Yet another question is, Will this finally lead to economic diversification? That is, Will the creation of an urban culture foster creativity the way Richard Florida claims that it will?

    The State has poured countless funds into the University of Hawaii, for example, yet local politicians express disappointment that all that research has not delivered.

    Yet the problem is not the UH, but the way local businesses have not taken cutting-edged research and capitalized on it the way other societies do. Really, like any other small town, local businesses in Hawaii produce things like foodstuffs — potato chips and off-brand soy sauce and soda — not high technology. What can local businesses be expected to do in a small-town society? Take a glow-in-the-dark cloned mouse from the UH and stick a chocolate-covered macadamia nut up its okole and sell it to a tourist? In a more urban culture, that might change, but how much?

    More importantly, people live in Hawaii because they want small town life. They live in suburbs and yet they are puzzled by all the traffic. They work in land development and yet they lament all the suburban sprawl. Get ready for all sorts of opposition to Abercrombie’s vision — for all the wrong reasons. Even if God came out of the sky and told us that high-density urbanization is the way to go, the population just may not understand that.

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13. skeptical once again November 30, 2011 at 9:42 pm

    I think that we in Hawaii might not have thought through the full implications of peak oil (or not even thought out any implications of it).

    Now, some might dismiss the concept of peak oil, but we need to remember that peak oil was originally theorized in the 1950s in regard to the decline of domestic sources of oil in the US, and it was accurately predicted that oil production would peak in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

    So if one looks at a chart of oil prices in the 20th century, it hovers at around $25, then shoots up in the 1970s with all sorts of arrows pointing to events in the Middle East and how they caused price spikes.

    http://www.wtrg.com/oil_graphs/oilprice1947.gif

    That might miss a certain point. There were always major disruptions in the Middle East, but these did not affect the price of oil.

    http://www.wtrg.com/oil_graphs/oilprice1869.gif

    It would seem that the major underlying cause of oil price hikes is not Middle Eastern turmoil, but rather US domestic peak oil which made the US vulnerable to such turmoil.

    On the one hand, peak oil is therefore not merely an abstract theory, but a reality that we have been living with since the 1970s. On the other hand, the sky has not fallen. In fact, since the 1970s, there are periods when the price of oil reverted to its $25/barrel historical norm.

    http://www.wtrg.com/oil_graphs/oilprice1970.gif

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    1. skeptical once again November 30, 2011 at 9:43 pm

       The question is now what is going to happen generally with global peak oil, which supposedly has become reality since 2010, at least according to most peak oil estimates.

       The specific question is what might happen in Hawaii.

       Will the price of jet fuel really strangle our tourist economy? That might happen periodically, but the resulting world recession would lower the price of oil back down.

       The real impact I think would be the home foreclosures resulting from such periodic oil shocks.

       If you check out the following website, you will find that home prices in Hawaii are generally overvalued by 80% in terms of the historical price-to-income ratio.

       http://www.deptofnumbers.com/affordability/hawaii/

       That website is optimistic compared to the 2011 Case-Shiller home price index.

       http://blog.redfin.com/sfbay/2011/03/case-shiller_more_home_price_drops_as_2011_kicks_off.html

       Another issue is the cost of commuting. During one of these periodic oil price hikes, the cost of commuting might be the straw that breaks the camels back for some families.

       Mass transportation, if popular, has the economies of scale to provide cheaper transportation. But if the price of oil is high enough, all that mass transportation would do is shift the high cost of oil to governments already under strain.

       Ultimately, people would be compelled to move to more centrally located areas. That means people in suburbs selling there homes at a loss and lower home prices and more home ‘underwater’ and going into foreclosure. How might that play out?

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       1. skeptical once again December 1, 2011 at 2:37 pm

          If you check out the following website, you will find that home prices in Hawaii are generally overvalued by 80% in terms of the historical price-to-income ratio.

          http://www.deptofnumbers.com/affordability/hawaii/

          One thing that I did not mention is that the website above uses the year 2000 as the baseline for understanding current home prices as overvalued by as much as 80 percent.

          But historically, home prices globally have been set at a norm of 2.5 times family income — anything over or under that reflects over- or under-valuation, respectively.

          But in 2000, homes were valued in Hawaii at 5 times family income — what would normally be understood as an overvaluation of 100 percent.

          So in 2011, home prices in Hawaii could be overvalued by 180 percent .

          We can contrast this to home prices in Ohio, which were at 2.5 times family income in 2000 and never really went above that ratio. Indeed, in most of the non-urban areas of the United States — in what we call “red states” — there was no housing bubble; the housing bubble is largely a bi-coastal phenomenon.

          http://www.deptofnumbers.com/affordability/ohio/

          Now, we can ask ourselves why there was already a housing bubble in Hawaii. Partly, it might be real estate hype. Also, the “innocent” or gullible nature of small-town people might be at play.

          But a big part of it might be the fact that so many people who buy in Hawaii expect to stay in Hawaii permanently, in fact, for generations. Buying into an “up” market makes sense because for many locals, this is not speculators flipping houses, it is the ultimate long-term investment. In this case, the 5.0 times family income is understandable (although perhaps imprudent, depending on the logic used by individual home buyers).

          The problem in Hawaii is that many people plan on staying in Hawaii because they do not have the skills to move any place else. They do not have the job or educational skills to move, nor even a baseline of “cultural capital” that one would attain just living anywhere on the mainland.

          A Texan with a drawl could move to California or Colorado and deal with the hostility and teasing he would get as a Texan, but he’d expect it. But a UH-educated person from Waipahu who speaks perfect English might not get that kind of teasing a Texan would get, but they might be extremely uncomfortable, never knowing what to expect, always feeling awkward. But many locals do not even have that baseline of standard spoken American English or a college degree.

          These people are also the least prosperous citizens of Hawaii and perhaps the most vulnerable to economic downturns. On Oahu, they also often live furthest from the urban core.

          The point here is that when peak oil kicks in even more than it has, it will be the poorest and least educated people on Oahu who will be most affected, not only by an economic downturn, but by the cost of commuting. The value of their homes might plummet dramatically. A shift to mass transportation — which they might not even be able to use, as blue-collar workers with trucks — would be beside the point. Their homes would be underwater.

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          1. skeptical once again December 2, 2011 at 5:19 am

             So in 2011, home prices in Hawaii could be overvalued by 180 percent.

             My math is a problem.

             Current 2011 home prices in Hawaii average nine times higher than family income according the the Department of Numbers website. So if 2.5 times family income is taken as a baseline, as it is with the Case-Shiller index, then home prices are overvalued in Hawaii by an average of 650 percent, not 180 percent.

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          2. skeptical once again December 2, 2011 at 1:50 pm

             On the issue of home prices in the US, there was a recent article in the Wall Street Journal on the topic of owning vs. renting:

             http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203764804577060502694077494.html

             The gist of the article is that it’s a great time to buy a house.

             However, if you google “Wall Street Journal” and “real estate” or “buying a house”, you will note that for years the WSJ has faithfully run an article once a month advising that real estate has bottomed out and that “Now is a great time to buy a home.”

             In fact, there is a WSJ article from March 9, 2008 entitled “A Good Time To Buy a House — If You Can”. Seriously.

             The problem for the WSJ is that the audience of the WSJ are generally businessmen and experienced investors, and if you read the comment section, 90% of the comments react against the article by saying “This article is propaganda from the real estate industry. These people are always saying that ‘It’s a great time to buy a house!'”

             (In fact, when it was assumed that there would be a rise in inflation and hence in interest rates as the US came out of recession in 2009, it was asserted in one WSJ article I came across (I cannot locate it now) that the best time to buy a house was during high interest rates because the house is a hedge against inflation. No matter what happens, for the WSJ it’s a great time to buy a house.)

             In the comment section of the first WSJ article in question, the readers generally asserted against the author that buying a house now depends on 1) where you live, and 2) who you are. If you live outside of the east or west coast, it could be a good time to buy. If you are tied to your location in the long-term for whatever reason (job, family), it might be a good time to buy.

             So the Honolulu Star Advertiser is not unique in sounding like commercial propaganda.

             The problem is that in a small town people don’t know this.

             The question is, what if peak oil will be as bad as some say it will be? The ramifications for the working-class suburbs in Hawaii are devastating. They still buy into the real estate myth (literally).

             What is to be done?

             Creating a ‘third city’ would provide both temporary construction jobs and a centralized place people could move to help with the transition — if they have the inclination and the sense to move.

             But even in a best case scenario with peak oil, the hammer will fall and the suburbs will collapse.

             Do people realize that? Even in the vast spaces of the mainland, there are only so many houses that can be built because people can only afford so much.

             But what will collapse look like?

             In English-speaking countries, the middle-classes live in the suburbs and the poor live in the urban core. In continental Europe, this is reversed. This European model could be the future of the US.

             What will happen to the west side of Oahu?

             Will “poverty” be an improvement, as many people on Molokai claim?

             I once read something that read: “I live in Waianae. This used to be God’s country. They put a highway through here and now it’s all about big trucks, pit bulls, rap music and drugs.”

             I suspect the problem there lies with government bureaucrats and the old, uncritical thinking of the UH urban planning professors who trained the bureaucrats. They saw a dirt road, and they wanted automatically to put in a highway. They see a highway and they want to put in a monorail.

             But what happens when all that will be stripped away? Anarchy? Or improvement?

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14. skeptical once again December 1, 2011 at 9:57 pm

    How serious will global peak oil be, for the world and Hawaii?

    Here’s a bit of the Hirsch report from wikipedia:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_report

    The Hirsch report, the commonly referred to name for the report Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management, was created by request for the US Department of Energy and published in February 2005. It examined the time frame for the occurrence of peak oil, the necessary mitigating actions, and the likely impacts based on the timeliness of those actions.

    The report states that the rise of oil prices will be both dramatic and permanent, nothing like the periodic price spices since the 1970s.

    “The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.”

    Now, this report was produced by the US Energy Department, so it has a certain mainstream legitimacy. It’s not a fringe publication. That is unsettling. If even the mainstream of analysts can be so pessimistic, there is reason to fret.

    One thing we are not taking seriously in Hawaii — at least not seriously enough, if the Hirsch report is accurate — is food security. The importation of food from thousands of miles away will no longer be as viable if oil prices rise dramatically, suddenly and permanently.

    One scenario is that the suburbs of the United States will hollow out; we need to consider how this will affect foreclosures and lenders and the economy in general.

    But growing food in areas now slated for development will not only become viable in peak oil conditions, but necessary.

    Also, there might be a shift toward vegetarian food and away from highly processed food (junk food) because people will buy straight from the farm or garden and won’t be able to afford meat (which requires substantial water and grain inputs).

    What would these two new realities do to the home building industry over the next ten or twenty years? It seems as though the current collapse of the housing market just has not sunk in, not nationally and especially not locally.

    Do the carpenters, electricians, real-estate agents and bankers know that they or their sons and daughters might have to become farmers? Or does nothing ever sink in for people who were once in a “hot” or dominant industry, even long after it collapses?

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15. skeptical once again December 4, 2011 at 1:28 pm

    I spent half of yesterday reading about “peak oil” theories, and it is sobering, even scary.

    I once viewed peak oil theory as a fringe theory, the way the theory of continental drift was a “far out” fringe theory in the 1970s — an eccentric theory espoused by a few scientists who are regarded as oddballs in their disciplines, but which just might turn out to be true.

    Later, as I came under the impression that peak oil theory might be similar to global warming theories in the 1980s, which was espoused by a growing chorus of scientists and adopted by politically progressive environmentalists.

    In fact, peak oil theories were postulated a couple of generations ago, and are a part of the conceptual apparatus of oil companies.

    The timing of the theory, for which there is a solid consensus (at least from my Internet search) is also scary from the perspective of the present day. Global oil production will reach its peak between 2010-2012. The price of oil will begin to inch upwards from then on until 2015, when it will skyrocket and stay up permanently. (I’ve read that the US military emphasizes this 2015 date, and that they are planning for that. We can perhaps see some of that thinking in Hawaii with the military pushing for alternative energy.)

    Now there is some fringe theory on peak oil out there, and it’s worth reading. (It’s worth studying because when you learn about something like sports or how to write well or cooking, you have to expose yourself to the best that’s out there, but also the flawed and inferior stuff in order to learn common mistakes.)

    One example of fringe theory in peak oil theory is “Olduvai theory”.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olduvai_theory

    The Olduvai theory states that industrial civilization (as defined by per capita energy production) will have a lifetime of less than or equal to 100 years (1930-2030). The theory provides a quantitative basis of the transient-pulse theory of modern civilization. The name is a reference to the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.

    The Olduvai theory was introduced in 1989 by power system engineer Richard C. Duncan as the “transient-pulse theory of Industrial Civilization”. The theory was backed up with data in the 1993 paper “The life-expectancy of industrial civilization: The decline to global equilibrium”.

    In a nutshell, not only will the world rapidly run out of oil, but it will run through all forms of energy in the face of exponential demand for energy in the face of oil production declines.

    The theory seems to stand on the (questionable) premise that electrical consumption will decline just as rapidly as it rose since the 1930s.

    The startling statistic is that global energy production per capita declined in 1978.

    That means that 2030, the world will be completely out of oil. By 2050, the world population will shrink to 2 billion persons. It will be a new Stone Age.

    However, there are a few observations I gleaned from reading about peak oil that tend to refute this “transient pulse theory of electromagnetic civilization”.

    First of all, if energy production declined in 1978, it was in part due to reduced demand, especially in the US. There is much more fuel efficiency and conservation in the developed world since the 1970s. If energy production declined since 1978 and yet peak oil has only been reached in 2011, it could mean humans are consuming less overall per capital.

    Second, the thesis underestimates the amount of coal, nuclear energy and natural gas in the world. Of course, these forms of energy are problematic for environmental reasons, but they exist in relative abundance, and renewable energy can slowly be adopted in the meantime.

    Third, there could be big drops in demand for energy in the developed world. We no longer live in the 1950s. For example, there are now zero-energy houses. Also, middle-class Americans lives used to revolve around owning bigger and bigger houses and cars; for the younger generation, their lives revolve around the Internet and mobile devices. Also, Americans generally don’t have as much money, and it’s a delusion to think the money is coming back.

    However, taking these very objections to heart, I ironically imagine the general pattern of diminished oil use conceived in Olduvai theory to have some potential validity.

    Economic theory tends to postulate exponential growth, but there have always been ‘utopian’ economists who espouse a ‘steady state’ economy (e.g., we can all live on communes and grow our own food and consume very little). That’s not going to happen. But with new technology and the “new normal” of less money, that’s becoming a greater part of American life.

    In a sense, this might be expected as a society moves to a post-industrial society. After a certain baseline of material welfare (housing, health care, etc.), people in a post-industrial society might more obsessed with staying ‘wired’ on the Internet and up-to-date on technology, education and job training and enjoying “experiences”, as opposed to owning large material goods as status symbols that they don’t use. (That is to say, the iPhone becomes a status symbol in the place of the McMansion. People will be just as status conscious and snobby, but the form it takes changes.) That might currently be a minority of people, but it might grow.

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