The Real (This) American Life; The Casa Grande

In mid-May, my wife and I were driving across the deserts of central Arizona to deliver some photos to an exhibit in Gilbert of all places.  We listened to "Hot in my Backyard" on This American Life on the radio as we drove.  The program was an interesting discussion of the state of the dialogue relative climate change.  I decided to send Ira Glass and his staff a note to see if I could interest them in a discussion of the larger picture.  I never heard back, as is more common than not.  Here's what I sent.  Since I'm remaking this into a blog post, I've put some links into the text.

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Ira and Co.,

Your shows are very well done.  We listened to “Hot in My Backyard” recently while we drove across the desert to Gilbert, Arizona, to drop off a photo for an art show my wife had entered.  We stopped at the ruins of the lost Hohokam civilization at Casa Grande National Monument on the way home to Tucson.  The program was interesting and insightful, but missed the real story of our age.  I can’t honestly say that I heard anything that surprised me, but I’m a Ph.D. biologist by training.  We were discussing the likelihood of climate change in the 1970s and 80s.  An atmospheric scientist friend told me in the early 80s that in his circles there was speculation that if the Antarctic ice cap destabilized it could slough off in as little as 40 years.  For the moment, it’s stabile.  Watching the wave of realization that we can affect the world’s climate spread out from the scientific community across the rest of society is interesting.  You presented scenes of that wave of thought change well.  But what if climate change is only one subplot of a larger story, a distraction almost?

Maybe climate change isn’t entirely new.  William Ruddiman says there’s evidence that people began to measurably affect greenhouse gases when we started agriculture.  What if America and its imitators are like all previous societies and civilizations, writ large?  Over and over, groups of people figure out creative ways to apply technology to extend a limiting resource, grow lots of food, then grow lots of people.  The civilization expands until the carrying capacity of the region is reached, and/or conditions change to lower the carrying capacity.  In the case of the Hohokam people who built the network of canals in the Arizona desert and made it bloom, a series of floods followed by drought years damaged the system, then the drought-reduced rivers didn’t provide enough water to make repair worthwhile.  People moved to less harsh environments.

The Casa Grande

Bill McKibben advocates using renewables to generate electricity; a worthy goal up to a point.  Unfortunately, the existing electrical grid would become unstable if more than about 34% of that electricity is generated from fluctuating renewable sources.  More important, it’s not really the electricity that’s the key to our version of a civilization.  The sentinel feature of America’s globalized world is harnessing vast amounts of energy to move people, goods, and materials quickly and cheaply to all corners of the globe.  The Industrial Revolution that led to the American era of dominance is in fact the Hydrocarbon Age.  It began with coal in Britain and Europe, but in 1859 America began to learn how to extract liquid energy, oil, in quantity from the crust of the planet.  We, more than any other nation, used that energy to build the modern world.  The civilization we built, that the rest of world has copied, converts oil into economic wealth, technological prowess, and military power on a scale heretofore unimaginable.

Oil isn’t optional.  Pretty much everything we do depends on extracting and burning vast quantities of cheap oil, close to 4 billion gallons every day worldwide.  Carbon from burning oil, coal, and natural gas is  making our planet into a better greenhouse.   Unfortunately an awful lot depends on burning those hydrocarbons; without mechanized agriculture based on oil products, our corn production drops from over 200 bushels per acre to 10-20 bushels.  There’s talk of getting past the “addiction to oil”; wishful thinking in the short term.  After the Kyoto accord, the world burned even more hydrocarbons.  Economic growth depends on cheap hydrocarbon energy, and oil prices drive everything else at the moment.  When the price of oil gets past $90-100 barrel, economic growth in advanced economies stops and they risk  contraction.  Look at Europe, which pays a bit more for oil than we do.  The PIIGS countries in the most distress are the countries that import the most oil.  Any chance of a relationship?  James Hamilton of UC San Diego details 11 economic downturns in the U.S. since the start of the Oil Age. 10, including the last one, followed price spikes in oil.  Coincidence?   High energy prices provide the stress, events like the housing bubble provide the trigger, and a contraction follows.  Then because most analysts are used to ignoring the cost of energy since it was cheap for decades, they discuss the deck chair placement rather than the iceberg.  Despite claims of improved U.S. oil production from new sources, the price is still high.  Why?  Oil is priced on global markets and there’s not really an abundance, rather barely enough for the moment.  And those new sources are only economically feasible if the price stays high; Catch 22.

There are 7 billion of us scurrying frantically across the surface of the earth growing food, extracting resources, building, and living.  Do you want to change how you’re living that life?  To keep our lives, we’re changing the world, often for the worse.  We’re close to a variety of limits, mostly masked for the moment by relatively cheap energy.  The mask is starting to slip.  Perhaps we should talk about a future that doesn’t resemble our past.

If you’ve read this far, thanks.  I’m happy to talk, if you have any interest.