Local Future

I've been meaning, like all week, to do a post about this weekend's peak oil and climate change conference in Grand Rapids, hosted by Local Future.

At the center of Local Future is Aaron Wissner, who I got a chance to meet a few weeks back at the Michigan Policy Summit. I went to the presentation listed in the schedule as about global warming, and got there a few minutes late (I'd gotten detained by someone asking me ... something), and heard what I though was a fairly typical presentation on climate change. The language changed, however, and veered right into peak oil and the changes that will mean for the way we live and how peak oil and climate change are essentially hitting us at the same time.

This is Kuntsler territory, and while chatting with Wissner that afternoon, I found that he had read The Long Emergency but not World Made by Hand. I was pleased to learn during our conversation that one of Michigan's Congresscritters has a pretty good grasp on peak oil ... and that he's a Republican (coincidentally, perhaps, that Vern Ehlers is both a scientist by profession and also netted the League of Conservation Voters' endorsement for this year). In fact, Wissner told me that Ehlers pretty regularly attends peak oil discussions in the Capitol.

I can't make the conference myself (I'll be off camping and showing the boy how to cast with the fishing rod I bought him for his birthday), but I understand that there's on-site registration (doors opened 15 minutes ago, and the opening address by the green-friendly mayor of Grand Rapids is in 45). One of the speakers at the conference, Richard Heinberg, just wrote an essay on coal for The Oil Drum.

The answer to the first paragraph of this…

I admit it: I'm no environmentalist. But I like to think I'm something of a conservationist.

…is, you’re actually neither, Jonah.

Here, we see yet another attempt by people previously hostile to the environment as an issue to attempt to co-opt it. It was a big hit last year, when Newt Gingrich was the first to argue that the problem with environmental issues are environmentalists. The really unreasonable folks, the argument goes, are those who’ve been saying all along that we weren’t do a good enough job to keep clean the environment.

Goldberg, as usual, has no idea what he’s talking about. He certainly doesn’t understand what it means to be a conservationist, hence the ad hominem attacks on Al Gore, who at least as it regards global warming, is more conservationist than hippie. I mean, the man’s solution to global warming is to better husband those resources available today and both upgrade our electrical infrastructure and unleash the imagination of the little guy. Gore, who Goldberg lazily dismisses as the high priest of Gaia worship, sees no reason why we can’t address global warming and make a buck at the same time.

You could forgive Goldberg’s confusion. Knowing all of this would require simple research that is not Goldberg’s forte. This much can be discerned that he goes to a science fiction writer who believes in spoon bending who is hostile to the science of global warming on how to define environmentalism.

This extends to the specific issues Goldberg cites – grocery shopping bags and corn for fuel. While you can debate the thorny paper vs. plastic issue, every real environmentalist answers it by advocating the use of reusable cloth bags that need not be discarded in the first place (and none of them will tell you that corn ethanol is a good idea).

But, again, this isn’t about making a coherent point or even understanding how an issue works. Goldberg, like many conservatives, has been consistently wrong on just about everything for the last decade. Normally, when someone has that shitty a track record, you’d expect them to eventually get tuned out.You can avoid doing that by keeping yourself relevant somehow, which is what Goldberg’s doing – saying that the people who won the debate actually lost it, and that really the only people worth listening to were the ones who were wrong all along.

The cost of getting around

We haven't seen these stories until much later in the summer in previous years. The headline appears to be a bit overwrought ... the locals interviewed for it don't appear to be near any kind of breaking point, but you can sense frustration.

I can understand it, although it's very difficult to feel much sympathy for anyone near the breaking point over record high gas prices. It's not like a lot of people didn't predict that this was eventually going to happen, and it's our custom to expect people to solve their own problems, especially problems of their own making and that were self-evident truths several years out.

As one of those few lunkheads who suggested that we were setting ourselves up for a hard fall by building a society around the car and cheap gasoline, mostly what was the response to our argument was a lot of head scratching and sometimes -- mostly from the institutional press -- outright mockery.

This has been a constant thread throughout this decade. Warnings that we perhaps think a little harder about the consequences of invading Iraq, and also that our relationship with fossil fuels was releasing carbon to the atmosphere with likely negative consequences for future generations were ignored and mocked. We were on a national spending binge, and no one likes a downer who points out that eventually whoever issued the credit card was going to come around, looking for some dough.

Although the current clown makes us long for the peace and relative prosperity of the Clinton years (now that it looks as if dynastic politics is in trouble), my guess is that history will not judge the Clinton years as well as we maybe suppose. He was probably the best president of the last 30 years, and certainly one of the two least terrible, but looking back from just 10 years later, he appears to have been given a tremendous gift in rock bottom oil prices. This helped stimulate the American economy in terms of both new sales of trucks and SUVs and also suburban development, both of which have since gone into the toilet. My guess is that ultimately, Bill Clinton will be judged for the masterful way that the more his enemies attacked him, the more popular he became, but was something of a wash when it came to crafting wise, far-seeing policy.

Unfortunately, we're left with a world designed and built on cheap oil. If our towns and cities were designed with anything resembling wisdom and foresight, we could more easily absorb the shock of $4 a gallon oil, because it would be easy to let the car sit during the week and use it only when we wanted to get out of town (and out of town to places not connected with a sound public transportation network).

We've also essentially torn down our networks of public transportation. I mean, there's a rail line that runs about 200 yards from my front door, and the old rail station is now a brewpub. Alas, the rails aren't constructed for passenger traffic, and the closest Amtrak station is an hour to the south (luckily, we've got a once-a-day bus heading there). Rather than modernize and update things, instead the notion of public transportation was mocked and we let it all deteriorate. It was generally assumed that gas would forever stay cheap, and the American economy would roar unabated forever, and that the day when gas might become $4 a day was something out of someone's twisted fantasy.