Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity – Page 18 – Public Intelligence Blog

2005/10/302009/12/04

Review: Blood in the Sand–Imperial Fantasies, Right-Wing Ambitions, and the Erosion of American Democracy (Hardcover)

5 Star, Congress (Failure, Reform), Crime (Government), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Fast Read, Brutal & Riveting, A Call for Progressive Engagement,

October 30, 2005

Stephen Eric Bronner

This is an absolute gem of a book, one I was able to polish off in a couple of hours before Crossfire comes on. It is brutal and riveting, nothing less than a thoughtful manifesto calling for progressive engagement and a restoration of engaged dialog.

Here are a few of my summative notes that serve as a review of the author's key points, all of which I find to be admirable and well-documented:

1) US Democracy is in crisis, in part because the “Halliburton Administration” is comprised of several liars and thieves, among whom I would suggest Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are the worst. Their resignations, and the appointment of Senator John McCain as an ethical vice president, strike me as necessary.

2) The Democratic Party failed to understand that ideological passion and the Republican mobilization of their own base would more than crush the Democratic pragmatism, focus on the economic case, and a heroic but insufficient increase in registered voters. In essence, the Democratic Party relied on mobilization and failed to find its voice or its spine in 2000 and 2004. Even when the Democrats knew–as Greg Pabst documented–that the Florida election was stolen twice (one with the disenfranchisement of over 35,000 people of color, the second time with the rejection of over-count votes in pro-Gore countries–while revalidating them in pro-Bush counties), they failed to rise to the challenge.

3) The author is brutal in a very polite and professional way as he describes the origins of the neo-conservatives and their commitment to looting the commonwealth of the poor and middle class in order to fund wealth transfers to the already rich, and a larger garrison state with which to pursue imperial adventures.

4) The author provides a very helpful review of what Ghandi was trying to accomplish (see also my review of the DVD by that name) and what I took away from this chapter was that non-violence is not only moral, it is educational and pragmatic. It unites the oppressed and enlightens the oppressor.

5) In the chapter on reflections from a personal visit to Baghdad, the author makes it clear that on-the-ground eye witnesses could plainly see–as the UN inspectors saw and US Marine Scott Ritter said–that Iraq was no threat to the US. The educators also heard from taxi drivers and intellectuals who said plainly that the demise of Saddam would be welcome, but occupying forces would inspire a massive nationalist insurgency. How is it that neither CIA nor the White House heard these voices? We conclude that CIA has become stupid in its reliance of classified sources and fabrications from defectors seeking resettlement, while the White House is merely unethical.

6) In an overview of the geopolitics of the region, while the author does not fully examine the nefarious misbehavior and selfish refusal to help from the other Arab nations, all of which continue to refuse land or status to Palestinians, he provides a very interesting discussion of the possibility of Iraq being divided into three parts–one aligned with Turkey, another with Iran, and suggests that colonial borders should not be considered permanent–much better to accommodate, better late than never–to tribal and religious realities. He also maps the planned Israeli walls, and I can only say that I consider this a very effective exposure of the lunacy of the Israelis. Palestine should be divided in half, each half augmented by additional land from contributing adjacent states, and Jerusalem made an international city-state under a joint religion and United Nations council

7) The book concludes with a very thoughtful discussion of 9/11 and of democracy. I agree with the author when he says that 9/11 had a *basis* in the US support of the corrupt Saudis, of the Israeli persecution of the Palestinians; and of the continuing imperialist ambitions including what Al Qaeda, not the author, have called virtual colonialism. The author tells us that democratic dynamics require accountability, morality, and reciprocity, and pointedly suggests that the neo-conservatives that have hijacked the Bush Administration have replaced all three with know-nothing fundamentalism and a grotesque imperial ambition that is quite ignorant and quite craven in thinking that we can “take over” the oil and water of the Middle East, and continue to occupy any portion of it.

This book is elegant, solid common sense, capably presented.

2005/10/302009/12/04

Review: Powerdown–Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World (Paperback)

5 Star, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Common Sense, Speaking Truth, Valuable Exit Strategies,

October 30, 2005

Richard Heinberg

This is a thoughtfully devised book that is about more than just oil. It reads like an elegant personalized tutorial in which the author presents the big picture, the current condition, four competing options, and a recommendation for a personal exit strategy. This book is quite literally priceless if you pay attention to the lesson.

The author puts the end of cheap oil in the larger context of other depleting resources (water, ocean fisheries, agricultural resources such as topsoil); population growth; declining food production, global climate change and ecocide; unsustainable levels of US debt; and international political instability.

The author is severely critical of all politicians in general, and brutally scornful of the neo-conservatives that have captured the Bush-Cheney-Halliburton-Exxon Administration (Enron being an invisible partner now). He actually itemizes, rather effectively (a half page for each of the following), what Bush-Cheney have done in eight years that is against the interests of the Republic. According to the author and his sources, they have 1) Stolen an election; 2) placed convicted felons and human-rights violators in positions of power; 3) facilitated 9/11, blocking its prevention, as a means of justifying the war on Iraq and a consolidation of domestic police power; 4) Lied to the American people, the UN, and other publics about Iraq, a war of choice not need; 5) Undermined international law; 5) applied indiscriminate force against civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, killing tens if not hundreds of thousands; and 6) subverted the US Constitution.

I take the above at face value–it is less of an angry diversion from the book's theme, and more of a critical current assessment showing that in the face of these larger strategic shortfalls that face us, Bush-Cheney were exactly the WRONG way to go. I of course acknowledge that the American people chose to return them to office; hence we get the government we deserve.

Across the book the author takes great care to cite the work of others and point the reader to useful resources. On pages 94-95 he gives us the key seven needs in a powerdown scenario: 1) Stabilize human population; 2) Increase resource efficiency; 3) Shift economics from production to services (including full employment); 4) Reduce pollution; 5) Divert capital to food production (one might add, basic food production like beans, instead of frivolous food production like exotic mushrooms and out of season fruits); 6) Shift agriculture to a sustainable model; and 7) Improve the design of all hard goods to make them durable and repairable.

I am absolutely fascinated with and respectful of the author's focus on Cuba as a model for a powerdown scenario. He does a tremendous job of showing how Cuba adjusted to the US embargoes and the collapse of their Soviet sponsor by going to organic agriculture, mass transit and use of bicycles and animals for much individual transport, and so on. It is be a compelling and fascinating turn of events if the Cuban organic full employment model ultimately triumphs over the immoral profligate US model of consumer capitalism and double deficits (debt and trade). Espero, con respeto, ese dia en el qual Cuba podra declarar su exito moral y nacional.

The other model that the author recommends is the Amish model, where there is a very high reliance on human labor and smart farming without tractors or pesticides.

The author debunks hydrogen as an alternative fuel, points out that hundreds of nuclear plans could be a 50 year solution, but that we will run out of uranium in several decades, and that solar and wind power are now very viable, but will be slow to scale. He emphasizes two aspects of any plausible positive scenario: 1) it will need deliberate commitments at the community level to re-engineer entire counties toward sustainable models, with locally produced food and limited energy demands, massive conservation of water; and 2) it will require considerable government intervention–large scale government intervention.

The author ends with a retrospective on the decline and fall of the Roman and Mayan civilizations. The latter experienced population growth, then tribal fights over scarce resources, a “surprise” drought with cataclysmic impact; and finally, a political leadership engrossed in short-term objectives and unwilling to focus on strategic planning for the long-term. This sounds all too familiar.

A final note that I really admired: the author emphasizes that in the future we will need to return to the employment of “primitive” technologies that are not dependent on fuel, and that there will be a need for a new order of monks or knowledge transmitters, who can re-teach entire generations, entire populations, how to powerdown while ramping up communal agriculture and self-sufficiency.

I will end by saying very candidly that my family is going to cash out of the Northern Virginia area. We are going to sell our home, my office building, and my business, and we are going to move to a community on a robust river in the mountains where communal self-sufficiency can be achieved. This is one of several books that have had a life-altering impact on my family. I do not trust our politicians to be responsible at the federal or state level. I am therefore moving us down to a county-level of personal integrity and interaction, where honor might be assured by a combination of kinship and mutual dependency. I cannot think of a more serious means of ending my review of this book than by stating how it has directed me.

2005/10/242009/12/04

Review: The Long Emergency–Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Hardcover)

4 Star, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Fuel Drop + Climate Change + Disease + Water Drop = Great Depression. ,

October 24, 2005

James Howard Kunstler

This is a brilliant piece of work, indeed so compelling that after glancing at it over morning coffee I set aside a work day and simply read the book. I take away one star because there is no index, no bibliography, and the author is very poor about crediting his sources. On page 163, for example, his observations about 300 Chinese cities being water-stressed, and about the Aral Sea disappearing, appear to have come directly from Marq de Villier's superb book on Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource but without attribution. This should have been footnoted.

Having said that, I consider the book itself, despite its run-on Op-Ed character, to be a tour de force that is very logically put forward. Indeed, although I have seen allusions elsewhere, this is the first place that I have seen such a thorough denunciation of how cheap oil underlies everything else including suburbia and Wal-Mart cf. Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. I am also quite impressed by the author's logical discourse on how communities have sacrificed their future coherence and sustainability for the sake of a few dollars savings on Wal-Mart products.

There is a great deal in the book that is covered more ably and in more detail by the other 600+ books I have reviewed at Amazon, and indeed, replicates much of what I write about in The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption but, I have to say, with a different twist that I admire very much.

I find the author's exploration of how cheap fuel led to wasted water, helping create cities and mega-agricultural endeavors that reduced our water at the same time that we consumed centuries worth of unrenewable fossil fuel, quite alarming.

I sum the book up on page 180 by writing in the bottom margin: “Fuel Drop + Climate Change + Disease + Water Drop = Great Depression.”

I disagree with those that consider the book excessively alarmist, and agree with those that find fault with the author's documentation. An index and an annotated bibliography would have doubled the value of this book. The author is clearly well read, logical, and articulate–an unkind person would say that he has also been lazy in not substantiating his arguments with what intelligence readers value most: an index and a good bibliography that respects the contributions of others to the argument.

The author in passing makes a good argument against our current educational system, and I for one believe that we need to get back to a system of life-long education accompanied by early apprenticeship and real-world employment and grounding for our young people. What passes for education today is actually child care, and the smartest young people, like my teen-ager, consider it to be nothing more than a prison.

On balance, a solid 4, a solid buy, and worth its weight in gold if you act on his advice and begin planning an exit strategy from those places likely to run out of water, fuel, and transport options in the next 20 years.

2005/04/282010/09/18

Review: New World New Mind–Moving Toward Conscious Evolution

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Education (General), Education (Universities), Environment (Solutions), Future, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Philosophy, Priorities, Survival & Sustainment, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

cover new world new mind — Vote and/or Comment on Review

AA Mind the Gap — Vote and/or Comment on Review

2004/09/042009/12/04

Review: Blood and Oil–The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum

5 Star, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, True Cost & Toxicity, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Absolutely Extraordinary: Cheap Oil Equals Lots of Bloodshed,

September 4, 2004

Michael T. Klare

Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add links.

I have heard this author speak to groups of international intelligence professionals, and they take him very seriously, as do I. In many ways, his books complements the one by Thomas Barnett, The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century except that whereas Barnett says that the military must go to war to make unstable areas safe for America, Klare points out that a) we don't have enough guns or blood to stabilize a world that we antagonize every time we deploy into an “occupation” mode, and b) cheap oil is going to be very very expensive in terms of American blood on the floor.

Although I have reviewed many books about both the problems within America and its policies, as well as books optimistic about the future of America and the world, I give credit to Klare and this book for finally forcing me to realize that our federal budget and federal policies, in relation to protecting America, are “inside out and upside down.” There is, and Klare documents this beautifully in relation to petroleum, a very pathological cycle that could be easily stopped. We insist on cheap oil, this leads to bloodshed and high oil prices; this comes back to lower quality of life for the workers, etc.

As Klare points out, the pipelines (and I would add the pipe to ship portals) cannot be protected. American policy makers are deceiving the public when they suggest they can stabilize the Middle East and protect cheap oil. Not only can the pipelines not be protected, but on America's current consumption path, according to Klare, the Gulf States would have to DOUBLE production to keep up with American demand.

Klare is also intellectually powerful in painting a future picture when China, Russia, and Europe are in armed competition with the USA for energy from Central Asia, Latin America, under the Spratley Islands, etcetera. As I read Klare's book, I was just shaking my head. Our policies on energy are delusional and destructive, and Klare is among the few that is providing an objective report to the public on this reality.

Klare is actually kind to the current Administration (Bush-Cheney), pointing out that they are no more or less corrupt than previous administrations going back to World War II. Cheap oil has become a mantra, and military power has become the unquestioned means of achieving that–along with supporting 44 dictators, genocide, state-sponsored terrorism (as long as we like them and we get the Jewish vote to boot).

I especially liked Klare's observation that cheap oil for the US is a major contributor to unemployment and destabilization within Arabia. Buying oil from Saudi Arabia subsidizes terrorism. Buying cheap oil from Saudi Arabia increases the number of unemployed who might be inspired to become terrorism. Hmmmm… At what real cost shall we continue to demand cheap oil?

Klare is also very effective in objectively criticizing the manner in which the US Administrations have integrated anti-terrorism initiatives with energy-protection initiatives. Bin Laden is still at large, but by golly, we have 200,000 Americans sitting on top of the Iraqi oil fields.

Klare joins Jim Bamford Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, Chalmers Johnson The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project), Derek Leebaert The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World and a score of other authors who have in one way or another alluded to the fact that we are now doing to China what we did to Russia after the Cold War: needlessly confronting them, scaring them, and pushing them to arm themselves. Klare focuses on our “occupation” of Central Asia, an area of direct concern and interest to China, but I would add our sending seven carriers to the Formosa Straits recently and part of the problem–reminding me of how we sent squadrons of nuclear bombers deep into the Soviet Union from the north, immediately following World War II, just to see how far we could get. WE started the arms race!

The book ends as intelligently as it begins, with emphasis on getting to a post-petroleum economy. Listing all the ways we could get there would be another book in itself, but we could start with neighborhood level solar power, more wind power, deep conservation (which must also apply to water), a gradual elimination of chlorine-based and petroleum-based industries, a turn toward self-sustainment across the board, and what Klare cites as his big three steps:

1) divorce energy purchases from security commitments—stop tolerating dictators and arming terrorist nations for the sake of cheap oil

2) reduce our reliance on imported oil, dramatically

3) prepare the way for a transition to a post-petroleum economy that includes conservation, hybrid vehicles, public transportation, the two-way energy grid that WIRED featured on its cover the same week Cheney met secretly with Enron…and so on.

Fool's gold at high moral cost. Klare makes it clear that if we do not heal ourselves from inside out, that no amount of guns, blood, or destruction will save us from the inevitable implosion of the unstable places where oil is to be found.

Special books read since then that carry the argument forward:
Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy
The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition

2004/07/282009/12/04

Review: The Outlaw Sea–A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime

4 Star, Complexity & Catastrophe, Crime (Organized, Transnational), Environment (Problems), Geography & Mapping, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Threat From the Sea–75% of the Planet,

July 28, 2004

William Langewiesche

This is not the book I was expecting. Normally it would only have gotten three stars, for recycling three articles, only one of which was really of interest to me (on piracy), but the author is gifted, and his articulation of detail lifts the book to four stars and caused me to appreciate his final story on the poisonous deadly exportation of ship “break-up” by hand. It is a double-spaced book, stretched a bit, and not a research book per se.

Two high points for came early on. The author does a superb job of describing the vast expanse of the ungovernable ocean, three quarters of the globes surface, carrying 40,000 wandering merchant ships on any given day, and completely beyond the reach of sovereign states. The author does a fine job of demonstrating how most regulations and documentation are a complete facade, to the point of being both authentic, and irrelevant.

The author's second big point for me came early on as he explored the utility of the large ocean to both pirates and terrorists seeking to rest within its bosom, and I am quite convinced, based on this book, that one of the next several 9-11's will be a large merchant ship exploding toxically in a close in port situation–on page 43 he describes a French munitions ship colliding with a Norwegian freighter in Halifax. “Witnesses say that the sky erupted in a cubic mile of flame, and for the blink of an eye the harbor bottom went dry. More than 1,630 buildings were completely destroyed, another 12,000 were damaged, and more than 1,900 people died.”

There is no question but that the maritime industry is much more threatening to Western ports than is the aviation industry in the aftermath of 9-11, and we appear to be substituting paperwork instead of profound changes in how we track ships–instead of another secret satellite, for example, we should redirect funds to a maritime security satellite, and demand that ships have both transponders and an easy to understand chain of ownership. There is no question that we are caught in a trap: on the one hand, a major maritime disaster will make 9-11 look like a tea party; on the other the costs–in all forms–of actually securing the oceans is formidable.

Having previously written about the urgent need for a 450-ship Navy that includes brown water and deep water intercept ships (at the Defense Daily site, under Reports, GONAVY), I secure the fourth star for the author, despite my disappointment over the middle of the book, by giving him credit for doing a tremendous job of defining the challenges that we face in the combination of a vast sea and ruthless individual stateless terrorists, pirates, and crime gangs collaborating without regard to any sovereign state.

I do have to say, as a reader of Atlantic Monthly, I am getting a little tired of finding their stuff recycled into books without any warning as to the origin. Certainly I am happy to buy Jim Fallows and Robert Kaplan, to name just two that I admire, but it may be that books which consist of articles thrown together, without any additional research or cohesive elements added (such as a bibliography or index), should come with a warning. I for one will be more alert to this prospect in the future.

Having said that, I will end with the third reason I went up to four stars: the third and final story, on the poisonous manner in which we export our dead ships to be taken apart by hand in South Asia, with hundreds of deaths and truly gruesome working conditions for all concerned, is not one of the stories I have seen in article form before, it is a very valuable story, and for this unanticipated benefit, I put the book down a happy reader, well satisfied with the over-all afternoon.

2003/08/202009/12/04

Review: High Noo–20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Complexity & Resilience, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Future, Games, Models, & Simulations, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Priorities, Public Administration, Survival & Sustainment, United Nations & NGOs, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Straight-Forward, Understandable, URGENT, “Strong Buy”,

August 29, 2003

Jean-francois Rischard

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to aadd comment and links.

Comment: This is still the best strategic overview and a book I would recommend all. See the others below.

Having read perhaps 20 of the best books on global issues and environmental sustainability, water scarcity, ocean problems, etc, over the past few years (most reviewed here on Amazon) I was prepared for a superficial summary, political posturing, and unrealistic claims. Not this book–this book is one of the finest, most intelligent, most easily understood programs for action I have ever seen. The book as a whole, and the 20 problem statements specifically, are concise, illustrated, and sensible.

The author breaks the 20 issues into 3 groups. Group one (sharing our planet) includes global warming; biodiversity and ecosystem losses, fisheries depletion, deforestation, water deficits, and maritime safety and pollution. Group two (sharing our humanity) includes massive step-up in the fight against poverty, peacekeeping-conflict prevention-combatting terrorism, education for all, global infectuous diseases, digital divide, and natural disaster prevention and mitigation. Group three (sharing our rule book) includes reinventing taxation for the 21st century, biotechnology rules, global financial architecture, illegal drugs, trade-investment-competition rules, intellectual property rights, e-commerce rules, and international labor and migration rules.

The author's core concept for dealing with these complex issues intelligently, while recognizing that “world government” is not an option, lies with his appreciation of the Internet and how global issues networks could be created that would be a vertical complement to the existing horizontal elements of each national government.

The footnotes and index are professional, but vastly more important, the author's vision is combined with practicality. This is a “doable-do” and this book is therefore my number one reading recommendation for any citizen buying just one book of the 360+ that I have recommended within Amazon. Superb.