2008-05-28 - 10:11 a.m.
It seems that the number one topic on everyone's mind these days is the price of everything going up. Dramatically, in fact. People and the radio and the internet and the television and the magazines and newspapers and every other information dissemination medium has a thousand and one tales for the source of this inflation, but it seems that the truth is never quite at hand and there is not a semblance of congruity between the myriad of explanations. Almost deliberately so, I might conjecture. But that is another argument for another blog.
I decided to think about this thing logically. To go back to the very source of the whole thing and try to get a more "over-arching" view of the situation. Apparently, the issue of inflation is not just a U.S. problem. It is an international problem. So what is going on with the world? Why are we all in this crazy boat together? Why do we exist at all?
Two hundred humble years ago, there were, at most, one billion people on Earth. That was a milestone for our lovable little planet. Never before had there been a billion humans alive here at the same time. It had taken about one thousand and eight hundred years for the population of human beings to grow by eight hundred million (1800 years to grow by 800 million). Most of that took place toward the end of those 1800 years. Immediately afterward, by comparison, it took only two hundred years to balloon that number by another five thousand million people (200 years to grow 5000 million).
I would account the first set of numbers to a few things: better agriculture, better engineering, better public health practices, and the increase in human ingenuity that brought all of them about. The latter numbers, it seems, were founded upon old discoveries, old technologies and old practices, namely the ones mentioned above...the same engineering, the same agriculture, the same improvements in public health, and maybe a little more advancement in human ingenuity. Minus one key factor: increased energy. We did not harvest the sun better. We did not tap the Earth's internal heat. We did not make huge leaps in learning how to harness the wind or the tides. We found(*) petroleum. An incredibly dense source of energy.
We found petroleum. We learned to use petroleum. We turned the energy of petroleum into energy that helped us increase our ability to use that eighteen-hundred-year-old knowledge of engineering, agriculture, and public health. We worked less to produce more. Using petroleum as our replacement for backbreaking labor. Our population grew because the food grew. The simplest of population biology. We had plenty of space to grow into, so overcrowding was not an issue. We had petroleum to make more food than nature could ever provide by herself, and we ate it, and we reproduced and our numbers grew.
Today, we have reached a level where the amount of petroleum we can get out of the ground and that we can burn to make more food has balanced out. We are now at the level where population biology would say we are balanced. We are at competitive levels. We must, like all normal organisms of biology, compete with each other for resources to keep our population viable. We, as human beings, do not have natural predators. There are no bears or tigers or lions to hunt us or eat us. Our biggest competitors are us. We will be the ones to keep our numbers in check.
Logic would say, since our number one gift from nature is our giant bundle of nerves sitting in our skulls, our awareness of the situation and the resolution to it is to, as a species, discuss the issue and come to a civilized and reasonable solution. That is what we are. That is what we do. We think. We communicate. We create tools and plans. We resolve issues.
The problem is that we chose to model our civilization of the past two hundred years after one of nature and the way that the Earth has always done things.
Don't get me wrong. Mother Nature and our lovable little planet are wonderful things with beautiful creations and great lessons to teach us.
But on the point of survival, Earth and Nature DO NOT USE intelligence or craft or plans. Nature is relentlessly brutal. Earth is violently uncontainable. They will destroy what cannot sustain itself. They will let things be eliminated. That is the essense of natural logic. Unrelenting destruction of the weak and feeble.
We have chosen this suicidal path as our method of dealing with each other. Capitalism and its many glorious innovations and the gifts that is bestows upon us is a zero-sum game. If you cannot compete, you are gobbled up and your niche is replaced. Whether you are a company. Whether you are a nation. Whether you are a tribe. Whether you are an individual in a city. Our world, each and every individual in each and every nation must live for themselves, and no one will live their life for them. Each one of us must be our own best friend, if we are to survive in this system. That is the way of nature.(**) That is the way we are going down if we continue this charade in international relations.
Our people are at a point where we want the best of what our civilization has created. We used more and more oil to produce more and more people and more and more stuff. Initially, most of this stuff only went to a small number of these growing number of people. That was the level that the petroleum being used could manufacture. The rest of the people knew about these wonderous gifts but could only sit there and see the small percentage of the other people having them and enjoying them. Well, with time, these people got a taste of that wealth and got their hands on it. And they wanted more of it. They demanded more petroleum from the ground. The used the natural system of competition to get at it. Their numbers grew even more. As demand grew, the amount of petroleum from the ground grew. People demanded more petroleum to be like the rich. Petroleum suppliers, at a competitive price, supplied more of it for them. And these "nuveau-riche" grew accustomed to this lifestyle of the rich. And why not? They are a part of the same human civilization on this planet. They want to have comfort too. They want to have sex too. They want to have families too.
Just as with everything that is difficult to deal with, we all turned our back to the emerging spectere of the inevitable. The petroleum in the ground is not unending. There was so much of it and it is mostly used up. We have reached the other side of the demand and supply curve. There is less and less petroleum in the ground. There are more and more people. And they all want to have the toys that the rich have.
We reached the top of two curves, and produced the peak number of people that could live off of that peak amount of petroleum. But the curve of how much petroleum is left in the ground is going down. The population curve will, with ease or with gutwrenching pain, also go down.
You do the math... More people... Less Petroleum... Same growing demand for the rich lifestyle. NO WAY, NO HOW.
With the system of money and power that we created, based around competition and capitalism, the problem of too many people, too little (and decreasing) petroleum will not be going away by using our brains and our civilized sensabilities. We will not be "talking this situation out". We will, using that brilliant model of Mother Nature and Father Earth, be letting our fellow human beings die off in competition. We will be letting the "have-nots" be sloughing off in the population growth curves. We will, as the powerful nations, be using our militaries to take oil to supply our needs for our population, and letting the losers in this competition succumb to their own overgrown masses. We are already seeing that in many places. And that is not taking into account the problems with our declining state of our environment.
Oil is our reason for such abundance. No other source of energy can provide for us what it has provided. It is made into plastics. It is made into fertilizers and animal feeds that become our food. It is used to move us around in transportation. It is used to power the machines that clean our drinking water and pump it into our homes for consumption, and to clean it again when it goes down our drains and toilets and into our rivers and oceans. It is turned into our roads, our houses, our pharmaceutical products, our cosmetics, our weapons, our paper, our CD's, our computers, our electricity for our refrigerators, televisions, and internet, and a plethora of other things we just don't think about that make our lives livable today.
So with every talking head explaining this or that, and complaining about housing prices and gas prices and price of food and ethanol, and airlines going out of business, and blah-blah-blah, we must remember that the backbone and the "raison d'etre" of this whole big crazy maelstrom of information overload is PETROLEUM. It is running low. We are growing in number. And we have set in place the international economic and political structure that disdains the use of our greatest asset, our brains, to deal with the inevitable and forseeable catastrophic results.
Consider this all as food for thought and maybe it will help shed some light on that next argument you see on CNN or FOX news.
See above for these notations:
(*)= we did not technically "find" petroleum. People who lived near the petroleum resources had used it for various small-scale activities for millenia. With the advent of automation, petroleum was found to be the best resource for dense carbon energy, and so it was exploited as such.
(**)= There are, of course, other paths that natural systems take to make efficient survival and proliferation methods. Packs. Symbiotes. Generalism. Etc. My point above was that in the end, every organism that wants to contribute to the existence of its species must survive and reproduce, and it will die in the end, no matter what.
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