Below is the tentative introduction to the book I am writing When the Lights go Out. All comments or suggestions are welcome. Ive written a couple of other chapters as well, but this gives the gist of it.
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Living in a world of Change
Although many people do not yet recognise it, we are living through one of the great turnings in human history. Many of the cherished assumptions about our way of life are becoming increasingly difficult to justify, and other things that we take for granted are slipping away quietly like a dying patient in a hospital bed. Since the time of our grandfathers’ grandfathers ever cheaper forms of energy have enabled us to prosper like never before. This prosperity has taken many forms and has allowed us to boost our numbers phenomenally At the same time we have reaped the benefits of science allowing us to invent new technologies which, to our descendants, would have seemed like magic. In the western world we can expect to live eighty years or more, to have access to powerful medecine, to have plenty of food and even to have a surplus of time to spend pursuing leisure activities, the arts or staring vacantly at Facebook updates on a computer screen.
All that is about to change. That’s what this book is about. Consider the following five points.
1 - We have exhausted all of the easy-to-get-at energy sources on which our modern way of life depends. All that is left are the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel. 2 - As a result, the material standard of living we have grown used to will plummet as governments shut down and higher prices put basic goods such as food, energy and housing out of the reach of many people. 3 - Our governing elites, whether they be politicians, businessmen or the media, are functionally incapable of doing anything about this and are indeed making the situation far worse than it needs to be. 4 - Most people alive today rely on cheap oil to feed them. As cheap oil goes away, so will they. 5 - Scientists and technology will not come to our rescue and there is no suitable alternative energy that will pack anything like the same punch as oil.
For most people, the reaction to those five statements is to put their hands over their ears, shut their eyes and sing ‘la-la-la’. If that is your reaction that’s fine. These days the shelves of bookshops are straining under the weight of books which feature a much more cheerful outlook. These books might involve nuclear fusion, thorium reactors or shiny happy people living in bio-engineered ecotopias on the planet Mars. My only request, if that is the case, is that you pass on this book to someone else who might read it instead of tossing it in the recycling bin. I’m sure you have a pale and thoughtful nephew, or a dotty aunt somewhere who would appreciate it. If not you could always leave it lying around at you local laundrette.
Okay, if you’re still reading, make yourself a cup of tea (or something a bit stronger) and get ready to enter the real world. The real world is a place inhabited by remarkably few people these days. There’s plenty of place to stretch out and have a picnic, to sniff the breeze and listen to the birdsong. The real world looks much like the fantasy world with which most of us are familiar but with several key differences - let’s call it Realandia. In Realandia money doesn’t grow on trees. In Realandia one cannot go on dumping all manner of synthetic waste into the biophysical systems that support life without there being consequences. Furthermore, in Realandia, people have to live according to the resources that are available to them and consequently don’t have expectations that they will grow fat and weathy simply by owning a particular class of asset, by exploiting other people in far-off countries, or by possessing little bits of paper inscibed with arcane runes and possessed of magical power. In Realandia there really is no such thing as a free lunch.
Nevertheless, it’s quite pleasant in Realandia. There are no economists, no politicians and no rolling news channels on TV (if you can even find a TV). There are no strident talking heads insisting that we have to destroy ourselves in order to save ourselves. Advertisers don’t inject lust seeds into our brains, goggle-eyed priests don’t offer us salvation and we don’t need to work ourselves to death just to keep up with the Joneses. We’ll be fitter and happier as a result. The pace of life is a lot slower and there is ample time for doing the good things in life and being with our friends and family, creating music and making jam. Indeed, why would anyone not want to live in Realandia?
That’s a bit of a rhetorical question because nearly all of us will be moving to Realandia in the not-too-distant future. The thing is, for the time being at least, emigration to this mythical land is free and, what's more, you don’t need a passport or visa to enter. The first ones to park their wagons there get the best spots to build a homestead upon. Once settled they can look forward to a life free from the chains that previously bound them back in the place that other people insist is the ‘real world’. Okay, so life there isn’t always a bucket of roses. Life is, after all, life. Bad things will happen, as well as good. The grass might not be greener, but, hey, at least it’s not Astroturf.
But the only real downside to emigrating to Realandia is the knowledge that you’ll have a lot of new neighbours soon - an awful lot. And unlike you, these new arrivals don’t actually want to be there. It’s hard to blame them though because if you wind up in Realandia without a plan or a purpose you can look forward to the following:
A lack of jobs
A lack of modern medicine
A lack of electricity and petrol
A lack of services
A lack of money and no pensions
A loss of the sense of control
So what better time to buy a guidebook and start packing your suitcase? Where might you get a guidebook, you might ask. You are already holding it in your hands, I would answer. Hopefully I can convince you to go there and beat the rush. Like another famous guidebook to a place of the imagination this one shares the same immortal words as The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: Don’t Panic. That’s right. There’s no need to panic because the tools and skills that you need to settle in Realandia are right there within your grasp already.
But before we proceed any further I would like to make the following points clear.
Firstly this is not a doom and gloom book. Having spent several years interacting with some very sharp brains in the peak oil scene I can put my hand on my heart and say that everything within these pages has been written with careful consideration and is not designed to induce some kind of knee-jerk reaction. If you become interested enough in our predicament as a society and as a species, you soon find yourself being drawn down curious alleys of enquiry that branch out to include everything from finance and economics to ecology and religion. This, of course, is anathema to our modern society, which revels in specialisation. I subscribe to John Michael Greer’s concept of catabolic collapse, meaning a slow unravelling of the industrial world characterised by gradual decay rather than a sudden apocalyptic ending. Whilst less exciting than most Hollywood-style apocalyptic dramas, the catabolic collapse scenario would seem to be borne out by a study of history, not to mention common sense. That doesn’t mean there will not be prolonged episodes of unpleasantness where sudden step-changes will occur, as well as some new challenges, but I’ll get onto that later.
Furthermore, a key assumption of this book is that there is no escape from our predicament. If we had the chance to turn back the clock by 50 years or so we could make a difference. But the fact is, as a civilization we have made our bed and we now have no choice but to lie on it. The bold decisions needed to drastically cut our use of fossil fuels, to take but one example, should have been taken and acted upon decades ago. They were not, and we now have no choice but to crash into a wall of collapse at full speed. This much, as they say, is baked into the cake. For this reason I will not be offering any suggestions along the lines of ‘if only we do this’ or ‘humanity can avoid disaster if we’. We can’t. We won’t. For a whole host of human reasons, geopolitics, media capture and psychology being but three, there is precisely zero chance of our entire species acting as one in order to rid the world of an abstract threat within a useful time frame. The only meaningful thing I can offer is at the individual, family or local community level. If a single person becomes enlightened enough to become resilient after reading this book then I will have considered it a success.
Thirdly, what follows can only be a short primer to further learning. This is unavoidable given the nebulous nature of trying to figure out where our civilzation is heading. An important point to note is that this is not a book that predicts the future. That might sound like a contradiction given the book’s title, so I’ll clarify. What this book deals with is recognising a number of worrying and converging trends. These trends in energy use, resouce scarcity, population growth and climate change, mixed together in a witch’s cauldron with philosophical blindness, political ineptitude, and rampant and accelerating exploitation of nature can only produce one thing: disaster. Recognising this is not the same as predicting in any detail what will happen in 10 years, 100 years or next week. Watching a hedgehog walk slowly across a busy eight lane motorway, one doesn’t need a crystal ball to foretell what will happen next.
And finally, most of what appears in this book is necessarily subjective. I’m not insisting that readers should agree with everything I say, and am the first to admit that I am not an expert in any particular academic field. But then perhaps that is actually a strength rather than a weakness. I have worked throughout my adult life in a variety of different industries and fields and have seen some things ‘from the inside’. I have worked within central government at Her Majesty’s Treasury, have been an energy trader with a large power company, and have worked as a journalist and newspaper editor for several years. Furthermore, I have travelled around the world for extended periods of time, have lived in Scandinavia for a decade and Spain for three years, the latter of which I set up and ran that country’s only ‘green’ newspaper and lived on an organic smallholding. I have worked in the Guatemalan jungle looking after confiscated rare animals, been an English teacher in the Czech Republic and a taxi driver in Copenhagen. I’ve worked as a journalist for numerous publications including The Guardian, as well as working as a cleaner in a detention block for asylum seekers in Denmark. I have a degree in economics and another one in development theory and environmental policy. I also have a masters degree in Information Technology for which I had to learn to program robots to build cars. I’m a father, a woodlander and a real ale drinker.
And I would like to think that all of this is grist to my mill. That’s why this book is not full of references and citations to lofty academic studies, of which I admit I have read very few but prefer to digest second hand via the work of other writers I trust. For that I make no apologies. We are all going through life, learning along the way and doing the best we can with the information we trust to be sound. What it boils down to is our belief about what is true and what is not. Real knowledge is like shining a torch into a dark space, but none of us has a torch powerful enough to light up the night skies. Nearly all of the concepts and ideas in this book sprung from the minds of other people, and there’s a bibliography at the end for further reading.
And yes, knowledge might be the power to see, but knowledge without action leads nowhere. So, if there’s only one thing you take away from this book I would hope that it is a resolution to do something that will take you at least one step closer to Realandia before everyone else gets there. Who knows, you might enjoy the journey. Note: photo (top) by Andrew Baines www.andrewbaines.com
Sometimes life is a bit of a blur. I have good intentions to write a blog post a week but what with moving house, working on my woodland, doing freelance work and having kids I have been struggling of late. Anyone who has been following the electronic scribblings on these pages for the last three years or so might have noticed that I started off unfocused, writing mainly about random stuff, went through a period of writing focused relevant articles that even got aggregated by other sites, and have now come full circle and started writing randomly again.
Apologies! My only excuse is that, in the great scheme of things, writing a blog for free comes fairly low down in the pecking order all things considered, when other things jostle their way to the front of the queue. Nevertheless, now that the heat of summer has dissipated and the cool September sea mists have begun to roll in off the Atlantic it is perhaps easier to be more reflective and calm again, which is the state of mind needed to effect any kind of lucid communication in this day and age.
That said, this week’s post is more of a news roundup than a fully rounded piece. You know how it is, you get an idea and think I must write something about that, but before you do something new turns up and you add it to the mental pile. Before you know it, you’ve got a kebab skewer of ideas for a blog post and no idea which piece you should bite into first. So, without further ado, I’l dish out the chunks of fried meat, one morsel at a time.
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Most people, when they move to Cornwall and drop out of mainstream society become impressionist artists, soapmakers, carpenters or, ahem, woodlanders. Not so Chris Abbot, whom I have come to know via the local Transition Penwith group. No, instead of setting up a little shop selling curios to tourists, or carving mushrooms out of logs, Chris decided to set up his own intelligence agency.
He says it is the ‘world’s first civil society intelligence agency’ and it’s run from a small building down here at the tip of England. Okay, so Open Briefing hasn’t exactly got the CIA isn’t quaking in its boots just yet, but with several analysts with backgrounds in intelligence on the staff rostrum, it’s not a bad source of unbiased information about how our civil liberties are being systematically stripped away. Did I say unbiased? Well, of course it isn’t - it’s biased towards ordinary folk, rather than the military industrial complex.
I saw Chris last week when he popped around to pick up some citrus trees I had brought back from Spain. He looked tired and said he had been working hard on new report about drones. That report, entitled Remote Control War: Unmanned combat air vehicles in China, India, Iran, Israel, Russia and Turkey has now been released.
Read it here (or a summary here) but don’t expect it to put you in a good mood.
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Yesterday saw the release of the IPCC’s report on climate change. There were not any real surprises in there, and if anything it has been toned down substantially so as not to rock the boat too much. I gave up hope in governments doing anything to tackle AGW several years ago when I was at the Copenhagen COP15 Climate Conference. It is now starkly clear that we either leave most of the fossil fuels in the ground, or we sign the death warrant of most human civilisations.
The message seems to be getting through in some quarters, with most UK newspapers reporting on it as their main item. My jaw hit the floor however when I read the Daily Telegraph - the go-to newspaper for aggressive climate science denialists - write an article with the following:
It is surely past time, therefore, to take matters out of the hands of the zealots – on both sides. No one can deny that mankind is pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at unprecedented rates, or that this will inevitably have a warming effect on the climate (the reason for the current “pause”, scientists believe, is that the heat has been stored up in the deep oceans, as part of a natural cycle).
Did my eyes deceive me? Had I actually just read that? An anguished howl immediately went up from the rabid, frothing at the mouth climate science deniers in the comments section. Today, however, there is no mention of the IPCC report on The Telegraph. Perhaps the editors got a call from the tax-avoiding, big oil protecting, independent media bashing, liberal hating Barclay brothers ... who happen to own The Telegraph.
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Still on the climate, the report states clearly that we are on course for a +5C warming by the end of the century on a business as usual (BUA) basis. BAU, in my opinion, won’t happen due to resource constraints, but assuming we can continue to plunder every gram of carbon based fuel from the Earth’s crust we will.
Who’s to blame? All of us, of course. Some more than others. In fact, some a lot more than others. But blame isn’t a particularly useful response. To that end I’ve decided to plant 500 trees a year and have already started. This is happening on my land at Fox Wood, with 500 acorns due to be popped into soil-filled bags in a couple of weeks. I’ll be writing more about it on that blog in due course.
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In other developments, I have long been threatening to write a book. That threat is now starting to be put into effect. I don’t know how long it will take me but I already have an idea, chapter by chapter, how it will pan out. In writing a book about the end of our industrial society one faces several challenging questions, such as:
Who is it for?
To what level of depth do I go into?
To what extent should it be empirical and full of references to statistics?
Should it be ‘a good read’ (i.e. with splashes of humour) or should it be po-faced?
Should it be self-published or should I seek a publisher?
I have managed to answer a few of those questions myself. The book, primarily, will be aimed at people in over-developed countries, and there will be a particular focus on Britain. After all, that’s where I live and am from. Why are most peak oil authors American? It is just not on the radar over here. I have some theories as to why that is so.
The book will be a primer. I don’t intend to go into much depth about the metaphysical underpinnings of our crises, although can’t entirely avoid that. I won’t be proposing any geo-engineering solutions, perpetual energy devices or happy endings (other than at the individual level). I can promise that it will have a dose of humour, however, as I don’t seem to be able to write the kind of dry fact-dense prose which features in most other books dealing with similar subjects.
This doesn’t mean I won’t be having a crack at the following:
Highlighting Cartesian/Baconian thinking as the departure point from which humanity began to get too big for its boots
Drowning the civil religion of progress in a bucket of cold water
Caricaturing the techno utopian fantasists as dangerous imbeciles
Standing up the the ‘bloke in the pub’ talk about nuclear fast breeder reactors and the like
Demolishing the myth of free market economics
On a more positive note, I’ll be focusing on what people, either as individuals, families or small communities, can do to prepare themselves for the future that is already upon us. The tentative title is When the Lights go Out: Surviving in the Age of Broken Promises.
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Writing a blog about the abstract concept of the end of the age of abundance probably has its advantages, although I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Last week, however, was a bit different when 22 Billion Energy Slaves reader and doomstead diner Harry Lerwill turned up in my local tavern the Dolphin Inn. Harry had come over from California with his other half Barbara and found himself in the neighbourhood hunting for ghosts (the Dolphin has three). It was good to sink a couple of pints of Cornish ale and chat about economic collapse. Anyone else in the area feel free to drop me a line.
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And finally ... how many energy slaves?
The title of this blog was gleaned from a comment made by petroleum geologist Colin Campbell. It refers to the number of human slaves equivalents we would need, working 24/7, to supply the same amount of energy that we currently get from easy oil.
One or two people have commented that if we were to include everything else we get from fossil fuels, taking tight oil, shale gas, coal etc. into consideration, the true number would be closer to 200 Billion Energy Slaves.
Alas, if I changed the title of the blog I’d probably lose a lot of links and readers. Saying that, anyone with a more mathematical bent than I is free to send in their calculations for how many energy slaves we actually would need if ALL non-renewable sources were taken into account. I would hope that it would include the reasonable assumption that slaves cannot work for more than 12 hours a day.
I’ll send a box of Cornish fudge to whoever sends me an email (jasonhepp at gmail dot com) with the most comprehensive answer before the end of October.
No, the title of this post doesn’t refer to my recent lack of posting on this blog - the best I can plead in this regard is that I have been very busy driving around Europe collecting my scattered belongings from previous lives - no, in fact it refers to the Channel 4 docu-drama of the same name which aired recently.
I sat down to watch it on my laptop with a mug of hot coffee and an hour and a half later I was traumatised enough to start composing this blog post on the same device. Let me explain. Blackoutdeals with the ‘fictional’ scenario of an electricity blackout hitting the UK. We are not really told what caused it other than it was a cyber attack by a person/organisation/state with a grudge. It’s shot in the kind of Dogme panicky first-person Blair Witch Project perspective, and apt to give you nightmares because every scenario that is depicted is eerily plausible. The acted parts are intertwined with real footage, mostly filmed during the mass riots that broke out in London and across the country two years ago. You might almost say it is prescient, but we’ll have to wait and see with that.
We get to follow the misfortunes of several people caught up in the ensuing chaos, including a twenty something brother and sister involved in a traffic accident, a mother and her young daughter who try to make an emergency dash to Sheffield and end up being at the mercy of a tagged offender (untrackable now the system has run out of power), a couple of freeloading hooligans on a rampage of shoplifting, theft and arson, and a young middle-class family in London, the father of whom just happens to be a wannabe survivalist who has a video blog which he uploads to YouTube much to his wife’s annoyance.
The story starts with life as it is today. Everyone is shopping and travelling and social media posturing and is completely wrapped up in their own world. When the blackout strikes, there is an initial mood of hilarity - a great excuse for a party. The survivalist character is in his element, and his wife films him firing up his emergency generator and filling water bottles from the radiator system. “You look happy,” she says, to which he replies “I am.”
Alas, his happiness isn’t to last. On day two of the blackout, the smells of his preparedness barbeque attract unwanted attention from some dodgy young Asian men who invite themselves round and start asking questions about how they are coping. One of the children gives away the fact that the family owns a generator. Things get worse from then on.
Up north somewhere, the two hell raisers start their vodka-fuelled trail of destruction as they try to get back home, stealing cars and eventually causing a huge accident with a fuel tanker. By day three anarchy has started to engulf the cities, with wide scale rioting and pitched battles with the police. David Cameron (yes, it’s very realistic, even he’s in it as himself) launches an emergency plan and fuel is trucked into key strategic locations - most of which seem to be central government offices. The hospitals are overwhelmed and losing power having got through not just the emergency backup generator, but the backup backup generator, and have now run out of fuel. The ICU equipment, which is battery powered as a last backup, slowly goes flat and the docs and nurses have to make split decisions over who to save and who to abandon. It doesn’t help that people are pouring in through the doors with carbon monoxide poisoning and burns (house fires rage out of control from people using candles).
By what must be day five or six, total despair reigns. People are either trapped in the cities, or else can’t get into them due to police roadblocks. Nobody can contact one another and the only sound from ‘the authorities’ is an Orwellian sounding radio message read out by a pleasant-sounding woman saying “We apologise for any inconvenience and are trying to restore order as soon as we can” - while the masses starve, loot and generally freak out.
It’s not all doom and gloom. There are some genuinely warming moments where people look out for one another. I won’t give any more away than I have done already. But the real message of this film is as simple as it is scary. The message is that the security of our modern lives is a flimsy facade and that behind it lies a rotting haunted house full of demons that the bright lights of the 21st century keeps at bay. With the flick of a switch all of the things we take for granted are gone. In a moment a middle class family can be transformed into a besieged group fighting for their very survival in their own home. Cars cease to function, money is useless, and those who took the precaution of filling up their petrol tanks can expect to get robbed for their efforts. People get sick, families erupt into firefights of blame, there are no communications, no food and no drinking water. People descend, rapidly.
This is how the programme describes itself:
Feature-length 'What-If' drama exploring the effects of a devastating cyber-attack on Britain's national electricity grid.
Based on expert advice and meticulous research, Blackout combines real user-generated footage, alongside fictional scenes, CCTV archive and news reports to build a terrifyingly realistic account of Britain being plunged into darkness.
The film plots the days following a nationwide power cut, as experienced by a cast of ordinary characters struggling to feed and protect themselves and their families. These eyewitness accounts reveal the disastrous impact of a prolonged blackout on hospitals, law and order, transport, and our food and water supplies.
The programme casts members of the public from user-generated footage, weaving real-life archive with scripted drama to tell the story of how Britain could descend into chaos and anarchy without power.
I dunno, what’s with all the expert advice? It’s almost as if somebody wants us to consider that the fictional scenario depicted could be a distinct possibility. Did I say could be a possibility? Bear in mind that 50% of the film is actual footage of the country erupting in violence two years ago - and the trigger for that outburst is still being debated with much head-scratching. And I like to remind people here that the UK energy regulator has been forecasting semi-controlled power outages beginning in 2015/16 for at least two years now. Jeepers, I even came up with my own fictionalised account of how it could happen several years ago. The only factor the film missed out was what happens to the nuclear stations in the absence of an electricity grid to keep them stable.
A friend of mine was doing a long-haul road trip through Germany and Denmark with me last week and he was telling me about living in New York during the ‘great blackout’ of 2003. “The first night was fun, with everyone having impromptu parties,” he said. “But when the second night came and there was still no power then a sense of dread began to descend. Suddenly it wasn't fun any more.” Quite.
I’m not one to get off on doomer porn but I do have a worrying intuition about how some people will behave if there is ever a serious interruption to the nation’s electricity supply . My gut instinct is that there would be widespread anarchy in some of our larger cities for a while, although I doubt this would last once all the (now useless) plasma televisions have been looted and the rioters run out of energy due to lack of food. And the supposedly lawless inner city areas are not lawless at all and there are any number of community elders to give their wayward youths a clip round the ear (or, in some cases, a dose of Sharia law). Once the initial surge of looting, chaos and pitched battles with the police/army has burned itself out an order of sorts will be restored, especially if the power comes on again.
I can only wonder about how the situation would be outside the large cities. Sure, there is likely to be some trouble, but there is only so much looting and arson you can get away with if everyone in the town knows who you are and where you live. Food might be a larger problem. And medical care.
Any such episode will be one of the ‘thunks’ on the downward steps of our peak energy curve, and the psychological impact of it will be long lasting. In its wake we can expect the authorities to consolidate their power, and for various political miscreants to appear out of the woodwork with ‘solutions’ to ensure that such a catastrophe doesn’t happen again. Normality will be restored, until the next time.
And a catastrophe such as a prolonged power outage would get people scared enough to agree meekly to a whole raft of measures imposed by the government to ensure the same thing doesn’t happen again. We’ve gotta keep those lights on! It’s not hard, for example, to imagine people protesting against fracking being branded ‘traitors’ and arrested. First they came for the anti frackers, then they came for the anti nukes ...
Interesting times.
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On a side note, I had an interesting time driving around Spain during August. I would briefly like to report that Spain is in a weird and eerie state of limbo. The south of Spain, from appearances, has never had it so good. Business is booming in the village where I used to live and everywhere is now immaculate and clean. New shops are opening up, even if there aren’t that many customers. My former neighbour’s daughter, a newly university-qualified teacher, has now been unemployed for three years and breezily says she doesn’t ever expect to find a job in this life. She’s not bothered by this, although her father grumpily confided that it would have been better if she had learned to pick olives, like him. He’s doing great now the price of food has gone up, he says.
However, on the way back up north I found myself driving around the massive new periphery motorway that encircles Madrid. Madrid is now engulfed by huge yards the size of multiple football fields where one can pick up rusting construction equipment on the cheap. Imagine hundreds of bulldozers, diggers, cement trucks and the like all parked in long neat rows with scarcely a human in sight. I saw them in the daylight on the journey south - along with several horizon filling ‘urbanizations’ of roads laid out in the arid earth with streetlights, ragged developers’ flags and not much else.
Okay, so it was about midnight on the way back up north, but it is a bit eerie to not see another car for over twenty minutes on a brand new highway surrounding a major first world capital city. It was a toll motorway, but all the barriers were open. I later read that the volume of traffic is now so low on the new toll routes that they lose money if they have to pay people to man the toll booths. They might simply close them.
Further north still my GPS satnav led me to a petrol station in the middle of nowhere. Almost out of fuel at 2am I discovered the station, like so many roads, had a large sign on it saying ‘cerrado’. It looked permanent. I sighed and pulled in - I had almost run out of fuel and didn’t fancy doing so in the dark. I got out and lay on the weed-broken tarmac in my sleeping bag and watched shooting stars until I fell asleep. At about 4am I was awoken by the sounds of a pack of wild dogs which seemed to be coming ever closer. I shivered and got back in the car.
I made it to Santander on the north coast and spent most of a day there waiting for the Plymouth ferry. 99% of the vehicle traffic was British holiday makers with big SUVs and shiny new caravans with names like Ambassador and Elite. We had to wait in a large concrete compound under the hot sun, and a huge cinema-sized screen was placed at the front with Sky news on. It was a continuous loop of news all day - Let’s Bomb Syria and Michael Douglas splits from Wife - both given equal billing.
I escaped the compound and explored Santander on foot. I liked it, but it was like a city gasping for air. Every third or fourth shop seemed to be shutting down. Many of the remainders were ‘We Buy Gold’ shops, or tacky Chinese junk pop-ups. Later on we sailed away from it in the dark and it disappeared into the night on the horizon and that was that. Cocktails were served in the bar and a lousy cabaret singer from Newcastle came on and tried to be all Shirley Bassey. That’s it, my Spanish adventure over.
It seems we're all at it now. Those of us dot-connectors who are concerned enough about the future to take action and relocate are scurrying across the face of the planet looking for somewhere we consider the odds might stack up in our favour a bit better than where we were before. Over at Resource Insights, Kurt Kobb can be seen relocating across the vastness of America to a new home in Oregon, the Doomstead Diner's RE went one step further and is now hiding out somewhere in Alaska and Ray Jason explains why he has taken to the high seas.
As for myself, I chose to take flight from the ostensible safe haven of Denmark and fling myself and my family to the furthest western reach of Britain - namely Penzance in Cornwall. I described my rationale behind the move here, and all I can say at present is that after four months here it feels like the right choice. I did, of course, buy a piece of woodland nearby, which is where I'm crafting my post-industrial career as a woodsman, with the first half acre of chestnut and oak to be coppiced this winter. At some point in the future, perhaps when planning regulations have drowned under their own weight, I'll build a nice little hobbit hole there. It'll be somewhere I can put me feet up and roast chestnuts as I eke out my non-retirement in as comfortable a manner as possible.
But that's future talk. Right now it makes more sense to be within a town, close to the children's school and also the shops. Which is why we've just completed the purchase of a house right in the centre of town.
Now, I would say that it's been quite a long and fraught process getting hold of this particular house. Not only did I have to take a major loss on otherwise stranded assets from our life in Spain, but I also had to negotiate several fraught months of having that money within the UK's increasingly fragile banking system, with a major risk of me being asked to bail out one of the TBTF banks with my savings. Nevertheless, the camel passed through the eye of the needle and I was able to spend pretty much every penny on a place that we can now call home and which we own 100% without even a penny of debt.
None of it would have been possible had my father not passed away last year, but I think he would approve of the fact that we have bought what he would term a 'fixer upper'. That is, the house is solid and the fundamentals are all in a good state, even if it needs something of an overhaul in various areas which I will list below. I'm only setting this out so that others may also start to think about what is important in a house fit for the future, and it's in no way an attempt to show off my abode as if I'm this week's Through the Keyhole mystery person.
It's perfectly possible, if you have ownership of your own property, to live very simply and cheaply. These people here manage to do so - perhaps they are role models whom we should seek to emulate (as is Joan Pick). With that in mind my criteria for buying a house were relatively straightforward:
- It has to be built to last. Most houses built in Britain after the last world war were not built to last. The one we chose was put up at the end of the nineteenth century, is constructed from heavy granite, is standing on bedrock and shows no sign of it not being able to stand for another thousand years or so. The walls are thick and the foundations are solid.
- It had to be big enough to allow for different economic activities to be undertaken in it, but not so big that it would be unaffordable to heat or maintain. Ours has a basement which can be dug out some more and used as a workshop by my wife for her upholstery business, and - joy of joys - an office space for me on the top floor. Furthermore, my assumption is that my kids will not be able to afford their own homes in the future, and that they'll be hanging around in our house far longer than is currently considered normal. With four floors, there should be space for us all.
Under the house
My new office. That old writing desk was rescued from a skip by my father in the late 70s
- It had to be close to amenities so that we can walk everywhere. Our house is a two-minute walk from the shops in the centre of Penzance. The town has pretty much everything you might want, from food stores and cafes, to a hardware store and a library. The hospital is a ten minute walk, the kids' school a five minute walk and the nearest pub is 98 seconds away (I timed it).
- It had to be easy to retrofit. One of the first things I will be doing is studying the central heating system and figuring out how I can get it running on wood fuel. I have two very heavy and antique wood-burning stoves from Scandinavia, which I salvaged, and which will be useful in our house as soon as I have disconnected the gas. At present all water heating is done by a dangerous-looking boiler in the basement which has a very large gas-guzzling pilot flame.
The boiler. To be replaced by a wood-burning stove with a water tank attached
I'll be looking to get water heating panels on the roof as soon as I can, and probably solar PV ones as well. At present the government is offering 'free' solar panels, although there are plenty of strings attached. I don't want to get into any debt, but nevertheless may take them up on this offer given that we have no more funds to finance things like that. The house is aligned north to south, meaning the morning sun heats up the back and the afternoon sun hits the front.
There is a carport at the back, big enough for two cars. My plan is to rip up a lot of the concrete and plant a small garden here. There's also a tiny garden at the front, which will probably just remain ornamental, perhaps with these coffee bushes (the house next door has bananas - everything seems to grow here).
Some coffee bushes and olive seedlings I picked up
The carport - just the right size to make a small enclosed garden
There are, of course, a whole lot of other factors that I need to take into account - especially insulation. But it is a terraced house, meaning that heat is not lost on either side, and the huge thermal mass of the walls at the front and back should be handy for keeping it warm in winter and cool in summer.
- It had to be above sea level. At 40m, up a steep hill from the sea (which is about half a mile away) I'm not too worried about sea level rise and storm surges just yet.
- It had to be affordable. This is one reason to choose the far west of Cornwall. Although house prices are still inflated by the bubble, this is one of the more affordable areas of the UK. Our budget was £200,000, which is about £40,000 less than the average house price. This is still an outrageously high amount by historical standards, and I'm fully aware (and grateful) that by some good fortune we had the money for it.
This alcove should be good for stacking wood in
- It had to be located in a good economic community. Penzance is a smallish market town with excellent trade links. The nearby railway station offers services to London, and everywhere in between, which is why the town thrived in Victorian times as fresh fish and flowers were sent daily to the capital, and tourists flowed in the other direction. Penzance is also a port, and it is easy to get to nearby France and Ireland. The house we have bought was most likely built by a merchant from those times. Given that I presume we will be rewinding the clock and going back to an economic model that will look a lot more like Victorian England than the current fantasy-based economic model, this can only be a good thing.
As you can see from some of the pictures I have included, I have a wealth of junk that needs sorting through. My several years' dumpster diving in Denmark mean I have a lot of nice old furniture, plus several thousand books and enough old but functional tools to set up a second hand hardware store. It will seem incredible in years to come that I was able to come by all of this stuff for nothing - or almost nothing. In total, I have five large trailer-loads full of 'stuff' - two of which are still in far-flung corners of Europe (another Spanish adventure awaits next month), which is the culmination of at least four lifetimes. And even then we are still lacking such basics as a sofa and mattresses - although I'm certain I can get hold of these from Freecycle in the coming weeks.
And below is the view from my new office window which looks out over Mount's Bay to St Michael's Mount. It beats sitting in the kitchen staring at a white wall, which I have been doing the past few years writing this blog, but it remains to be seen whether I'll be able to stop looking at it and actually get some work done.
So that sums up our new abode. It's been a long and winding journey to get here and it's emptied the coffers but - as Dmitry Orlov notes - we're going to lose our money anyway, it's up to us to choose the manner in which we do so. And that's just what I've done. I have no debt, no pension fund to look forward to, no stocks or shares, no precious metals hidden away and very little cash and no permanent job - but what I do have is a house that is suitable for living in and earning money from into the far future and that, in my opinion, represents a store of real wealth.
This morning I awoke to the sound of a strange noise coming in through the open windows of the house. To my half-asleep ears it was a whooshing, rustling sound, as if thousands of people were stood around outside the house all screwing up balls of paper with their hands. A clap of thunder brought me to my senses and I leaped out of bed to close the windows, which have been permanently open for the last couple of weeks, just as the sheets of monsoon-like rain began to torrent down from a cotton wool sky.
Yes, Britain is experiencing something of a heatwave at present and has just had the hottest July weekend in years, and this sudden welcome gush of rain looks set to provide only a momentary respite. It only fell for about ten minutes, but it was long enough to wash the dust off the cars and give the local foliage a much-needed drink. However forecasters say that next week temperatures will be even hotter. So far they have touched the low 30s (around 90F), which is more than hot enough for most people here who are more used to damp and soggy weather.
If temperatures do rise to 35C (95F) next week, as is predicted, we can expect to hear many more warnings from the government about the dangers of extreme heat. Already, it is estimated, at least 760 people have died who would still be alive were it not for the heat. Yes, most of them were elderly or in poor health, and were unable to find somewhere to cool off (air conditioning is almost unheard of in Britain). Internet boards are full of scoffing Australians and Texans, saying that 30 odd degrees of heat is practically chilly to them - but then weather is all about what people are acclimatised to (I've seen people from hot countries practically die in Scandinavian winters in which I could get away with wearing a thin sweater). It’d be gallows humour to point out that some of the only remaining cold rooms to be found in the UK are within municipal morgues at present.
Particularly at risk are people who live in high rise tower blocks, which trap heat during the long days. This heat rises and builds on the upper floors, and the nights are too short to allow much of it to escape before the merciless sun is up yet again. It’s just one example of infrastructure that isn’t fit for purpose and was never designed to cope with conditions outside a narrow range of possibilities. Similarly, there are reports of melting roads in Cambridge, outbreaks of grass fires across London and low water pressure caused by people wasting it by keeping their lawn sprinklers on all night.
I am just old enough to remember the summer of 1976, which was the last really hot summer this country experienced. Below is a picture of the five-year-old me (dressed as a wizard) in the Banbury carnival. Minutes after this picture was taken I fainted in the heat and had to be carried away by paramedics (note to self: don’t wear a black wizard gown and hat in suffocating heat). Around the country at that time people were finding their water supplies cut off and lines developed at rapidly erected standpipes on street corners. It was hot alright.
So although extreme weather events are nothing new it is the increased frequency of their occurrences that is the obvious effect of global weirding we are now starting to experience. We’ve just been through the coldest spring in living memory, which followed hot on the heels of the wettest summer. A friend in southern France reports that a month ago it was only 10C there, when it should be more like 30C. Germany has just recovered from mass flooding, the Arctic ice is melting at record rates - one can go on and on about the weird climatic conditions that are now prevailing across the globe.
So what are we, in Britain at least, doing about this very obvious climate change? Here, unlike in the US, people at least say they take anthropogenic global warming seriously. Despite repeated attacks by various well-funded lobby groups through such organs as the Daily Telegraph, most people believe we are in deep trouble, albeit trouble that is far off enough not to have to worry about just yet.
But the government doesn’t seem concerned in the least. Not only are there efforts to stop climate change being taught in schools, but the chancellor just announced that fracking companies will face the historically lowest taxes on record for any fossil energy producer. This, we are told, is to kickstart the revolution in shale gas fracking - a revolution that IMO if it goes ahead is likely to lead to the closest we have come to all-out civil war in this country since the 17th century.
The reasoning behind this is simple enough; to drill enough well heads to produce even a modest flow of gas we would have to drill literally thousands of wells in the northwest alone. This would be in people’s back yards, on farming land and in areas that are naturally beautiful. The only feasible way that this could ever happen is if the government takes control of land and property on a grand scale, and it would need a very large security force to do that. In the process groundwater would be polluted by the fracking chemicals and much of the remaining North Sea energy would be wasted in trying to make this very low EROEI energy look attractive. It's a recipe for disaster, but it's also a price that many people seem willing to pay given the drum-beat of hype that is pouring forth from politicians and the media.
The only real hope in this scenario is that the American fracking sham comes visibly apart at the seams within the next couple of years. The resulting shock will strangle the UK’s nascent fracking industry at birth before it gets a chance to irreparably pollute the aquifers and cause much bloodshed. It’s a race against time.
And let’s not forget that the UK is running out of water. The intensely wasteful use of water in agriculture is estimated to only have a few years left in it and 'peak water' is on the cards. Future warming, such as we are experiencing right now, is putting a huge strain on water resources and scientists reckon that we are only a few years off putting ourselves into a permanent drought situation that will see crops shrivelling in the fields beneath a super hot sun.
Of course, there are many ways to conserve water - the most obvious of which is to grow crops biodynamically and restore as much moisture retaining topsoil as possible, but I haven’t heard anyone in a position of importance talking about these measures. Indeed, this kind of overshoot is a blind spot for the growthaholics, and shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with business as usual. The solution - as ever - is to import more ‘stuff’ (food, water, oil) from the global marketplace, wherever that is, and that technological solutions will be found for the most pressing of problems. The assumption here is that the UK will continue to remain a wealthy country far into the future and that foreign markets will be able to provide all of the commodities and energy we desire - all at a favourable price - and that technology is the goose that keeps on laying the golden eggs whenever we need it to.
Alas, this kind of non-thinking is delusional and dangerous. We are being promised a future that we can’t afford and only a very small fraction of people realise the severity of the creeping problems which are now beginning to consume us. There is no way out of our predicament while this kind of blindness persists. We are fated to collide with overshoot like a car hitting a brick wall, and all we seem to be able to do is push our foot down further on the accelerator and scream ‘yee ha’ as we do it. It’s not a pleasant thought, but then 22 Billion Energy Slaves trades in unpleasant truths rather that comforting fantasies. If we want to get a taste of how the UK will be in 20 years then have a good look at Egypt.
“Does Andy Murray winning Wimbledon mean that we are headed for the economic good times again?” asked pretty much every news outlet in Britain yesterday. We were even treated to an ebullient Jon Snow on Channel 4 News prancing around on London’s Primrose Hill in the summer evening sun asking bemused onlookers whether their consumer confidence had improved over the last 48 hours (to their credit they all looked baffled by the question, perhaps suggesting that those who live in the media-land bubble should get out more).
But the headlines keep coming thick and fast. Here in Britain we are told that a house price boom is on the way. But if that’s the case then who’s buying? It certainly isn’t the kind of people for which owning a house would be rather useful, say, young people starting up a family. Instead, demand seems to be driven by the increasingly ubiquitous buy-to-let landlords, keen to make a killing out of a desperate situation. Some of these ‘ordinary people’ have amassed hundreds - even thousands - of properties, which they let out to those unable to afford their own. One recently boasted that he ‘earned’ £35,000 a week, meaning he could go on and buy a few hundred more properties and become even wealthier.
Presumably some algorithm somewhere has decided that I might be a good BTL landlord as I keep receiving emails from companies wanting to make me rich. But given that so many people are now being forced into usually sub-standard accommodation, presided over by a rentier class indifferent to their plight I find myself wondering when the day will come when landlord killing becomes a fashionable sport again. Britain might be running out of money, but there are still plenty of lampposts and miles of rope.
Although, whenever I express sentiments like the one above I am inevitably accused of being gloomy, or depressive or, worst of all, boring. I have to say, it’s hardly a barrel of laughs pointing out repeatedly the emperor’s lack of clothing, and sometimes I’m tempted to just stop typing this stuff and get with the programme. You know, perhaps economics can be sentiment based - perhaps scientists will come up with that wonder fuel after all, and maybe those climate scientists who say it’s one minute to midnight really are just after a new research grant. Comforting thoughts indeed.
But then the fundamentals come screaming back at you and you can’t tie your tongue. Schadenfreude is a horrible word, and not just because it’s difficult to say (or spell). What makes it even worse is the fact that you can raise your voice as loud as you can, and even when you are proved repeatedly right, most people won’t accept the truth of what’s in front of their noses. That seemingly apparent truth is that the age of limits is upon us, not that you’d know it from the media and all the assorted ‘experts’ who are wheeled out of their ivory cubicles to pontificate on topics concerning the future.
We are apparently in an economic recovery. The US jobs market is booming, and Chinese people now all own at least one BMW.
Never mind the ‘fundamentals’, such as the velocity and supply of money - that is money in the ‘real’ economy away from QE. Here’s a chart put up by The Automatic Earth:
In this case it is looking at the US and that supposed ‘boom’ that they are having over there. Yes, there’s a boom going on alright as the chart shows - a boom in government credit creation that is being transferred more or less directly into the coffers of the biggest investment banks for them to sit on and do nothing with. This is money that current and future generations of Americans now owe the government. And the velocity of money - that is, the speed at which it travels around the economy from one hand to the next - is also experiencing a massive boom - if you turn the chart upside down.
But, hey, back in Britain again we will all soon be sitting in driverless cars designed by Google (never mind that the government is running out of money to fix the potholes in the roads). And the next big boom area is the fusion of biotech and robotics where ‘the line between human and robot will become blurred’. And by genetically engineering crops and handing over their ‘patents’ to corporations we ‘will cure world hunger’. Obama has vowed to ‘light up Africa’s darkness’ by electrifying the continent. Ten billion people on planet Earth is 'not a problem'.
I don’t know about you but this maelstrom of voices is starting to make me dizzy. Perhaps I should just tune off and live in a cave, as an increasing number of people seem to be doing.
But what is really confounding is the sheer amount of misinformation out there that somehow possesses the almost magical ability to coalesce into ‘fact’. Perhaps it’s just a result of our over-complex society and will go away in due course. Thus, we are told that fracking gas in Britain will give us enough energy for 100 years. Fact. No argument. No dissent permitted.
Mention the very real limits which make this pipe dream unachievable and you are inevitably accused of being overly negative. But I can now see quite clearly how events are shaping up in Britain and how we will go down screaming and battling one another as the dead weight of entropy pulls us beneath the waves. The problem is, we are literally running out of the kind of energy flows we need to make a modern industrial economy tick over. North Sea oil and gas is dropping like a rock, wind and solar are frankly useless for anything other than small scale applications, nuclear is a giant sickly radioactive white elephant that is running out of current buns, and any other energy source that you care to think of is so riddled with problems that it beggars belief that people buy into it.
But as the needle on Britain’s fuel gauge hovers ever closer to the orange area I wonder what the reaction from the population at large will be when the lights literally do go out - as we were warned would happen by 2015 by no less than the energy regulator Ofgem a couple of weeks ago. Will people say ‘Oh well, it was nice having fossil powered energy while it lasted but now I’ll just trade in my Ford Fiesta for a donkey, get a job as a day labourer on a farm and tell the kids that they’ll have an even harder time of it than me.” Or will they scream blue murder at the politicians and energy companies, march en masse through the streets and elect a wide-eyed militant loony who promises to ‘restore Britain’s glory’?
Predictably, the news about the increased risk of blackouts in 2015 was met with a barrage of denial by politicians and industrialists. “The lights will not be going out,” was the peeved response. There was a subtext to that response, of course, and the subtext was ‘Unless we let them go out by not fracking the life out of the country, letting the French and Chinese build a new generation of nuclear power station and opening up some of the coal mines that Maggie shut down because they were so hard to get the coal out of. Indeed all we have to do is try harder to keep the lights on - if we all join hands, scrunch up our eyes and shout at the top of our voices:
The lights are going to stay on!
The lights are going to stay on!
We refuse to recognise the legitimacy of the laws of thermodynamics!
