Oil, Climate, Oppenheimer, and Restructuring
“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.” - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Beyond Vietnam, 4/4/1967
At a young age, I was greatly influenced by the Oil Shocks of the 1970s, concluding it was a good idea we move away from a culture equating development and wealth with the burning of ever greater amounts of oil. It became and remained a cornerstone of my politics. Unfortunately in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, Americans – Democratic, Republican, White, Black, Brown, male, female, and other – rejected building anything atop such a cornerstone. Instead, we accelerated in the other direction creating SUV and Pickup culture. Ever more oil was used to simply transport, from here to there, an average American of 180 lbs., encased in heavier and heavier vehicles, averaging 4200 pounds today, a third heavier than four decades ago – a simple physics of energy waste. Electric cars are averaging even heavier.
Since 1980, American oil use rose 4 million barrels a day, while global oil use increased 55%. Not that America became much more efficient in burning oil than the rest of the world, just our volumes were already ahead of everyone else and determined to remain so. Today, with only 4% of the global population, the US consumes 21% of global oil production.
Global oil reserves continue to deplete, the remaining oil becomes increasingly expensive to extract. However, the American consumer has been sheltered from both these facts primarily in two ways: first, a massive increase in debt; second, we blew up much of the Middle East to control the planet's largest remaining oil reserves. By the way, don't kid yourself, the present idiocy in Ukraine is as much a war about oil and gas as it is anything else.
I first looked into the topic of climate change in the late 1980s. The science all seemed perfectly sound, actually not just sound, but fundamental to how life on earth evolved. The models, well, that was another matter. Closely following economic and environmental issues led me to understand predictive modeling, especially about the future as Yogi Berra said, wasn't a science.
So, looking at the climate models back 30 some years ago, and more importantly what they said about the cuts in fossil fuel burning needed to stave off radical change in weather patterns, well, it was completely clear that wasn't going to happen in 10, 20, 30 or 50 years. When approached by people talking about climate change, and in those days it was very few, mostly I'd say, “Let's hope their models are wrong. Let's talk about how we use less oil, that's part, if not key to what must be done.” Nevertheless, that wasn’t a conversation to be had, even among those concerned about climate. The Reagan Revolution had been total.
So, it was both ironic and infinitely amusing at the recent OPEC meeting, the oil industry, for the first time, honestly said don't look to us for change, look in the mirror, reduce demand. I agree 100%. For the United States, demand destruction remains the primary solution. An easy start is to figure out how to restructure the transportation infrastructure, cutting the mass used to transport people and goods, again, fundamental physics. In America these days, gains could be had by just cutting the average weight of those being transported, start by restructuring to make daily life much more conducive to walking and riding bikes.
In the 1990s, not forgetting about oil, I turned my attention to electricity, trying to help develop a politics for restructuring US energy use with greater efficiencies and renewable energy generation. Key to matters of efficiency was better information. Electricity utilities and their customer bases were an information desert, at that time the internet was beginning to explode. Tying the growing information network to the established electricity grid seemed, in the noxious parlance of the era, a “win-win.”
Being unhelpfully clever at that point, I've since tried learning to be much less clever, I would say to the small group of people who knew anything about electricity, “A bit is cheaper than a watt,” attempting to convey information and compute technologies might be key to greater energy efficiency. This was before I came to understand the computer industry itself didn't practice this. The new industry relied on brute force energy just as wastefully as all preceding industries. Not valued through any new measures, computer technology became overwhelmingly valued by the dominant industrial value of more, with one exception, the technology’s growing ability to replace human labor and its associated costs. The new information technologies were not going to be used for greater energy efficiency, they were rapidly becoming an ever increasing energy sink.
With computing’s next technological generation, promoted as AI, this energy drain threatens to be untenable. The entire human brain uses 12 watts to be powered, while “training” one program using an AI Language Model “was estimated to require as much energy as a trans-American flight.” The future energy required is so massive, one of AI's greatest promoters, using the money gained from selling-out to Microsoft, looks to develop small scale nuclear power plants, existentially entwining the sublime technologies of the burgeoning Quantum Era.
In a wonderful 1961 speech about science and culture at the University of Colorado, J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the 20th century's midwives of the Quantum Era, noted it was imperative for all to understand the world had changed. We needed to understand we were dealing with issues “the context for which none of our institutions were ever really designed.”
He added,
“We live in a time that has few historical parallels, there are practical problems, problems of the restructuring of human institutions, of their obsolescence and inadequacy, and problems of the minds and spirit which if not more difficult than before, are different, and indeed plenty difficult.”
In 60 years, we've done nothing about restructuring human institutions, remarkably, even less so than moving away from oil. Today, their obsolescence and inadequacy are completely obvious, whether it’s the oil industry, electric industry, banking industry, or lord help us all, the halls of government in DC and across the planet. This inadequacy and obsolescence continues to promote ever more destructive established values, instead of transcendence through the restructuring of our institutions from the ground up, starting with the actions we as individuals take daily.
These are amazing times in human history. The knowledge Homo sapiens gained not just allows, but necessitates, a retooling and revaluing of daily human life never available to the generations preceding us, with just as importantly remembrance of things that should have never been forgotten, or maybe never learned. Such a revolution of values requires an almost wholesale rejection of today's dominant structures and values.