Under a Fluorescent Moon

      Mr. Obama heads to Europe now where official hostility is rising against the Anglo-American method of pounding monetary sand down the rat-holes of “non-performing” debt, bankrupt enterprise, and bubble-levitated bonds. Our poised and charming Prez may escape personal obloquy from the quaint old-world street folk, but most of the other G-20 policy playerz take a dim view of the shell-and-pea games being played by the custodians of the world’s reserve currency, including front-end-loader bank bail-outs, the shuffling of worthless securities under TARPS and TARFS, the desperate efforts to prevent the sane re-pricing of real estate, the cannibalizing of treasuries by the Federal Reserve, the now-notorious hijacking of public “liquidity” injections by third parties like Goldman Sachs, and most generally the perceived sacrifice of everybody else’s greater good for the sake of maintaining Lloyd Blankfein’s cappuccino machine.
    What’s going on now is nature’s way of telling you that America’s standard of living has to be reduced by something between 20 and 50 percent.  You can have it in the form of a compressive deflationary depression, including widespread bankruptcies… or you can have by way of inflation, in which money loses its value.  But there’s one basic qualification to this: the way down is not symmetrical with the way up.  That is, it’s really not just a matter of ratcheting down to a standard of living half of what it was, say, in 2006, because in the event all the various complex systems that support everyday life enter failure mode before our society re-sets at a theoretically lower level of equilibrium.
    By this I mean our methods for getting food, for moving about the landscape, for deploying capital, for trading and manufacturing, for schooling, doctoring, and running public services all destabilize and, to some degree or other, fail to deliver their contribution to normal daily life.  Banking (capital deployment) is already mortally wounded.  It remains to be seen how this will affect the food supply half a year ahead in the harvest season.  Capital is as big an “input” for our method of farming as diesel fuel or fertilizers made from methane gas.  The failure of banking will combine with city and state insolvency to crush public transit, law enforcement, fire protection, and whatever flimsy local safety nets exist to keep the ultra-poor and helpless from die-off.  The lowering of living standards by 20 to 50 percent essentially eliminates all but the must critical commerce, meaning that most of the stores in the malls and strip malls lose their customers and shed employees, while the mall and strip mall owners lose their rents, and the bankers lose performing commercial real estate loans. As all this occurs, tax revenues go way down, schools can’t pay their employees or buy diesel fuel for their yellow bus fleets. More people lose the ability to carry health insurance.  Hospital emergency rooms are overwhelmed. Health care descends to Third World levels.  Meanwhile, pensions are destroyed, the elderly live on dog food and ketchup. . . .
     This is where we’re headed. It could easily be worse than the 1930s, when we still had plenty of family farms, plenty of oil, plenty of factories in good running order, and a highly regimented population of workers unaccustomed to luxury, leisure, and entitlement.  We’ve hardly begun to see the potential political repercussions of economic disorder now underway.  I think it will start to show in a big way not long after Memorial Day, when the current false euphoric Wall Street rally ends in yet another pool of tears, and the despair trickles downward. A crucial piece of the outcome depends on what happens over at Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department – which lately seems to have seceded from the federal government.  A peeved public is going to start wondering why the bankers and insurers have not been called in by the criminal division to do a little ‘splainin'.  As the spring yields to summer, the Obama team’s current fix-it plans are also likely to have run out of credibility.  Mr. O better be prepared to get a new game.
    I spent the weekend at the yearly Aspen Institute Environmental Forum – a confab lately devoted about equally to the energy and climate fiascos.  It’s a peculiar exercise, since major sponsors include the oil and gas companies and the auto industry. The Saturday center-ring panel on peak oil, for instance, was shockingly weak, led by the flack from the Shell corporation, a charming lady, highly-skilled at blowing green smoke up the public’s ass. Even more shocking is the consensus among the presenters and attendees – including the hotshots of climate and energy science and the elder statespersons of environmentalism – that the energy problem merely amounts to finding other means for running all our cars.  The assumption that we must remain car-dependent remains absolutely entrenched among these people who ought to know better.  Of course, the words “public transit” were barely uttered.  It’s disappointing to find such idiocy among this particular elite.
          But Sunday’s departure really plunged me into the epicenter of American idiocy – namely, the airline industry.  They’ve been running airplanes out of Pitkin County, Colorado for at least fifty years, but they seem to discover a’fresh every morning that strange winds blow through the valley.  After jerking around absolutely everybody in the terminal for a couple of hours with unexplained delays, the United Airlines ground crew announced that all flights for the day were cancelled, causing a rhino rush back out through the security checkpoints to re-booking counters.  I ended up on a bus for the Denver Airport – a five hour trip, including twenty-miles of parking-lot quality traffic along I-70 where the jackass Colorado DOT had closed down one eastbound lane, despite the fact that it was Sunday and there was no work going on there. 
    You’d also think that after all these years, the state of Colorado might have organized choo-choo train service from Denver into the ski valleys of the Rockies, given how important the ski industry is to the state’s economy – and how incredibly fragile the airline service is. But that would be too sensible for a nation determined to become the Bulgaria of the western hemisphere.  So, instead, they get up every single morning in Aspen and try to figure out whether commercial aviation works out there, and half the time it doesn’t.  Anyway, the Aspen Institute was very generous in organizing the bus trek out of there, and putting up us travelers stranded overnight in airport hotels.  Mine was some rummy operation called the Staybridge Inn where the vaunted in-room wireless didn’t work in my room, so I write to you in a dreary little chamber off the lobby where children are screaming from their overdoses of fry-max and melted cheese in the only dining venue (Ruby Tuesdays) along this massively over-scaled boulevard of chain motels.  I can easily see the whole miserable strip becoming a ruin inside of five years as the airline industry dies. Final note: the hotel elevator proudly declares itself to be the German-made product of the ThyssenKrupps corporation.  America’s so lame, it can’t even make its own elevators anymore.
    I apologize for a somewhat sloppy blog this week.  My tendencies to insomnia are aggravated by high altitude and I am cross-eyed with sleeplessness. . . .
____________________________________

My 2008 novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available in paperback  at all booksellers.

Comments

[effee]

This is re: Joe who says he can design an electric car that gets the equivalent of 1000 mpg for $2000. My response to that is WTF are you waiting for then? ANYONE who could actually do that would be a magician, not to mention the richest person the world has ever known.
As far as fusion power goes, that may very well never pan out. People have been working on fusion power for over half a century and still no one knows if it's possible or feasible. Why don't you get serious and stop talking nonsense. It's offensive to those who know something about these matters.

[celtnorse]

I think this deserves a post, and an earnest rebuttal of the "purist" doomsaying... but with agreeable caveats.

FWIW, I readily agree that the fossil fuel powered economy is in peril. I also agree (and I think the spittle flecked fury of thise who dismiss it in the comments is not only foolishness, but at least in some cases, vaalidating).

With the disappearance of cheap energy, civilization as we know it really will implode. It will implode fast and furious, or it will implode in an inexorable decline, but implode it will. And as it does so, the idea of social disintegration and even catastrophic upheaval is not at all an unreasonable prediction. On the contrary, it might be cold and sober analysis.

However, what I think is lacking here is enough deference to new technology, and the potential for the unknown to serve up opportunity (just as much as it can serve up disaster).

Worth noting here is that when the world transitioned to fossil fuels, it was well after the indutrial revolution was under way, and at the time, forests all over the western world were being annihilated... for thermal output. It was unsustainable, and without the industrial powered transition to Oil, it would have collapsed.

Before I address this specifically, I would like to make clear both to Mssr Kunstler, and to anyone who reads this, that I also think that the idea that the author is at least partly fed by a host of tired and typically banal biases is very clear. Lines like the one in The Long Emergency that speak to the Southeast in caricature clinging to their skewered ethos if individualism that needs a gun to defend it, as a place likely to fly apart under duress, reveals worlds to me (and I'm an ExPat New Yorker living in Europe).

Nevertheless, I think there are VERY serious insights in the body of his work.

But, he dismisses fusion, as have many, far too quickly. There are a number of feasible paths to this next level of human industry that are on the table, and they will pan out in some form, becuase they MUST pan out in some form. I base this on the "necessity is the mother of invention" code, and on the fact that I agree in the main with Kunstler on what will happen without it... though I am a bit less infused with sunny optimism.

It is easy for Mssr Kunstler, or indeed anyone to scoff at viable Fusion since the biggest beast in the fusion world is the ITER facility. But ITER is a beast of unbelievable proportions. In a lot of ways, it is the ultimate expression of how risk aversion actually wastes resources, because the Tokamak was effectively a dead end when it was at Princeton over a decade ago. This approach will simply never be of commercial use, and in fact its research value is highly dubious as well... though it certainly keeps a load of researchers on a payroll.

In any case, this position is also what Bussard believed, and as he was the driving force behind the EM "pinch" approach that is still going strong, one has to concede that Boron 11 may have its place, and has potential. However, because of the nature of the proton-Boron11 reaction, it may also be impractical as a viable power generation alternative.

But... then there is Helium 3. The reason He3 is such an interesting target, is simply that it really has the potential to be the real deal, a true "game changer" that could take humanity to the next level in almost unimaginable ways.

The fact that He3 is so stable, and so small, is both a challenge and a boon. Getting practical power from a thermal reaction is almost certainly out of the question. The coulomb barrier (the electrostatic repulsive force of the nucleus) is so high (around 1MeV) in an He3 - He3 reaction, that it is almost impossible to imagine ever getting enogh collisions in any kind of plasma to generate positive energy. Even with a mix of Deuterium and He3, (technically also aneutronic), there would be so many side reactions between deuterium atoms (which definitely does produce neutrons aplenty) that the overall process would not be aneutronic at all.

However, magnetic containment is not the only way to get nuclei to fuse, and there may be the possibility for breakthrough technologies that make use of this. For example, it has been suggested, that with a geometric arrangement of double walled carbon nanotubes (which generate nano scale electric fields) would tend to create a stream of He3 ions in a single line with extrardinary precision (keeping them centered to within several proton diamerters, even taking into account quantum flux). A single tube would be divided at the center, and angled minutely, sending a stream of ions towards an opposing stream from the other direction, wherein an extremely high fraction of them would pass within the range of the strong nuclear force, securing fusion. Perhaps with something like near 100% efficiency.

Such an approach would use an array of these tubes, aligned and being perfectly straight geometrically, angled at the center. He3 Nuclei that fused would then release all their energy in 2 protons moving at better than half way to the speed of light, and being charged ions, could have the vast majority of their energy captured directly as electricity through electrostatic containment within the reaction chamber.

Keep in mind though, that this approach is one of several that could yield such a breakthrough. In the interest of sobriety, also keep in mind that a helium 3 nuclei even in the smallest possible nanotube (12 Carbon rings in circumference) it is more or less like a stream of peas in a tunnel opening several hundred yards wide. Engineering and manufacturing this would be a challenge to say the least. But it does not seem impossible.

The final point here is that had breakthrough technologies such as this been a major focus of our civilization during the last few decades, rather than the debacle of things like ITER (which ironically, was done under the idea of an incremental approach), we would have a decent likelihood by now of having something viable, if not solved, in our hands right now.

With a solution, we could be looking at the moon as the source for cheap clean energy that would support humanity with low cost and wasteless energy for several centuries at least. An order of magnitude cheaper per joule or kilowatt-hour than anything we will ever see with Oil again. Several places on the moon with high concentration of titanium in the regolith, are likely to have quite high concentrations of He3, and with cheap energy, commercial exploitation and in fact colonization of the moon would be at hand.

If you think this is infeasible, you are as unimaginative in the realistic sense, as those who scoff at Kunstlers clear eyed assessment.

I would also add finally, that without a breakthrough like this in fairly short order, there is an extremely high risk of forces being unbound in the coming years that will indeed potentially result in the wholesale re-ordering of most human societies, and undoubtedly to all of our great detriment, and to that of posterity. Sustainability is not viable in any meaningful way through any of the much lauded solutions that use "sustainability" as a buzzword. The facts just dont support it (excpet perhaps solar, but only in an orbital configuration, and the numbers there even at scale, are not promising.

We need this, and we need it quickly, or I really fear our children will inherit a world in steep decline, and a civilization with its apex rapidly becoming merely a bitter memory.

[celtnorse]

Try Again...

I think this deserves a post, and an earnest rebuttal of the "purist" doomsaying... but with agreeable (to Mssr Kunstler) caveats.

FWIW, I readily agree that the fossil fuel powered economy is in peril. I also agree (and I think the spittle flecked fury of those who dismiss it in the comments is not only foolishness, but at least in some cases, vaalidating to his thesis about the nature of denial).

With the disappearance of cheap energy, civilization as we know it really will implode. It will implode fast and furious, or it will implode in an inexorable decline, but implode it will. And as it does so, the idea of social disintegration and even catastrophic upheaval is not at all an unreasonable prediction. On the contrary, it might be cold and sober analysis.

However, what I think is lacking here is enough deference to new technology, and the potential for the unknown to serve up opportunity (just as much as it can serve up disaster).

Worth noting here is that when the world transitioned to fossil fuels, it was well after the indutrial revolution was under way, and at the time, forests all over the western world were being annihilated... for thermal output. It was unsustainable, and without the industrial powered transition to Oil, it would have collapsed.

Before I address this specifically, I would like to make clear both to Mssr Kunstler, and to anyone who reads this, that I also think that the idea that the author is at least partly fed by a host of tired and typically banal biases is very clear. Lines like the one in The Long Emergency that speak to the Southeast in caricature clinging to their skewered ethos if individualism that needs a gun to defend it, as a place likely to fly apart under duress, reveals worlds to me (and I'm an ExPat New Yorker living in Europe).

Nevertheless, I think there are VERY serious insights in the body of his work.

But, he dismisses fusion, as have many, far too quickly. There are a number of feasible paths to this next level of human industry that are on the table, and they will pan out in some form, becuase they MUST pan out in some form. I base this on the "necessity is the mother of invention" code, and on the fact that I agree in the main with Kunstler on what will happen without it... though I am a bit less infused with sunny optimism.

It is easy for Mssr Kunstler, or indeed anyone to scoff at viable Fusion since the biggest beast in the fusion world is the ITER facility. But ITER is a beast of unbelievable proportions. In a lot of ways, it is the ultimate expression of how risk aversion actually wastes resources, because the Tokamak was effectively a dead end when it was at Princeton over a decade ago. This approach will simply never be of commercial use, and in fact its research value is highly dubious as well... though it certainly keeps a load of researchers on a payroll.

In any case, this position is also what Bussard believed, and as he was the driving force behind the EM "pinch" approach that is still going strong, one has to concede that Boron 11 may have its place, and has potential. However, because of the nature of the proton-Boron11 reaction, it may also be impractical as a viable power generation alternative.

But... then there is Helium 3. The reason He3 is such an interesting target, is simply that it really has the potential to be the real deal, a true "game changer" that could take humanity to the next level in almost unimaginable ways.

The fact that He3 is so stable, and so small, is both a challenge and a boon. Getting practical power from a thermal reaction is almost certainly out of the question. The coulomb barrier (the electrostatic repulsive force of the nucleus) is so high (around 1MeV) in an He3 - He3 reaction, that it is almost impossible to imagine ever getting enogh collisions in any kind of plasma to generate positive energy. Even with a mix of Deuterium and He3, (technically also aneutronic), there would be so many side reactions between deuterium atoms (which definitely does produce neutrons aplenty) that the overall process would not be aneutronic at all.

However, magnetic containment is not the only way to get nuclei to fuse, and there may be the possibility for breakthrough technologies that make use of this. For example, it has been suggested, that with a geometric arrangement of double walled carbon nanotubes (which generate nano scale electric fields) would tend to create a stream of He3 ions in a single line with extrardinary precision (keeping them centered to within several proton diamerters, even taking into account quantum flux). A single tube would be divided at the center, and angled minutely, sending a stream of ions towards an opposing stream from the other direction, wherein an extremely high fraction of them would pass within the range of the strong nuclear force, securing fusion. Perhaps with something like near 100% efficiency.

Such an approach would use an array of these tubes, aligned and being perfectly straight geometrically, angled at the center. He3 Nuclei that fused would then release all their energy in 2 protons moving at better than half way to the speed of light, and being charged ions, could have the vast majority of their energy captured directly as electricity through electrostatic containment within the reaction chamber.

Keep in mind though, that this approach is one of several that could yield such a breakthrough. In the interest of sobriety, also keep in mind that a helium 3 nuclei even in the smallest possible nanotube (12 Carbon rings in circumference) it is more or less like a stream of peas in a tunnel opening several hundred yards wide. Engineering and manufacturing this would be a challenge to say the least. But it does not seem impossible.

The final point here is that had breakthrough technologies such as this been a major focus of our civilization during the last few decades, rather than the debacle of things like ITER (which ironically, was done under the idea of an incremental approach), we would have a decent likelihood by now of having something viable, if not solved, in our hands right now.

With a solution, we could be looking at the moon as the source for cheap clean energy that would support humanity with low cost and wasteless energy for several centuries at least. An order of magnitude cheaper per joule or kilowatt-hour than anything we will ever see with Oil again. Several places on the moon with high concentration of titanium in the regolith, are likely to have quite high concentrations of He3, and with cheap energy, commercial exploitation and in fact colonization of the moon would be at hand.

If you think this is infeasible, you are as unimaginative in the realistic sense, as those who scoff at Kunstlers clear eyed assessment.

I would also add finally, that without a breakthrough like this in fairly short order, there is an extremely high risk of forces being unbound in the coming years that will indeed potentially result in the wholesale re-ordering of most human societies, and undoubtedly to all of our great detriment, and to that of posterity. Sustainability is not viable in any meaningful way through any of the much lauded solutions that use "sustainability" as a buzzword. The facts just dont support it (excpet perhaps solar, but only in an orbital configuration, and the numbers there even at scale, are not promising.

We need this, and we need it quickly, or I really fear our children will inherit a world in steep decline, and a civilization with its apex rapidly becoming merely a bitter memory.