The following line from the attached article, from the 8 June 2011 edition of the Mail Online, perhaps best summarizes our immediate situation, in human terms:
A study by the [UK’s] Institute of Fiscal Studies today reveals many of the country’s poorest pensioners already face a nightmare choice between heating and eating.
So, in one of the world’s wealthiest countries of the 20th century (talk less of the 19th), the early 21st century was already starting to look strikingly different. What changed? Why such dramatic (and disturbing) social indicators, and why now in the UK?
Of course, those who follow this blog may already know part or all of the answer: in the last 5 years or so, the UK made the transition from being a net exporter to being a net importer of the fossil fuels needed to run its economy, especially petroleum product (crude oil and natural gas). That is certainly the largest and most significant shift for the UK, economically; however, it is by no means the only factor. [N.B., I conjecture that former PM Tony Blair was actually aware of this, as a then-looming problem; hence his short-sighted, politically motivated “deal with the Devil” to ally his Labour (socialist) government with the far right politics of the neoconservative Bush Administration, in the US. The bitter results of that un-holy alliance, sometimes called the “Blair-Bush Project,” are still being felt in many parts of the world today. This would also end up evolving into much of incoming President Obama's "foreign policy inheritance" from the Bush Administration.]
In the US (itself a former net energy exporter), the story is essentially the same. The cost of importing energy in the US, over the past 3 decades, has taken a gradually increasing share of the US national budget. In concrete terms, as of this writing, the United States borrows roughly 1 billion dollars per day per year (for every working day per year, exclusive of holidays and weekends) to help finance its energy requirements. Moreover, in the US as in the UK, there is a minority of households which no longer earns enough money to have both heat and food, during the coldest of winters.
This issue became painfully obvious to me when the Government of Venezuela (yes, “that one!”) began giving development assistance to poor households in the northeast section of the United States. Using its state-owned fuel service enterprise (yes, once again that means “socialism” for anyone who still cares), via its Citgo gas stations, the Government of Venezuela began dispensing subsidized heating oil to selected low-income communities in New York City and in Boston. That was a major PR and public diplomacy coup for the administration of Hugo Chavez. It also resulted in the provision of a vital service for a number of low-income households in targeted zones within those two American cities.
Throughout the industrialized world, governments have been coming under increasing pressure to provide social services, as part of an overall government-sponsored social safety net for vulnerable sectors of their respective populations. Moreover, they’ve been asked to so at a time when energy and other commodity prices continue to rise on world markets. That's the first noose. The second noose placed around the necks of many national leaders is in the form of the neoliberal package of "corrective" measures, allegedly to set their economies aright: short- to medium-term term lending facilities established by the International Monetary Fund, or IMF. Greece is the poster-child of the moment; however, the entire greater Mediterranean region is one big political-economic cauldron of discontent, at the moment. Curiously, the southern half of the region has been named: either the "Arab Spring" or the "Arab Awakening." No such positive re-branding has been applied to the northern half of that same tumultuous region, however. Good things take time, I suppose.
Throughout the region, and indeed throughout the world, the fundamentals of the current political-economic crisis are essentially the same. In short, the cost of doing business (in either the public or the private sector) is continuing to rise, due to increases in imported fuel, and other key commodity price increases on "world" markets. I emphasize world markets here, inasmuch as each country must make their purchases from the same handful of international commodity sellers or traders. The examples of the current crisis are all around us now. Choose any large-scale service provider now, and I will likely show you a struggling industry somehow related to it: airlines, taxis, hospitals and health care, universities, local governments, food pantries and other nonprofit organizations, and of course households—and on and on and on.
In the US mainstream media, stories that focus on this type of big picture perspective are few and far between. News about our long-term ecological-economic predicament is diced and sliced into easily digested ("pre-digested?") bits—they are like “news vignettes” actually, served up like “dainty appetizers of information” at a cocktail party: individual complaints about gas prices here, and a bit about rising food prices over there. Periodically, there is a “hard-hitting report” on how this or that grocery store was “cheating” customers on inflated food prices, in response to the latest climate catastrophe somewhere in the Midwest. Nowhere, however, is there any “mainstream” media outlet that consistently attempts to connect the dots between our energy resource consumption patterns, resource availability (including medium-term supply-demand factors), and the medium- to long-term socio-economic implications thereof. Why might that be? It's enough to make you think there might actually be certain things we're not "supposed" to know.
The idea that key commodity prices (ergo, general consumer prices) have been trending upward since about the year 2000 for all OECD countries, due to the depletion of cheap oil on the world market, never seems to enter popular discourse—not yet anyway, and certainly not in the US. All we in the US get are those little news vignettes, typically wedged in between other pieces of so-called “news” on women’s hem lines for this spring, and in-depth special reports on burning topics like “how to lose weight by eating more." Then there are the other 267 cable channels dedicated to specialty consumer tastes like leisure sports, game shows, Internet shopping, and “reality TV” (the irony is so thick you can cut it with a knife, on that one). For us to be “dumbed down” any further would be to take what was left of our collective critical thinking skills, and plant them as kind of fertilizer, to be used in the gardens of our post-modern delusions about how the world supposedly works. Rome is on fire, and we are all "Little Neros." As an educator, the actual propagation and maintenance of this type of mass ignorance (much like a tropical cyclone) is both fascinating and frightening to watch happen, all at the same time. Personally speaking, I am both intellectually fascinated by the process, even as I am emotionally horrified at the possibility of somehow being overtaken by it.
In the meantime, real flesh-and-blood human beings who have lived in formerly rich countries like the UK and US (and who also happened to be "poor") must now occasionally choose—during unusually cold months—between food and heat. They might not have money for both in sufficient quantity now. It’s a small minority of people, at present. But this is also how it always begins, of course: small cracks in a system, going unnoticed and uncared-for, for long periods of time. Then, seemingly “suddenly,” the small-but-growing cracks that nobody cared to check somehow became connected to each other, to form a huge fissure. By that time, of course, the tipping point has been reached, and “the crisis” (whatever form it may ultimately take) is subsequently unleashed. We (those who care about such things) saw this happen in mid- and late-2008. The financial crisis was a sight to behold, indeed. Again, personally speaking, my own intellectual fascination was somehow in a strange competition with my combined sense of moral outrage and absolute horror. It was like watching a terrible roadside accident: I didn’t really want to see it happening, but I somehow couldn’t turn away either.
This duality within me—that “attraction-revulsion factor”—is in some ways reflected in society at large. We all want to “do the right thing” most of the time, but then again, “that piece of ____________ (insert your own personal vice, here) looks really attractive to me right now! It would just feel so good if I _____ (insert verb here) it. It might even relax me, or make me feel better." And so it goes. We know we shouldn’t eat that piece of cake. We shouldn’t sleep with that stranger. We shouldn’'t invest in that blood diamond. We shouldn't buy that Hummer. We shouldn't cut down all the trees and rape the Earth.
Enter bargaining (with whom, exactly?): because ___________ (our current vice) may already be “in process” somehow, we decide that we will stop either tomorrow, or next week, or next year, or ten years from now, or when our children are grown—or perhaps when we’re dead. And so it goes. It’s been all about taking what I want for me and mine, anyway. And as long as “me and mine” remains the dominant paradigm (individualism run amok), at a time when “me-ism” is destroying the very environment that gave rise to it, the the very concept of the collective remains in deep trouble.
Duality abounds in the Universe, of course. It is everywhere—even in our current terrestrial crisis. In this regard, if there as a positive aspect to the potential demise of our (post)modern lifestyle, it is this: the very nature of the crisis itself will force a re-think among our leadership. It will be forced—through the sheer magnitude of the crisis which I assert is coming (or perhaps which has already “quietly” arrived)—to reassess how we have organized ourselves to interact with the Earth and her resources.
My main concerns at this point are two: 1) the time factor, and how long will it take them (and therefore “us”) to turn the steering wheel of The Titanic; 2) the autism factor, with regard to how deeply disconnected our leadership actually become from physical reality now (e.g., its fundamental capacity to interpret signals in the surrounding environment, and then respond to them in a “socially appropriate” way?). Ice bergs can now be dimly seen through the fog of our collective confusion and autism. How soon before we will be willing and able take action and change course? The answer depends in part on folks like you and me, and how we respond to what's coming next.
I invite you all to continue reading, thinking, talking, and sharing.
Blaine
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