John Michael Greer is the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America and the author of more than twenty books on a wide range of subjects, including The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, The Ecotechnic Future: Exploring a Post-Peak World, and The Wealth of Nature: Economics As If Survival Mattered. He lives in Cumberland, MD, an old red brick mill town in the north central Appalachians, with his wife Sara.
Any readers of The Archdruid Report who grew up, as I did, watching old black and white science fiction serials repackaged for the afternoon TV market may be forgiven for an overload of déjà vu just now. Somewhere near the end of any given serial, there’s inevitably a moment when the evil overlord says, “No! This cannot be! I am invincible!” It’s usually a close-up shot on the evil overlord’s sinister face, and it’s followed within fifteen seconds or so by a cataclysmic explosion that vaporizes the evil overlord, his death ray, his fortress of doom, his legions of terror, and everything else within a couple of planetary diameters or so, except the hero and any other characters who are sympathetic enough to be allowed by the scriptwriters to get to safety behind the zarkonite shield.
Well, it’s been said. Get ready for the explosion.
The example I’m thinking of right now is Lord Browne, formerly the chairman of British Petroleum and now a major player in the fracking industry. A few days ago, in a public appearance, he insisted that the United States would be able to stop importing foreign oil by 2030, because the supply of shale gas that would be made available to the US by fracking technology was, and I quote, effectively infinite.
Ahem.
I found myself wondering if Lord Browne might possibly have been one of the contestants in the Monty Python Upper Class Twit Of The Year Contest skit which, in a nice bit of synchronicity, a reader forwarded to me right about the time that his lordship was making a very public fool of himself. Browne has been employed for some time in the oil industry, and therefore has had every opportunity to find out that the word "infinite" does not belong in any meaningful statement about fossil fuels. Now of course he may simply have been engaged in the same sort of puffery that we saw not too long ago from mortgage brokers and real estate agents, who had pressing financial reasons to spend much of their time expressing equally expansive and equally inaccurate notions of where their market was headed. Still, I suspect there’s more going on than this.
Over the last six months or so an extraordinary torrent of nonsense about limitless gas and oil supplies has been sloshing through the media, spouting out from an equally extraordinary assortment of people who ought to know better. We’ve seen pundits loudly claiming that the United States had become a net petroleum exporter, when what was going on was that modest amounts of gasoline and other refined petroleum products that Americans are too poor to afford nowadays are being sold to more prosperous countries abroad. We’ve seen fracking technology, which the oil industry has been using for decades, waved around as a brand new technological breakthrough; we’ve seen the Bakken shale, which has been known since the 1970s and doesn’t actually have that much accessible oil in it, ballyhooed as a brand new game-changing discovery; we’ve seen the most blatant falsehoods proclaimed as fact—I’m thinking here of the pundit I critiqued in a previous post, who insisted that kerogen shales are exactly the same as what’s being drilled in the Bakken, and that the US therefore has some absurd amount of shale oil ready for pumping.
Over the last few weeks, a number of my fellow peak oil writers have expressed worries about this outpouring of counterfactual drivel. Myself, I find it a very hopeful sign. What we are seeing is the shattering of the consensus that has excluded any discussion of peak oil from the collective conversation of our time. Plenty of pundits who refused to talk about peak oil at all are now talking about it incessantly. Even though they’re screeching at the top of their lungs that it can’t happen, and scrabbling around for any argument, however feeble or blatantly false, they can use to back up that proposition, they’re still talking about it.
That is to say, industrial society is collectively entering the stage of denial.
The application of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief to the process of dealing with peak oil has become common enough in the peak oil scene that an offhand reference to one stage or another in a talk or blog post on the subject rarely needs an explanation. It’s not just peak oil: the sequence of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance has become part of the common currency of thought in the modern world. For all its drawbacks and critics—and it has plenty of both—the five stages do a tolerably good job of modeling the way many people go through the grieving process in most contexts, which is after all as much as any theoretical structure can be expected to do.
Whatever its more general applicability, furthermore, it very often fits the experience that people have when they start to wrestle with peak oil and everything that it implies. Those of us who have been in the peak oil scene for a while now have watched plenty of people stumble their way through it one step at a time. There’s the denial stage—no, that can’t possibly happen, I’m sure they’ll come up with something, there must be plenty of oil around here somewhere. There’s the anger stage—it’s all the fault of the politicians, the bankers, the oil companies, David Icke’s evil space lizards, or somebody, and if we just denounce them loudly enough on our favorite blogs, we’ll be fine. There’s the bargaining stage—okay, the age of abundance is over, but if we build lots of wind turbines or buy organic coffee or go to one more round of meetings where we all come to a consensus about the nice cozy future we think we want, it’ll all work out, right? There’s the depression phase—we’ve failed as a species, humanity is irremediably awful, it would be better for the whole cosmos if Gaia just got it over with and chucked us into extinction’s compost heap, and so on. Then, finally, comes acceptance, when you’ve finished dealing with your emotional issues about the end of the petroleum age and can get to work at last on the practical stuff.
Now of course some people go through the stages in a different order, some people skip one or more of them, and some people get stuck in one or another of them. (Kubler-Ross recognized that the same thing happens in the kinds of grieving she studied, a point her critics don’t often remember.) Still, the model stays in use in the peak oil scene because something roughly comparable to the five stage process can be traced in the experiences of a lot of people who go through a peak oil awakening. That much is a fairly common realization in the peak oil scene; what I don’t think many of us anticipated, though, is that the same process might happen on a collective level as well. I suggest that this is what’s been happening in recent months, and that it’s what has driven the tirades against peak oil that we’ve all seen splashed over the media.
With that in mind, I’d like to glance over at a considerably more useful artifact of the current stage of the peak oil debate. Feasta has just released a study by David Korowicz on the ways that a financial crash could kickstart a more general economic implosion by gutting the fiscal gimmickry that keeps international trade running. (You can download a PDF here.) It’s a thoughtful analysis, and it takes the time to make its assumptions explicit, which is useful; in the very few places where it runs off the rails, it’s fairly easy to glance back to the presuppositions governing the study and figure out where the problem lies.
Korowicz argues, if I may oversimplify his careful prose, that the current global financial system is a tottering mess that could come apart at the seams in no time flat, and it’s under stress already from a variety of factors, including peak oil. If and when it comes apart, he suggests, the entire structure of letters of credit and currency flows that supports global trade in little luxuries like enough food to eat could quite readily come apart also, producing a fiscal cardiac arrest that could shatter supply chains and bring most nations’ economies to a screeching halt in a matter of days or weeks.
Is this a plausible scenario? It’s considerably more than that, for a close equivalent happened in late 1932 and early 1933 in the United States. A banking system that had been fatally wounded by the 1929 stock market crash and its aftermath had been propped up temporarily by federal money—they called it the Reconstruction Finance Corporation then; that’s spelled "TARP" this time around—but was still loaded to the breaking point with huge amounts of worthless debt and unprepared for ongoing economic contraction. Then a new round of economic crisis triggered by events in Europe—no, I’m not making up any of this; look it up—pushed the US banking system over the edge; as banks folded one after another, the basic trust that makes a credit-based economy function evaporated; nobody could be sure if the bank that received their deposits or their loans would still be there the next day, bank runs followed, and the whole economy shuddered to a halt. Paychecks could not be cashed, businesses could not pay their suppliers or get paid for their products, and many of the negative consequences Korowicz sketches out duly happened.
Could that happen again, on a global scale? You bet. It’s the sequel, though, that didn’t get into Korowicz’ analysis. Faced with the imminent reality of national collapse, the US government did not sit on its hands, which is what those with the capacity to do something are always required to do in fast collapse theories. Instead, it temporarily nationalized the entire American banking system, declared that all assets held by the banks were owned by the government until further notice, made private ownership of gold by US citizens illegal, and ordered every scrap of gold in the country much bigger than a wedding ring sold to the government at a fixed, below-market price, with stiff legal penalties for anybody who tried to hang onto their gold stash. (I’m not making up any of this, either. Look it up.) Flush with seized bank assets and confiscated gold, the government poured money into the nationalized banks, which could then meet every demand for funds, stopping the panic in its tracks. Once stability returned, the banks returned to private ownership and got their assets back, though gold remained a government monopoly for decades longer.
This sort of drastic measure is far from rare in economic history. Germany in the 1920s put paid to its era of hyperinflation by issuing a new currency, the rentenmark, which was backed by taking out one big mortgage on every single piece of real property in the country. Other countries have done things even more extreme. A nation facing collapse, it bears remembering, has plenty of options, and it also has the means, motive, and opportunity to use them.
It’s only fair to point out that this sort of drastic response is something that the Feasta study specifically excludes. One of Korowicz’ basic assumptions, stated as such in his study, is that governments will respond to the crisis by choosing the minimal option they think will solve the immediate problem. It’s a reasonable assumption, right up to the point that national survival is at stake, but at that point history shows in no uncertain terms that the assumption goes right out the window. Nation-states are good at surviving—that’s why they’ve become the standard form of human political organization in the viciously Darwinian environment of modern history—and it’s hard to think of anything a nation-state won’t do if it thinks its survival is threatened.
That said, Korowicz’ study points to one very plausible way that the next major round of crisis could slam into the industrial world. The fact that the nations affected by it could kluge together responses to it, slap the equivalent of defibrillator paddles onto their prostrate economies, and get a heartbeat again for the time being doesn’t change the fact that a financial collapse followed by even a partial supply chain breakdown would be a massive crisis, the sort of thing that could well plunge hundreds of millions of people into permanent poverty and push the global economy further down a long ragged decline that will be much less amenable to drastic responses. We’re in agreement, in effect, that the patient is terminally ill; the question is simply whether first aid measures available to the paramedics on site can get his heart beating again, so he can drag out the dying process for a while longer.
Of course this is not the way the Feasta study is being discussed over much of the peak oil blogosphere. The fascination with sudden collapse—call it the Seneca cliff if you must, though it’s only fair to note that Seneca was talking about morality rather than the survival of civilization, and the civilization to which he himself belonged took centuries to decline and fall—is to the peak oil scene exactly what the fixation on Bakken shale oil and "effectively infinite" natural gas is to the collective imagination of industrial society as a whole: a means of denial. It’s just one more way of pretending that we and our grandchildren’s grandchildren don’t have to endure the long bitter centuries of decline and fall that are waiting for us—a future that, let’s face it, is considerably more frightening than a sudden collapse. Claiming that it’ll all be over in a flash is not that much different, all things considered, from claiming that it won’t happen at all.
Wry reflections about evil overlords aside, I suspect we’ve got a ways still to go before the various modes of denial finish working their way through the collective imagination of our time. The pundits and corporate flacks who have, for all practical purposes, gone barking mad about the world’s energy supply—I really don’t think any less forceful phrasing reflects the nature of these strident claims that scraping the bottom of the barrel, via fracking or otherwise, ought to be treated as proof that the barrel’s still full—are by and large associated with the two economic sectors, finance and petroleum, that are going to be clobbered first and hardest as the reality of peak oil sets in. The elephant’s in their living rooms; that’s why their shrill denials that elephants exist can be heard so clearly all through the neighborhood. As the elephant roams a little more widely, I suspect that the same frantic tone will travel with it, until finally we find ourselves on the far side of denial and the next phase starts.
That phase, for those who haven’t kept track, is anger. It’s once that stage arrives in force that the explosion will follow.
I’ve commented more than once in these essays about the echoing gap between the fantasies of elite omnipotence so common in contemporary America, and the awkward realities of a nation where power has become so diffuse that constructive action is all but impossible. The diffusion of power over time is a commonplace in the history of nations; an earlier post in this series has already discussed the concept of anacyclosis, the ancient Greek historian Polybius’ analysis of the way the diffusion works; still, there’s another dimension to it as well.
That dimension? The cluelessness that so often afflicts ruling classes in the last years of their power.
There’s no shortage of poster children for that in the present case, but I want to call on one of the less blatant examples here, precisely because he’s a very smart man. The person I have in mind is Robert D. Kaplan, who burst onto the current-affairs scene in a big way in 1994 with a harrowing and crisply written article titled "The Coming Anarchy." He’s one of the brightest of the tame intellectuals who provide American politicians with things to talk about, and like many of those tame intellectuals, he clawed his way up from a middle-class background to his present status as an adviser to Pentagon brass and a regular speaker at high-end conferences.
Thus it’s revealing to go back to one of his books from the 1990s, the lively but inconclusive An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future (1998), and read his account of his one brief collision with the country he thinks he’s exploring. Most of the book chronicles Kaplan’s encounters with his peers—that is to say, other tame intellectuals and the politicians and businessmen whose largesse keeps them employed—in their natural habitat, a landscape of airports, office parks, urban condominiums, and other fashionable venues. Once, though, his years as a foreign correspondent in some of the world’s rough places broke through, and he climbed aboard a Greyhound bus for a trip through the American Southwest to see the country and the people first hand.
The scene is really one of the best examples of unintentional comedy in modern letters. Kaplan briefly succeeded in extracting himself from the bubble in which tame intellectuals of his caliber normally live, and the world outside the bubble shocked him right down to the soles of his Bruno Magli shoes. His fellow passengers were, like, fat, and even the thin ones didn’t seem to be trying to fit any definition of pretty and stylish he’d ever encountered; they wore cheap ill-fitting clothes in garish colors, and some of them had their belongings in plastic garbage bags rather than, say, Gucci suitcases. You could practically hear the "Ewww, icky!" escape his lips.
Now it so happens that I’ve done a certain amount of travel by Greyhound bus through various corners of the country, and shared space on a moving bus with the same kind of Americans that left him gaping in horror. (If I’d been on that bus with him, no doubt he’d have been appalled by the guy with the scruffy beard and ponytail two seats up, wearing baggy clothes that had seen many better days—hint: you don’t wear nice clothes on a long bus trip—and reading some dog-eared fantasy novel from the 1970s instead of whatever piece of highbrow trash the New York Review of Books was touting that week.) I’ve seen the garish polyester tank tops and the T-shirts that look like they’ve been used to clean auto parts, the women on their way to visit boyfriends who are doing five to ten for one thing or another, the college students who don’t have fancy scholarships, the middle-aged couple with bottom-level jobs on their way to visit some uncle they haven’t seen in ten years and who’s dying of cancer, and all the rest of it. All this is familiar enough to most Americans, but to Kaplan, it came as a shock.
Mind you, he had the courage to get in line along with his unfashionably plump, unfashionably dressed, unfashionably accessorized fellow passengers, and board that bus. I suspect that most of his peers have never done anything of the kind, and would never think of doing so. In today’s America, if you want to avoid seeing how most people live, nothing could be easier; America’s geography is so thoroughly carved up by income level that it takes a deliberate effort to fall out of the comfortable orbits inhabited by the middle and upper classes and plunge back down to Earth.
This is quite common in aristocratic societies at certain points in their history. When Marie Antoinette responded to reports that the Parisian poor had no bread by saying, "Then let them eat cake," she was being clueless, not catty; a life in the rarefied circles at the zenith of ancien régime France had given her precisely no exposure to the fact that it was the price of bread, not some unexpected shortage of it, that was making the lives of the underclass wretched. Her husband probably had a slightly clearer grasp of the situation, at least in the abstract, but he—along with a great many other aristocrats who would share his fate—had no more useful an understanding of the powderkeg on which the vast and tottering structure of the ancien régime was so unsteadily perched.
The irony here is that the ancestors of these same aristocrats had been as hard-bitten a collection of ruthless pragmatists as history has on display. The medieval barons whose progeny were on their way to an appointment with Madame Guillotine not long after 1789 resembled nothing so much as old-fashioned Sicilian mafiosi, complete with the Mafia’s devotion to the Catholic church, its code of honor, and its readiness to slaughter people en masse whenever the situation seemed to warrant it. Like every other feudal elite in history, the old French aristocracy emerged in a time of chaos, when the last scraps of central government had gone missing in action, and local landowners smart and strong enough to gather a band of armed followers and lead them into battle could impose their own rough justice on as large a domain as they could seize and hold.
Such times do not favor cluelessness. Even after the feudal system formalized itself, the heir to a barony who was too detached from the hard realities of the time could count on being removed from his position by the business end of a battle-axe. It was only after warfare became a monopoly of the French king, and aristocrats no longer had to risk their lives regularly leading their vassals on the battlefield, that it was possible for the French upper classes to isolate themselves in a bubble of their own creation and start drifting toward their wretched destiny.
It’s of interest to note that this process took a great deal longer in two other European nations, Britain and Prussia—those of my readers who got an American public school education, and so know nothing about history, will probably need to be told that Prussia was the nucleus of the German Empire, and what’s left of it is now part of Germany. In Britain until after the Napoleonic Wars, and in Prussia right up through the Second World War, it was common for the sons of aristocrats to join the military. Since Britain and Prussia both spent most of the 18th century at war, clueless young aristocrats tended to be removed from the gene pool via the helpful Darwinian selection pressures of early modern warfare. It’s worth noting also that British noble families drifted out of the habit in the 19th century, and the stereotype of the blithering aristocratic idiot entered British popular culture not long thereafter.
America’s aristocracy—yes, I can hear the screams of outrage evoked by the use of that latter phrase. Let us please get real; we have one, or a close equivalent to one. In every community of social primates, there’s an inner circle of members who have more influence, and more access to whatever wealth happens to be available, than the other members. In every community of social primates, your odds of getting into that inner circle depend partly on whether your parents belonged to it, and partly on your own ability to defeat rivals and bluff or bully or fight your way into it. Any group of social primates that claims not to have an aristocracy—as far as I know, this affectation is limited to human beings, though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that bonobos have gotten into it as well—has simply found it convenient to rely on a covert hierarchy instead of an overtly recognized one. In today’s America, as in every other human society, the single most important predictor for your place in the income distribution curve is your parents’ place in the same curve. Some people do move up from below—Kaplan, as already mentioned, is an example—but they do so by adopting the values and attitudes of members of the social strata above them, who by and large control who is and isn’t allowed to make that ascent, and who make that choice on the basis of who fits in.
America’s aristocracy, as I was saying, has never had the tradition of sending its sons into the military. The great wars of America’s history—the Civil War and the two World Wars—have seen members of every class show up at recruiting stations; the little wars have been fought by professionals or, in a few cases, by whoever happened to enlist when the drums started pounding and the press yelled for war. Most other potential sources of Darwinian selection have been kept away from America’s privileged classes with equal solicitude. The one exception is economic struggle, and even there the transfer of wealth from individual financiers and industrialists to trusts and holding companies has done much to guarantee that even the most feckless child of wealth and privilege will continue to enjoy wealth and privilege until the guy with the scythe makes the whole point moot.
John Kenneth Galbraith, whose prescient writings pointed to so many of the pitfalls into which today’s America is busily flinging itself, sketched out the consequences with his usual urbane wit in his 1992 book The Culture of Contentment. Galbraith seems to have taken a good deal of pleasure in making himself unpopular in the corridors of power and privilege, and the book just noted must have contributed heartily to that end; I’m thinking here particularly of his discussion of the unmentionable fact that the more money an American makes, the less actual work he or she has to do to earn it. Still, the core of the book is a precise and mordant comparison between the privileged class of contemporary America and an example I’ve already cited, the French nobility on the eve of the Revolution.
That comparison has an exactness that very few people notice these days. Louis XIV, the Franklin Roosevelt of his day, took a great deal of wealth and privilege from the French aristocracy and imposed a flurry of restrictions they found burdensome. After his time, it became a central goal of the nobility to restore their position at the king’s expense. Their strategy is one with which modern Americans ought to be familiar: they insisted on a massive military buildup and an aggressive foreign policy that landed France in expensive wars, while at the same time demanding tax cuts. The goal was simply to bankrupt the French government, so that—no, not so that they could drown it in a bathtub; instead, they wanted to force the king to call the États-Général—roughly, the equivalent of a US constitutional convention—which alone could create entirely new tax structures. Once that happened, they hoped to bully the king into restoring their former privileges as the price of acquiescing in a new tax regime.
The result was a high-stakes game of chicken between the party of the aristocracy, and the party of the civil servants, bureaucrats and officials whose authority and wealth was guaranteed by the power of the king. (If you want to describe these two parties as "Republicans" and "Democrats," I’m not going to argue.) What neither side noticed was that their struggles imposed severe burdens on the rest of the population, the peasants, laborers, and small-scale businesspeople on whose passive acquiescence the entire structure of power and prestige ultimately rested. As the struggle went on, the aristocracy did their best to delegitimize the king and the central government, while the civil service and its supporters did their best to delegitimize the aristocracy; both sides succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and managed to strip the last traces of popular legitimacy from the French political system as a whole.
So when the aristocrats finally got their way and the États-Général were summoned, all it took was a few speeches by radicals and a bit of violence on the part of the Paris mob, and the entire structure of the ancien régime disintegrated in a matter of weeks. The aristocrats, who were chiefly to blame for the mess, were also the last to figure out what had happened. It’s tempting to imagine one of them, stepping aboard the tumbril that will take him to the guillotine, saying to another, "So, Henri, how’s that political strategy working for you?"—but there’s no evidence that any of them managed that degree of insight even when the consequences of their failure were staring them in the face.
I sometimes wonder whether the members of America’s privileged classes will show any more insight into the forces behind whatever messy fate waits for them. Certainly they’re making all the same mistakes as their French equivalents. The power, wealth, and influence of the privileged classes in today’s America is a function of their ability to manipulate an elaborate structure in which government and what we jokingly call "private" industry are inextricably tangled. Most members of those classes have no skills worth mentioning other than those needed to manipulate that structure. They’re very good at manipulating the structure, and extracting wealth from it—that’s why they have the status and the influence they do—but they have forgotten, as most aristocracies forget when they reach senility, their own dependence on the structure.
Like the aristocrats of France before the Revolution, indeed, they’re busy undermining the structure that supports them—the culture of executive kleptocracy that pervades the upper end of American business these days is hard to describe in any other terms—and they’re equally busy trashing the last scraps of legitimacy the American political and economic system still has in the eyes of the people, for the sake of short term political advantage. It has in all probability never occurred to any of the people engaged in these activities that there could be negative consequences, or that the people in ugly clothes who bear the brunt of all this brinksmanship may eventually withdraw the support on which the entire structure depends. None of this can possibly end well: not for them, and probably not for the rest of us, either. I would remind those of my readers who think they would cheer the collapse of America’s ancien régime that what followed on the heels of 1789 was not the Utopia of reason promised by the radicals of that age, but the Terror, followed by the Napoleonic Wars.
In a way he didn’t intend, a core metaphor from Kaplan’s famous article "The Coming Anarchy" makes a perfect image for the mess ahead. He imagines the people of the world’s rich industrial countries as passengers in a limousine rolling through the dark and potholed streets of some Third World city, rife with poverty and violence. It’s interesting to note that he never asks what will happen when the limo runs out of gas. (I don’t happen to know his current views, but in earlier books he rejected the concept of peak oil.) Nor does he discuss what happens when the driver tries to dodge a pothole without braking and slams the limo into a brick wall—that’s more or less what’s happening to the economy of the industrial world just now—and let’s not even talk about the possibility that the people of the city might throw up some barricades, or lob a couple of Molotov cocktails in the limo’s direction. When one of those things happens—and I’m all but certain that it will—I hope Kaplan has enough of his wits about him to put on a greasy T-shirt and a pair of torn blue jeans, and mingle with the crowd.
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John Michael Greer is the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America and the author of more than twenty books on a wide range of subjects, including The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, The Ecotechnic Future: Exploring a Post-Peak World, and The Wealth of Nature: Economics As If Survival Mattered. He lives in Cumberland, MD, an old red brick mill town in the north central Appalachians, with his wife Sara.
On the Far Side of Denial
The Distant Sound of Tumbrils