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19 March 2008 - Oil and the current stock market chaos
NEW! (Added 19/03/2008)
Climate change is all over the newspapers and the TV news. You'd think it was the most urgent problem facing humanity or something.
Meanwhile, the current stock market chaos is being attributed to irresponsible bank lending on sub-prime mortgages.
The question is: why are the sub-prime chickens coming home to roost now? How come a bank - Bear Stearns - that made it through the 1930s Depression has just been bought for peanuts by a rival? We've had recessions in the economy several times in recent decades, but now some economists are talking about a "Second Great Depression". Can cavalier lending alone really have brought this about? What's different this time?
I only found out about "Peak Oil" last October, through word of mouth. There turned out to be plenty on the Web about it, and the occasional article hidden away in the finance pages of the British dailies.
I won't go into the details - good introductions are here and here - but basically, long before the consequences of climate change bite the developed world, the world economy is going to go into terminal freefall. This is because capitalism is predicated on permanent economic growth, and permanent economic growth depends on permanent increases in energy production.
You don't have to be an economist - perhaps it helps not to be one - to see that capitalism is thus, essentially, an edifice built on sand. Unless a means to harness nuclear fusion is found soon - and they've been trying for 30 years without any sign of a breakthrough - permanent increases in energy production are simply a ridiculous dream. And the breakneck growth of the Chinese and Indian economies, and of the world's population, is bringing this glaring truth into sharp focus.
In particular, production of oil, by far our most important energy source, has not increased for 3 years, despite rapidly growing worldwide demand. That's because all the evidence suggests that oil production has reached its peak. All the high-quality, easily-extractible stuff has gone, and from now on production can only fall. Yes, there's plenty left, but that's not the point: without increasing oil production, there can be no economic growth.
I've read many apparently well-informed and sober articles that maintain that the point of Peak Oil marks the beginning of the end of industrial civilisation - attractions to come including the collapse of democracy, food shortages, resource wars, and the ultimate breakdown of society. Conversely, I've read no counter-arguments that don't seem founded on wishful thinking or vested interests.
My first response to learning about Peak Oil was a feeling that we'd best enjoy the period of normality we have left. I had no idea that it might strike in months rather than years. But there are ominous signs: petrol in the UK at £1.08 a litre - and going up by the week - and suggestions of panic about to erupt in the stock market. Of course, I don't know if this is "it"; but it echoes to an uncanny extent, in both its manner and its timing, what the Peak Oil pundits have been predicting for years.
No economic commentators seem to have been making any connection between the credit crunch and Peak Oil, which makes me think I may be wrong here; but is it coincidence that banks have got scared of lending just at the point where it's become clear that oil production recently peaked? This isn't to suggest that current rising oil prices are to blame for the market chaos - rather, I'm positing that the market chaos, and the rising oil prices, are two separate consequences of the same root phenomenon. The market isn't looking at oil prices, but at oil production.
For the moment, I'm past the point of worrying about it. It's going to happen, and soon. Of course my equability won't last, but for the moment I'm in a state of something like awe, feeling I'm contemplating the beauty of something in the early stages of its dying.
By way of postscript: till recently I'd thought that, yes, there was something fishy about the US government's account of the 9/11/01 atrocities. But this acknowledgement was overridden by my inability to imagine what might impel even as morally bankrupt a government as the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld one to participate in the massacre of 3000 of its own people. Then I read about Peak Oil, and then I read about Mike Ruppert. (I've just ordered his book.)
3 February 2007 - Pedantry round-up
I don't claim never to make errors in my English, but PUR-LEASE, what's going on here??? -
- "Panorama reveals that GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) attempted to show that Seroxat worked for depressed children despite failed clinical trials. [New paragraph] And that GSK-employed ghostwriters influenced 'independent' academics." (BBC News Web site) - Sigh. WHY the full stop? WHY the new paragraph? I just don't understand how you can get this wrong if you've got half a brain cell in your head, let alone if you're employed as a writer by (supposedly) the world's most prestigious news-gathering organisation!!
- "There's an old adage that suggests one shouldn't fix what ain't broke. Aside from the grammatical inefficiencies of this statement, it isn't true." (Stuff magazine) - I hasten to point out that I don't buy this garbage: the magazine was lying around in our office kitchen. I've no idea what the writer means by "grammatical ineffiencies" - I suspect they're talking about "infelicities" but couldn't be bothered to check a usage that common sense says is utterly meaningless. It's also not clear what they're complaining about - the use of "ain't" or the fact that one can't, logically, fix what isn't broken. If the latter, the error is not grammatical but, as mentioned, logical. And to call this an "infelicity", if that's what the writer means, is of course totally missing the point. Often I feel a little bit of a snot-head about pointing out bad English, but (a) for Heaven's sake, these people write for a living in a more prestigious context than I do and (b) this person at least clearly regards himself as a master of the written word.
- "The UK is famed as a nation of tea drinkers, but the coffee shop has again spread through our shores." (BBC News Web site) - Now, OK, I know "shores" here is a metonym, but a few microseconds' extra thought would surely have yielded one that doesn't conjure up visual paradoxes.
- "An estimated 47 percent of Britons drink coffee regularly, they are still in the minority compared to tea drinkers, who make up..." (BBC News Web site) - Barely worth mentioning, this sort of thing, as it's so frequent nowadays. A depressing number of journalists seem incapable of using simple conjunctions to convey relationships between statements. A "but", "although" or "and" after the first comma would help us to understand what point the writer is making regarding the relative numbers of tea and coffee drinkers. And even then, if they really can't handle such subtle concepts as clauses, they could at least have the decency to learn what a full stop is for.
23 December 2006 - The genre-lisation of the modern world, gobbing oiks and language levels in the Body Shop
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In a filthy mood while doing last-minute Christmas panic-shopping today, I was agreeably disgusted by the reorganisation of CDs in FOPP. (FOPP is Cambridge's self-consciously hip independent record store, where the staff have been known to sneer at me for being bald and where it is rare to step foot without having one's ears assaulted by snare-drum-backed expletives pumping through the 1000-watt speakers at 5000 decibels. It is, however, the best record store in Cambridge, which is saying very little, and which is only true because it usually has large numbers of back-catalogue CDs at a fiver each.)
Anyhow, recently FOPP has introduced its own spectacularly arbitrary "cataloguing" system to its store arrangement. If you're looking for a CD of the genre that once subsisted under the quaintly arachaic term "rock/pop", you now have to meditate on the nuances of the terms "Pop", "Alternative/modern rock" and "Classic rock/singer songwriter" before you're in a position to negotiate the ever-shifting organic labyrinth of spotty dreadlocked students and stacked Milan Kundera novels to find the disc of your designs.
It seems to me there are 2 possible rationales for this scheme:
- Sheer stupidity on the part of the store management. This is my preferred explanation, and I would hazard that it is compounded by the notion, misguided or otherwise, that "youths" warm to a store that considerately pre-pigeonholes their vapid and blinkered musical taste so as to give them the feeling that they actually have an "identity" or something.
- Customer manipulation, one of the many scourges of the mature consumer society. This is the technique whereby the management seeks to generate maximum confusion in the visitor's head, forcing him or her to perform multiple tours of the store in the search for the CD they actually came in for, in the hope that by the time they find it they'll have a pile of spot-purchases decided on during their lengthy intramural travels reaching up to their armpit.
If anyone has any inside information on the "thinking" behind this phenomenon, I would be interested to know.
- In the lovely Lion Yard, a group of teenage oiks was standing on the balcony, gobbing on people below. It turned out that they were aiming at some of their "chums", but judging by their dubious application of skill and concentration I would be surprised if a large number of their viscous projectiles didn't find their way into the hair and handbags of innocent bystanders and coffee-sippers. Needless to say, nobody even so much as acknowledged the presence of these naughty "scamps", let alone made any attempt to reprimand them. God knows, I didn't. I thought, "I want to move to Switzerland", and shuffled on.
- Finally, apologies to the assistant in the Body Shop to whom I used the word "denomination" with reference to gift tokens. This was stupid of me, and my hostile impatience at her incomprehension would have befitted Samuel Johnson, wormholed here from the 18th Century, but was poor form for someone who's had 37 years to get used to living in a world where usage of words with more than 2 syllables is liable to lead to brain haemorrhage and possible legal suits.
9 December 2006 - Impressions of Berlin
- 1-4/12/06, and my first visit to Berlin in nearly 16 years. Two previous visits: 1988 and 1991, i.e. just before and just after the fall of the Wall.
- The old centre, including the Ku'damm and Kantstrasse, is now very subdued - a world away from the electric atmosphere it had both before and just after the fall of the Wall.
- The commercial centre has moved almost entirely to the east. I expected this, but wasn't prepared for the degree to which it would change the feel of the western part of the city - now, the latter has an "out-of-town" feel, like a large but unexciting London suburb.
- Even in the east, the atmosphere is cheerful but not exciting - Berlin feels less like a capital city than it did when it wasn't one. Friedrichstrasse now seems to be the main shopping street - there's certainly more going on there than in the Ku'damm by both day and night. Even so, you can't get away from the fact that Berlin is now another interesting and stable large European city, and that the forces of history, which used to lend it much of its vibrancy, have moved elsewhere.
- Another reason for the subduing of Berlin is undoubtedly high unemployment. Naively, I'd expected the new Berlin to be a little pocket of prosperous West Germany in the middle of the former GDR. It isn't: it feels for the most part like an East European capital, a city servicing a large area with severe economic problems. Now that the subsidies have gone, Berlin has had to stand on its own two feet, and its economic and cultural energy seems to have dissipated rather than spread.
- Our hotel, in Charlottenburg, is run by Russians. It's clean, but the decor is very much Soviet bloc style, and they don't supply new soap and shampoo each day.
- Seeing us perusing his menu, the owner of a Vietnamese restaurant in Kantstrasse desperately persuades us into eating there, and we are too weak-willed to resist. As it happens the food is excellent. But we can see why he resorts to the hard sell: it's Saturday night, and only three tables are occupied.
- The Mitte district, where all the reconstructed older buildings are, is now clean, spruce and a very pleasant place to be, busy with tourists and with an agreeable spaciousness about it, especially on the Museuminsel and around the Humboldt University.
- The new dome on the Reichstag is impressive, though perhaps more so from the inside, with its carefully arranged assemblage of glass and mirrors, than the outside. (In profile it's almost as near a sine-curve as a semicircle.) The mirrors that form the concave central column offer jumbled reflections simultaneously of the city outside and of the visitors below. It very immediately and effectively conveys the message, "This is your country, you are its people, and this is your government". You can step out onto the roof of the building, from which there are superb views across the city.
- Being older and theoretically wiser, I wondered if visiting Germany afresh after so long would make me see the Germans as so many English seem to and as I sometimes wonder if as they are, i.e. as pushy, officious and unfriendly. I didn't, but found them polite and cheerful. The sense of order in Germany is linked to the idea of social responsibility, and it's a breath of fresh air to encounter this when in Britain any common civic sense died at least a decade ago. Overall, I was reminded of how much I like Germany, and not just because I studied its language at university. I also studied French, but still don't feel the same affinity with France. I think I'm essentially a north European, a Teuton and a Protestant at heart :)
- The Wall is a distant memory: a generation has grown up since it came down. There's a cobbled line visible in places that marks its route, such as at the site of Checkpoint Clarlie, but for the most part you'd never know it had been there.
- The biggest disappointment was the mess that's been made of Pariser Platz immediately to the east of the Brandenburg Gate. I'd always thought the Gate was impressive standing on its own away from all buildings, but looking at old photos I see it actually used to have buildings butting right up against it. The Gate now once again is part of a larger architectual ensemble, but the buildings on either side of it are undistinguished, and clash in both colour and style with the Gate. A strange misjudgement, since a lot of money and thought has been lavished on new buildings elsewhere in the city.