[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Cassandra's View

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (October 01 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


As I mentioned in last week's post, I took the opportunity this year to
travel to Sacramento to attend the annual conference hosted by ASPO-USA
- the acronym-impaired may want to know that this is the US branch of
the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, the largest and most
respected organization in the peak oil field. It was, as the Grateful
Dead might have put it, a long strange trip, and ever since my return I
have been wondering just how to talk about the experience on The
Archdruid Report.

That the conference needed to be discussed here I had no doubt. Some of
the presentations at the conference were profoundly insightful. Others
were profoundly obtuse - and this very fact is worth noting, as a marker
of the extent to which intelligent people with the best intentions in
the world can still miss the most crucial implications of the systemic
crisis facing the industrial world just now. Still, inspiration chooses
its own path; it wasn't until I unpacked a book I'd found in a very
different place the day before the conference, and flipped idly through
its pages, that I knew how to say what needed to be said.

Perhaps the most surprising personal discovery I made at the conference
was that while many people there had encountered these essays, most of
them apparently thought that the word "archdruid" in the title was a
cute internet handle rather than a job description. I am in fact the
elected head of a Druid order {1}, and in that capacity I travel now and
then to events hosted by other Druid organizations around the country.
It so happened that the ASPO conference took place just after one such
event, a harvest festival for Sacramento's Pagan community, celebrating
the autumn equinox.

That's where I was on the two days prior to the conference, celebrating
the coming of autumn with Sacramento's Druids and Pagans in a sunny,
pleasant park east of town. That's where I wandered into a bookstall in
the row of vendors, and bought a copy of an old favorite, Bulfinch's
Mythology (1855); and it was as I paged through the volume, thinking
mostly of the challenges involved in finding a place for it on my
already overcrowded bookshelves, that I found a reference to the old
story of Cassandra.

Most people nowadays have heard the name, but those of my readers who
had what passes for an education in the American public schools may not
be familiar with the story. Cassandra was a daughter of Priam, the last
king of Troy; Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy in an attempt to
seduce her but, when she refused him, put a curse on her so that nobody
would believe her predictions. She thus had to watch helplessly as all
her warnings were ignored and her father's city plunged headlong into
the catastrophe of the Trojan War.

When Troy fell to the Greeks, the Greek commander Agamemnon took her
home with him as a captive. In a scene portrayed with stunning force in
Aeschylus' play Agamemnon, she foresaw his murder - and her own - at the
hands of Agamemnon's estranged wife; no one believed her then, either,
and captor and captive died together. The crowning irony is that
Apollo's curse has lost none of its power today; more often than not,
when someone is described as "a Cassandra" these days, the phrase
implies that the dire events that person predicts will not happen.

In terms of the original tale, though, the whole cast of Cassandra's
story was present and accounted for at the ASPO conference last week.
The event took place in an expensive hotel across the street from the
California state capitol, with skyscrapers filling in for the fabled
towers of Troy, and King Priam played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who did
not attend the conference but prefers a penthouse suite in the same
hotel to the less private comforts of the governor's mansion up the
street. Lunches, finger food for breaks, and hors d'oeuvres for the
evening receptions all tended toward the overly precious, and the
uniformed hotel staff bustled about like servants at a Bronze Age royal
court.

In this setting, the presentations and talk at the conference took on a
surreal quality, as though the global civilization we were discussing -
the one running out of cheap and easily available fossil fuels - was on
some other planet. I'm not at all sure how many of the attendees took
the time to connect the energy that provided climate-controlled air,
fluorescent lighting, PowerPoint slideshows and overabundant snacks for
the conference with the sinking lines on graphs that tracked our world's
rapidly depleting oil, coal, and natural gas reserves. I'm even less
sure how many of them traced out those graphs to their logical
conclusions and thought through the likely impacts on their own lives;
even in peak oil circles, this is surprisingly uncommon.

Some of the presentations, certainly, showed no trace of such
reflections. To my mind, at least, the most pathetic of them - and I use
this word with its full meaning of "evoking pathos", not in its current
sense as a general-purpose insult - was offered by Christer Lindstrom, a
pleasant Swedish businessman who wants to solve peak oil by building
countless millions of little four-seat computer-guided monorail cars to
replace today's urban automobiles. No hint of the fantastic capital
expenditures needed to build a new transportation grid in cities
sprawled across three continents, no reference to the immense burden on
the electric grid such a project would impose, darkened his presentation.

Instead, we watched pretty computer graphics and video footage of
prototypes circling a little test track in Uppsala. In a world blessed
with cheap abundant energy, some such thing might be worth considering.
Still, one of the core implications of peak oil is precisely that the
huge projects of the recent past - the interstate highways and the
Apollo programs - are slipping out of reach as the surplus energy that
made them possible depletes out from under us. Ignore this essential
point, and it's easy to come up with technological fixes that will solve
the peak oil problem; applying them to the real world is another matter.

None of the other presentations were quite so detached from the
realities of our predicament, but some came close, clinging to a model
of business as usual that has already been outstripped by events. Other
presenters showed a clearer grasp of the situation. Among them were
geologist Ken Verosub, who provided a crisp summary of the fundamentals
of petroleum science and the steep and ongoing decline in American oil
reserves; David Hughes, another geologist, who put coal into the energy
picture and showed the dubious figures behind claims that coal -
currently being used at the same rate per capita as in 1910, and itself
subject to drastic depletion - can replace our declining oil supplies;
and engineer Robert Rapier, familiar to readers of The Oil Drum {2}, who
sorted out sales hype from reality in the biofuels industry.

What set these presentations and others apart from the more facile ones,
at least from my viewpoint, is that the former recognized that we are
long past the point of ready answers. The cry for solutions is a common
one, and understandably popular. Still, thinking of peak oil as a
problem we can solve by some grand project, or combination of projects,
misses some of the most crucial features that define the crisis of the
contemporary industrial world.

The essence of that crisis is that we no longer have the resources or
the time to bring about changes in our infrastructure or technology
large enough to make a significant difference on a national or
international scale. We threw away that opportunity when the industrial
world abandoned the steps toward sustainability taken in the 1970s. The
quarter century from 1980 to 2005, when energy was cheaper and more
abundant than ever before in human history, could have been used to
launch the transition to sustainability, but that opportunity was wasted
- along with all those billions of barrels of oil - and all the wishful
thinking in the world will not bring either one of them back.

The Limits to Growth (1972), the most insightful (and thus the most
vilified) of the warnings issued during the Seventies, outlines the
resulting predicament in detail. One of the central themes of that study
was that constructive change had to happen while there was still a
surplus of energy and other resources to fuel it. By the time
significant shortfalls begin, all available resources are already
committed to current needs, and any attempt to free up resources for
some new project comes into conflict with the demands of existing
economic sectors. The US government may be in a position to loan Wall
Street $700 billion it doesn't have - in today's economic world, money
is so close to a mass hallucination that it's not surprising to see it
wished into being so casually - but actual resources such as fossil
fuels, trained labor forces, and time are not so flexible.

The recent troubles set in motion by attempts to promote ethanol
production show how the resulting limits work. Diverting corn to ethanol
production boosted US gasoline supplies over the short term, but sent
food prices soaring, sparking inflation across a wide range of products
and causing a cascade of problems elsewhere in the economy. This was a
relatively modest example, because ethanol production for motor fuel
used existing pipelines, gas stations, and other infrastructure;
something on the scale of an attempt to replace gasoline with hydrogen -
which would require a completely new infrastructure from top to bottom -
could draw down remaining resource stocks so drastically that, pursued
with enough misplaced enthusiasm, it could drive an economic collapse
all by itself.

Thus a focus on grand solutions is self-defeating, even when those
solutions are not as obviously beside the point as Lindstrom's dream of
a mini-monorail in every garage. We need to start with a close look at
the resources that are actually available for change in the real world,
with all its political, economic, and cultural complexities. We need to
recognize that the apportioning of resources to any economic sector,
however absurd it seems, has a constituency that backs it and can be
counted on to fight against attempts to divert it. We need to accept
that no one is likely to agree cheerfully to cuts in their standard of
living unless they themselves see a very good reason for the change -
and after so many decades of predictions of imminent doom by purveyors
of apocalyptic fantasies, another round of warnings just isn't cutting it.

These hard limits sketch out the range of action available to today's
industrial societies in the first years of the age of peak oil. They do
not make a cheerful picture; Cassandra's view never does, and this is
why clear assessments of unpleasant realities so often get pushed aside
in favor of grand, elegant, and optimistic visions flawed only by the
minor fact that they are unworkable in the real world. I don't claim to
know whether this habit will one day bring down Sacramento's towers in
flames, as it did the towers of Troy; still, as those towers shrank in
the rear window a week ago, the possibility was hard to dismiss out of
hand.

Links:

{1} http://www.aoda.org/

{2} http://www.theoildrum.com/
_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He
lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/10/cassandras-view.html


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