00101 Four horsemen that stalk the land: Peak Oil, Political Criminality, Economic Irrationality, and Climate Instability

The problem of dysergy.

Just as good things work together to make even better situations — a situation we call synergy — bad things work together to create even more catastrophic situations. Consider the Katrina hurricane event in 2005. Catastrophic weather, poor local preparation, social injustice, toxic political responses, big engineering mistakes — all worked together to make a bad situation worse. The word for this negative “synergy” is “dysergy.”

Note that these events involved all four of our cardinal threats: climate instability, economic irrationality, political criminality, and even peak oil, which drove the rapid post-Katrina price increases in fuels due to the inability of the world to make up the production lost in the Gulf of Mexico due to Katrina.

Four mega-problems.

The four mega-problems we face going into the next 50 years are peak energy, climate change/instability, economic irrationality, and political criminality.

Most observers of peak oil see a direct connection between the price run-up of oil in 2008 with the economic crises of that year. The same month that oil peaked in price (July 2008), the world witnessed the all-time high peak of consumer credit in the United States.

We are now in the midst of a “great-unwinding” of credit with many problems in the economy as a consequence. Less money spent by consumers leads to less money available for oil exploration, and that means even less oil in the future. The year 2008 saw food riots in developing countries, as the price of food soared beyond what the poor could pay for food. The economic irrationality of our systems makes it harder for people to earn enough for their basic needs because politically connected elites take so much for their own use by their clever manipulations of the system. There isn’t enough to go around and our politicians make it worse by looting the entire population so they can reward their friends and punish their enemies.

Climate instability drives an increase in extreme weather worldwide. The annual costs of the repair and recovery of storm damages increases with each passing storm season. This contributes to economic instability and is a constant threat to energy production infrastructures.

Alternatively, they may understand exactly what is going on but they don’t want to spend the money necessary to mitigate the problem. They bet that whatever happens to the population, they will end up on top. I don’t have any problem believing that the economic and political leadership of the United States could be so cynically corrupt. Do you?

When it comes to climate instability. . . One question that must be considered is how much of the world will be habitable in 50 years. In the past, the human response to drought and desertification has been to move somewhere else. Without water and without agriculture, human life as we know it is not possible. With seven billion people in the world, and the threat of desertification hanging over major parts of the planet, we have to ask ourselves: If we are on the verge of a 50 year drought, where will we go? What will seven billion people? Fifty year droughts are not uncommon in the history of humanity. The Chaco Canyon civilization was destroyed by a 50 year drought. A civilization killing deal doesn't have to be a 50 year drought either. A ten year drought destroyed the lives of millions of people in the United States during the 1930s, sending hundreds of thousands of people on the road, climate refugees in search of better weather.

Anyone who doubts the reality of climate change, which includes most of the political and economic leadership of the United States, isn’t paying attention.

The similarities between the ruling elites in the United States, and the Russian aristocracy in 1917, and the French aristocracy in the 1780s, are numerous and chilling.

This Political criminality enormously aggravates all of our problems pretty much everywhere on the planet. The purpose of government should be to protect and enhance the common good. Instead, everywhere we go, governments are under the control of special interests who distort public policy for their own economic benefit. The rent-seeking economic and political aristocrats who dominate our governments are merciless, violent, and amoral.

Our elections are contests among competing bands of thieves and parasites. The major political parties contend for the right to loot the public so they can reward their friends and punish their enemies. They use their authority to rig the system to disadvantage anyone who would challenge their monopolies on political power. Until permaculture has reached enough people to become a critical mass, this situation will go from bad to worse.

It will complicate every other problem and will drive us steadily toward the ash heap of history.

I discuss each of these crises individually at greater length in section 9. Right now I want to focus on how these issues work together to make a bad situation worse and gravely complicate our response.

In Chaco Canyon, the foolish decision of the elites (political criminality) to invest in grandiose buildings with no economic purpose (economic irrationality) wasted resources and work (resource exhaustion) and hastened their decline and collapse during a time of on-going extensive drought (climate issues).

The toxic combination of economic irrationality, political criminality, resource exhaustion, and climate problems, in earlier times and different contexts, brought down ancient Rome and the Mayans and other civilizations of antiquity.

They will take us down too if we don’t take determined action to deal with the real issues of the four horsemen of the modern apocalypse before it is too late.

The thigh bone connected to the knee bone.

Everything really does connect, often without many degrees of separation. The connections can be beneficial or they can be negative. In permaculture design, we want to increase and strengthen beneficial connections as much as possible, while eliminating or mitigating negative connections.

Peak oil brings higher prices and problematic availability of fossil fuels. This reduces conventional food production which depends upon fossil fuels (declining food production is really bad.)

Climate instability may make it impossible to grow certain crops and will reduce harvests of other crops. Meanwhile, peak oil will limit our ability to throw energy at the problem which has been our typical response in the past.

Economic irrationality can make it impossible to grow food because production money isn’t available. It limits the money available to explore for new oil reserves and deploy alternative energies like wind and solar. Productive wealth may be destroyed by rent-seeking elites who take from the productive and squander their resources on displays of high living and gratuitous consumption. Because crops aren’t planted, or are destroyed by weather, farmers can’t pay loans and mortgages and don’t buy much in stores which increase the economic crisis, which in turn feeds the food production crisis. (Declining food production is really bad.)

Over the world situation hovers the specter of toxic political criminality responses to these challenges that will make the situation much worse.

So as you can see . . . one thing really does lead to another, and the end results are not always what we want or need.

Avoiding die-off.

The ruling elites of this country are every bit as blind to the consequences of their actions as the Romanoffs were in 1917 and the French aristocracy in 1789.

Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat it. If we learn anything from history, it is that it is dangerous for social stability to allow economic aristocrats to centralize so much wealth that others have too few resources to have decent lives.

The political criminalities of our major party politics could lead us into a civil war that might push us right over the edge onto the ash heap of history. The problem with unsustainable systems is that they are unsustainable. Sooner or later they collapse. We will not be an exception just because, you know, we are the Americans and the British and the French and etc. and we like ourselves a lot and think we are special.

If this vicious downwards spiral begins, we could end up with a terrible die-off of the human species — billions of deaths. That would not be a peaceful process. The destruction it would leave behind would be devastating to the earth’s natural systems.

I'm not telling scary stories for the sake of the adrenalin rush.

Our job, as students of permaculture, is to make sure that the worst future does not happen. The default choice that our aristocracies are leading us to is a future a dystopia of post peak oil/peak food and energy shortages, climate instability, economic irrationality, and political criminality. There's money to be made in chaos, collapse, and violence. Just ask Blackwater and Halliburton.

With iPermie, you become part of a process to direct, deflect, and harness the enormous energies at play in our world so that instead of doom, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy of wisdom, peace, and sustainability going into the future.

There are reasons to be hopeful. We are here, having this conversation, openly and flagrantly one might say. Many sustainability concepts, which just a few years ago were marginal, are now at play in the public square.

Our temporal salvation cannot be imposed from above by the government. It must grow from the grassroots, starting with individual people and their households who make their own decisions to use less stuff, burn less energy, and live more lightly upon the land.

As this process spreads from one household to another, our grassroots work for wisdom and justice and beauty will impact the large systems of our societies and their economies. We will develop new systems that make it easier to do good for the planet and for humanity.

If you are impatient for the process to begin — and who isn’t — take some satisfaction from the fact that by working through the permaculture design process you take the essential first step necessary to save yourself, all you love, the planet and the future of humanity.