Obituary

It's been a bit of a tough week. I wanted to write about the book I'm reading at the moment which is called Navigating the Coming Chaos: a Handbook for Inner Transition and is written by peak oil writer Carolyn Baker. There's been a bit of talk about synchronicity recently on other peak oil sites and for me this was mine because, like others, I am feeling a particularly strong level of fear lapping around my knees. It's a kind of fear of a greater fear, if you like, that only a Cassandra could feel. The best quote I saw this week that could approximate the cause of this came from Noam Chomsky … here it is:

”The general population doesn't know what is happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know.”

So I felt fortunate indeed when I opened Carolyn Baker's book and began to read. In it she posits that humankind is about to have a near-death experience. There's nothing we can do about this, it's as if we are walking in front of a bus, oblivious because we are listening to our iPods. We have no comprehension of the three e's: energy, environment and economics, and the interplay between them that has led us into our dazed predicament. We are not prepared for it, either materially, mentally or spiritually. It's as if we are going to be forced to march into a battle wearing our bathing costumes rather than body armour. The only thing that can come from this is disaster on a scale that is scarcely imaginable to the modern mind and we can expect to see mass social breakdown and suicides as the myth of our exceptionalism disappears in a puff of smoke.

Anyway, that's the bad news. The good news, if you could call it that, comes in the form of inner transition, and that's what she talks about in the book. She talks about becoming a new kind of human being, and one that can live with a continuous conscious connection with the living universe. And cultivating your own inner bunker. There is plenty of Jungianism in it and I just know that it is going to be one of those books that opens up new paths for me.

But I haven't finished the book yet, so I'll wait until I do so before offering up more.

The second thing I thought I might right about was a follow on from last week's post about George Monbiot. Having accused him last week of not really understanding peak oil it was only 48 hours later that he published a hot button article claiming that peak oil was irrelevant. Could it be that GM reads my humble blog? Ha, I doubt it, but still he put the cat among the pigeons and there was plenty of roiling debate about whether he has a point or not. The unofficial consensus seems to say that he had a couple of good points (namely that peak oil won't stop us being fried by burning fossil fuels – something we knew anyway) but that overall he was still wrong, primarily because he was basing his arguments on dubious data supplied by cornucopians.

John Michael Greer commented to the effect that climate change activists such as George Monbiot are labouring under delusions of grandeur because they see mankind as omnipotent whereas peakers recognise the limits of our power and are therefore somehow more realistic. There might be something in this but I for one am growing a bit tired of this dualism – it's like a football match with the environmentalists (in the green shirts) on the one side and the peakers on the other (in the black shirts) with the Earth as the ball. I became an environmentalist as a teenager because my local forest was cut down to make way for a new housing estate, and because I couldn't stand seeing whales being harpooned or seals being clubbed to death: does that sound delusional?

The third thing I thought I might talk about is how fast things are unravelling. I read an article yesterday about numerous cities in the US going bankrupt and how feedback loops effectively bring about fast collapse scenarios far more rapidly than it took to build up the city in the first place. It goes something like this: city gets into financial difficulty because it has borrowed too much based on the value of its assets (i.e. real estate in most cases); city suddenly finds it can't pay the debt due to sinking asset prices and a stalling local economy; city cuts back on essential services and cuts pensions and welfare payments; crime sky-rockets as a result but there is not enough money to pay the police so certain areas (usually the poorer ones) become unpoliced; which causes even more crime which in turn further lowers house prices which in turn further makes the gap between asset values and debt wider. People are trapped because they can't sell up and move somewhere else. The tax base falls and another step towards third world status is complete.

What I'm interested to know is what the limiting factors of these negative feedback loops might be. I can imagine vigilante citizens patrolling the streets perhaps, and maybe local food coops and trading arrangements springing up. Whether people are ready for this kind of sudden shift in lifestyles is the 64 million dollar question.

I was going to write about all of these things but this week's blog post is overshadowed by the death of my father in England. Now before anyone thinks that I'm sobbing into my keyboard I'd better point out that my father and I had a somewhat strained relationship and I have barely seen him for the last 18 years. The last seven years he has been slowly degenerating into a second infancy as dementia ate away at his brain, and the last year has been particularly bad for him. It was, as they say, a merciful release.

I'll try not to make this into a pity party but I would just like to say that there won't be many people attending his funeral. In life he seemed to think that people were eggs, because one of his favourite sayings was 'You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.' He broke quite a few eggs during his life and prided himself on being feared by his employees when he was a company director of GEC. He used to stroll around the train factory where he worked summarily firing workers for things such as wearing earrings. He boasted about workers dying from asbestosis and prided himself in never having read a book in his life.

Born in Cheadle in 1932, Jack grew up, as he said, as a dirty-kneed urchin in a solidly working class household. As a teenager it seemed he was destined to be a footballer and played for Manchester City in their junior team. Furthermore he built up his strength lifting scrap metal round the back of the factory he worked in, becoming an anatomist's model in the process. He must have got bored with this because he met my mother, got married at 21 and hopped on next trans-oceanic liner to America. Stepping off onto American soil, the first thing he did was to come down with acute appendicitis. He was rushed to hospital only to be left in the corridor for hours while my mother, only 19 and in a state of frenzy, rushed to find a good Samaritan who would pay a bond for my father to have the operation. If she hadn't found one such man I wouldn't be writing these words.

They spend the next 16 or so years living on and off in Canada. My father, a member of the Communist Party, was finding life in the US too difficult (so he said). Canada took him in and he made the swift conversion from Communism to Capitalism, once he had made enough dough as a property owner there.

Back in England I arrived in 1971 (my sister is ten years older than me and grew up with a Canadian accent) and my father climbed the greasy pole of a manufacturing industry in terminal decline, working his way up as others slid down. As a ruthless cost cutter who was not afraid of making omelettes he had found his niche and was rewarded correspondingly. Thatcherism was on the rise and my father was one of her acolytes. If anything, she was too soft for his liking, and he advocated paying lower taxes and instituting the death penalty for petty offences such as smoking dope. I was packed off to private school and the intention was to turn me into a mini prodigy which, of course, I never became.

The scene was set for one conflict after another and, despite my caving in to his insistence that I study economics at university (I was all set to study classics) he never really saw me as much more than an expensive failure. A few attempts at reconciliation proved fruitless and in the years after my mother died (some 20 years ago) he devoted himself obsessively to researching ways to avoid paying tax; something which, in the end, I think contributed to his decline.

Still, it doesn't do to speak ill of the recently dead, so I'm going to present another side of my father as well because he had sides that not many people realised. He was great nature lover and he took us on walks most weekends around some of the most beautiful parts of the English countryside. If it wasn't for this early exposure to nature, where I was allowed to play to my heart's content, I'm not sure how I would have grown up.

Furthermore, he abhorred waste of any kind. Every scrap of food had to be eaten, no matter how bad it tasted, and he would state again and again that we are spoiled in the west and that people were starving in other countries. He saw military expenditure as morally wrong too, saying that for every minute an F1-11 was in the air it could stop a child dying from malnutrition. Lights left on in the house were punishable with having my pocket money docked (from the 10p it stood at!) and nearly all technology, which in those days meant colour televisions and VCRs was profligacy that would turn your brain to mush.

”People,” he would say to me time and again ”are really quite stupid and will do anything and buy anything you tell them to. The trick in life is to do what you think is right and not be bothered by what others think of you.” I didn't agree with him at the time (I just wished my father would be like everyone else's!) - but I now realise that this was one of the lessons I really took to heart. While all my friends were going on holiday each year to Florida and on cruises, we stayed in a leaky caravan in a field in Cornwall, where it normally rained continuously.

His toughness extended to central heating, which he was almost ideologically opposed to. Every winter he would construct his own storm windows and generally weatherise the house. One room (the lounge) was kept warm, while the rest of the place was as cold as the crypt. Sleeping with a thick jumper on was the norm and it was unusual if you couldn't see your breath indoors between December and March.

Again, this is something I now thank him for. I am able to weather a far greater range of temperatures than most people I know, although it does mean that I suffer in offices when the thermostat is set way too high.

Similarly, my father taught me a lot about tools and gardening. Almost everything was 'home made' in our house, from the car which he had salvaged from a scrap heap and put together one cold winter (with me standing there handing him tools for many a long Saturday when I'd rather be out with my friends), to the beer which he drank rather too much of at weekends and many of the clothes I wore. Some of our food came from the garden too, and every autumn he would take us out into the 'wild' (i.e. on National Trust land) to pick masses of elderberries, which he would make into wine with his own printed labels 'Château Heppenstall'. Unless it was work related he never went in restaurants, flew on planes or bought furniture.

In his later years, hit by the grief of losing my mother at the relatively young age of 58, he softened a lot in his stance on things. With old age he partially gave in to the insistence of everyone who kept saying he should 'enjoy his money' and splashed out on a few of the consumer items that most other people take for granted. He tried to reconcile with me but couldn't help but get caught up again in his emotions, with the result that I stayed away from him whenever possible.

When I analyse the core cause of the conflict between us I think it can be boiled down to our world views. I have an innate sense of what I call optimistic pessimism – all I can remember feeling since I was very young was that we were destroying the world and that by the time I was an adult much of it would have been wrecked. My father, like everyone else of his time who had lived through the Second World War, was the opposite and took the view that scientific progress was marvellous and cost-free. Everything from giant dams, to nuclear power stations and our town's first McDonald's restaurant was 'marvellous' and he claimed his only wish was to be young again so that he could see these fantastic developments take shape. This unacknowledged worship of progress was his true religion and was probably what drove a wedge between us.

In the end he spent the last year of his life at a string of nursing homes and hospitals. He was kicked out of the first one for 'inappropriate behaviour' and ended up under heavy sedation in hospital while doctors experimented on him with different cocktails of drugs. It's a sad way to end up and he died alone, with even the nurses at the nursing home (who only spoke Polish and could not even communicate with him) failing to notice he had died. My sister discovered him in his room on Tuesday evening, having come down with a cough that morning which had quickly overwhelmed his immune system. It occurs to me in writing this that I don't even possess a picture of him.

We are now arranging a funeral. As a devout atheist he had made it clear that he didn't want to be anywhere near a church, even in death. So we are arranging for a burial in a woodland setting, something I think he would have approved of. We're getting a humanist speaker to conduct a ceremony and I'm writing a eulogy, which will probably end up being a more saccharine version of what is above. I realise now deep down that I loved my dad, despite all of the conflict. I hope that when I die my children will possess a picture of me. How does that Neil Young song go … ?

Old man take a look at my life I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me the whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes and you can tell that's true.

Marmite Madness and the Muffled Media

If only we could drill for Marmite ... a tanker delivering some of the controversial savoury spread

In this last week, which has seen people panic-buying petrol across the UK, we have been reminded of two unpleasant facts which are likely to be rearing their ugly heads much more frequently in the future. For those who don't know, a mooted strike by a union which counts petrol tanker drivers as its members quickly led to mile-long queues at filling stations, leading to one woman accidentally setting herself alight as she tried to decant fuel which in turn led to calls for rolling heads at the ministerial level.

All of this was sparked by some union reps saying they might consider calling a strike over safety conditions.

The first ugly fact that I mentioned was the reminder that any threat to the fuel supply causes mass hysteria. In this instance there has been (so far) no actual supply interruption, but that didn't stop people overreacting.

The second reminder was that in these situations the mass media amply fulfils its role of hysteria amplifier, quickly weighing up the situation, coming to hasty conculsion about who or what is to blame and then shouting PANIC at the top of its lungs while jumping up and down and getting all red in the face. In this case they decided to blame Francis Maude, the Conservative Party chairman, who suggested that if there was to be a strike it might be a good idea to fill up a jerry can with fuel just in case. Normally this would be considered stirling advice, after all, doesn't it pay to be prepared?

Now, I'm not exactly a fan of the Conservatives and I'm sure that Francis Maude has done many questionable things in his life to get to the position where he is now – but advising people to fill up jerry cans with petrol can hardly be counted as one of them. But the blame for the woman who accidentally burned herself is being laid firmly at his door, and a quick Google search of 'Francis Maude blame' reveals 631 news articles featuring those exact words. Yes, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, the media has gone stark raving mad.

I should know. I was at the centre of some media madness about a year ago. I'd been working as a freelance contributor at The Guardain, acting as a kind of 'our man in Copenhagen'. The Guardian, it should be understood, has a kind of strange fetish for Denmark that stops just short of the country warranting its own pull-out section every week. To the average Guardian reader the country represents a kind of liberal utopia free of crooked politicians, inequality and obese people. It's wrong on all three counts but having spent almost 10 years living here, two as editor of a Copenhagen based newspaper, I'm quite familiar with the phenomenon and have come to accept that I live in an inkblot country onto which outsiders project their own fervid imaginings, whatever they may be.

So there I was, trying to feed them stories which I thought would fit in with their readers' preconceived notions and I came across a small story that I thought might be of some interest. It concerned a tiny shop in Copenhagen which sold foreign foods to homesick expats, who had been told some months before that they were no longer allowed to stock the savoury spread Marmite on their shelves. The reason given by the man from the Food and Veterinary Administration was that the dark sticky spread was fortified with vitamins, meaning that it had to have special permission to be sold. The Danes love banning things that are foreign, and Marmite was just the latest product, along with a whole raft of others from Horlicks to Birds Eye custard. To get permission to sell Marmite would have involved a lot of red tape and cost, and the shop owner was angry because it was a best selling product.

I asked The Guardian if they might be interested in this and immediatley was told that 'Yes,' they were. I said I'd write it up within four or five days, just as soon as I'd been and interviewed the owner and taken some pictures. They got back and said that they needed it the next day. 'Okay,' I said (a little huffily because I had other things to do).

The next day they were onto me again. 'When is it it ready?' I was asked. But I could not get it finished until I had a quote from the Food and Veterinary Administration, and every time I rang them they seemed totally uninterested and claimed they'd look into this mar-mme-tay product I was talking about. When I rang them for about the fifth time the spokesman, clearly annoyed, went and interrupted the relevant minister in a meeting (after I told them who I was writing it for). She didn't think it was important either – she was probably busy with other things, like plans to protect against the country against Monsanto - and so I had to warn them that I'd have to say they had 'no comment'.

Then my phone rang and it was one of the Guardian editors who told me 'At the moment we have Obama meeting the Queen on the front page and we want to replace that with your story-' I gulped. 'Okay, I'll file it now,' I said.

Needless to say, the story sparked a storm out of all proportion to its merit. Within hours it became the biggest story in the UK, with every major news outlet clamouring to get their own version of it and, briefly, it was the most Tweeted topic in the entire world. People in Britain, who will tolerate practically anything apart from fuel price rises and someone messing with Marmite, went predictably insane, throwing Danish bacon and furniture into skips and promising to stop their children playing with Lego and turning down the volume when Sandy Toksvig was on the radio. My inbox began to fill with angry emails asking me what the hell I thought I was doing and, when a Danish journalist got through to me on my mobile and started shrieking 'Are you trying to start a trade war?' at me I decided it was time to turn it off and bury it in a draw in the kitchen. It's probably fair to say that I went into hiding.

It should be remembered that Denmark is particularly sensitive to boycotts having had most of its products boycotted across large parts of the Muslim world following the Mohammed Cartoon debacle (which I inadvertently almost became a victim of, but that's a story for another day).

After several days, during which the Sun newspaper made the Danish ambassador in London come out and make an apology, Marmite was debated in the Danish parliament and angry groups of geographically challenged Britons called for the picketing of Ikea, the story slowly began to fade away and I began to peek out from beneath my rock. The stampeding herd had passed me by and all that was left to show was the trampled earth and a faint savoury yeast smell hanging in the air.

So what did I learn from this experience? Many people congratulated me for getting a story on the front page of The Guardian as if I'd uncovered some kind of major corruption scandal, but in truth I was a bit ashamed of the whole affair. I'd been badgering The Guardian for a while to take some of my peak oil articles seriously but had been met with a polite rebuff. They weren't sure which section to file them under and, in any case, wasn't the whole peak oil thing just speculation? No, the only black viscous liquid they wanted me to write about came in little jars rather than 42 gallon barrels. So in the end I just came away with a small sum of money and a great after dinner anecdote.

So the question remains: just why is the mainsteam media so poor at addressing peak oil issues and all the worrying depletion issues which surround it and instead fixate on trivial matters?

Who knows – perhaps it is not 'human interest enough' or maybe it defies categorisation so effectively, if one considers the wider issues associated with peak oil. Or maybe it is just a little too uncomfortable and close to the bone, after all, even The Guardian is driven by a 'cash engine' of dealing in cars. Could it be that its just too … boring?

Perhaps it is just a simple case of not wanting to rock the boat, but whatever it is the end effect is that we're not being informed of the really important stuff. Whatever your idealogically-driven choice in newpsaper it's a bit like being given the choice of voting for the Democrats or Republicans in the US which was memorably described by Noam Chomsky as being offered the chance to vote for one of two wings of the Business Party - and newspapers of all stripes are more or less the echo chambers of the big parties and know where their allegiences lie.

Of course that's not to say that the big newspapers never address these important issues. It's quite common for, say, The Independent or even The Telegraph to have a self-flagellating front page splash about an approaching doomsday scenario. But these are flash-in-the-pan affairs and you only have to turn a few pages in to get to the travel section in which readers are encouraged to burn aviation fuel like it's going out of fashion, or the business section which advises readers on which commodities or stocks are worth pouring your money into for the purposes of getting richer.

And perhaps that is just it. We live in a commercial world and facing up to an energy depleted future just doesn't sell adverts. To be consistently the bearer of the kind of sobering reality that peak oil represents sits uneasily with the fashion and shopping supplements – heck, even the environment sections are more often than not just cheerleaders for the biotech and nuclear industries. Any newspaper editor who gave serious column inches to peak oil and all the kind of things that people in their thousands read voraciously on blogs written by the likes of Dmitry Orlov and John Michael Greer, might soon find herself shuffling uncomfortably before the withering gaze of the sales director who wants to know why BMW have just pulled out of their seriously lucrative full page advertising campaign. 'Are you trying to lose everyone their job?' they might ask.

There's a bitter irony in all of this as well because for all the theorising surrounding peak oil and societal collapse, the moment it actually starts to bite people hard, instead of a sudden surge in interest people will be too busy just trying to survive and the time for pointy-headed postulating will be past. At this time anyone brave enough to say 'told you so' will likely be blamed for not 'telling us so' enough as people will be looking for scapegoats – in the way that environmentalists were perveresely blamed by oil companies who finally accepted the reality of anthropogenic global warming for 'not being effective communicators'.

So if people don't want to think about these issues – probably the most important that humankind has ever faced – then I doubt any amount of exposure in the MSM will have any effect. It may even have the opposite desired effect if powerful business-as-usual interests direct their firepower on peak oilers and publicly manage to 'out' us in the way they have done with climate scientists.

So maybe it's time to stop looking to the mainstream media and instead focus on the small community of bloggers – and when the plug is pulled out of its wall socket and the internet goes dark or is unaffordable we'll turn back to paper and ink and printing presses. At least you can insulate a wall with an old newsletter – something you can't do with an old blog.