(being a letter-to-the-editor for local print media)
I was completely amazed by the story in our daily newspaper that expansion of the Central Wisconsin Airport will proceed. The article detailed a host of problems facing airlines and airline travelers, then quoted the airport manager and two Portage County Supervisors engaging in wishful thinking about a need to expand the airport in hopes of attracting more air traffic.
Unfortunately, they seem poised to commit a large amount of public money to this wishful thinking.
Local officials quoted seemed unaware that global petroleum production is now undergoing its all-time peak (or simply, “peak oil”). We will never again see an era of cheap energy such as the brief one which allowed airline travel to exist for its brief moment in history.
(This is true even if every U.S. national park, forest and wildlife area is drilled in a desperate attempt to find more oil in the USA.)
The airlines are dying, as James Howard Kunstler has remarked. We should briefly mourn their passing and get on with making other arrangements for moving people around–sustainably, renewably, without fossil fuels — not keep building onto airports. Sustainability is the factor that seems completely missing in local elected officials’ calculations about all the large-scale projects in the works locally.
Owing to the peak oil problem I just mentioned, the CWA expansion will join the Highway 10 Bypass in becoming obsolete even before the ribbon-cutting ceremonies are carried out. These projects were planned by consultants and experts with their eyes firmly placed in the rear-view mirror. Are there no sustainability – oriented, forward – looking consultants aware of the limits to growth, available these days?
Byron King’s recent article on Energy and Oil, entitled “Silent Spring for Aviation” captures the futuristic obsolescence of the CWA expansion: “…the current situation cannot last. At this rate, small towns are surely going to lose air service…It means that 70% of the nation’s airports are at risk of losing most or all of their airline service.
http://www.energyandoil.com/silent-spring-for-aviation
The eco-sprawl build-out of Stevens Point, the CWA expansion, dinosaurish highway projects and the new jail project all commit Portage County residents to what looks like a considerable amount of debt just as we’re heading into the fossil fueled economic downturn.
Two decades from now, perhaps some of our local youth will have the courage to ask their elders who made these decisions some questions: “Why did you leaders choose to ignore the peak-oil data that was already reported in the mainstream media and Congressional Record? What were you guys thinking?” Presently, no one in local public life seems willing to challenge these obsolete-before-built projects.
I sure hope there is still time to stop before any more is invested in the CWA expansion.
Bobby Gifford
Park Ridge
Archive for May, 2008
Central Wisconsin Airport Expansion: Obsolete before built, in face of peak oil
Sunday, May 25th, 2008Good news! Economic crisis pretty much over
Sunday, May 18th, 2008If i’m reading the financial press right, and listening carefully enough to the pundits on CNBC, it sounds like they’ve pretty much got the economic crisis, from sub-prime mortgage mess to that “recession thing,” discounted as a thing of the past.
If you’re as suspicious of people’s motives as i am these days, you’ll probably chalk up this quick end to the economic crisis to the desire to get people out there buying again.
It’s important to get people out to the big-box stores, buying Chinese container shipfulls of stuff. It’s important to get people back to buying homes again. Somehow–and i’ve heard this straight from the pundits, so it must be true–we’ll find a new, ever-more creative way, to loan money to a whole new crop of homebuyers, since the old crop seem to be a bit shall we say “tapped out.”
And lastly–the most important buying of all, for the media moguls and their paid pundits–we need to have people confidently buying stocks again. We’re assured that now is the time to “back up the truck and load up on shares” in big banks, retailers, homebuilders, and all the other formerly-shaky corporations who sell stock to the public.
All this good news amounts to burying the problems of working-class people in the USA back on the back pages of the news. What i’ve been calling the “stealth recession” will go back to being stealthy again, while the wealthy show off their wealth in new and ever more bizarre ways. The financial elites in the USA/the global economy will prove themselves willing to shed layer upon layer of workers from the “middle class” (however that’s defined these days), and millions of formerly “middle class” folks will find themselves falling into the working class, even without a safety net to cushion the fall.
As for poor people globally, look for millions of these souls to be written-off entirely in the new “upturn” we seem to be facing. “Write-offs” seems to be the new name of the game in getting the economy to turn around, some way, any way.
Bobby G
Sharon Astyk: 10 Things Americans are Doing to Deal with Energy & Food Prices
Sunday, May 18th, 2008As usual, Sharon Astyk’s blog is worth reading:
http://sharonastyk.com/2008/05/16/542/
One of the few people focusing on the impact that peak oil is having on working-class people in the USA.
bg
Stevens Point: The Big Build-Out Begins
Friday, May 9th, 2008This week, The Big Build-Out was green-lighted in this small city. I see where Cathy Dugan was one of the few voices from the wilderness, along with Reid Rocheleau and another apartment owner, speaking against Stevens Point creating a Tax Increment Finance (TIF) district for the big corporate welfare plan to aid AIG Corp. putting up its big building in the industrial park east of the freeway. I feel somewhat guilty for not going down there and adding my voice to the few last opponents of the coming Big Build-Out in Stevens Point.
It’s no wonder that activists burn out in this area. Being the lone voice or two speaking out against what you see as wrongheaded development, more of the same business-as-usual with a smiley green face put on it, being greeted with either derision or just stoney silence, has got to wear on people after a while. It looks like we’re bound to be a monopole, a one-party town (Dems) for the next decade or more, playing the economic development game “the way it’s played now” as the Development Director would say. (As far as I know, caving in to corporate demands and giving concessions is the way the economic development “game” has been played for decade after decade; nothing new there.)
We also know that monopoles don’t last long; eventually two poles again emerge, and struggle begins anew. So there may be hope, a decade or more hence, for another look at wrestling with the peak oil problem and a less energy-intensive way of life. Of course, by then, we should be about 120 months into the global decline of oil production, so we’ll be well behind most other small cities in catching up to the cacophony of events transpiring then.
What is the rationale for why this TIF is so fiscally responsible for Stevens Point? It’s the “spin-off development,” of course.
In days gone by, people used to complain about the kind of spin-off development that the Big Build-Out will spin off. It was disparagingly called “Urban Sprawl.”
Now that Stevens Point will become an “eco-municipality,” no one would dare call “urban sprawl” all that spin-off development of hastily-built shopping plazas, convenience stores, restaurants, music venues (to create a “night-time economy” out there in Downtown #2), more large big-box stores, and of course, hundreds of new apartment units. They’ll be L.E.E.D. buildings! And all of the myriad services this Build-Out will demand of the city and surrounding county townships and municipalities? They’ll be paid for by escalating property assessments and rising property taxes. Somehow, the housing bubble will remain un-deflated in our area!
I’m suggesting a new term we could coin for the Big Build-Out: “Eco-newsprawlapality.” What do you think, could it catch on? In this brave new construction zone, the peaking of global oil production is still decades away, not an imminent threat, and the prospect of a sprawling small city utterly dependent upon the automobile seems to bother no one, not even the greenest of green activists. Except perhaps the few folks with enough gumption such as Cathy Dugan and Council member Amy Heart displayed, to speak out when they smell something fishy in the works.
Bobby G.
Climate change is politically correct; peak oil is not p.c.
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008If you subscribe to the number of on-line “communities” (Yahoo groups and so on) that I do, you’ll start to notice this pattern about our “progressive” global youth sub-culture population (progressive meaning, generally left-liberal leaning people): recognizing the problem of global climate change is politically correct; recognizing the peak oil phenomenon is not politically correct.
Why do you suppose this would be?
After giving this months of thought and careful study I’ve noticed a pattern. Progressive folk have no problem telling an unenlightened and skeptical co-worker, extended family member, or friend/neighbor the following: “Nope, your skepticism is misplaced; there is no longer any debate among climate scientists that global climate change is caused by humans. The debate is over; now we have to act.” The same progressive folk might not have it in them to say, “Nope, your skepticism is misplaced; there is no longer any debate among petroleum geologists that the global peak of oil production is either very near* or has already occured. The debate is over; now we have to act.”
Why is this schism in thinking so prevalent among well-read, NPR-listenin’ people do you suppose? My considered opinion is that, quite simply, it’s a matter of freedom of choice, gets to the heart of “being American” and having options, choices, being able to act on your conscience when it’s time to do so. We’re a smorgasbord, a lunch-buffet full of competing ideas, ideologies, action strategies, all equally valid, and everyone is entitled to their opinion, even if their opinion allows them to continue living that rampant consumerist lifestyle.
Being a climate-change activist is a matter of making conscious choices, lifestyle choices, choosing among options. You’re doing what you can, and if friends, co-workers and family don’t get it, perhaps someday they will, after noting the example you’ve set. You’re choosing voluntary simplicity, re-designing your life one choice at a time, you’re being that change you want to see in the world.
Being a peak-oil activist–well, you really can’t be a peak-oil activist, since there is no allowable route for activism, so you’re restricted to being “concerned about peak oil” — is a matter of realizing that we in the “developed world” are plumb out of choices. The hard truth, if this peak oil thing is true, is that we’re facing an “inconvenienced truth” which means we’re going to get inconvenienced, and soon. You realize you’re going to be living a life of involuntary simplicity, and that’s not good. You’re thinking you’ll have to “become that change that already happened in the world” so as not to be flattened by the steamroller of bizarre events that you suspect is already unfolding.
And no one in our modern civilization likes involuntary change. It’s like, an infringement on your freedom or something.It’s more than the involuntary nature of personal change that chafes us about the peak oil thing. Recent generations have been reared on the notion that scarcity is impossible, that imagination is the most important “resource” and that there can be no energy shortage because we’ll ultimately just engineer a new workaround for any energy problems that may emerge. There’s always a technological fix for any problem. Whatever enormous, global-scale problems that engineering has created, can always be fixed with even more engineering through some sort of kludge that is even more enormous and global in scale.
For example: got too much CO2 in your atmosphere due to running thousands of coal-fired electricity plants? No worries: simply find a way to sequester all that CO2 deep underground in a perfectly sealed, no-leak chamber of some sort, and do so just as fast as the CO2 is being emitted from those thousands of coal-fired plants. Just hit the EASY button you bought at Staples.
But it’s even more than all that. There’s the class factor about climate change vs. peak oil concern. The trouble is, since the data is so readily available, the unwashed and uncredentialled mob is becoming savvy about peak oil. And that’s not comfortable. You can’t have any schmoe out there in the factory or slinging sweatshop sweatshirts in the local distribution center in your town, being well-read and knowledgeable about the coming end of industrial civilization as we’ve known it. That’s just wrong. That schmoe didn’t spend thousands upon thousands on expensive paper to give them credentialled credibility, and that’s just wrong.
We admire and applaud the Swedish people for having come up with the eco-municipality concept. We’re rather appalled that these otherwise bright people and their forward thinking nation, also hosted the founding of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, or ASPO. We’ll forgive them that, as long as they keep it somewhat on the down-low.
Plus, you have to consider the quality of the spokespeople. Climate change has very moral high-ground folks leading the movement. There are prominent neoliberals such as Al Gore, and prominent billionaires and people who operate very, very well-funded NGOs, at the head of the climate change thing, able to quote Gandhi and the Dalai Lama at the drop of a hat.
At the head of the peak oil thing, you’ve got people like that Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas, a bunch of retired petroleum geologists only now able to speak their truth now that they’re outside the corporate world. Why didn’t they speak up when they were in there? Or people like Matt Simmons who obviously has a vested interest in doing finance deals for very large oil and gas drilling firms and who sees $200-a-barrel oil as a bullish thing for his industry. Or you have snarky cynical commentators such as James Howard Kunstler who use profanity at the drop of a hat and aren’t afraid to cry “bullshit” when they hear people slinging bullshit, or point out that things are truly fucked up when things are indeed, truly fucked up beyond all rehabilitation.
And lastly, for many progressives living in the higher income brackets, peak oil is just not an impactful thing. If your household income is high enough, earned by two professionals in a small city in the Wisconsin hinterland, you’re not going to feel the peak oil pinch for a long time to come, not until your fuel bills go over $300 or $400 a week perhaps. Err… well, there is the problem of shortages, once they begin to develop, if the peak oil thing goes through. And then too, there’s the related problem of the collapsing economy all of that cost burden and shortages would bring. Even publicly-funded jobs may start to be cut. But if you’re a peak oil skeptic, all those concerns are irrelevant since they’ll never come to pass in your lifetime. Well, maybe your kids’ lifetime…
That high fuel price thing, no relation to oil production peaking, is more of a ghetto problem impacting people who perhaps can’t afford even the gas to schlep over to a job interview forty miles away since that last job went bye-bye 15 months ago and there haven’t been any offers since. Again, these are not the folks you want heading up your social movement; otherwise, you’ve got neo-Bolsheviks and that is just so wrong.
And just when you thought we’d run out of reasons to be a skeptic on the p.o. question, there’s the prairie populism aspect. A lot of folks find themselves going into a full-on Jim Hightower rant about the corporate plutocracy of oil and how fully 100% of the problem we’re now facing is due to the new robber barons of oil offshore-ing their trillions in US dollars into that huge global slush-fund somewhere in the dozens of trillions U.S. The only peak oil, your prairie populist side says, is the one the oil barons have cooked-up to screw us.
Not that the trillionaire boys’ club aren’t truly evil bastards who are accomplishing the last great upward wealth transfer, but it’s just that this answer is the one that satisfies, but if you’ve been following the peak oil thing for the past 100 months, it’s not the answer that is probably true. The rabbit hole goes much deeper than that.
So there’s a stab at some reasons why peak oil is politically incorrect, but climate change recognition is politically correct!
Bobby G.
*near means, within a half-decade, say perhaps on the date 13.0.0.0.0. [12/21/2012]