Jason Heppenstall

Adios to Orange Blossom and Stranded Assets

Published April 29, 2013 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on April 29, 2013


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I have just returned from Spain, where we had to go at short notice to give a farewell kiss to our stranded asset. Yes, our farmhouse, which had been the focus of all my dreams and efforts a few years back, was finally released from legal limbo land and the keys handed over to the happy new owners. We got back around half of what it cost us to buy it and do it up, but speaking with other people in the same situation we know that we are among the lucky ones.

What a strange place Spain is! This truly is a country where dreams go to die. To the casual visitor it looks like an earthly paradise. The entire region was bursting forth with a trillion wildflowers on our visit, the air was scented with jasmine and orange blossom and the boughs of the lemon trees still hung heavy with fruit. A bumper wet winter had left the Sierra Nevada mountains with a deep snow pack – meaning happy times for farmers in the year ahead – and the local people were just as courteous, graceful, witty and family-oriented as they ever were.

These were among the reasons why, almost ten years ago, we had chosen to go and live there. The ruined house on the side of a fertile hillside had been converted into a small organic farm. Our kids were happy to sit in the shade of an almond tree with a rock and bash open almonds while I either worked on the land or went into the office where I was running a small ecologically-conscious newspaper that I had set up. Life was good.

Or at least it would have been if we hadn’t taken out a loan to renovate the property. In time that loan became an unbearable burden and our dreams slowly dissolved before our eyes as we found ourselves forced to return to work in Copenhagen and live in a government subsidised flat for five whole years. That wasn’t part of the plan.

And we were the lucky ones. Those who steadfastly refused to leave are now stranded. Most foreigners have left the area. Those who stubbornly refuse to lower the asking price of their houses are hit the worst because they can’t cut their losses and move on. Instead they exist in a shadowy half-world of penury, trying desperately to earn a euro here or there and doing anything they can to keep the wolf – or in this case the bank – from the door. The last thing they need is escapees like me parachuting in and pointing out how lovely the smell of orange blossom is in the spring air.

Those with families to support face an unpleasant decision. With all work having dried up many are finding that the only way to feed their families is by doing illegal things. ‘Such as?’ I asked my friend, who is still desperately clinging on in a legal way. ‘All sorts,’ she replied. Dope grows remarkably well in Andalucia.

Only those who can draw money from the currently still-functioning pension systems of northern Europe are faring better. Yet even that may not be a shortcut to safety as healthcare costs are climbing just as they themselves go into decline. The Spanish have a word for foreigners like that. They call them ‘soloistas’ or some such word – loners. People without family who rely on their money from other countries, their healthcare from far away and a cheap and functional system of airlines to take them wherever they need to access these services. Many of them sit in their jerry-built concrete shells by their swimming pools, drink in hand, and convince themselves that they are still living the good life – even though sterling has depreciated, food costs have rocketed and all of their friends have either been evicted or hot-tailed it back to the country they had said they despised before things started to go wrong. Just one more glass of sangria and everything will be okay again …

Spain is a strange place. It has been in a state of free fall collapse for several centuries. One of my favourite writers, Jan Morris, described the country’s fortunes as (paraphrased) ‘like a rock bouncing, bouncing, bouncing down a steep mountain, its descent every now and again arrested by a small outcrop.’ Here was a country that had a vast empire that was able to liquidate – quite literally – the wealth of an entire continent and bring it home. Five centuries later it was one of the most backward regions of the western world and an embarrassment to the EU. And then the money began to pour in.

The money was used to modernise the country in a kind of Spanish Great Leap Forward. It was all about catching up. Building. Building roads and airports and millions and millions homes that nobody really wanted. You want ten thousand euros? – I’ll lend you fifty! Peasant farmers who owned dry and dusty parcels of land in Almeria – land that would have been literally worthless, almost a curse on the family – suddenly found they could borrow thousands from the bank to buy boring equipment, pumps, plastic greenhouses and fertiliser. All of a sudden they were rich on selling tomatoes and lettuces – and all kinds of other tasteless pseudo foods – to the moneyed northern Europeans, and could afford to employ migrant Africans in bonded slave-like conditions. New pickup trucks and a house by a golf course were suddenly the order of the day. It was a boom alright.

I’m happy that the place where we had chosen to live – La Alpujarra –  was considered too backward even for this kind of boom. The roads were too bendy. The people were too simple. The land was too steep and the streets of the local town were full of the dirtiest and most bedraggled kind of New Agers. Sophisticated people from Granada would come and visit in their thousands every weekend and bring with them loud music, iPhones and shiny fast cars. The locals secretly called them ‘aliens’ and kept their mouths shut as they were serving them in their restaurants and guest houses. I’m happy to say I was never called an alien. At least, not to my face.

But what of these urban sophisticates now? They are among the ones we see on the news reports, living on food handouts and protesting against the government. With their safety blanket pulled out, unemployment rocketing (said to have reached 6 million last week) and the country’s political (and royal) classes being steadily exposed as crooks and liars, things suddenly don’t look so rosy. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Not so for my erstwhile neighbours who, by and large, are getting along just fine with their fields and their small houses and appropriately sized vehicles. Fertlizer and pesticides had always been too expensive, so not that many people had got into the habit of using much of them. These folks had always said things were terrible even at the best of times. The country people of Andalucia haven’t forgotten that the region is prone to famines, genocide and an unstable climate. Listen to some proper flamenco and ask yourself if this comes from a land of happy upbeat people.

Driving back down the coastal highway on the way back to the airport it was impossible not to notice how empty it was. This was a Saturday mid-morning and a few years ago one would have expected it to be moderately busy. Now, we saw a car only every few minutes. It felt like the whole road was ours – and this was the widely ballyhooed mega motorway that was supposed to be a ‘ring of tarmac’ encircling the whole of Spain. Sadly uncompleted, like a broken necklace.

In the news today I read that a Spanish woman dowsed herself in petrol and walked into a bank. The bank had taken her house and her savings and everything else she owned. ‘You have taken everything from me!’ were the words she shouted before igniting the fuel. Such stories are increasingly common.

What next for such a country? There is a growing chorus calling for the debt to be abandoned – for the country to walk away from its obligations to the monolithic banks and finance organisations and to set themselves free again. There is, if the truth be told, no other option. Whether it goes smoothly or is done with explosives is the only question worth asking. Alas, Spain’s history, if it can be used as a guide, doesn’t bode well. I’d love for someone to tell me that I’m wrong on this, but I’m not sure I’d believe them.

But I hope that in this case the past is going to prove to be no guide to the future. Spain held out for so long against the Anglo model of capitalism. Petty local corruption, ironically, kept development at bay and ensured the system as a whole remained resilient. It was only the surging tidal wave of EU reforms that swept away the small scale municipal corruption and replaced it with respectable-looking TBTF corruption.

Bounce, bounce down that mountain.

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Ding Dong, the Witch is DEAD!

Published April 16, 2013 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on April 13, 2013

 

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Thatcher: The Oily Lady

 

Margaret Thatcher: The first Peak Oil PM

There has been an awful lot of debate raging since former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher died last week. And like many debates that raise the emotional tempo this one is crystalizing nicely into two competing camps, namely the camp that says she ‘saved’ the UK from decline and the camp that says she left it a scorched moral wasteland where only the greedy and the bigoted flourish.

Regardless of what one might think of her policies however, what has been mostly missing is the role that oil played in her ascendency. When she came to power in 1979 Britain was a dark and miserable place. At least that’s the official narrative; from what I remember things were actually not that bad at all. I, as an 8 year-old boy, could roam around my local town at will without anyone regarding this as unusual, the music in the charts was pretty good, television was for the most part entertaining and giant supermarkets had yet to suck the life out of local communities. Things were pretty good if you didn’t read the newspapers.
But one aspect of life in the 1970s that could hardly be called good was the price of oil. The two oil shocks that had occurred earlier in the decade has threatened the onward march to a wealthier, more comfortable, future. People might have been watching the Good Life on television, but that didn’t mean they actually wanted to give up their jobs and raise pigs in their own back yards. Something had to be done!
Enter Thatcher stage right. The grocer’s daughter from Grantham hit the moribund political scene like a whirlwind, smashing taboos and giving the whole gentleman’s club a sharp kick up the backside. Like any successful politician in a democracy she had identified a deep craving within the psyche of the electorate and had used the power of promise to unleash a wave which she rode to victory as well as any Oahu surfer.
Although people didn’t realize it, they had just done a deal with the devil. No, not Thatcher, the devil I am referring to is right out of Doctor Faustus and its name is oil. Thatcher, and her ideologist in crime Ronald Reagan, pulled every trick in the book to flood the world with cheap oil. North Sea production was ramped up off the coast of Britain, and Reagan did the same thing, eliminating price controls on oil and natural gas in the US. Deals were struck with other oil producing nations to do the same thing and pretty soon the price of oil – and thus the price of everyday life in the industrialised world – crashed to a level so low that it was hardly worth thinking about. The age of mega-abundance was upon us.
Britain, along with much of the industrialised world, then moved into a peculiar position. The access to cheap energy and materials might have been temporarily secured, but Thatcher had a dragon she wanted to slay in the form of the unions. British industry, as she saw it, was inefficient and stuffed full of unproductive suits and workers – most of whom happened to be socialists. The miners’ strike is the best remembered battle here, and Thatcher, by now power-crazed, refused to back down – and won.
But who needed industry anyway? It was much cheaper to get poorer countries to make stuff for you. I remember going on a school trip to a factory where they made tennis racquets. The production manager gave us a talk and I clearly remember him saying that they were ‘offshoring’ soon to China where ‘Each worker will make ten tennis racquets for a bowl of rice.’ And we children all nodded sagely at what seemed to make sense.
Instead of industry we got finance. The so-called Big Bang happened in 1986, when the shackles were thrown off the City of London and financial firms were, not to put too fine a point on it, allowed to create money out of thin air. This proved to be much easier than making cars or ships or digging up coal, and the tax receipts were fantastic too. Nobody mentioned the fact that the whole thing looked like a Ponzi scheme, and the boom in the 1980s swept everyone up, including many of Thatcher’s former naysayers who suddenly found they were doing quite nicely out of it. There can be few more spectacular examples of this than the former Marxist comedian Alexei Sayle, whose stock in trade was lambasting Thatcher and the Tories with foul-mouthed invective. Sayle now test drives luxury cars for the right wing Telegraph newspaper and he’s tied himself in quite a few rhetorical knots trying to explain that one.
But bitter cracks had opened up in the national discourse. Who had the greater moral right to exist? Was it the pit miner, whose family had worked in the same pits for generations, or was it the new breed of financial whizz-kids in the City, who wore red braces and said things like ‘Greed is good,’ into their brick-sized mobile phones? Well, we know who won that battle, if not the debate, in the end.
Individual families were riven – including my own. Once, my aunt and uncle came for dinner. I must have been about 15 at the time, and after a couple of glasses of wine a discussion started between my father and my uncle about the coal miners. My father was ardently pro-Thatcher and had done well out of her policies, whereas my uncle was a socialist through and through, and drove an ambulance for a living. Things became heated and my uncle said to my aunt ‘Get your coat, dear,’and they walked out. I never saw or heard from them again and have no idea if they are dead or alive. Such were the divisions that opened up over Thatcher.
Now, almost thirty years later, it is clear what Thatcher’s legacy was. She, and others like her, rode to power on a gusher. People wanted a cheap way of life and she gave it to them. The billions of barrels of oil that have been wasted over the last few decades could have been used to build a new infrastructure that didn’t rely on the assumption of an infinitely available and cheap energy source. Instead, we wasted it on expensive plastic yachts for the rich and cheap holidays on the Costa del Sol for the poor, and a million other things in between. The chance we were given was squandered.
Was Maggie to blame? Yes and no. She might be a figure of hate for the left and a source of quasi-religious devotion for the deluded neoliberals on the right (including, I might add, Tony Blair) but ultimately, if she hadn’t come along, someone very like her would have seized the same opportunity. Is this how democracies seize up in the end? With two ultimately competing blocks of voters vying for their own share of the pie and regarding the competing faction as ‘evil’? What would Jung say …
People often accuse her of making Britain a crueler, nastier place. Is this true? I have no idea. Looking at it the other way around it could be said that a modern industrialised lifestyle was making Britain a crueler, more atomized, society and that Thatcher was merely our totem. She was the crucible that allowed the 60 million residents of these islands to access vast material riches at the expense of the Third World, and to burn our way through oil supplies that took billions of years to form. She allowed the proud nationalists among us to perpetuate the myth that Britannia had not quite finished Ruling the Waves, and that it was our manifest destiny to remain Great.
Without her, or someone like her, our energy descent would have proceeded in a nicely linear fashion. It’s fun to do a thought experiment on this one. Imagine, for a moment, that instead of electing a Thatcher, we had elected a dull leader lacking in charisma but with the nation’s long term security at heart. This leader, instead of throwing her weight behind motorway and airport expansions, chose to support and invest in bicycle power and energy from windmills. Her government made it law that every house should be thickly insulated to cut down on energy loss, and that cars should be taxed at 200% so that you had to be quite well off to afford one (reinvesting the money in public transport instead).
Yes, Britain would have looked like a larger version of Denmark, where all of the above were followed through on. But instead we got a massive road network that is constantly jammed and unsafe to cycle on, millions of new flimsily-built properties that leak heat like sieves (I have freezing toes as I write this in the fairly expensive 1990s-built house we are currently renting) and an energy grid that is geared for failure.
So, instead of a painful but relatively gentle transition to a future where the ability to harness energy slips slowly from our grasp what we can expect instead is a traumatic and sudden drop-off of available energy exacerbated by a painful financial crash that will likely be the most traumatic time since the cities were bombed to rubble by Hitler.
Luckily for Maggie, though, she won’t be around to experience all that. That joy is all ours
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Buried in Progress

Published April 6, 2013 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on April 5, 2o13

 

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If you want to see a picture of what defying progress as defined in the modern sense looks like, see the picture above. I came across it today as I’m reading the classic Farmers of Forty Centuries by the American agronomist F.H.King.

Published in 1911, King travelled to a China before petroleum powered agricultural machinery and artificial fertilizers. It’s quite an amazing book, and in it he details all the ingenious methods that Chinese farmers used to enrich the soil and continue the traditions of forty centuries. The book is a cross between a travel journal and a permaculture handbook – my kind of book!

But the copy I have seems to be a bit of a dud – all the illustrations are missing! I was reading about King’s fascination with Chinese burial mounds- or ‘graves of the fathers’ – of which he saw many thousands as he sailed up the Hwangpoo River towards Shanghai. These burial mounds were sacrosanct; nobody was allowed to plant crops on them but shallow burials meant that the nutrients of the corpses didn’t go to waste. He writes:

“These grave lands are not altogether unproductive for they are generally overgrown with herbage of one or another kind and used as pastures for geese, sheep, goats and cattle, and it is not at all uncommon, when riding along a canal, to see a huge water buffalo projected against the sky from the summit of one of the largest and highest grave mounds within reach.”

Intrigued, I Googled the subject to see if any of these grave mounds were still there, which yielded the above picture. So, yes, at least one of them remains, although in this case it is only there because some elderly and traditional Chinese person didn’t grant permission for the development company to build a condominium complex on it!

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Peak Oil: All Going to Plan

Published April 1, 2013 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on April 1, 2013

Something wicked this way comes? Lightning strikes Cyprus.

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Perhaps it’s the unseasonable chill that has settled over Britain and shows no sign of abating but there’s a decidedly gloomy feeling in the air. Something doesn’t feel quite right; indeed it’s all gone a bit Twilight Zone of late.
 
I’d hazard a guess that the eerie feeling is the initial and ongoing onset of cognitive dissonance that is growing in the damp basement of the nation’s consciousness. It’s that uneasy feeling that all is not well and that all is not going to be well, despite how many times the politicians and techno optimists tell us everything is on track.
 
And that’s just the small minority of people who take a passing interest in current affairs. The majority, whose days are filled with TV entertainment shows, sports and other diversions, must really be wondering what the hell is happening and why they are suddenly finding their options for living a normal life constrained ever more with every passing month. It must be the government’s fault.
 
But this is what peak oil looks like. It’s what peak oilers have been saying it would look like for years if not decades. In fact, we are following the script to a tee, which makes it all the scarier because we know what is coming next. We can tick off the following as ‘happened already’:
 

 

  • Global liquids (excluding ethanol etc.) plateauing and supply remaining constrained despite growing demand
  • Which in turn led to a huge hike in oil prices that has stayed with us
  • Thus causing a permanent state of close to zero growth or shrinkage in the major industrialised nations
  • And a shortage of food in much of the Middle East, leading to riots and revolutions
  • Followed by a desperate scramble for unconventional fossil fuels, such as shale gas, tight oil and deep sea oil

 

Furthermore, we were told to expect politicians to do anything to restore the expected growth paradigm, and that all of their efforts would be in vain because of their collective failure to recognise energy inputs as a limiting factor for economic success. We can certainly tick that one off the list as well.
 
So what’s next in the peak oil recipe book of How to Make a Global Disaster of Epic Proportions? Well, almost certainly we can expect to see the wheels come off the global financial system. The 2008 ‘credit crunch’ was just the first distant rumbling noise of an approaching storm, and what happened in Cyprus last week was the first violent flash of lightning as that storm makes landfall. Depositors now face losing 60% of their bank deposits in what looks like a smash and grab by the troika of the IMF, the EU and the ECB. I’d be surprised if many of them saw anything at all of their deposits back. Europe is so phenomenally broke that to ‘fix’ the debt would require some several hundred trillion dollars. Reality check: the entire world economy is only about 70 trillion dollars measured in annual GDP.
 
Those on the inside know the scale of the problem and we are now seeing the first part of the great deleveraging. For the past hundred years or so we have seen a giant credit bubble grow – the biggest credit bubble in the history of the world. There is now something like 99 units of phantom ‘money’ for every unit of value. Those in the know are quietly getting rid of their soon-to-be-worthless paper wealth and using it to buy up tangible wealth in the form of solid productive enterprises, land, minerals and gold. Empires in waiting are quietly disposing of their US debt and buying up precious metals, and the average man in the street thinks the fact that the US stock market is rising means that everything is doing fine (just don’t look at the trading volumes, which tell another story).
 
Why is finance important? Because, as Nicole Foss tirelessly points out at The Automatic Earth, finance is the operating system of the global economy. If it crashes, then nothing but a complete system reboot will restore the economy. Indeed, when it does crash we will see economies freeze up, like has happened in Cyprus. Forget a 1 or 2 percent drop in GDP, we’re looking at anything up to 50% wiped off the value of the economy in short order.
 
The history of humankind is a history of snatching. First it was just basic land snatching from one another. Slavery was a form of snatching other people’s energy and using it to get useful products and money from the land we had snatched. Then we discovered oil, giving us the chance to snatch energy that had taken millions of years to form. This in turn allowed the creation of the biggest credit bubble in history, which is a form of inter-temporal snatching i.e. appropriating wealth in the form of debt from our descendants. Now that the inter-temporal wealth bubble is collapsing in on itself the clever snatchers who know that the game is up are busy appropriating productive assets with the idea of leaving the rest of us out in the cold to freeze.
 
We didn’t mind the snatchers as long as the game was on the up. We were quite happy to buy shares and over-priced property and take out private pensions. But now that the game has been thrown into reverse we are losing our trust in the institutions that rely on trust to function. Banks, corporations, regional and national governments. And as the trust erodes (prior to an all-out stampede when a critical mass of people catch on) these centres of power will do whatever it takes to maintain the concentrated core at the expense of the periphery. Once that happens panic will set in as people suddenly realise that they are actually on the periphery, and an unholy scramble for ‘safety’ starts- although by then it will be too late.
 
In the meantime we are fed an illusory series of bubbles, which rise into the air before our eyes, shimmering beautifully. A bubble in this sense is an apparition of wealth that convinces us of its value. It rises up, expanding as it does so, getting bigger and bigger as people inflate it with their wealth. It’s a law of physics that an expanding bubble will always burst and a law of human nature that some people will always insist that this isn’t true. That’s what our economies are doing these days. In the absence of creating real value they are instead merely blowing bubbles for reasons of political expediency and the enrichment of financiers extracting wealth from the suckers among us.
 
Bubbles might be ephemeral, but when they burst they create real damage in the real world. Industries crash, people lose everything, political careers are cut short and everyone says ‘never again’. We’ll likely witness the bursting of the shale gas bubble pretty soon which, among other things, will spark off an energy panic and case stage two (or perhaps it will be three) of the financial crash.
 
So contagion is likely to be the order of the day. Europe will contaminate the US (despite an initial flight to the illusory safety of the US dollar), China will struggle to service its infrastructure under the deadweight of its reckless expansion, and everywhere else in the world will bear the brunt of the ensuing chaos. A vast deflationary period will ensue, probably for a century but maybe longer, until economies can reestablish themselves at a lower level of energy throughput and with a lot fewer mouths to support because several billion of us rely on business as usual to ensure adequate food for our survival.
 
And that’s just the financial problems, which in the long run are actually the least of our worries. Following financial collapse and the inevitable wars that will ensue (Europe is laying down the groundwork for one right now) we’ll be hit with the kind of power shortages that nobody in the 21st century really likes to contemplate. There may well be plenty of oil left but that doesn’t mean you or I will benefit from it. What’s really important is traded oil. Once a country, say Saudi Arabia or Venezuela, falls below a certain threshold of oil production needed to keep the local population happy, the idea of selling it abroad becomes deeply politically unpopular. The only way to then get at that country’s oil is to fabricate a casus belli and invade it. It’ll be a pity that the major economies will likely be too broke to finance such resource wars.
 
Telescope events again and even the great energy crunch of the next few decades will pale in significance to the great damage we are doing to the environmental commons, with topsoil, the oceans and the climate all being left in a state far less capable of supporting life than they are even now. That is the great gift we will leave our children and their children and so on.
 
It doesn’t give me any joy to contemplate this, or to say that these predictions are coming true. Indeed, it’s hard enough being a Cassandra when people don’t want to listen. Try telling any of the above to the cornucopian techno optimists and they’ll tell you to perk up a bit and put your faith in the scientists or policy makers or economists. Soon it will all be flying cars and trips to Mars. Indeed, there’s been plenty written in the last couple of weeks on the peak oilosphere about the modern religion of progress, and some of us would do well to acknowledge that we’re probably also trapped by it to some extent. The realization of the trap is perhaps even harder to bear than when one considers our current predicament in any depth.
 
And that’s another techno trap of our age – the assumption that the universe operates along linear lines. That’s why we put hope in economists who regard monetary and fiscal policy as scientific instruments. Just tweak this knob and this will happen. Pull that lever and that will happen. But that’s not how the real world operates – economies are human constructs and as such they are vulnerable to the vagaries of human irrationality and emotional drivers. Fear and greed are two words conspicuously absent from economics textbooks.
 
And it’s the same with science. Most people these days erroneously equate science with technology. Thus scientists in labs create the latest iPhones and cures for diabetes. Give them enough time (and money) and they will cure cancer and perfect cold fusion. Just don’t hold your breath while you are waiting.
 
So what hope is there? Well, it’s not my intention to dish out hopium. For what it’s worth I’ve spent the last week researching shale gas and coal for an article. I had a long phone conversation with Carl Shoupe in Kentucky, who used to be an Appalachian coal miner and now fights big coal in a town where everyone is a) working for the coal industry and b) is being shafted by the same. He says that even in this community some people are starting to twig that blowing up mountains and bulldozing the rubble into valleys wasn’t such a bright idea after all. There’s a bit of hope for you.
 
And what else? I’ve been out meeting local food producers, including organic farmers, fishermen and various artisanal producers. It’s heartening to see such a thriving network of local foodies, even if it is against a backdrop of continued supermarket expansion and a general lowering of food quality. I have been a bit surprised by the lack of organic food in the shops in the UK – there seems to be far less than when I lived here last in 2000. People, on the whole, seem to be going for the cheapest, junkiest food and the situation seems to be getting worse all the time (the only ‘job creators’ in the news seem to be the big fast food chains and the discount food stores – all of whom are doing very well. Yet another facet of peak oil.) So from now on I’ll be getting my organic foodstuffs delivered in a box once a week from a local farm. It costs more than the local Tesco, but at least it won’t poison me and my family and it’ll provide a bit of extra income for a local farmer.
 
But even so, if the supermarket trucks stopped rolling tomorrow, how much food would the regional food network where I live be able to supply? 10%? 15%? Who knows. Hopefully it was pay to get to know the people growing the food I eat.
 
In the meantime I’ve been concentrating of getting some resilience built into my own life. A few fruit and nut trees have gone in at Fox Wood – the start of a forest garden. I’m stocking up on tools and various pieces of equipment while I can. I might even get that poly tunnel set up this year instead of next – there’s no point hanging around. I know it’s not much, but it’s a start, and you’ve gotta start somewhere.
Posted in Bugout Plans, Energy, Environment, Home | Tagged , ,

It’s the ENERGY, Stupid!

Published March 25, 2013 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on March 22, 2013

 
 
Goodbye Denmark. Eight years is a long time to live somewhere.
 
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And so begins my second attempt at becoming a free-range organic human being. We arrived in Cornwall last week after two grueling days of driving and one night spent on a ferry in the North Sea. On it we had a cabin with a porthole and I found myself waking in the middle of the night in one of those ‘where am I?’ panicky moments. I looked out at the dark sea beneath a mantle of stars and could see that we were sailing past some oil installations which were lit up like Christmas trees. It was strange to see them out there in the dark as they looked so peaceful and benign, but in my bleary-eyed state my mind began to play tricks and they morphed into aliens straight out of H.G.Wells, come down from the inky reaches of space to suck out the lifeblood of our planet.
 
‘What was I doing?’ I asked myself. ‘Was I crazy?’. Regular readers will remember that I quit my comfortable and well-paid job as a copywriter in Copenhagen and decided to buy a piece of woodland in the extreme southwest of Britain in a bid to distance myself and my family from the vagaries of the industrial system before it grinds to a halt and causes widespread mayhem and misery. I fell into a restless sleep and awoke in the grey dawn and lay there for some time thinking about what lay ahead.
 
It had been a pleasant drive the previous day across Denmark from Copenhagen to Esbjerg, on the west coast. The sun had been shining and everything was crisp with ice. The car struggled a bit with the huge trailer it was pulling, so I kept the speed low to try and conserve fuel. The port was like everything in Denmark; clean, efficient and quiet. We drove onto the ferry and parked up on the cargo deck next to a truck full of pigs bound for slaughter in England. My youngest daughter looked through the metal bars at the worried-looking creatures and has since refused to eat even the tiniest morsel of meat.
 
When we hit Essex the next day the contrast was stark. The weather was foul; wet and windy, and for almost the entire day we battled across England’s tired and overloaded road network, dodging potholes and managing to frustrate drivers who wanted to overtake us. On one section of motorway a number of signs had been erected asking ‘See anything suspicious? Ring this number …’. Motorcycle police were buzzing around and stop and searches were taking place. Was this kind of thing now routine in the UK? After 13 years of living abroad it would be interesting to find out what else had changed.
 
We drove around a section of the notorious M25 London orbital motorway, eager to get through the crushing over-developed southeast. The kids needed to use the toilet so I had to pull in at South Mimms service station – an unpleasant experience and a reminder of how commercialized and crass things had become. It used to be that when driving on a motorway – a public highway – that a sign would alert you to the presence of the next service stop. It would be a simple icon of a petrol pump, and if you could grab a bite to eat there it would also display a knife and fork icon. This has now been changed so that the name of the chain restaurant and oil company is displayed. So, if you really want a Burger King, you know you’ll have to drive an extra 30 miles to get to the next one. It avoids disappointments. If there is a hell, it will look a bit like South Mimms service station, with all its smiling ‘eager to help’ shop assistants, its constant announcement of ‘buy one get one free’ deals and its tables of porky human beings absent-mindedly pushing burgers into their mouths as they play computer games on their iPads.
 
Driving on through the driving rain we eventually escaped the gravitational pull of London and began our trundle down to the southwest. By evening we had just made it past Bristol and then, a couple of hours later, Exeter. Regarded by many as the beginning of the back of beyond, it certainly felt like we were heading into another realm as we passed over the windy sleet-lashed high moors and drove ever onwards towards where the sky was dark and the signs of human life became increasingly scant. Powerful cars with private number plates – Audis, new model Range Rovers, sports cars – roared past us as we traversed those bleak moors in the night. Who were these people? No doubt they were second home owners, heading down from London for the weekend to stay in their idyllic cottages with sea views that locals can no longer afford.
 
It felt strange to return to this, the land of my birth. For all the deadweight of crass consumerist culture that had infested the land, all the ugly cheap housing estates, the soulless motorways, the bottomless banality of the national discourse, the wasteland of popular culture – I knew that beneath all of that the layers of history and the sacred hills and towers and places of great wildness and peace existed still. This is what I was looking for on my return. I also know that there are people here – many people – who have simply had enough of all this plastic culture and have said ‘stop’. Perhaps there aren’t quite a hundred monkeys yet, but we might be up in the mid-seventies in some places.
 
It would be easy to lament the fall, but then that’s a tiring game and it doesn’t leave you a winner. Britain as a modern energy-rich nation, it seems certain, had peaked and was now on the downward trajectory and picking up pace. In Denmark there had been few signs of anything being out of order in the wake of the financial crisis, but in Britain the signs are everywhere and they are not possible to ignore. I’ve only been here a week, but a week is long enough to hear the shrill voices of alarm. High streets are shuttering up, companies are folding, people are worried about their savings and their retirements, poverty is getting worse. People shop in a place called Poundland – which is like Walmart but not as classy.
 
I sat through the Budget on Wednesday, watching it on television as I nursed one of the most savage episodes of flu I’ve ever come down with (‘High quality germs are the only thing we British still do well,’ quipped a friend). For those of you who don’t know, the government’s annual fiscal planning announcements are a spectator sport on a par with the American Superbowl in terms of press coverage and popular discussion. The chancellor, George Osborne, didn’t offer anything new. More giant infrastructure projects, tax breaks for gas fracking companies and, for the masses, a penny in the pound off pints of beer. The opposition jeered and heckled – so much so that the deputy speaker almost had to throw some of them out of the chamber – and then Ed Miliband gave quite a rousing counter speech attacking the government on its economic record. The expected GDP growth figures had been revised down again for the umpteenth time and now the Labour Party were enjoying their position as taunters.

It was enjoyable watching Miliband attack the assembled bunch of privileged millionaires on the opposite benches – the rough and tumble of British politics is in stark contrast to the staid and bland Danish version (even if it is merely a sideshow) – but the really funny thing was that if his party had been in power the economic growth figures would be more or less exactly the same. It should be clear by now that with persistently high oil prices, a Eurozone economy in recession, phase two of the financial crisis popping up in Cyprus, a host of massively over-leveraged large companies in the UK who are soon to face hiked interest rates, maxed-out consumers etc, etc, no amount of austerity easing or borrowing is going to continue to sustain the unsustainable.
 
Speaking of unsustainable, no sooner had I arrived here than the government gave permission for a massive nuclear power station to be built down the road from me. Okay, so Somerset isn’t quite ‘down the road’ but it would be the closest such large nuclear facility to where I live. It will cost £14 billion to build (and then some, probably) but the French utility EDF wants a guarantee on the price of the electricity that it will produce. It’s a safe bet that they want quite a high price for many decades, and if the government grants this then it will lock the country into paying a French company huge amounts of money into the far future, all the while endangering the surrounding land and seas. Local news stations have been giving it a positive spin, swallowing the hype about ‘5000’ jobs being created and interviewing a local dairy farmer who said he expected to sell ‘20% more milk to the thirsty power station workers.’ That’s if anyone will be buying his dairy products at all after the first inevitable leak occurs …
 
If Britain had an energy gauge you would now see the needle heading into the orange area. Nobody, well hardly anybody, is willing to face this uncomfortable fact. Indeed, it is being reported in the news today that Britain will run out of natural gas next week. Yes, you’d better re-read that. A cold front is coming in and covering the country with snow and quite simply, there ain’t enough gas in the system. Gas-fired power stations may also have to shut down, potentially leading to blackouts. But rest assured, the government has told us that we can just ‘go shopping’ for some extra gas in Russia. Hmmm, isn’t Russia currently blackmailing Cyprus over its gas reserves in exchange for bailing out its bloated and corrupt financial sector? How long before that big bear of a country has Britain in a similar head lock? I’ve written before about the coming energy crunch that is due to hit Britain, but I’ve barely unpacked my suitcase before the first wave seems due to strike.
 
But anyway. I’m not focusing on what’s dying, right now there’s just too much to point a stick at. Every end is a new beginning for something else. As I have mentioned in previous posts, Cornwall is an area rich in local producers, crafts people and artisans. Especially right down the end where I am now living, in Penwith. Tomorrow I’ll be attending my first Transition meeting at the town hall, which is but a five minute walk from the house we are renting, and I’ll be getting to meet some kindred spirits who gravitated here for similar reasons to me.
 
Then, if the weather clears up (it was sunny the first few days and has been raining non-stop since) I’m planning to plant a few fruit and nut trees over at our woodland. I have sent off for some replacement worms for my wormery after the last team were euthanized by
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Our Bonzo Economies

Published February 21, 2013 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off  the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on February 15, 2013

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Sometimes, it seems to me, the disconnect with the reality that is being reported in the media and the other reality that isn’t getting much attention can make you question your own sanity. I’m talking in particular about the state of the global economy. Not a day goes by at the moment where we don’t hear self-flagellating reports of the state of the economies of Europe, followed up swiftly by news that the US economy is ‘on track’ and ‘growing’.

Why is the US economy ‘growing’ (apologies for the quotation marks, which I find I have to use to denote verbal irony on an increasingly regular basis)? Is it because of the digital mint at the Fed relentlessly churning out computerized funny money? Or perhaps because the Americans have ‘grasped hard realities’ and are ‘taking things in hand’? Who knows? The subtext to all this reporting seems to be that we Europeans are a bunch of idle debt-junkie slackers and the hard-working Americans – led by the charismatic Mr Obama and his nice wife – somehow have chanced upon a magic formula for success.

This is of course all pig-stinking flapdoodle.

Nowhere recently have I heard any mention of energy, except in reference to the fantasy that the US is undergoing a shale revolution and will soon become a net exporter of oil. Of course, these claims don’t stand up to much analysis. The hype surrounding shale gas has brought in so much capital that it was inevitable that there would be a crash in the price of gas, thus rendering any further production uneconomic. As for the claim that the US will become self-sufficient in energy, well, that one might actually be true if demand destruction (called ‘energy efficiency’ by the media) in the home market continues – as it will.

And what portion of this fabled GDP growth in the US can be put down to QE? Injecting digital money into a pool of ‘money’ that is made up of 99% credit is like pouring a glass of clean water into an atrophied fishing lake choked with algae and expecting all the fish to start breathing again. They won’t. The ever clever Nicole Foss put it nicely last week on her podcast interview with Jim Kunstler (listen here) when she compared the whole credit vs assets thing to a game of musical chairs, with one chair for every hundred people. As the music plays, people don’t notice there is only one chair per hundred – they are too busy dancing to the music and having a good time. It is only when the music stops that we realise, and by then it is too late to adopt a policy of loitering next to the only chair as the others dance around you.

QE, it seems, is simply window dressing and it is being used to inflate another stock market bubble. How else to explain the rising stock market despite the falling economic activity (yes, the US experienced shrinkage in the last quarter, although this was immediately explained away by an army of analysts who said it was due to decreased spending on defence – nothing to see here). If the US economy is doing so well, why are asset managers in top Wall Street firms publicly buying shares and proclaiming their faith in recovery, but privately cashing in around seven times that amount and squirreling the money away to somewhere safe? What do they know that the media echo chamber isn’t willing to tell us? It just doesn’t add up.

Of course, we have QE over on this side of the Atlantic as well; indeed it is one of the Bank of England’s favourite policy tools at the moment. Like a doctor in a white suit, the Governor administers doses of QE to the ailing patient and then stands back to watch the result. The media pounce on any sign of improvement in the condition: More Land Rovers sold to the Chinese! Tesco had an exceptional Christmas! The alcohol and gambling industries are booming! [Hey, wait a minute on that last one, says the doctor.]

Unfortunately for the Bank’s surgeons, there is also Doctor Death, standing there in the shadows with his vial of hemlock which he drips into the patient’s ear muttering ‘Don’t worry, this will only hurt for a little while …’ in his sinister voice. Yes, the chancellor, George Osborne is busy making sure the patient never gets out of bed again with his relentless thumb-screw turning austerity measures, designed to placate the sleeping dragon that is the City of London.

Because if and when this dragon awakes, turns a cold eye over the economic landscape and decides to flap lazily into the sky and find another mountain in another country on which to roost, the true shambles of the UK economy will be revealed to all. Having off-shored a lot of the productive economy back in the 70s and 80s and de-skilled the work force to such an extent that most people can now only operate computerised systems to service the debt-strangled consumers of the fabled ‘service economy’ the only things keeping the economy afloat are a massive property bubble and North Sea oil.

But property bubbles aren’t exactly a sensible way to conduct business and North Sea oil and gas, as we all know, are running out fast. How many years left? Not many, that’s for sure. Economic policy makers are tying themselves in knots trying to find a solution to this unsolvable predicament. Interest rates are already so low they just can’t lower them further, boosting manufacturing won’t work because it tends to involve using energy that increasingly isn’t available – and anyway nobody can afford the capital – and so boosting the money supply with QE and tampering with the exchange rate are the only feeble instruments left in the tool shed. What they are praying for, of course, is that the magic Knight of Growth will ride in to save the day on his horse like a Findus ready-made lasagne in a just-in-time delivery system.

But, and here’s the downer, growth of the type we have been led to expect just can’t happen in a world economy where oil hovers at around $100 a barrel. With our entire way of life predicated to run off abundant and cheap oil, we are like flies gazing longingly at a glowing light bulb but finding our feet well and truly stuck to a strip of fly paper. Alas, this is the situation we find ourselves in, and there will be a lot of angry buzzing around us for the foreseeable future.

Of course, there’s a lot of talk about switching to new forms of energy, from wind power to thorium reactors to shale gas, in order to maintain the wasteful energy-intensive lifestyles we think of as normal. Each one of these energy plans is fatally flawed for various reasons, and in any case, switching an economy from a highly concentrated form of energy to a lower one a) Has never been done before b) Is prohibitively expensive in terms of money, energy and capital and c) Would take a minimum of several decades – or maybe up to a century if you go for a long-shot gamble with an unproved technology like thorium reactors. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to salvage some form of electrical energy, but we should have started the transition thirty or so years ago, and there is still no serious talk of doing so, so we can reliably expect the lights to be going out over the next handful of years.

In fact, the policy measures pronounced by finance ministers and presidents day in, day out, remind me so much of a toy dog I had as a child. He was made of plastic, with clockwork innards, and had rough polyester fur glued onto his injection moulded body. His name was Bonzo, and if you turned a key in his belly he would emit a mechanical yapping noise and his little plastic legs would make him scamper forwards until he reached a wall or other immutable obstacle, where he would invariably fall over, the yapping noises growing ever weaker as he spent his mechanical energy on the useless task of spinning around on his side and barking.

The UK chancellor George Osborne is almost exactly the same age as me, with only a couple of weeks separating us. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder whether out mothers shopped at the same toy shops, and whether Mr Osborne also had a Bonzo dog like mine. If so, perhaps the young George (or Gideon, as he was called in those days) sat in his cot staring at the spinning, yapping mechanical dog and somehow the image became ingrained in his world view and manifested itself decades later as economic policy.

It’s the only logical reason I can think of for the endless slew of ‘stimulative’ measures he is coming up with in the face of the sitting room wall of declining net energy. Expect more of the same until the key stops turning.

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In the year 2038

Published February 11, 2013 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on February 4, 2013

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner

So today I sat in an empty room with white walls across the desk from a man in a grey suit. The only things between those four walls were a desk, a laptop computer with a small flashing light on the side of it, a miniature printer and two men sitting on plastic office chairs, one of which was me.

The man was visiting from one of Denmark’s largest banks and he was trying to get me to increase the amount of money I put into the private pension fund I am compelled to have by law. Lying between us on the desk was a piece of paper with my details on. At the top, just under my name, it said Retirement due date: October 2038.

The man began to warm up his sales pitch, saying that these were ‘uncertain times’ and that I needed to ‘secure my future’. There were insurance products he could offer me, as well as golden nest eggs and money trees that needed planting right away. I held up one hand for him to stop.

“Wait a minite,” I said, “before you go any further you should know that I’m leaving your country in less than a month and never coming back.”

He looked at me, one eyebrow slightly arched. Leaving the country? Why would anyone want to do that?

“So you have a new job then – a new career?”

“Kind of,” I said. “It’s a bit complicated. I doubt you’d understand.”

“Try me,” he said.

I told him about the forest. About coppicing and making things, and about growing a forest garden and practicing permaculture and making charcoal. I said my wife would be restoring furniture, upholstering things, sewing clothes and looking after needy old people.

“I’ll also be a doing a bit of writing,” I added, superfluously.

My words hung in the air like a stale smell at a vicar’s tea party. It didn’t sound like much of a business plan in that white office with only a desk in it.

But he had heard of charcoal. “So you will be doing a lot of barbequing?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Mostly squirrels and fish, I imagine.” It was supposed to be a joke, but it died the moment it left my lips. The man in the suit didn’t know it was supposed to be a joke.

It wasn’t really a joke.

There was quite a pause. “But you will still need to contribute to your pension for when you retire.”

“I’m retiring now,” I said. “This is my retirement.”

Did that sound pompous? Maybe a bit arrogant? If so, I didn’t mean it to.

“What, did you win the lottery or something?” he asked. His expression looked somewhat eager, like he was onto something.

“Nope.” I said

I tried to explain further but he had a wait till I tell this to the other guys smirk on his face so I didn’t press on. He asked how I would pay the bills, the mortgage, put the kids through university, pay off the car and all the other things that are deemed necessary for a modern fulfilling life.

I told him I wanted to reduce my expenditures first and that the kids would be okay and he shouldn’t worry about them not going to university. “They’ll survive,” I said.

Not convinced, he went on to explain that his company’s pension plan was expected to grow at a rate of around 4.7% per year into perpetuity – or at least until 2050, which was where his graph went up to.

I had expected this. “I don’t think it is going to do as well as you say it will,” I ventured, a little weakly for my liking. I had a whole load of words in my arsenal if need be; words like catastrophic deleveraging, financial supply chain contagion, ponzi scheme and equity meltdown – but I was only going to get them out if I was backed into a corner.

“It’s guaranteed to grow,” he said. “Here, read this,” he said, pushing forward a suave brochure with a picture of two young-looking old people walking barefoot along a beach and wearing white clothes and smiling.

“But what would I do if I waited until 2038 to retire?” I asked. “I might die in the meantime. I’m not really into gambling.”

“What would you do?” he asked in mock astonishment. “You could do whatever you wanted. Play golf. Go on a cruise. Spend time with your grand kids. Your call.”

“But I’m retiring next month,” I said. “And I don’t like golf. Or cruises.”

He cracked his knuckles, sighed and then leaned a bit closer. “What you’re saying you want to do isn’t retiring,” he said, “it’s a recipe for having to work hard until you drop dead.”

“I know,” I said.

“Perhaps,” he added “you should consider continuing your pension plan for a few more years until you can be sure that your, er, business plan is working out.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

He frowned at me. His frown said I am a realist and you are not a realist. I looked at him. I guessed he was about five or six years younger than me, although he was going a bit bald around the edges whereas all I have is a grey streak.

“I know,” I said. “But at least I’ll be doing something I like.”

He leaned back in his chair, sighed and looked at the ceiling.

“Is it possible to just get the cash payout now?” I asked.

He thrummed his fingers. “If you want,” he said, resigned to the fact that I was a no-hoper. “It’s your right to do so – but you know you have to pay a 60% punishment tax.”

“I know,” I said. “I looked into it when I was first made to take the policy out.”

The printer took at least five minutes to chug out all the forms I had to sign. We both pretended to look at different spots on the white wall as we waited for it.

“What about a mortgage?” he said. “You can’t buy a house without a steady income.”

“I know,” I said. “In the long term I’m planning to build a house in my forest.”

“A house in a forest.” he repeated distractedly.

“Yes. More of a hobbit hole actually, like in Lord of the Rings. I’ve already designed it on paper, I reckon it will take less than a year to build.”

The financial adviser looked at me soberly. He didn’t seem to have heard what I’d said. Perhaps he chose not to hear it. Perhaps he thought I had gone too far. I signed the papers and pushed them across the desk.

“Thank you Mr Heppenstall.”

We both stood up and shook hands.

“Good luck,” he said, handing me a business card. “Email me if you change your mind and I can get it all reinstated. Talk it over with your wife.”

“Thanks,” I replied.

Outside the office the next employee was waiting in line to be processed. I went for a walk in the park and looked at the icicles hanging from the trees

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The Wheels of Destiny

Published February 7, 2013 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on February 2, 2012

The Cosmos. You are it. It is you.

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner

When you think about it, it’s astonishing that you’re alive. That I’m alive; that any of us is alive. The fact that only one of six million or so sperms just happened to reach the egg, which was formed in your grandmother’s belly, making you you is astonishing enough, but when you take all the other factors into consideration too it simply becomes mind-blowing that you personally are alive.

I mean, according to Neil Shubin, in his book The Universe Within, the very molecules in our bodies contain traces of the Big Bang and are encoded with the shadow of the creation of the cosmos. Various astronomical events that took place billions of years ago led to the creation of humankind: it’s a fact.

Indeed the molecules that compose our bodies, according to Shubin “arose in stellar events in the distant origins of the solar system.” Written inside humans, Shubin argues, “is the birth of the stars, the movement of heavenly bodies across the sky, even the origin of days themselves.”

And he means all of us BTW, not just a select few middle class types with the right post codes.

But stellar origins aside, it’s not often that you get to find out something about your more recent ancestors a little closer to home. That’s exactly what happened to me today when my sister contacted me with some interesting news. As an enthusiastic genealogist, she has uncovered all sorts of amazing things about our family. For example, it seems we’re descended from the vikings who established the village of Heptonstall (meaning Rosehip Valley in old Scandinavian) in Yorkshire, and that in the intervening millennium most of us have had hard-scrabble jobs, such as picking up stones from fields. Most of us died in our forties from the sheer exhaustion of having terribly hard jobs, bad nutrition, plenty of alcohol and awful, cold, housing.

But recently my sister, let’s call her Joanne because, frankly, that’s her name, has been trawling a whole lot of digital archives from local newspapers and what she has sent me is mildly horrific. My great great great great grandfather, one Francis Gretton, was a vet in Burton on Trent, in the English Midlands. Just what exactly was he doing at 7:30pm one evening in early October 1872, loitering by the railway tracks? The only witness said he was a ‘little fresh’ which I presume is a euphemism du jour for ‘totally trashed’ and the only thing the engine driver of the London express heard was a thud. At the next stop the stoker got out and had a look, finding my G-G-G-G-grandhather’s sliced-off foot lodged behind the wheel. Later, they found the rest of him scattered liberally along the track near the place of impact.

 
 

But the question remains; what was he doing on the track for an hour between when he was last seen and when he was hit by the express train? Nobody will ever know.

Another of my relatives, this time a little further back in history, came to a similarly gruesome end beneath the wheels of a cart in Sussex on 15th October 1846. Porter Peskett, slipped as he was getting off his wagon on a road that, through some spooky coincidence of history my sister would live on some 150 years into the future, and was run over by two wheels. The gruesome report can be seen below.

 

The fact is that had either one of these men failed to reproduce before their fatal date with mankind’s greatest invention I would clearly not be here typing these words on a cold Saturday night in Copenhagen two centuries hence.

And finally, here’s an obituary of my GGGG grandmother – Nannie Phillips – who got to be 97 on a diet of milk, cheese and bacon – and who didn’t fall beneath any wheels.

 

All of this makes one think that it’s worth bearing in mind that even if it doesn’t feel like it now, the actions that we take today will have an unmeasurable effect in the future. Yes, one day we’ll all just be dust and bones, although it’s doubtful that any of us will be lucky to have any hard-copy records of our demises stored in databases for our descendents to peruse. Just a thought to bear in mind as we hurtle headlong towards our digital non-future.

 
None of this is particularly relevant, but I would just like to say that if you are alive and reading this – congratulations
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Denmark Goes Nuclear

Published February 2, 2013 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on January 30, 2013

 
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Okay, so it’s something that has been bothering me for some time. In response to my last postsome readers, on various sites, have said things along the lines of ‘Denmark is a great place to be because everyone pulls together and is environmentally-minded, and it would be a big mistake to leave and go back to decrepit Britain.’Well, bull and red flag. That got my brain boiling and I have three things to say on the subject of Denmark before I never mention the subject again. EVER!If you’re only interested in what’s mentioned in the title of this post, skip straight to point three and ignore the rest.

Some explanation is needed.

One. Denmark does not ‘pull together’. The people of Denmark do as they are told to do, think what they are told to think, and never question authority. Minds are controlled by state propaganda, and the janteloven, which I mentioned in the previous post, keeps people servile and compliant. One cannot expect any help if something bad happens to you, as I was reminded a couple of months ago when an American student was attacked on a bus here in broad daylight and beaten up for being a ‘Chinese boy’ while every single passenger turned a blind eye.

This is not an uncommon occurrence. I myself had a bike accident once and lay bleeding on the road for several hours, unconscious. When I came to, people were sat at the nearby bus stop listening to their iPods as if I didn’t exist. Nobody offered to help me, even though I had a huge gash on my head and was liberally covered in blood. Thanks for the help guys.

A close-knit community. Did I mention that after five years of living in this block of flats I’ve only spoken to one neighbour out of eight? I mean, I’ve said ‘Hello’ and got either a grunt in return, or more likely, some passive-aggressive silence. I’m not counting the old woman next door, who rang the doorbell to call me something horrible based on my non-Danishness. Or the person who reported me for ‘introducing a bio hazard’ with my worm compost bin, leading to me having to get rid of it and euthanize my beloved team of red-wrigglers.

Two. Denmark is not the best country in the world, as if there could ever be such a thing. Almost every week there is a report saying so in the media. Danes believe their flag is descended from Heaven and that they are the chosen ones. The country supposedly has the best restaurant and food, the happiest people, the smartest society, the most environmentally friendly civilization on the face of the planet, the best city in the world to live in. I could go on.

They have been talking about this for a long time, as the narrator of this video clearly states:

 

The reality is that a majority of people in the world have never heard of this pipsqueak country. Please, Danes, stop it. You are embarrassing yourselves and will only regret it later!

(Is it impolite to mention also that it’s also the cancer capital of the world, has a huge problem with alcoholism and suicide, is Europe’s second most wasteful nation and is addicted to coal and has the fourth largest environmental footprint of any country in the world?) Is it a case of ‘we think OSDS’?

Three. Relating to two. This week – and I just have to share this with someone because nobody really in the international press outside of specialist international policy websites has reported it – Denmark flunked out of pretending to be green! Yes, you read it here first. Extra, extra! Greenland, which ahem, is kind of independent and allowed to do what it wants as long as Copenhagen agrees to it, is being sold to the Chinese! Well, not all of it, just the bits that contain uranium. This, apparently, would make supposedly anti-nuclear Denmark one of the biggest exporters of uranium on the planet.

They don’t want it in their back yard – they want it in yours!

But it’s not just uranium. Eco-friendly Denmark wants a slice of the oil pie too. Denmark’s version of the-historical-German-party-whose-name-cannot-be-mentioned-in-polite-company- said that ‘Future generations will not forgive us,’ if Denmark does not go for the massive oil and uranium grab on turf that it controls. And the main parties all seemed to agree.

Greenland’s deputy prime minister, the eminent statesman Jens Frederiksen, gave the matter some deep thought and after a profound philosophical enquiry stated: “If everybody else can sell uranium, then we might as well. There’s a lot of money in it.”

Kerching!

Denmark’s avowed social-liberal prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who is known more for her Gucci handbags than her policies, has become tight-lipped and is refusing to answer any parliamentary questions that contain the word ‘Greenland’. Apparently she says it is ‘not appropriate’ to talk about Greenland’s ‘private affairs’.

This is Denmark’s prime minister showing off her hoard of designer swag. No, honestly – I’m not joking.

So there you have it. When Denmark put out all those press releases about it being the greenest, most sustainable country on God’s fair earth – it didn’t really mean it. Apparently it’s okay to tell big fat pork pies if that’s what everyone else is doing. Especially if it keeps the money taps open and the investment cash rolling in. You can’t expect having one of the highest standards of living in the world to just pay for itself, you know.

Now where was that writer from who wrote the story ‘The emperor’s new clothes’?

This particular blogger is tired of stating the bleeding obvious and will welcome spending his time doing something more positive than thinking about these matters from now on. ‘Nuff said.

***
By the way, a big thanks to everyone who is continuing to read this discursive, peculiar, iconoclastic, mildly subversive blog of mine. This month, for the first time, I’ve hit the 10,000 page view mark – and it’s going up by 10% a month – which is leading me to think that I might actually put some more effort into writing these posts.As it is, I hammer them out whenever I have a spare moment at the kitchen table. Over the next couple of months I’ll be ‘in transit’ back to England, so will be posting a bit infrequently, but when I get settled I’m planning to start writing in a more structured way.That’s what you can do when a full-time job isn’t getting in the way.
Posted in Bugout Plans, Home | Tagged

Staring at the Sea

Published January 21, 2013 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on January 21, 2013

 Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner
 
I announced recently on the pages of this blog that I would shortly be leaving Denmark with my family and moving back to the UK, where I am from. This decision was a long time in the making and the past couple of years of agonizing could be neatly summarized by The Clash song ‘Should I stay or should I go?’
 
In the end, of course, we chose to go back to England, where at least one of us is from (my wife is from Denmark and our two young daughters were born here). Without wishing to be too reductionist about this decision, I took into consideration all the factors that I think will be defining in an era of depleting net energy and social unrest that I think we are now entering into. When all was said and done, however, I had to go with my heart and what common sense told me. It’s long been a hunch of mine that one of the most important things about positioning yourself in preparation for the great Stopping of the Music is to make sure you will be somewhere where your face fits in and the people who surround you share the same cultural values. So, no moving to Outer Mongolia or darkest Peru for this WASP.
 
Perhaps the most agonizing aspect of this decision was the fact that land and farmhouses in Denmark are dirt cheap compared with Britain. I had fallen in love with the island of Møn, an idyllic island in the south of Denmark, covered in ancient Neolithic tombs, and populated by small villages filled with the kind of chocolate box thatched cottages you see on postcards. Here one could buy a 200 year old farmhouse in excellent condition with six or seven bedrooms plus outhouses, a couple of acres of land and probably an orchard or two along with some woodland and still have change from £150,000 (or $235,000). The same property in the UK, where the bubble is still rampant, would set you back up to a million pounds – around six or seven times the price in Denmark.
 
But, tempting as this was, when we really considered all the factors, the UK seemed like the better option FOR US.
 
So, without further ado, these were the factors that were taken into consideration in deciding which side of the North Sea to live on. It goes without saying that these are not the ONLY factors – but these were the ones that stuck out in my mind the most.
 
1 – Energy. When it comes to comparing the UK and Denmark, neither comes out very well in terms of future energy supplies. Both largely rely on oil and gas from fields in the North Sea which have double digit annual depletion rates. Neither country has much of a manufacturing sector (and what remains of Denmark’s is becoming increasingly uncompetitive due to high labour and energy costs) with high energy requirements, so most energy is used for transportation, heating, agriculture and leisure.
 
Denmark’s energy policy, at least officially, is geared towards a high-tech ‘green’ future of wind turbines (of which there are already many) and solar panels to power a smart grid and a transportation system based on electrical energy stored in batteries. The country at present meets most of its energy requirements from burning coal, natural gas and post-consumer waste, with some imported power from Sweden, which produces nuclear power. Denmark has no nuclear power itself, although Sweden’s Barseback nuclear reactors are sited just across the Øresund Strait, easily visible from where I live. [Both reactors have now been decommissioned but still contain nuclear waste, and plans are afoot to make the site a short term nuclear waste storage facility as Sweden winds down its nuclear power programme.] Around a quarter of electricity currently comes from wind power, and the plan is to increase this to 50% by 2020. Denmark may be able to achieve this by trading power with Norway, which has the topography to allow for storage in the form of hydro power. Whether it does or not is a different matter. The country is aiming for 100% renewable power by 2050.
 
The UK doesn’t really have a coherent energy policy. Sweeping pronouncements are periodically made by ministers but these usually run into problems before anything is implemented. With the windfall from oil and natural gas now winding down serious problems are now on the horizon and rolling blackouts are likely by 2015/16, according to no less an authority than the UK energy regulator Ofgem. The country has several ageing nuclear reactors and there is a strong nuclear lobby that favours building more, despite robust public opposition.
 
Renewable energy, which is bountiful in the form of wind and wave power, was growing well due to a favourable investment climate and a generous FIT for home owners, but has stumbled of late due to widespread ideological opposition by the right-wing press, and cuts due to the implementation of austerity measures. Furthermore, politicians have jumped on the hydro-fracturing bandwagon, with breathless announcements of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas in the rock formations beneath Britain, which has further pulled out the rug from beneath the feet of the renewable industry. The fact that this fracked gas has a very low net energy level and lies beneath privately owned and heavily populated land (unlike in the US, the UK government does not have the right to extract minerals from beneath privately owned land) does not seem to deter the enthusiasm of the fracking advocates.
 
Given that nuclear plants won’t be ready in time and are probably unaffordable, oil and gas is running out, the renewable energy industry is being strangled by ideologues and fracking is a mirage, it does seem likely that the lights will indeed be going out in Britain sooner rather than later. There is some coal left in the ground, although much of the capital for its extraction was laid to waste during the Thatcher years, so the best that Britain can hope for is favourable terms with Russia, as it imports natural gas at the end of a very, very long pipeline.
 
2 – Transportation. Neither the UK nor Denmark are particularly large countries (and the UK is set to get a whole lot smaller if Scotland opts for independence, as seems likely), with land masses of 94,060 and 16,562 square miles respectively. Both have excellent transport links, with numerous roads, functioning rail lines and sea ports. Denmark, famously, has an excellent infrastructure for cycling owing to policy decisions made after the 1970s’ oil shocks, and its relatively flat topography. At the city level around half of all trips are made on two wheels.
 
The UK is considerably less cycle friendly as the powerful motoring lobby has very effectively made sure that money is funnelled into road projects suited to cars rather than bicycles, and local councils have haphazardly implemented cycling infrastructure that in most cases doesn’t connect.
 
Nevertheless, Britain is criss-crossed with canals from its manufacturing days, and there is no reason why these shouldn’t go into full time use again. Furthermore the tow paths alongside these canals in many cases already double as cycle lanes. There is a national bicycle network, and things can only improve for low speed forms of transport as the number of journeys made by car continues to diminish, as it has been doing for some time now.
 
3 – Food security. Neither Denmark nor the UK has much in the way of food security. At present both countries rely on very long supply chains and just-in-time delivery systems to get food into shops. If both countries had to rely solely on what was available to them from their own soils and seas then mass starvation would quickly ensue. The last time Britain was tested in this respect was during the Second World War, when a mass mobilisation of the population to grow food just about managed to feed the nation (although many were away fighting in other countries). Then, there were around 30 million residents, whereas today there are over 63 million (Denmark has about a tenth of that number). Furthermore, it must be assumed that 70 years of mechanised farming has considerably reduced the capacity of the soils to grow food, and relentless overfishing has reduced fish stocks drastically as well. In terms of wild game, there is not much that would survive more than a few short years if the population was in a state of extreme hunger and short term crisis management.
 
The one bright spot in this otherwise dismal picture is the rise of organic farming and local food networks. These have grown enormously in recent years as people put less trust in the corporately-controlled food web and opt instead to eat more local and more healthily.
 
Denmark, similarly, has a food problem. Despite a much lower population, the relatively fertile soils cannot yield the heavily meat-based diet to which Danes have become used to. Technically, we are told, Denmark is a net food exporter, but in my local supermarket the only things I can find that are grown here are potatoes and apples, so I’m guessing that there is some statistical figure fiddling going on there.
 
Farming in Denmark is in something of a crisis at present due to many farmers taking out large Swiss franc denominated loans on government advice with which to buy new machinery and other capital. Servicing these loans has now become unaffordable for many as the Swiss franc has appreciated due to its supposed safe haven status. Furthermore, food production is geared towards the production of 25 million intensively reared pigs a year and cash crops, especially rape seed, although much is also given over to wheat production. Local food coops do exist, but they are relatively few compared with the UK. Nevertheless, consumers do tend to opt for organic food, with even the cheap supermarkets stocking a good range of food grown without chemicals (although often it is imported).
 
3 – Governance and society. There are clear differences between the UK and Denmark when it comes to governance. For historical and cultural reasons Denmark is governed well and the UK is governed not quite so well. Both are democratic societies hung on the framework of a monarchy, with the royals enjoying almost universal adoration in Denmark, as opposed to ‘only’ 82% in the UK. Both countries have coalition governments, although only Denmark has radical factions representing parties founded on both Marxism and ultra-nationalism enjoying any power.
 
Denmark is characterised by its homogenous native population and has sometimes been described as ‘more of a tribe than a nation’. There are few social strata within Denmark’s famously classless society (although I would question this assumption) and politicians must appease the entire nation, rather than one particular power group within it, and are held accountable as such. The social contract in Denmark is very strong and rigid and has been aptly described by the half-Norwegian novelist Aksel Sandemose as the ‘Jantelov’ – a set of unwritten codes of conservative behaviour by which Danish people unwittingly live out their lives. The codas are effectively anti-individualistic in nature, requiring that the common man or woman suppress their own personal desires and ego for the common good of the state.
 
The other side of the bargain is that rulers (political and monarchical) must be trusted to ensure the stability and survival of the state. Any digression from this bond of trust is treated with public opprobrium. As a result, Denmark has a very progressive tax system and it is said that ‘nobody is poor and nobody is rich’. This might be a bit of an exaggeration, but the fact remains that allowing everyone to enjoy a comfortable middle class lifestyle, while enviable to liberals from less progressive countries, nevertheless rests on the assumption that there will be a continued abundance of cheap fossil fuels and favourable trade deals with poorer nations. In other words, it can’t last.
 
The UK, by contrast, has something of a class war going on. Although the old system of inherited caste privilege is dying out, a new breed of ultra-wealthy people sit at the top of the ladder and use the resources of the poor to further advance their wealth advantage, and in doing so hollow out the core of society and make it more prone to social upheavals. At the centre of this black hole is the hyper-power known as the City of London (not to be confused with the actual physical city of London), a vast Ponzi scheme that holds a large amount of power over the government. The City, which enjoys very little regulation, is said to be ‘too big to fail’ although its activities have caused the UK economy to be hugely unbalanced in favour of unproductive financial derivatives at the expense of the ‘real’ economy of goods and useful services. Unfortunately, when it does inevitably fail, the likely results will be catastrophic, which brings me onto the subject of …
 
4 – Finance and economics. Denmark and the UK are similar in that they both hold ‘world records’ in the debt stakes. Denmark has the unenviable position as the country with the highest household debt. At something like 400% of annual income – and growing at an alarming rate – Denmark’s consumers have been spending money over the past few years like drunken sailors who just washed up on the mythical shores of Consumerlandia and found the streets to be paved with gold VISA cards.
 
Maybe it is the widely-held belief that nothing bad can happen to them and that the government will ride to rescue that has caused all of this, but it is was certainly also the case that this cheap credit was pushed onto those least able to afford to pay it back as well. As ever, it takes two to tango. Cultural factors may also play a part. Danish people like to think of themselves as ‘virtuous’ and ‘deserving’ and the Lutheran religious values of purity which are buried like undead zombies under the floorboards of the nation’s psyche, have crawled up to manifest themselves as people who live in flats where everything is painted white and decked out with expensive designer furniture. A weekend in New York to pretend to be one of the characters from Sex and the City, or a quick holiday to Thailand in the deep of winter to top up your tan is considered normal behaviour in this virtuous zombie culture. Is it any wonder that Denmark is routinely quoted as ‘the happiest country on Earth’?
 
Many people took out 100% mortgages in the last decade, and opted to pay only the interest rather than any of the capital. Now, with several small and medium sized banks having already crashed, lenders are forcing borrowers to pay back some of the capital – and many of them are suddenly finding they cannot afford it. A popular prime-time TV programme in Denmark is Luksusfælden – or ‘fall from luxury’ – in which insolvent families are visited by some hard-nosed financial advisors and put on a tough economic diet, which sometimes they cannot stomach. Notable episodes have included a woman who thought that denying her children designer clothes was tantamount to abuse and broke down in tears when confronted with some perfectly good second hand clothes, which was all she could afford.
 
Denmark may well be a nation of superlatives. Not only does it have the world’s highest household debt, but it also has one of the world’s largest public sector (for a ‘free’ nation, continually vying with Sweden for first place) and the world’s highest tax rate. It is calculated that the marginal tax rate is as high as 70% – meaning that by the time you have earned and spent your wages, some 70% of it has gone back into the public coffers in the form of income tax, VAT and various other taxes and charges. Not that Danes seem to mind – on the contrary, opinion polls repeatedly show that given the choice between lower taxes with fewer public services and higher taxes with a greater safety net, people will always opt for the latter. It drives foreigners living here nuts, especially the Americans.
 
The UK, similarly, is a nation of debt junkies. Although personal debt is nothing like as high as Denmark’s, the national debt is stratospheric. The country as a whole owes about a trillion pounds, split between government debt, financial debt, private debt and business debt. The government debt is growing at a rate that makes it impossible to ever repay, no matter how much ‘austerity’ the government imposes on the bankrupt populace. This is, of course, the same situation that every European nation finds itself in after three decades of monetary expansion based on cheap credit and fairy money, but more so. With diminishing tax revenues from North Sea oil, a growing budget deficit, an elderly and retiring work force and huge financial and property bubbles there is simply no way that the UK can avoid going spectacularly bust. When it happens it won’t be pleasant.
 
5 – Climate change. This is already having an impact on the UK, where it has been raining heavily for half a decade now. Gone are the dreams of many who, some years back, forecast that we would have a climate similar to the south of France and that most of England would be good for growing grapes. Instead, we have a cold wet slap in the face, persistent flooding, and wild swings in temperature. Of course, this could change again as ocean currents shift, and the country (and northern Europe as a whole) will rapidly turn into an ice block if the Gulf Stream shifts to the south or peters out entirely. In this respect Denmark and the UK are in the same boat.
 
In terms of rising sea levels, the UK has a clear advantage over low-lying Denmark, whose highest point is Himmelbjerget (‘Sky Mountain’) which rises to a majestic 147m (482 feet). Indeed, sea levels will not need to rise by more than a few metres for much of Denmark to simply disappear into a kind of Atlantis with stylish furniture. An added worry is that as polar ice melts in the Arctic this could trigger tsunami-producing earthquakes in a process known as isostatic rebound, which would have the potential to sweep over Denmark with devastating consequences. You think it couldn’t happen?
 
The UK at least has topography on its side, although certain areas such as East Anglia and the Thames Valley (where London is situated) will cease to be land. Having the resources and money to build huge defensive walls against sea rise in the future seem about as unlikely as the assumption we will be able to build floating cities or, indeed, live on the bottom of the sea like crabs.
 
6 – Housing. It seems odd to mention housing as a key consideration in deciding which country to live in, although in this case Denmark emerges as the clear winner. Due to the aforementioned good governance, housing in Denmark is generally of a high standard. Insulation is at standards that Britons can only dream about, which is just as well as it gets mighty cold in Denmark (it is minus 15 degrees centigrade outside right now as I type this in my super-insulated flat).
 
Britain, by contrast, seemed to give up building proper houses after the last war. Cheap and cheerful became the driving ideology and ever since we have constructed millions of cheaply-built identikit houses, created suburban sprawl and blighted the landscape. What’s more, these cheaply constructed houses are almost unaffordable to the average person who wants to avoid wage slavery. In fact, if one wants to buy a house in the UK that will keep you warm, won’t break the bank and won’t have bits flying off it in a gale you have to look at properties that were built over a hundred years ago. Many of these, however, have preservation orders put on them, meaning that owners are not permitted to make improvements on aesthetic grounds.
 
7 – Trade Links. Internal trade links are likely to prove robust in both countries due to the aforementioned good quality transportation networks. Trade with other countries, when things settle down, is likely to be with regional partners. I expect the UK (or whatever the country is called in the future) to have good trade links with France and other places in Europe, as it had in the past.
 
Denmark, as with many other factors, is likely to look more and more to Norway and Sweden for trade and protection. With their shared cultural and linguistic heritage, I envisage Scandinavia’s northern countries being some of the ‘better’ places to live – at least if you are a Scandinavian or can pretend to be one. I can imagine energy and fuel (in the form of wood and hydro power) being exported to Denmark from Norway, which has plenty of space and resources, perhaps in exchange for grain and other agricultural products. Denmark itself has little in the way of exploitable natural resources so it’ll be back to the land for the majority of the populace.
 
8 – Geopolitics. If resource wars kick off in Europe, and we can’t rule this out, then Denmark could well find itself in the firing line. This is not an enviable position to be in but the fact remains that Denmark to some extent still ‘owns’ Greenland. With various world powers eyeing Arctic oil and minerals, and even claiming ownership of the North Pole, it is unlikely that things will end up being agreed amiably over sherry. Should Denmark lay claim to Greenlandic oil, as it was suggested by Danish MPs on the morning news today, it would set itself up for a fight with Russia and perhaps China too. Hell, even Britain might claim a share. Yet it goes without saying that Russia could eat Denmark for breakfast, so without backing from, say, the United States (of which Denmark, like the UK, remains a client state) the country would have no chance of holding onto its prized possession. It can hardly be a coincidence that the ex-Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, quit his role to take up the top post at NATO.
 
 
Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s self-commissioned portrait. What message is he trying to send out I wonder?
 
China, it might be added, has been having high level meetings with Denmark about Greenland and all the goodies that exist there. It has offered Denmark some pretty choice morsels in terms of trade pacts, with one of the most significant being the sale of fur coats to cater to China’s exploding requirement for bling. Incidentally, Denmark is one of the world’s leading producers of mink, fox and chinchilla fur.
 
The UK, by comparison, having lost all of its huge mineral-rich overseas landmasses, will continue to struggle to make itself relevant – which is a good thing in my opinion. It has been a century since the British Empire began to collapse – more than enough time to get over it – and the country will likely revert back to what it once was, i.e. a group of soggy islands off the coast of northern Eurasia well suited to sheep farming. Of course, it will likely take a few centuries to get to that point, by which time I and everyone reading this will be long gone and some of my distant descendents may well be sheep herders.
 
9 – Population and carrying capacity. As mentioned above in ‘food’ both the UK and Denmark will eventually have to severely reduce numbers in order to live off the planet’s natural income as opposed to its energy inheritance. At present, people in both countries largely subsist on what William H. Catton calls ‘ghost acres’. These are invisible fields in far-off places where the food is artificially produced using oil – invisible to practically everyone who doesn’t want to contemplate them. As energy, the master resource, becomes less available, so will these ghost acres.
 
But before that happens we have to go through the next big financial shock, which could happen any month now. Nobody knows how long Europe’s politicians and bankers can keep shoving golden eggs down the goose’s throat, but when those same golden eggs stop appearing at the other end we can expect our standard of living to start resembling what ordinarily comes out of a goose’s backside. Many people will suddenly find themselves without the inclination to carry on and commit voluntary entropy, and some will achieve this semi-unwittingly with drink and drugs. More still will end up shivering/sweating in the cold /heat and a failing medical care infrastructure will suddenly reverse the increased longevity that we have been led to expect by the media. With social care systems collapsing we can expect to see the elderly being abandoned (some would argue that is already happening) as it becomes unaffordable for the system as a whole to look after them. Disease management systems will similarly be hit by cutbacks and viruses will have a field day.
 
But when the rubble has stopped bouncing after a few years we might find ourselves in a position of falling population as couples avoid conception, which commonly happens in collapsed societies. Unwittingly, we may already have entered this, as fertility rates have been falling for a long time and only expensive procedures, which will likely be unavailable in the future, currently allow infertile couples to have children.
 
10 – Preparedness/resilience. If all of what I have written above make you wonder why I’d want to stay in either country and put myself and my family through that risk, then this last point is the remaining element – hope – to emerge from Pandora’s box after all the other forces of chaos had been let loose.
 
It is my steadfast belief that people in the UK – or perhaps I should say some people in the UK – are better prepared mentally and physically than their Danish equivalents. The Transition Town movement grew from the UK, although in reality people have been practicing low impact sustainable living for decades, and despite the hollowing out of industry many small scale artisans still remain below the radar. There is a growing web of food networks, local currencies and community energy projects and the assumption of many people in the UK is that they cannot trust the government to deliver vital services to them. This, ironically, is a strength when compared with Denmark, where people are less empowered to take over their own livelihoods, and act timidly when it comes to going against the system. The assumption here is that the government always has their best interests at heart and that all solutions come down from the top. Have you ever heard of Occupy Denmark? No, I thought not. In this respect, the conservative janteloven, which is supposed to protect society from radicals, may in fact be its Achilles heel.
 
In the UK there is strong grassroots opposition to the coalition government and its suicidal plans to build more roads, airports, nuclear power stations and fracking wells. Overcrowded Britain, for better or worse, is a country of NIMBYs, making any new capital project that is perceived to be dangerous or ugly (or both) difficult or downright impossible. I certainly want to be there to play my part in helping to stop any suicidal growth projects that might be in the pipeline for my local area. Call me a de-growther, if you like.
 
Finally, and although it might sound like a bit of cliché, I really believe that the concept of fairness and sharing is etched into the public conscience. Whenever disaster strikes we tend to stop grumbling about one another and pull together to get through it as best as we can. It takes practice to stiffen that upper lip. We have developed a warped sense of humour as a safety valve for life’s absurdities and horrors, and despite decades of media scare stories about the dangers of strangers the country is still packed to the gunwales with good Samaritans the charitable folk. Furthermore, there’s a growing sense of reverence for the natural world, a stirring of the spirit that urges us to protect the Earth in all of its diversity. Is this part of something bigger? We will have to wait and see on that one.
 
All of the above might look like a reductionist attempt to convince myself that buying a small forest in one of the outermost appendages of the country and learning the skills of a woodsman is a good idea. If it seems that way then it wasn’t supposed to be. Reductionism and rationalisation can both be dangerous pursuits and none of us can predict how the future will be and what our place within it will look like. All of us have to learn to embrace uncertainty and proceed with caution but retain good spirits and a sense of wonder at the world in all its complexity and all its awesome beauty. That, at least, is what I intend to do
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Kenya: What Next?

Published January 15, 2013 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on January 13, 2013

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner

 
A roadside stall in Nairobi selling signs
Towards the end of last year the company I work for sent me to Kenya for two weeks. I had never been to Africa before and my duty was to report on the various luxury lodges and game reserves that are the bait which is used to attract wealthy visitors. Tourism is important to Kenya, representing its second greatest way of earning foreign exchange after agriculture, and any hint of trouble in that restive country has a knock-on effect that is felt keenly by those managing the tills.
 
Despite my duty to my employer I also wanted to get a glimpse of the real Kenya – the one that is never mentioned in the glossy brochures and tour websites – and get an idea of where the country is heading in the near future. The writer Paul Theroux once remarked that travel writing, if it is decent, should be predictive in that it should give the reader an idea of ‘what happens next’ after they have read the final page. I can’t promise to match Theroux in style but here, for what it’s worth, is my account of my Kenya visit.
 
Passing south from Italy over the Mediterranean I looked down from my window seat aboard the jumbo I was on. Snowy peaks gave way to the glittering sea, followed by the coastal cities of north Africa and then … nothing. The Sahara seems limitless, even from 35,000 feet, and I could detect no marks left by human beings in its sandy immensity. I counted five hours of flying before I saw any evidence of human life again, and by that stage night had fallen and we had flown over Libya, Sudan and a corner of Ethiopia. I was beginning to see what they called it the Dark Continent.
 
Nairobi, when I landed, didn’t seem half as bad as I had been led to believe. Everyone had warned me about the ‘insane’ traffic, but clearly they had never been to an Asian city. By contrast, Nairobi seemed to be a low-rise and spread out city and the main traffic danger would seem to be dying of boredom sitting in a traffic jam. I mentioned this to the driver and he told me that the problem would soon be sorted as a new network of roads was being built by the Chinese to ease the problem. They were also building a new airport terminal, he added, with the old one being considered dysfunctional and unbecoming of a country ‘whose time has come’.
 
I was taken to a swish colonial-style hotel set in lush gardens somewhere near the city centre, and it was here that I got my first taste of what it means to be an mzungu (‘white person’ or, literally translated ‘one who roams aimlessly’) in Kenya. At the entrance there was a metal detector portal which people entering the hotel were walking through. As I made to do the same my arm was gently grabbed and I was steered around it. “No sir, Europeans are VIPs in my country,” said my driver. “This is for non-VIPs,” he added, which I took to mean ‘Kenyans’.
 
Over the next few days I got to know a bit of Nairobi and visited the office of my company. My main impression was one of tight security. Practically every building that wasn’t a shack had a wall, a gate, a guard or two and a coil of barbed wire. I was shown Kenya’s first Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, which was a matter of national pride, and even that was heavily guarded.
 
‘I will take you to The Village,” said my driver. A village in Nairobi? I imagined Maasai tribesmen and mud huts, but instead it turned out to be a giant newly-inaugurated shopping mall and entertainment complex with 150 different stores. This development and others like it, I was soon to learn, was where Kenya was setting its sights. It was a familiar story and one I had heard many times before. But if Kenya wanted to become ‘like Europe’ as someone put it, then where was the money coming from? I would find out later.
 
Instead of a shopping mall I asked to be taken to a slum. Not just any slum, mind you, but the biggest in Nairobi. Kibera, which means ‘the jungle’ in the Nubian language, is the second biggest slum in Africa. My guide looked somewhat horrified that I wanted to go there and tried to talk me out of it. When he could see that I really did want to go there rather than The Village he went into a bit of a huff. “Why you want to go there when it is full of bad people?” he asked plaintively.
 
The answer to that was that I wanted to see how people managed to live in such challenging conditions. With the slew of problems I consider are heading our way, I figured we in the industrialised world had better stop looking at people living in slums as deserving of our charity, and instead take a look at what they are actually doing to make life more bearable.
 
Official estimates of how many people were living there were 170,000, packed into an area of indeterminate size. This, however, was a lie according to the young man who took me around the maze of streets, and he said there were more than a million people there. “Do you know what NGO stands for?” he asked. I knew it was a trick question. “Nothing Gets Organised,” he said, laughing as a couple of young white people walked past with the name of their French aid organisation emblazoned on their crisp tee shirts.
 
I had been warned that it was dangerous to walk around Kibera, but I didn’t feel in any way threatened. On the contrary, young children, of which there were many, would run up and touch my hand and then run off again giggling. “They want to know what mzungu skin feels like,” explained my guide, who had grown up in the slum and still lived there. Adults, likewise, smiled and said ‘jambo‘ as we passed.
 
The slum was like any other town in that it had main roads with cars driving through, and a maze of side streets leading off them. Where it differed from a ‘normal’ town was in the fact that the ground everywhere was composed of mud saturated with plastic bags and detritus, and all the buildings were composed of scrap wood and metal. Fetid open sewers ran here and there and children swarmed around, playing with anything that it was possible to play with. Nevertheless, there were shops and stores, hairdressers, nyama choma (‘roast meat’) stalls and jewellery makers. We went into one of the latter and met the owner, who made jewellery and other artifacts out of discarded cow bones. These he sawed into manageable pieces with a jigsaw and then carved into exquisite objets d’art by hand. It was amazing what he could achieve with just a few resources and a bag of discarded bones.
 
 
A typical street in Africa’s second largest slum, Kibera
 
 
We also visited a woman who helped others with AIDS, of which there were many, to make soap and other useful things. She gave me a rehearsed speech about self-sufficiency and dignity and afterwards I bought some of the things they had made, handing over a few US dollars, which is the de facto currency in Kenya for foreigners. We then went on to see a medium sized concrete building which had been constructed as a communal toilet block. The idea was simple and ingenious. One squatted down over a hole to do one’s business, which went down into a huge vat where it bubbled away and produced methane. This gas then came out of a pipe in the centre of the building and could be used for heating water and cooking. Okay, so it probably wouldn’t pass the strict hygiene standards of, say, Europe, but it did give the residents a form of energy and collected disease-spreading waste at the same time.
 
The slum is well known in that it was the setting for some of the scenes in the film adaptation of John Le Carré’s novel The Constant Gardener. In that story, sinister pharmacological firms used the powerless and poor slum-dwellers for experiments. My guide seemed proud of the fact (that the film was made there) but said the premise wasn’t true. Instead, he said, the big business here was in adoption, with many families from the US and Europe coming here to adopt. “Last year there were so many we arranged them into football teams and had a tournament,” he said without irony.
 
 
Grinding bones to make jewellery in Kibera
 
We stood on a bluff overlooking the slum, which spread organically like a pattern of tightly fitted metal shapes, and across the valley we could see a brand new development of high rise flats. These were, according to my host, new apartments that the slum dwellers were supposed to be moving into. They were constructed with Chinese money (yes, there they were again) at the behest of the government, which regarded Kibera as an eyesore and an embarrassment.
 
The flats were, however, unoccupied and when I asked why I was told that the monthly rent of 10 dollars was ‘too high’ for anyone to be able to afford. And so they stand there, empty, as the numbers in the slums steadily grow.
 
 
The new apartments in the distance were ‘too expensive’ at 10 dollars a month
 
 
Over the next couple of weeks I bore this in mind as I travelled around the country, stopping off at places that in most cases cost hundreds of dollars a night, and even a thousand in some places. My driver began to realise that I was more interested in finding out about his country than I was in singing the praises of luxury hotels, and relaxed accordingly. He told me about the tribal strife that was at the root of all politics and therefore most of the problems of Kenya. The country, as it was inherited from the British 50 years ago this year, comprises some 43 million people divided between 40 tribes. Two rival but similar tribal groups control most of the government and business, and politics is a ramshackle affair of stitched-together allegiances, ideological loyalties and nationalistic bombast, all lubricated by money and bribes. In other words, it’s a bit like the UK.
 
The thing that everyone I spoke to feared the most was the upcoming election, scheduled for March 4. The last time the country held a national election 1,500 people (at least) were killed in violence and 600,000 driven from their homes, many of which were burned to the ground. Already, the election process was in full swing when I visited, with voter registration booths set up in even the most out-of-the-way areas. Rumour had it that voters, may of whom are illiterate, would receive a two pound bag of sugar or flour if they put their X in the right box Large hoardings stood beside highways with pictures of be-suited politicians proclaiming their election promises: ‘Let’s get Kenya working’ and ‘School for every child’. So fearful was the government of a repeat of the widespread anarchy that they were driving around the handing out (Chinese gifted) motorbikes to local tribal chiefs as long as they promised to use them to ‘spread the message of peace’ to their clan members.
 
But violence, as I was frequently reminded by the Daily Nation, goes on all the time in Kenya. During my visit the big news was that dozens of policemen had been massacred in an ambush while trying to capture a group of cattle raiders in the northern Samburu province. Yes, cattle rustling, it seems, is big business in Kenya, although to the pastoral and nomadic Samburu it might seem more akin to genocide. At the same time, the tribe is having its ancestral lands confiscated by the government to make way for more safari reserves and a couple of American ‘wildlife NGOs’ are implicated in this. The suspicion is that, as elsewhere, ‘backwards’ tribal people can be got rid of, stuffed into cheaply-erected buildings and bullied off their land with impunity if it interferes with the affairs of business or government – or an unholy alliance between the two.

 
A typical headline from the Daily Nation
Indeed, as I type these words, news has just come of another massacre, with between 150-200 people dead, hacked by machetes and shot with bullets, in the country’s southern Tana River Delta area. What with the ethnic violence, the incursion of Al Qaeda into the northern regions (and Zanzibar) and China’s slowly tightening grip on the country, it’s a wonder that the standard rhetoric regarding the country is the incantation-like ‘moving towards prosperity’ meme. A few weeks before I left, John Michael Greer on his Archdruid Report blog published a fictional story about America losing its hegemonic grip entitled How it could Happen. The opening chapters focused on a proxy war between China and the US in east Africa over oil rights following a discovery in Tanzania. With this story in my mind I was on the lookout for evidence of its feasibility when I visited Kenya. I didn’t have to look far.
 
China, it seems, is getting Kenya into a slowly-suffocating strangle hold. Huge infrastructure projects are taking place around the country, with new trunk roads, highways, airports and port facilities springing up wherever one looks. The projects have brought money and jobs to Kenya, and everyone I spoke to said they were extremely grateful for them. When I asked what China wanted in return most just shrugged and said that the Chinese simply wanted to help them out. One ventured that Kenya would be sending some fish back to China as thanks.
 
In Kenya everything seemed to be under construction
 
Only one person I met showed unease at China’s presence. She said that oil had been discovered around Lake Turkana in the north. The arid region is home to many nomadic tribes and is near the border of Uganda, South Sudan and Ethiopia, and it can hardly be a coincidence that the Chinese have built roads leading into that area. I drove along that road one day, noting the endless stream of container trucks heading north. The containers came up from Mombasa on the coast, Kenya’s main port. Soon, however, they won’t have to go so far as China has picked the beautiful Swahili island of Lamu – a UNESCO site – to build one of its String of Pearls megaports.
 
My driver said the containers, many of which had Chinese writing on them, contained equipment for exploration and drilling. Someone else said that many of them were bound for South Sudan, which is experiencing a sonic boom of an economic explosion. It’s also a lawless place, he said having just spent two years working there, where a driving offence is likely to lead to an on-the-spot execution by the traffic police. People go there, he said, and come back as millionaires after only a year or two, if they make it out alive. Almost limitless wealth can be had from extracting minerals and oil and the attendant building boom, which is why he was there. “The government won’t let you take cash out from there, so people buy gold bars and smuggle them out,” he added. Much of the wealth has ended up in Kenya, hence the boom and the property bubble in Nairobi.
 
 
A container heading north from Mombasa
 
But there was also a human price to pay for this boom. All along the route of the new road, new-born babies have been found, many still alive, in rubbish dumps and garbage containers. Their ethnicity is a mix of Asian and African, and as such they are considered abominations and abandoned at birth to die. You don’t have to be especially sleuth-like to link the dire poverty of the average African to the oil wealth of the Chinese workers to figure out what is happening. Orphanages are appearing along the route, hastily constructed from breezeblocks, to meet the supply.
 
Which brings me onto the subject of aid and NGOs. If there’s one thing that seemed to unite the people I met in Kenya – both black and white – it was their distaste for, bordering on disgust of, western aid agencies. They were haughty. They drove huge SUVs and ran over villagers. They earned a fortune and do nothing. They were puppets of state governments. Interferers. Racists. Neo-colonialists. You name it, nobody I met who expressed an opinion had much positive to say about the likes of all those aid agencies whose names we know so well.
 
But the main charge levelled at them was that they had allowed marginal populations living on arid land to bloom into millions of hungry mouths that were reliant on aid. Which is worse, they asked, allowing a million people to starve in the short term, or creating the conditions for tens of millions to starve in the long term?
 
The accusation was that the agencies had created a dependency and thus held power over regional governments. Somalia, which shares a long border with Kenya, was a case in point. It was colonialism by proxy, they said: Do what we say and give us your oil and minerals or else we will turn off the food and you will starve. But what happens when millions of disaffected people get angry with western ‘meddling’? Does it make a difference that these are Islamic nations? The situation, from what I was told, was ugly and getting uglier with every extra mouth that was born.
 
I realise that, thus far, I haven’t painted a particularly rosy picture of Kenya’s immediate future. Could it be that Britain left behind a flawed design for the nation? It wouldn’t be the first case. After all, the British managed to keep the country pacified with the liberal use of machine guns and torture chambers. But, strong as Kenya’s image is of itself as a nation, its geographical position remains a major source of weakness. Given the extreme levels of corruption that hobble the country, the Chinese interest in its resources, the ongoing militarization and spread of radical Islam around its periphery, the base tribal prejudices of the voters and the fading ability of its protector states – the US and the UK – to project power – where now for Kenya?
 
Speaking of the US, who would have guessed that America was building a huge web of bases across east Africa? The strategy makers at the Pentagon seem to know exactly where the focus is shifting to in geopolitical terms, as this Mother Jones article points out. But what of America’s ability to project that power in an era of unprecedented debt and political paralysis? A few years ago would the Chinese have been able to make inroads into such a vital strategic area unchallenged just as they are doing now? Again, How it could Happen looks prescient.
 
And what of its natural assets? Think of Kenya and think of wildlife. On my trip I was lucky enough to go on a number of game drives, and I’ll not soon forget hearing a hippo, seemingly right beside my head, outside my tent in the middle of the night. Indeed, when it comes to wildlife and safaris you can believe all the hype: Kenya is an extraordinary destination if you want to see Africa’s wild animals.
 
But the situation there appears no less grim. Surging population growth (almost 3% a year), widespread land development and endemic poaching are taking their toll. Not all of those Chinese shipping containers are heading back home empty, some of them are full of ivory and rhino horns. The Kenyan government can’t afford to lose its charismatic mega fauna – how else could it justify 1,000 dollar a night hotel beds? – and so it is stepping up the battle against poachers.
 
Some rhinos now have 24 hour armed guards, and surveillance drones and internet snooping are now being employed to catch the perpetrators. The Masai Mara, much to conservationists’ horror, is being ‘encroached upon’ by the Maasai people themselves, who happen to be canny business people and have used their new found tourism money to get more of the one thing that they equate with wealth: cows. But more cows, over time, leads to less lions and elephants. This is great for the Maasai, who now watch Manchester United on their television screens and are very big on Facebook, but bad news for the natural world in general.
 
 
‘Wildlife’ spotting in the Masai Mara
 
I was in the Masai Mara for a few days and happened to visit an eco camp near a Maasai village. It was here that Barack Obama had stayed in 2006, when he was a presidential candidate and was presumably getting in touch with his Kenyan roots. I was shown the luxury tent he stayed in and I couldn’t help but snap a picture of the impressive compost toilet that the future president of the free world must have sat upon and contemplated the lovely scenery.
 
 
Barack Obama’s compost throne
 
As a matter of fact, some of these lodges, isolated as they are in remote locations, are models of self-sufficiency, with solar panels, organic vegetable gardens, energy-free cooling methods and construction based on using local natural materials. It is a pity, however, that they charge so much to stay there as the logical conclusion that the average Kenyan has already reached is that a safari is only for the wealthy foreigner and not the average Kenyan; something that hungry and armed local people will not forget when the tourists stop arriving in their chartered planes. Today’s lions and hippos and impalas must seem like the playthings of the rich and powerful. Edible playthings, that is.
 
So where does this leave the average Kenyan? My fear is that they won’t be in for a pleasant ride. Everyone I met in Kenya was pleasant and friendly, and it was in most cases a genuine warmth and not just because I was a walking dollar sign. I’d love to believe that Kenyans could all have comfortable lives and be free of war and disease and poverty and all the other things that Oxfam says it is unfair to label Africa with, but to do so would be to turn a blind eye to reality.
 
But for the time being, remember the date: March 4 2013. That’s the date we will get to see whether Kenya can put aside its tribal divisions and work at keeping itself as a fully functional nation state in the 21st century.
 
Epilogue: Theroux revisited
 
When it was time to leave Kenya I found myself stranded for some hours in Nairobi Airport due to a technical problem with the plane. I wandered around, trying to escape the incessant American TV evangelists which seem to drone endlessly from every TV set in Kenya, and found a bookshop. In it I picked up a copy of Paul Theroux’s latest novel The Lower River, which concerns an American man who returns to the Africa he thought he knew from his time with the Peace Corps during the Vietnam War era.
 
It descends into a nightmare tale and, without giving too much away, Theroux’s opinion of rural Africa is that it has degenerated along with us. And one of the main causes of that degeneracy, he seems to be saying, is the way we have abused and exploited it in the name of religion, development, charity and all the rest of it. It was a powerful read and a fitting end to my trip unstinting in its honesty. Read it and squirm.
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The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics & Dutch Ecotechnik

Published January 9, 2013 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on January 8, 2013

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner

A while back I wrote a series of half-serious posts entitled Peak n’Oil. In them I attempted to pick out some tracks to listen to as we tumble down from the heights of Hubbert’s Peak. At the time, as far as I was aware, nobody was actually writing songs about peak oil and the associated civilizational decay, so most of the tracks I picked dealt with it tangentially.
 
All that has changed with Muse’s latest album entitled The 2nd Law. So when I got this album at Christmas it was, well, like Christmas for me. Not only had my favourite current band released a new album, but the lyrics and subject matter of the music was all about peak oil.
 
Well, not quite about peak oil. The Second Law of Thermodynamics concerns entropy, and what from our point of view we might as well call energy death. It states that isolated systems always evolve towards a state of thermodynamic equilibrium and therefore maximum entropy. Energy flows from zones of higher temperature to areas of lower temperature. My cup of tea is doing a very good demonstration of it right now. They also flow from concentrated form to diffuse form, providing said energy is not locked into a chemical state. To get out of that state it needs a catalytic agent.
 
Scale up from my cup of tea to the entire planet and that’s our peak energy problem in a nutshell. We humans have been taking the concentrated forms of energy – oil, coal and gas – which were formed over geological time, and have been turning them into diffuse heat in the atmosphere. It’s what we do every time we drive a car or turn on the kettle. In this way we have placed a single complex biological organism – us – at the centre point between concentrated and diffuse energy forms.
 
Doing so has enabled us to have a fossil fuel party for a couple of centuries, and we have configured our economies, societies and cultures as if we were always going to remain at this central pivotal point between concentrated and diffuse energy. Our ability to do this has marked us out as a successful species, easily able to replicate our DNA and perpetuate our progeny, because the ability to leverage other forms of energy in favour of the agent species is what marks it out as successful. That’s why foxes eat rabbits.
 
If you believe that we can maintain our pivotal position ad infinitum that marks you out as a cornucopian. If, however, you harbour doubts about whether this is possible, or indeed desirable, then you belong to the reality-based community who recognise that our default position is not at the exact centre of that energy equation and may be starting to drift off target.
 
Matthew Bellamy, Muse’s frontman, is a thoughtful chap and recognizes this. Who knows, he might even be lurking out there in the peak oil blogosphere under a pseudonym. He’s only got it slightly wrong, reason would suggest, in that the Second Law is concerned with closed systems and planet Earth isn’t a closed system as it gets inputs of solar radiation from the sun, and leaks heat back into space as well. But never mind that, it shouldn’t spoil your enjoyment of what, in my opinion, is Muse’s best album to date.
 
Incidentally, if you’re in north America, you can catch them on their latest tour. They are well worth seeing live.
 
 
 
 
Houses in Germany with solar roofs. Image from here.
 
Well, it’s been a busy few days since Christmas, which has seen me in no less than six different countries. The reason for this was the fact that I had to go over to England to pick up a large trailer I got cheap on eBay, as well as a bargain basement 10 year-old-car to pull it.
 
When I got to England, on Boxing Day I couldn’t help but notice the whole place looked like a giant space toddler had spilled a cosmic glass of water over the whole country. Roads were submerged and trees poked out of what appeared to be lakes but were in fact fields. I have never seen the country looking so bedraggled and wet and it is quite amazing to think that only about ten months ago I wrote a post about the fact that meteorologists were forecasting a drought that would dry up all the rivers and lead to a devastating loss of wildlife. Well, they were a bit wrong on that one, with 2012 forecast to be the wettest year on historical record for England. Welcome to the new normal.
 
On the way out of the country a couple of days later, indeed, a flooded road led me to miss my car-train through the Channel Tunnel and I didn’t arrive in France until fairly late into the evening. When I did get there, France was entirely dark, so I don’t have any observations to make about the place, other than that it gets dark there at night time. Ditto with Belgium, which I entered later in the evening.
 
I had to make it to Eindhoven in Holland, where my motel bed awaited me, and did so at about 11pm. Starving hungry I enquired about getting something to eat (this particular establishment being located close to the motorway for ease of parking/locating) and was told that I could either pick from the restaurant or order sushi in the bar. A quick look at the restaurant confirmed that it was outside of my price league, so I retired to the bar to nibble on some wallet-emptying raw fish and sink a fine Belgian beer. Not for the first time in my life I marveled at the fact the Dutch are the best English speakers in the world; far better, indeed, than the English.
 
The next morning I hit the road again with my frankly gigantic trailer. The rain had cleared and it was sunny, illuminating the green Dutch landscape and putting me in a dreamy frame of mind. I had been driving at a steady 80kmph (50mph) all the way, as this is considered the best speed at which to save fuel – and here in Holland I noticed a strange thing: everyone else seemed to be doing the same. There were no aggressive light-flashing BMWheads eyeballing me as they screamed past. I had heard it said that the Dutch had got into eco driving as part of their fossil fuel energy descent plan, and here was the proof of it.
 
All that changed when I got into Germany. I always feel a bit nervous in Germany because I don’t speak more than about 50 words of German – a language deficiency often reciprocated by the natives in my experience. It has been a couple of years since I was last there – but what a difference! It is obvious even to one passing through that Germany is going hell for leather to make itself run on renewable energy. Last time I was there you could see all the wind turbines that had sprouted across the landscape – this time the story was all solar.
 
I’m used to seeing the odd house here in Denmark or the UK with a few solar panels on it. But Germany seems to be ramping up this on an industrial scale. Many houses sported 10-40 panels, but it was common to see barns, factories and even car showrooms with roofs made entirely of panels. Usually, as far as I could tell (remember, I was driving past) there would be 100-200 panels per roof. The record was one which had eight clusters of 8*8 panels, meaning there must have been 480 panels on a single roof.
 
 
A warehouse roof in Germany
 
Of course, and readers of this blog and ones like it will be well aware, that doesn’t make Germany ‘green’ or sustainable. There are still the monster truck parks, the giant supermarkets, the sprawling highways full of brand new cars driving at 200kmph (124mph) – and let’s not forget that Germany is a manufacturing country with a huge demand for high concentration energy and raw materials. I’m also well aware that Germany benefits from trading electricity with nuclear France, using that country as a giant battery.
 
But still. It’s hard not to admire the direction the country is taking. Everyone seems to be on board with it, and you’d have to be a dyed-in-the-wool cynic to say that a huge overhaul of the energy system conducted by this nation of engineers is not a step in the right direction
Posted in Energy, Home | Tagged , , , ,

The Great Escape: Part IX

Published December 26, 2012 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on December 25, 2012

A sleeping Earth spirit at Cornwall's Lost Gardens of Heligan

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner 

“Everybody thinks of changing the world but nobody thinks of changing himself.” Leo Tolstoy.

 
When I first learned about our energy crisis and all the implications I asked myself the same question that everyone else must do who has been through a similar epiphany: ”What the hell am I going to do about it?”
 
At the time it seemed like there were two options. The first of these was to do nothing and just hope that engineers and chemists will come up with a new form of energy that allows us all to continue living our normal lifestyles into the far future. This was the easy option because effectively I wouldn’t have to do anything myself; all of that would be taken care of by someone else. The risk of going down this path, however, was that ‘they’ wouldn’t find an alternative energy source that packed the punch of oil, and that we’d all be left in a dangerous blind alley with no escape route. This is the approach taken by the majority of people, in most cases unwittingly.
 
The other option would require more effort, and to most people it would seem like I was taking a giant gamble. To do so I would have to try and unhitch my life from the global carbon gravy train which, as anyone who has tried it knows, requires quite a large amount of effort. But to do so I would know that in fact I was really just creating an insurance policy for myself – a get out of jail card for me and my family. This sounded like the more sensible option.
 
Which is why I have bought a six acre wood in Cornwall, in the far west of England. It is situated a few miles inland from the sea, not far from the town of Penzance, an ancient market town and seaport famous for its pirates of yore. Tucked away in a small valley, the woodland is virtually impossible to find, even with a map, and it has a kind of ‘lost world’ feel about it. In the centre of the wood is a grassy clearing of about an acre, which is where I intend to build a house.
 
It won’t be a normal house, of course, unless you are a hobbit. I’m going for the Simon Dale style of earth-sheltered building, and when it is completed you will hardly be able to see it. I have some fairly strict rules that I intend to stick to in its construction. Firstly the materials will be, wherever possible, natural. Wood, which will be a major element, will come from the forest, stone from a local quarry and straw bales from a local farm. Cornwall has plenty of sheep, so wool may also play a part in insulation.
 
Obviously, some materials don’t just grow on trees, such as glass, but for these I intend to look around salvage yards and take stuff off peoples’ hands that they no longer want. Instead of using regular cement, I intend to use lime, which biodegrades far more readily than concrete does, and absorbs CO2 as it hardens. It will, of course, be completely off grid and I’ve got my work cut out devising reliable systems for providing heat, power and clean water.
 
As for the woodland itself, my plans there are to turn it into a working coppice wood, continuing to allow wildlife to flourish within it. The trees are a mixture of English woodland broadleaf species, so we’re talking mostly oak, beech and chestnut. There are a few other varieties too, such as lime and ash – although the latter may well be doomed as disease spreads through the British Isles. I intend to get hold of a charcoal furnace or two. Cornwall is a popular holiday destination and I can’t see demand for barbeque charcoal dropping off any time soon.
 
In the grassy bit I’m planning to turn some of it over to growing vegetable and most of the rest to growing a food forest. There will be fruit trees. There will be nut trees. There will be beehives and a pond with slug-eating ducks.
 
The wood, if you like, is my pension. I don’t expect ever to get a pension from the government that will amount to more than a few pennies a month (or more than a few million pounds a month if hyperinflation hits), and it seems like my predictions are proving to be right as the age of retirement keeps moving up and the forecasts for pension values keep moving down.
 
Of course, I’m not deluded enough to think that selling hazel rods and bags of charcoal will earn me anything like enough money to provide for me and my family. I’ll still be doing some freelance writing and translation work for the foreseeable future, and my wife will be working restoring old furniture and reupholstering it, which is where her marketable skills lie. We also have a little business making and selling natural soap, which earns a bit of extra money. Publishing a local newspaper focused on transition is also something I would consider doing. From now on, diversification is the name of the game.

 
A batch of our natural soap, this one made with elderberries  
Why England, why Cornwall?
 
Well, I’m from England, so for me, after 13 years as a castaway in foreign lands it’s a homecoming of sorts. Being a foreigner in other countries has taught me many things, but one thing that I always felt lacking was my ability to participate in democratic discourse. If you’re reading this then you probably already know that the ability of democracy to function on a human scale is imperilled by apathy and the inability of reasonable people to frame logical arguments that everyday people can relate to. It’s long been a frustration of mine that I was not able to fully participate in improving that, even on a small scale such as at my kids’ school. Going back to a place where the cultural norms are my cultural norms means I will be able to be much more engaged in making a difference on a local level.
 
As for the geographical placing, we picked Cornwall for a number of reasons. First and foremost among these was the fact that it’s an out-of-the way place, too far from the centres of power to be worth exploiting, and with little of commercial value there. As one of Europe’s poorest regions it has a resilient spirit, and the people are warm and have a no-nonsense attitude to live. You will not find many Cornishmen (or women) queuing up all night for the latest iPhone.
 
It’s a place already packed full of collapsees and transitioners and there is a strong network of small scale growers, and people experimenting with alternative ways of living. The palm tree friendly climate is warmer than the rest of the UK, meaning that things grow well there and, being a peninsula surrounded by the ocean, it’s not hard to go and catch your supper. It’s also an area full of artists, attracted by the ethereal beauty of the place, and is home to the wonderful Minack Theatre and the inspirational Eden Project and the mystifying Lost Gardens of Heligan.
 
There’s a great cafe there too.
 
 
There are no nuclear power stations in or near Cornwall, and the land, while not the most productive, has been farmed for some 5,000 years and is still more or less unconcreted. There are no known shale gas or oil deposits lying under the ground and, what’s more, it is the only place in the world (as far as I know) where Earth spirituality is taught in the schools as a regular subject, alongside maths, English and, er, surfing.
 
On this last point it has occurred to me more than once that to get through the looming crisis we would do well to develop some useful tools. One of those tools is cultivating a sense of our place in the universe. Our religion of materialism and ‘progress at all costs’ has turned out to be an empty one, with levels of dysfunction and stress at historical highs. Is this a world you want your children to grow up in? The reason for this, I am convinced, is the fact that we have turned away from the bounty offered to us by nature, grabbing all our ‘rights’ but neglecting our responsibilities.
 
I’m 41 years old now and if you have been following this ‘edited highlights’ autobio skit, you’ll have noticed that I’ve done a lot of travelling, worked in a lot of jobs and seen and done a lot of things. The reason I wrote it, however, wasn’t to stroke my own ego or find some cathartic form of self-therapy – no – the reason I wrote it was to explain the rationale behind the decision to move to Cornwall and throw in my lot. In my experience I have found that whatever work you choose to do in life, you will almost inevitably find yourself being sucked into the globalized profit-maximising paradigm that is firmly in place at present. Call it what you want – the Machine, the Matrix or even the System – it is the black hole at the centre of humankind that sucks us back in every time we attempt to get away from it and, God knows, I’ve tried once or twice.
 
But black holes can end up eating themselves and the one we have created is eating up the very planet we live on. It is a system that defines our economy, dominates our politics and dictates our lives. How do we escape its gravitational pull before it sucks us all in? Buddhists talk of ‘right livelihood’ as part of their Noble Eightfold Path. The premise is pretty simple: engage in a trade or occupation that does little or no harm to others. Would not doing something outside the orbit of The System constitute ‘right livelihood’?
 
But how does one achieve such a step in the 21st century, dominated as it is by huge corporations and governments hell bent on increasing economic growth at any cost? Let’s say you wanted to cure people of sickness and decided to become a doctor, under our current system (in some countries more than others) you would find yourself being pressured to ‘do the wrong thing’, following the agenda set down by pharmaceutical companies, and prescribe your patients pills that would make the company profits but not necessarily cure the sick person. Indeed, in the end you might do more harm than good. It’s a conundrum.
 
I myself have been working in media now for a number of years, and have discovered that this analogy applies equally there. Media, like any business, has to make money to survive in our current paradigm. Most people, on the whole, do not like to read about uncomfortable and often complex issues, so if you publish a newspaper that focuses on uncomfortable and complex truths then you won’t have much of a readership. It is far simpler to focus on entertainment, which by and large makes people feel good about themselves, and garner a large readership at the expense of publishing news and views about climate change and peak oil. This has the benefit also of not embarrassing the powerful corporations that own many publications, who rely on business as usual to keep the profits rolling in.
 
So, in that respect, media has to go mainstream if it is to survive, effectively relegating uncomfortable news to blogs, which are of interest only to a select niche readership. Thus the media amplifies and gives exaggerated importance to the business as usual paradigm, while ignoring or side-lining many important issues, creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop that allows everyone to keep their heads in the sand a little longer.
 
We can add into that unholy mix the role of government which, in many cases, acts simply as an enabler for powerful interests and has no regard for the future beyond the end of its term in office. Take UK chancellor George Osborne’s backing of the fracking industry. Developing such an industry in Britain will be disastrous for many reasons, and it is guaranteed to fail, causing quite a lot of damage in the process. In fact, it has all the hallmarks of a panicky decision made by a government which knows the country is going to run out of cheap energy in the not-too-distant future.
 
This shows that The System is reaching the limits of its growth and the business as usual model, which has worked fine for decades, is rapidly becoming untenable. Like a cancer, it will grow until it kills the host, which in this case is our planet and all the species which live on it (including us). The cheap energy and materials necessary for the continued survival of the global economic system that provides a lavish lifestyle for Westerners and a few disparate global elites at the expense of most of the rest of the world have hit their natural limits, and all that remains now is to watch as it slowly comes apart, with disastrous consequences for those who rely on it for survival.
 
I’m not a great believer in any so-called fast collapse scenario, in fact I think John Michael Greer’s Long Descent is far more likely, but I do think we will now lurch from one crisis to the next for the rest of our lives. Some of them will be financial and economic, but we can’t rule out war and other man-made cataclysms. All of these will take place against a backdrop of a steadily worsening climate, acidifying seas and the disappearance of ground water, topsoil and biodiversity. We will also witness the slow decay of our creaking infrastructure and institutions, the rising anger of populations who have not realised that it is payback time for the Faustian pacts entered into, and the disastrous consequences of the overshoot of the global population. It will not be pretty.
 
So the only logical and reasonable thing to do in such circumstances is to detach ourselves from the tumour and attempt to build up some new, healthy, tissue. It won’t be easy, but then again, we don’t have any other choice. I’m not talking here about being a ‘prepper’, living a life of isolation and fear with a pile of guns and tins of beans; the only way we can hope to make any progress in transitioning to a more sustainable and less dangerous is at the community, village and regional level. The number of friends you have will be of far more importance to the number of guns you possess.
 
That’s another reason I’m happy to be moving back to England; the fact that hardly anyone owns a gun. And for all its (many, rapidly getting much worse) problems – not least the fact that the carrying capacity of the country has been severely breached – thousands of people across the country have been working at building resilient systems for decades. Indeed, the Transition movement, which was born in nearby Devon, is vibrant and growing, and I’m very much intending to be a part of it when I get there.
 
In terms of resilience, if I were to compare England with Denmark, where I currently live, the contrast is sharp. In Denmark people rely on the government to sort out their every problem, and I have never encountered anyone here who has done anything other that ra-ra-ra on about smart grids and electric cars and other government subsidised white elephants that will supposedly deliver a future that looks much like the present. It’s true that there are a few resilient people in Copenhagen’s Christiania alternative enclave, but these are societal outcasts rather than the norm.
 
Finally, I’d like to point out that Cornwall is one of the most beautiful places in Britain. It has miles and miles of golden beaches, wild moorland dotted with ancient stone circles and tumuli and cosy organic villages nestling along the coast around natural harbours. It has its own flag, its own language and its own culture. I know some people will object to this observation and accuse me of idealism, rose-tinted glasses and all of that – and I am aware that Cornwall also has some pressing social problems due to poverty and under-investment – but really, where would you rather live? Who wouldn’t choose somewhere rich in nature and culture rather than a concreted patch of suburban wasteland on the edge of an increasingly dangerous city? On my various travels I have been to a lot of different cities across Asia, Latin America and Africa, and in my opinion the only thing worse than being dirt poor is being dirt poor in a giant city with millions of other dirt poor people.
 
Of course, I realise that there is a big debate surrounding whether one should pack up and move somewhere ‘safer’ or just white-knuckle it where you are. The jury is out on that one, but for me at least, while the music is still playing, I’d like to make my move in the full knowledge that it will probably be my last one. How do I know it is going to work out? I don’t, is the simple answer. And it depends what you mean by ‘work out’. But uncertainly is a thing that we must all learn to embrace. Life has always been uncertain, it’s just that we have had the illusion of the uncertainty being taken away for a while.
 
Finally, I want to put something back into the community into which I am about to embed myself and my family into. I was able to purchase the woodland with money I inherited from my father who died earlier this year, and I’m sure he would have approved of my venture. Likewise, I have finally sold the house that I own in Spain that was like an albatross around my neck for so long, meaning we can live without getting into debt again. I recognise this good fortune for what it is, but don’t want to keep it all to myself like some kind of Scrooge.
 
To that end I am planning on running courses at my woodland, primarily to teach people about ancient woodland skills (a local man has offered to teach the courses and I’ll be his first student) I also want to select a few of the local kids who show an interest, and offer apprenticeships; and a woman nearby is breeding shire horses, which she wants to use for hauling lumber out of forests and I’ve said that she can practice on mine. These are the kind of self-reinforcing links in the new network that we are going to have to build, instead of spending too much energy simply demanding that the government and corporations change their evil ways.
 
As we continue on our long descent I suspect that my decision to own and work on a woodland won’t seem quite so strange to people in five to ten years’ time. I know that I am going to make plenty of mistakes along the way – that’s the best way to learn. There will be plenty of challenges, I’m sure, but also plenty of joy. Indeed, it seems to me that life is a conundrum that each one of us, with our own unique set of circumstances, must solve. So eventually, after a long and winding road and a few false starts, I feel like I’m just beginning to solve mine and can finally feel Earthed.
 
And so, at the end of February, it”ll be time to say Farvel to Denmark, and dydh da to Cornwall.
 
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The Great Escape Part II: Adjusted for Inflation

Published November 23, 2012 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on November 23, 2012

 

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner

As I write these words I am flying in the belly of a giant metal bird over the duned sands of the Sahara Desert. No, I’m not dreaming or hallucinating, I’m sitting on board a huge plane and making my way from Amsterdam to Kenya, where I will be spending the next couple of weeks. Below me stretches out the seemingly infinite expanse of Libya.

 
What is a peak oil blogger like me doing on a monstrous energy-guzzling vehicle like this? Well, that’s a long story and you’re quite welcome to call me a hypocrite if it makes you feel better. The fact of the matter is that I’m being paid to go and write about Kenya for the company I work for. It’s not a bad job, compared to some that I’ve had.
 
Did I mention how big this plane was? It has two floors! Two floors! And it’s as long as a very long bowling alley. What’s more, for every passenger there are around five empty seats on this giant bird. We are moving at 597mph and our weight is almost 400 tonnes. It doesn’t seem right that something so huge and heavy should be able to glide through the skies as I sit here and sip Chilean wine from a plastic glass. My grandchildren, if I ever have any, will never believe it.
 
So there will be an official me and an unofficial me. The official one will be writing about safari lodges and charismatic megafauna, while the unofficial one will be keeping a steady uncensored eye on the things going on in this corner of Africa – the exact spot where John Michael Greer recently set his end of empire short story and identified as a likely flashpoint for a proxy war between the US and China.*
 
But anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself here in what is supposed to be the second installment of my autobiography-lite. You can read the first installment by clicking here if you haven’t already done so.
 
Where was I? Oh yes, London.
 
After I completed my first round of A levels at 18 I was faced with a stark choice. For reasons that are too boring to go into, I found myself facing another year in Solihull while all my friends went off to different universities around England. If I stayed on and completed my studies in classics and English then I should be all set for studying archaeology at some vaguely prestigious university, which fitted in with my new plan to become a dusty-bearded globe-trotting itinerant who might perhaps one day discover something interesting in a tomb somewhere.
 
But of course I lacked the will and stamina for that so I decided to drop out and become an economist. My motivations for doing so were purely social ones. I couldn’t face another year in my home town and, it was rumoured that they let any Tom, Dick or Harry onto economics courses.
So when my parents came back from a two-week caravanning holiday in France they were shocked to hear that I was leaving home. When? they asked. Next weekend, I said.
 
And that’s how I suddenly found myself in London. Well, not quite London. The university to which I had been granted access was Middlesex University, based in Enfield, north London. Because of the tight timespan there was no chance to find anywhere to live and I found myself living in my parent’s caravan in a field outside the northern boundary of the city, not far from the M25 orbital motorway. That’s where I spent the first term, which just happened to be winter, trying not to freeze to death in an icy field.
 
The university had several campuses spread over north London, but there were two main ones. One was a large stately home in acres of parkland populated by art students (a codeword for ‘nice girls’) and the other was a dreary concrete tower block in a depressed suburb (Ponders End, if you must know) populated by belligerent boorish militant socialists. Guess which one I ended up in?
 
When I had recovered from the culture shock I decided I had better start trying to enjoy studying economics. And here was the surprising thing: it was nothing like I had expected it to be.
For the first year the course was mainly concerned with philosophy. Thus I was introduced to Rousseau, Marx, Smith (to balance out Marx), Malthus and a whole load of other deep thinkers. The fact that I had chosen to study the social science path rather than the maths-based path of econometrics seemed like a good decision to me.
 
I moved into a flat with a bunch of new friends and a number of wild parties ensued. Anyone who has ever seen the TV programme The Young Ones will have some sort of idea where I am coming from.
The first couple of years passed in a flash. It was also an interesting time politically. The Berlin Wall had just been knocked down, Margaret Thatcher was in the process of being back-stabbed and got rid of, and large scale riots were erupting in London over the introduction of the Poll Tax (and those riots were being organized by my fellow students at my campus).
 
At the end of my second year I had to find a job for a year in some place that vaguely complemented my study of economics. I was a bit despondent as I had grown used to being a student i.e. not doing much work at all, and anyway, I had no idea where to apply to. So imagine my shock when I was, for reasons unknown to me, suggested as an intern at Her Majesty’s Treasury. When I saw the official letter, with its embossed letterhead, my eyes almost fell out of my head.
 
And so I spent one of the weirdest working years of my life as an intern in the Economic Forecasting department of the Treasury. I sat in a huge office with just me, an irritable stuttering boss (who was a genius with statistics) and a greenscreen computer console. My boss generated the statistics, I laboriously typed them into the monitor and then made computer printouts of the charts I made. At the end of each day I saved all my work on a brick-sized hard drive which I then locked in a bombproof safe (it had to be bombproof because the IRA kept letting off bombs nearby, one of which shook my office like a thunderclap).
 
The charts were all the same: GDP growth projections for the UK economy. My boss, in his cleverness, could make the dotted line, which was the projection, wiggle up or down depending on various factors and variables that were added into an unholy mix. There was nothing inherently wrong about this, it just depended on the simple fact that most people don’t have a degree in statistics and can therefore not comprehend what ‘GDP weighted for seasonality and adjusted for inflation including indexed data and excluding mortgage adjustments’ is. Instead they just think ‘growth forecast’ and ignore the fact that it always looks better before budgets and elections.
 
Big Ben was right outside our window and its bonging signified lunch every day for me and the other interns. This was taken in the canteen with the great and good of British politics of the day. Norman Lamont was the chancellor at the time, with John Major having just left to fill Thatcher’s still warm shoes. Other faces we would see included David Mellor, Chris Patten and various other rabble from the Conservative Party.
 
The Treasury was a weird building. Cavernous doesn’t even begin to describe it. It was full of long corridors with giant offices, more often than not populated by balding depressed-looking men wearing crumpled suits: in other words, economists. Huge stacks of paper were got through each day, which were then wheeled away by porters with trolleys for shredding. Nobody spoke and the only sounds (except for Big Ben and my boss cursing under his breath) was the constant echo of footfalls along huge lonely corridors.
 
We interns found a way of avoiding the mind-numbing work. Down in the basement of the building, below the streets of Whitehall, there were dozens of rooms stuffed full of the dusty detritus of Britain’s vanished empire. It was here that Churchill set up his war office, and it seemed to us that nobody had been down there since.
 
We found a room with an old pool table in it and filled it with candles so we could see. This we set up an ongoing pool tournament, which wiled away many an hour when we were supposed to be working. Nobody ever found out about it because the Treasury was so big that all one had to do when reappearing after several hours MIA was make sure you had a pen stuck behind one ear and were carrying a piece of paper and looking serious – nobody ever questioned you. It was my first lesson in Kafkaesque bureaucracy and how to get around it.
 
While I was working there I rented a room in a house in Highgate, close to where Karl Marx is buried. It was a big house with a big garden and I made a couple of good friends there. We were variously, Luke, a carpenter; Idris, a Turkish Cypriot tennis coach; Katarina, a high class Danish prostitute who would bring rich businessmen round to the house like a cat brings in dead mice; Rob, a friendly bearded South African ex-soldier cycle nut who lived in a corner of the attic for free and would literally cycle across continents for fun; and Sam, a northern Irish Big Bank employee and wheeler dealer who taught me a lot about how to make money out of thin air.
 
I actually spend quite some time working for Sam with his various legal scams. He would, for instance, sell things he had seen advertised in the local papers for twice the value – and then quickly buying them if he got an offer, sometimes with disastrous consequences. (These days Sam scours the US looking for unwanted Airstream Caravans, ships the back to the UK, does them up and sells them for a fortune. You have to hand it to him.)
 
Occasionally, when something politically important was coming up at the Treasury (like a budget) there would be more visits by ministers to our department by ministers than usual. The lesson I took away from all this is that you can do all sorts of politically useful things with numbers and statistics if you make them complex enough.
 
One day, to reward us for all of our hard work, we were invited to Downing Street. As I showed my security pass to the policeman and he opened the gate for me into what could be the world’s most famous street, I felt like I had entered another reality. Only four years before I had been a snarling rebel. What had happened to me?
 
At the reception I got to talk to the government’s head economist Alan Budd. He was behind much of the ‘neo liberal’ thinking that has driven economic policy in the UK for the past 20 years, but I couldn’t manage a single intelligent word. All I managed to splutter to him was that a student at my university had been propelled through a plate glass door that week by a police car after protesting against student grant cutbacks (loans were being introduced back then). It was meant to sound jokey, but it came across all wrong due to my nervousness and he gave me a funny look and moved onto the next person.
 
I also spent that year writing my thesis which was entitled something like ‘The UK in Respect to the Exchange Rate Mechanism and the inevitability of Economic and Monetary Union across Europe’. Yes, it was a page turner. My tutor didn’t really care what I wrote as long as I included lots of authorative looking charts (which I was by now an expert at), dozens of footnotes and a conclusion that stated full monetary union would be achieved across Europe.
 
I think I must have put a curse on the Treasury because literally the week after I left at the end of my year-long stint Black Wednesday happened and the UK almost bankrupted itself trying to remain in the ERM. Happy days.
 
After I left, with a pocketful of money, for the first time in my life I got on an aeroplane and jetted off to Canada and America for a three month odyssey of hitchhiking and riding the rails.
 
I’ll talk about that and plenty more in my next blog post, which will appear at some point over the next two weeks, or whenever I encounter an internet connection.
 
* Okay, it’s a day later now and I’m sat in my colonial era hotel enclave in Nairobi where non-VIPs have to walk through a metal detector and past numerous security guards to get in. I’ve just had a coffee and read the local paper which is full of the news that 40 policemen were massacred by a 400 strong armed militia as they were trying to crack down on Kenya’s big boomtime business – cattle ranching.
 
I arrived at the airport late last night and was told by the driver that a shiny new airport is almost completed – built by the Chinese. “China is very good for us at the moment,” he said. I bet it is.
 
Anyway, I’m just waiting for the same driver. Against howls of indignation I’ve persuaded him to drive me to Nairobi’s biggest slum for a look around. I hear they have a bodged together a biogas electrical generator that runs off human sewage and gives electric light to the residents. Should be interesting…
Posted in Home

The Spreading Darkness

Published November 2, 2012 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on October 30, 2012 

 
Britain at night as viewed from space

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights table inside the Diner

As I write these words on a clear but chill evening in Copenhagen, a violent ‘superstorm’ is lashing much of the eastern half of North America. It’s not clear yet what destruction Sandy will leave in her wake but it’s being reported that around 8 million people are without power and that includes much of New York City.

But awe inspiring as that blackout is, the one that caught my eye the other day is the one that is going on in Britain – the one nobody has noticed. It was being reported on in the Daily Telegraph which, in line with its deep distaste of anything ‘environmental’ was spinning the fact that the country is turning off masses of lighting at night as further evidence of the evil do-gooding greenies under the headline ‘Streetlights turned off in their thousands to meet carbon emissions targets’. The bare facts of the matter are thus:

· 3,080 miles of motorways and trunk roads in England are now completely unlit;

· a further 47 miles of motorway now have no lights between midnight and 5am, including one of Britain’s busiest stretches of the M1, between Luton and Milton Keynes;

· out of 134 councils which responded to a survey, 73% said they had switched off or dimmed some lights or were planning to;

· all of England’s 27 county councils have turned off or dimmed street lamps in their areas.

In fairness, it was the Sunday Times that undertook the survey and the DT was just doing some churnalism, but given that the particular Murdoch organ crouches behind a paywall I doubt many people ever got to read it in the first place.

But far from this mass turn-off being the work of ‘hysterical warmists’ (as the paper insists on calling anyone who suggests that atmospheric chemistry can be altered by adding gargantuan amounts of carbon dioxide), it becomes clear that the real reason is money, or the lack of it due to rising energy costs and diminishing public budgets:

Local authorities say the moves helps reduce energy bills, at a time when energy prices are continuing to rise. Several of the big energy companies have unveiled price hikes in recent weeks, including British Gas, npower and EDF Energy – which this week said it was increasing its standard variable prices for gas and electricity customers by 10%.

And:

The Highways Agency said the full-switch off had saved it £400,000 last year, while reducing carbon emissions, and said it planned further blackouts.

Meanwhile 98 councils said they have switched off or dimmed lights, or planned to in the future.

In Shropshire, 12,500 – 70 per cent of the area’s lights – are now switched off between midnight and 5.30am, while Derbyshire County Council plans to turn off 40,000 lights at night. In Lincolnshire, some are turned off from as early as 9pm.

Leicestershire County Council expects to save £800,000 a year in energy bills by adapting one third of the country’s 68,000 street lights so that they can be dimmed or turned off at night.

Caerphilly in Wales no longer lights industrial estates overnight and Bradford dims 1,800 of its 58,000 street lights between 9.30pm and 5.30am. 

People don’t like the dark – it arouses a primeval fear within us; a fear that modern life with its 24/7 strip lighting and permanently-on TV screens was supposed to have banished. ‘Keeping the lights on’ is the emotional hot button used by the proponents of nuclear power and fracking to induce fear in people and browbeat them into accepting dangerous forms of energy. It’s a useful binary: either the lights are on OR we go back to the dark ages and live in caves. That’s what they would like us to believe.

And safety bodies are up in arms about the lights being turned off, as are city dwellers who have bought second homes in rural areas. Here’s my favourite quote from the article:

Caroline Cooney, an actress who complained to Hertfordshire County Council when the lights near her home in Bishop’s Stortford were switched off after midnight, said she faced a “black hole” when she returned home from working in the West End of London.

“My street is completely canopied by large tress and I could not see my hand in front of my face,” she said.

Mrs Cooney, who appeared in Gregory’s Girl and who has also appeared in Casualty, said it was putting people in danger and the council was effectively imposing a “midnight curfew on residents who do not want to take the risk of walking home blind”.

“When I came out of the train station it was just like a black hole,” she said.

“I simply cannot risk walking home in what is effectively pitch blackness.”

However the council told her it could not “provide tailored street lighting for each individual’s particular needs”. 

You have to laugh and I bet the council spokesperson had a bit of a giggle preparing that response. Had it been me I might have gone further and suggested a pair of night vision goggles.

But I don’t think it’s such a bad thing.

In Spain, we used to live in the darkest place in Europe. We were high up in the mountains of Andalucía, on the southern flank of the Sierra Nevada. At night the stars were so clear that if you lay flat on your back it felt as if you were drifting through deep space, which – hey – you were. I had no idea, until then, that you could see tens of thousands of stars with the naked eye.

I had an astronomer friend living nearby who had a giant telescope on his farm house. As a matter of fact, it was so big it practically was his house. When he wasn’t identifying distant star clusters and taking pictures of them he was running a campaign to banish unnecessary light pollution. He had seen how the skies of Britain had been turned into warm orange fuzz, and didn’t want the same thing to happen to Spain.

Unfortunately Spain had other ideas. They positively loved installing 1000w sodium lights on the side of any building that was more important than, say, a dog kennel, making the night even brighter than the day. At least they did – I’m not sure many of them can afford so much powerful lighting any more.

In any case, my friend thought that when you blot out the stars then you lose something. Kids were growing up having only seen stars on cinema screens. That just wasn’t right, he thought. How can you love the universe you were born into if you can’t even see it?

Peak cheap energy may have its downsides, but being able to see the stars again sure isn’t one of them.

Posted in Energy, Home | Tagged , ,

A Cargo (Bike) Cult

Published October 22, 2012 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

 
In days of yore cargo bike racing was a big thing in Copenhagen, something that is being resurrected by Harry vs Larry, whom I pinched this image from 

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on October 20, 2012

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner

It’s an interesting experience living in a country as it slowly but surely wakes up to the fact that it is not immune from the economic storm clouds that are building. Here in Denmark politicians have finally realized that the country cannot support such a cumbersome public sector in such straitened times, and that something’s gotta give.
 
For anyone unfamiliar with the Scandinavian model of ordering society, it can basically be summarized thus: high taxes, high benefits, high standard of living. I’ve written about it extensively in my old blog (which I may provide some archive files of, if anyone’s interested) – so much so that it makes me exhausted even contemplating it. It’s the kind of society that makes liberals swoon with envy and free market conservatives boil with righteous anger.
 
I used to get my daily dose of right-wing trollery from – sorry to say it – resident Americans who had fallen into the Danish honey trap but were now living out their tortured ‘prison sentence’ existences in this socialist utopia. How dare they have a well-ordered society where nobody is stinking rich and nobody is poor? It flies in the face of all logical reason!! It’s communism, I tell you!!
 
At the other end of the scale are the dreamy liberals who came to this land of social mobility, sexual equality, eco consciousness and tasteful shabby chic design, convinced that they have entered the Holy Land – and their faith is similarly unshakeable.
 
In the middle, of course, are the Danes. For them, this is just normality.
 
But now, it turns out, that normality which once seemed so unshakeable is increasingly unaffordable. It’s a basic tenet of politics in Denmark that socialism rules the roost. Even the Conservative Party would be considered pinko commies by American standards – and the far-right Danish People’s Party could be aptly described as, ahem, national socialists – although they don’t appreciate the nomenclature.
 
Thus an unholy row has broken out about something called dagpenge. Now dagpenge (pronounce dow-peng) means literally ‘day money’ – that’s unemployment benefit to me and you. If you lose your job, or quit it, you are liberally showered in the stuff. I did just that two years ago and was entitled to about $2,000 a month – and practically all I had to do to earn it was click a button on a website once a month to say ‘I want some more please’. This was great and I could have carried on for five years, if I had wanted.
 
Problems have arisen, however, because it turns out that when too many people click that button, the few people left in full time employment have trouble paying for it. It’s pretty obvious stuff, really, but it could only work in the same manner as a Ponzi scheme in an ever expanding economy. Thus the (socialist) government has now declared that the maximum length of time you will be allowed to claim this money is two years. In reality this means that a large hole has suddenly appeared in the safety net that a country used to womb to tomb entitlement could never have dreamed of until recently.
 
As a result political scalps aplenty are being eviscerated. Most of the main parties (and, oh, there are many parties here) realise that such a bloated system of welfare cannot continue in its present form, but just can’t bring themselves to do anything about it. The left wingers and communists, however, want the period to be extended and for things to carry on as normal, printing money if need be. It’s a very familiarly depressing scenario and there’s nary a news bulletin without some mention of it.
 
But the country’s underlying economic woes have serious structural problems. We can also add into the cauldron of troubles the fact that many of the country’s biggest employers are packing up and moving overseas where employees come cheaper and there aren’t so many regulations. This is further inflating the jobless figures (which, by the way, are semi fantasy because they don’t include all of those who are put on educational schemes or the ‘before time’ pensioners, some of whom are in their 20s) and reducing the tax base like a snake eating its tail.
 
As if that were not embarrassing enough, unfortunate Denmark is surrounded by economic over-achievers! To the south is smoke-belching Germany, where Chinese millionaires are standing in line to buy luxury cars, and to the north are Sweden, with its huge natural resources, and Norway, ditto but with lots of oil as well. 
 
Okay, so Denmark has some large factory fur farms, is big on biotechnology, pig ‘production’ and Lego – but it remains to be seen which of these industries can stay the course as they all rely on low oil prices, a stable trading environment and generous government subsidies.
 
Oh, and it also has Vestas – the wind power company – but even that has lost 95% of their value since 2008. That just leaves Bang & Olufsen, Carlsberg, Maersk, Lurpak, Aragorn and The Barbie Song.
 
Anyway, given the guaranteed fact of our low energy future in which most of those energy slaves we enjoy the services of today will die off, I thought I would simultaneously do my bit for the environment, secure my transport future and provide a tiny boost to one small area of Denmark’s manufacturing industry in one fell swoop. Yes, I bought myself a cargo bike.
 
I have been considering buying one for quite a while. They are very common on the streets of Copenhagen, and are used to carry everything from children and shopping, to pets and, er, expanded polystyrene. 
 
 
 
 
But with so many models available now I was having trouble figuring out which one to go for. Ignoring the cheap-looking Chinese made ones that have appeared of late (look closely at the welding and components and you’d want to ignore them too), I narrowed it down to the most popular four different brands I regularly see around me. These were as follows:

 
A Christiania Bike at work. Image courtesy of Copenhagenize
Christiania Bikes. This is the original three wheeler cargo bike. Constructed with a sturdy frame in a workshop within the sprawling commune of Christiania in Copenhagen, these are the original road warriors and have been trundling the bike lanes of the city for around 40 years. They are no-nonsense affairs, with internal gears (which is the standard on Danish bikes – meaning you have to exert backwards pressure on the pedals backwards to brake, and you don’t get the gears gunged up with crud)  and come in any colour as long as it is black. Actually, that’s not quite true any more, and you can get them in various pastel colours, if you are that way inclined. They can carry loads of up to 100kg.

 
The Sorte Jernhest. Image courtesy of this blog
Sorte Jernhest. This means Black Iron Horse in Danish, and is a cargo bike that means business. Like the Christiania Bike, it is solid and looks like it is built to last. It’s a bit more stylish than the former, with a nice looking horizontal tube frame and an industrial looking finish on the front metal box. I have never actually tried one of these out but I was tempted to go it for this because of its mix of durability and cool name. Just like the others on the market, they are not cheap, but they cost practically nothing to run and are unlikely to seriously break down in the short or medium term.

 
The Nihola Bike. Image from this blog
Nihola Bike. This is ostensibly another copy of the Christiania Bike and is manufactured in a workshop in Copenhagen. In my journalist days I went down and met the owner and he lent a few of the bikes to the newspaper for delivery purposes during the COP15 climate conference.  The design is modern and the gears work well, but to my mind the ride felt a bit ‘tinny’ and it felt like I was going to fall off when I went around a corner. Still, nice design and quite practical. I’d say they would be fine for city use and light loads, but they are not really designed for heavy, dirty work.

 
The Bullitt Bike – image from here
Bullitt Bike. This was the last of the cargo bikes I considered. Unlike the other three this is a low-slung , long-based two-wheeler, and the cargo section is in the middle. Like the name says, these go like a bullet, and are by far the fastest of the lot. What’s more, the gearing is phenomenal and being a recumbent means you can deliver more of your leg muscle power to where it’s needed. They come in a variety of colours and models and are seriously slick. I was very tempted by the Bullitt, but what put me off in the end was the price tag, combined with the fact that a bike this flashy is bound to get stolen.
 
 
So, in the end I went with my gut feeling and opted for the solid traditional hippiemobile – the Christiania Bike. The reasons for this are manifest. I shall list them as bullet points:
 
  •            It’s a tried and tested technology. If you can still see 40 year old Christiania Bikes rumbling around the streets you know that this is a bike that is built to last.
  •            It can carry a load of up to 100kg (probably more) with no problems. I will need to be able to move this amount of weight up to 20 miles every day, and it would seem ideal for it. Plus, with a single big handlebar, getting off and pushing is always an option.
  •            I want the option of being able to fit an assisting electric motor on it in the future, and the large exposed back wheel provides plenty of space to do so. The bike is fine in flat areas like Copenhagen, but it would be seriously hard to ride it up a steep hill, fully laden, without some kind of power assist.
  •            I like its black no-nonsense design and the fact that you could easily sell things out of the front box area as it is a deep box with sides that slope forwards, making presentation of the goods easy.
  •            I love Christiania. It’s a truly inspiring place to be that shows what people can achieve against all the odds (expect a long post about Christiania soon) and I want to help support its survival.
 
And so I found myself down in Christiania a couple of weeks ago hopping over puddles and sniffing the tang of marijuana on the crisp October air as I searched the flowery back streets for the Christiania Bike workshop. I entered a large brick building where overalled women were busy twisting lengths of metal and scrap objects and turning them into works of art to go on sale. I asked one lady where the bike workshop was and she pointed me to a glass door at the back and told me to just go on through. Once I’d found my way in, Jens, the manager, showed me to my new steed, which was stacked up with a consignment of others (see below).
 
 
Selling like hot cakes at the Christiania Bike workshop in Copenhagen.  That’s my bike, ready to go, in the foreground.
 
There was a bit of paperwork to go through (like paying for it) and I asked Jens how business was. He said it was pretty brisk, all things considered, and they were flat out busy with new orders (the bikes used to be made here but nowadays they are made ‘offshore’, meaning on the quaint Danish island of Bornholm, and then shipped to the mainland for assembly in Christiania). It was good to hear that they are still doing well despite all of the competition out there nowadays – five years ago these were practically the only cargo bikes you ever saw.
 
As I rode out of Christiania and joined the rush hour commuter traffic (mostly other bikes) on one of the main arteries of the city I felt like I was riding on a wave of euphoria. The steering took a bit of getting used to, and I learned that you have to lean back a little as you turn to avoid overbalancing the bike and falling off. But apart from that it felt fine to ride, and very light. Having ridden (driven?) much larger bikes during one summer spent as a rickshaw driver in Copenhagen, I was used to being a bike lane hog, although the Christiania Bike is narrow enough to allow others to pass, so this isn’t a problem.
 
Okay, so it’s just a black bike with a box on the front – but no, it’s a bit more than that – it’s a pretty low-risk security for the future. Just think: no fossil fuels to power it, no insurance, no parking fees, hardly any maintenance costs and no tax. And just riding it keeps you fit and your leg muscles bulging.
 
Okay, transport: tick. Done that, now onto the next thing …
 
 
Here’s my bike on its first ever job, earlier today – a 20km round trip to pick up a 19th century chair for my wife to restore.  It was an easy job but I can’t count on such light loads in the future.
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Are you a Hobbit?

Published October 14, 2012 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on October 13, 2012

Simon Dale's Hobbit style house in Wales

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasboard inside the Diner

I will begin this week’s post with a confession that few of you could have guessed from the limited information I reveal about myself in the global cyber commons aka The Matrix. Here are some clues: I grew up in the English Midlands, I’m of average height for a Brit (i.e. a dwarf by Scandinavian standards where I live), I have a fondness for real ale and my idea of pure unsurpassed bliss is sitting beside an open fire, smoking a pipe and listening to the slow monotonous tung of a grandfather clock.
Yes, that’s right; it’s something I have suspected for a while – I am a hobbit.
As if further proof were needed, I can rummage in my drawers and find scraps of paper with crude drawings of earth built ‘hobbit holes’ in the style of that made by Simon Dale (see main image), and what’s more, my toes are hairier than the average. I’m pluckier than the average person could guess, and although I have never outwitted a dragon, I did, alas, have a promising career as a burglar in my younger days (more on my reckless past in a future post).
But this post is not about me and my hairy toes – this post is about EVIL.
Speaking of toes, I once had a tattoo made in Guatemala by a man from Los Angeles who told me he had tattooed the name of Sean Penn’s dead dog onto his big toe (i.e. Sean Penn’s big toe, not his own). The fact that I just revealed that Sean Penn has his dead dog’s name inked onto his big toe makes me a celebrity news breaker and I fully expect to quadruple the visitor count to 22BillionEnergySlaves this week as a result, given that Sean Penn’s web presence is double that of all news relating to peak oil – I hope one or two of those visitors will stay.
Anyway, back to the plot. Draw a deep breath, because I’ve been contemplating evil all week, and the various forms it can take. But what is evil? I’m not sure. I’d define it as an action that causes gross suffering to sentient beings and/or wanton destruction of part of the biosphere for psychological satisfaction.
Here are my conclusions about evil if you are in a rush and don’t have time/can’t be bothered to read the rest of the post: evil does exist, and mostly it is dressed up as good. What’s more, technology can act as a catalyst of evil.
I realize that evil is a strong word. I believed in evil as a child – you know the kind of evil I mean – the kind personified by the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the kid-munching giants in the BFG. Then, as I got older, I started to think that evil didn’t really exist and it was more a case of stupidity, or senselessness, on the part of the people I had previously labelled evil. This belief was bolstered by a flirtation with Buddhism, and even the Dalai Lama has said something to the effect that people are not ‘evil’ they are just making mistakes that will negatively affect their karma.

The Childcatcher: probably quite evil in a conventional way

Well, whatever. Recently I’ve come around again to thinking that evil does exist, and we’re liberally marinated in the stuff. What’s more, there are three types of evil people – or people who employ evil means, more precisely. The most common-garden recognisable variety evil is committed by psychopaths. You know the type; they will capture you, lock you in a box and torture you for days before ending your life in a most unpleasant manner and then walk around wearing your genitals for kicks. Whether these people are simply insane or not, I don’t really care – evil is a good enough label for me.
The second type of evil doer is of the same breed as the above, but more refined and clever. Not wishing to get blood on their own hands these people rise to positions of power and then channel their evil ways through the power they have attained. Whether they are the president of a company or the president of a nation doesn’t really matter, they get their kicks from, as George Orwell put it, stamping on a human face forever.
Then there’s the third kind of evil. This is a far less visible type, but by sheer biomass is probably the weightiest of them all. The evil I talk of is evil dressed up as good. Everyone’s at it, it seems. From the countries who think their shit don’t stink because they have ‘progressive policies’ for their citizens (while quietly exploiting the Third World for their own benefit), to the various NGOs who act as virus carriers of ideology to the far corners of the globe, and rabid corporate backed scientists who are pushing all manner of destructive technologies into the biosphere in the name of humanitarianism.
We’re all complicit in this last scam. Indeed, living in the ‘developed’ world, it is all but impossible to not contribute in some way to the systems that enslave our fellow men and creatures. This applies to some more than others, of course, but I type these words on a laptop that was in all probability assembled by wage slaves (in the name of giving someone a job), manufactured and transported half way across the world by climate-damaging oil (in the name of economic growth), produced in a country where the environmental costs of its manufacture were borne by the ecosystem and the health of the human population (in the name of free trade), sold to me by some corporation who will probably be contributing money to whoever wins the next election in the US in order to keep their profitable racket going (in the name of free speech and democracy) and, finally, uploaded onto a blogging platform that is owned by a company which plans to turn the human race into cyborgs (see late week’s post).
What’s a blogger to do? Throw the computer into the garbage and retreat to a cave in the Himalayas? Chuck myself onto the nearest compost heap and await the end? Start watching the X Factor and try to become ‘adjusted’?
J.R.R Tolkien knew what evil was. His time in the Somme, during the First World War, showed him the depths that humans could plunge to. Would the German machine gunners who gunned down so many young men have considered themselves evil? I don’t think so.
Tolkien would never be drawn on the meaning of the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings. Nevertheless, we can probably assume it was to do with nuclear weapons. Destructive technology was Tolkien’s bugbear. In one quote he hinted at the meaning, seemingly saying that once some kind of destructive power had been brought into being it began to live a life of its own:
“I should say that it was a mythical way of representing the truth that potency (or perhaps potentiality) if it is to be exercised, and produce results, has to be externalized and so as it were passes, to a greater or lesser degree, out of one’s direct control.”
Which, to me, is the theme of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien drew on Scandinavian and Anglo Saxon mythology for his inspiration. He was all too aware that our native mythology had been utterly supplanted by Christianity, and what remained of it in Wales and Scotland, was mostly Celtic in origin. Instead, he was driven by a desire to create an English mythology – even if it was ‘made up’ – never anticipating the success he would encounter in such an endeavour.
As I mentioned above, I grew up in ‘Tolkien country’. My childhood was spent close to Oxford, where Tolkien lived and worked as a professor of linguistics at the university – I was probably lying in my cot, aged two, when he died. I hadn’t even had a chance to read The Hobbit at that point.
Turning back the clock, when young John lived in Warwickshire it was a very rural (and it still is, to a degree) but the hamlet he lived in, Sarehole Mill, near Hall Green, was some miles from the encroaching spread of Birmingham; England’s second city and the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. I spent most of my teenage years in this area, which is now well and truly part of the spread of the city and not a very pleasant place to be unless you are a connoisseur of suburban blight (sorry, Hall Greenians – okay, to be fair, it still has its nice parts). I lived for a year very close to Sarehole Mill, which is now embedded in a run-down urban zone where you are as likely to hear Urdu spoken as you are English. It’s almost impossible today to recognise this as a place that inspired Tolkien to invent the fictional Shire, surrounded as it is by busy dual-carriageways, Indian takeaways and dodgy car repair shops.
Here’s a picture of the pub where Tolkien used to chat to his friend C.S.Lewis (of Narnia fame) called the Eagle and Child (known by locals as the Bird and Baby).

The Eagle and Child in Oxford, where Tolkien would meet up with fellow writers

But the surrounding countryside, now some miles away, remains recognisably ‘Shire-esque’, and you can still visit the places where he was inspired to write about the Barrow Mounds and various other places that crop up in his books. There’s even a farm called Bag End and a road called Hobbs Moat Road. If you’ve ever wondered why the unusual chapter ‘The Scouring of the Shire’, in which various low-down characters are driven from the realm, was appended to the end of LOTR, then it’s my guess that it was Tolkien’s cathartic way of dealing with the destruction of his beloved rural idyll by way of fantasy.
So, back to evil. When I see articles like this one, about a new iPad for babies (sorry, it’s in Danish), I can’t help thinking that the kind of evil we should surely be worried about is the kind that we all-too-often take for granted as ‘normality’. How exactly did the marketers of this particular product manage to convince themselves they were adding to the sum total of human welfare? Or the development agencies who consider that they are doing Amazonian tribes a favour by rounding them up and building them somewhere to live that looks like this (but we must cut infant mortality!):

If a visiting alien economist (and I pray there are none ‘out there’) were to analyse our setup, he/she/it would quickly deduce that the ‘enlightened’ first world is a giant face-sucking vampire squid, to borrow a phrase, on the rest of the planet – just by looking at trade deals alone. For every one of us with our iPods and designer kettles and reality TV programmes, there are 10 people on the breadline packed like peas in a pod into a single room, heating dirty water from a beaten up kettle over some burning sticks and living with the reality of not having a TV or any other form of consumer electronics device. What kind of way is that to run a planet?
Anyway, my personal jury’s still out on whether there are truly ‘evil’ forces out there, or whether we are just suckers for unleashing forces that could be considered evil and setting up systems that promote evil. I suppose I should mention Rudolph Steiner, who had some pretty deep thoughts on this subject. He didn’t see the world in black and white terms, and for that we can be thankful. Instead, it is my understanding, he considered the whole progressive materialist fallacy as evil – or at least bad – through and through, with that evil coming in two different flavours which, together, can balance one another out.
These two concepts he named Luciferic and Ahrimanic, with the former being concerned mainly with spirit and cosmology and the latter being concerned with materialism, science and ‘hard facts’. Thus, we are living in Ahrimanic times, by his reckoning, with evil being channelled or justified in that way. There’s an awful lot more to it than that and it’s well worth reading up on his ideas.
So, getting back to hobbits, who are resolutely not evil because they are earthy creatures and not concerned with metaphysics or playing psychic power games, we can perhaps see that what this world needs right now is more hobbits and less evil wizards (marketers, politicians, thaumaturgic manipulators), orcs (mindless consumers, imperial soldiers) and gollums (tortured addicted souls).
Are you a hobbit? You don’t have to look like one. If you hunger for peace and quiet and the chance to feel the moist earth between your toes, to have a small place to call home where it is safe to raise a healthy family and grow a vegetable patch or an orchard, and if the word ‘permaculture’ is more attractive to you than ‘monoculture’ then chances are you have hobbit blood flowing through your veins. And of course, it’s not easy being a hobbit in a world full of orcs and dragons, but we can take heart that we are a resourceful and resilient breed, often at our best during the most testing of times (and often quite lazy at all other times).
So if you are a hobbit reading this then I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve, so please carry on reading and bear the following in mind:

“The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places.
But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now
mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps, the greater.”
J.R.R Tolkien
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The Acid Factory Forest

Published September 30, 2012 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on September 29th 2012

 
Some Acid Factory rosehips

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner

If you ever happen to find yourself flying to Copenhagen Airport you will no doubt take a metro train to the city centre shortly after landing. After you have been on the eerily driverless train for roughly three minutes you will notice that to your left you are passing a built up area of characterless blocks of flats, car parks and hotels. That’s where I live. In the other direction you’ll notice that you are passing close to the sea, with Sweden clearly visible across the Øresund, if the weather is good. In the foreground, just before the shoreline, you’ll notice huge mounds of dirt and tangled pieces of metal surrounded by earth moving equipment. Underneath it, although you could never tell, is the Acid Factory Forest.
Let me explain. I live on a road called Syrefabriksvej, which in English means Acid Factory Way. The reason for this is that quite a long time ago it used to lead to – you guessed it – an acid factory. Back in Denmark’s industrial heyday, if there ever was such a thing, the shoreline was covered with salt works, fish processing plants and factories. Then, by the 1970s or so, the fish had gone and production of goods was shifting overseas, meaning the factories shut down and the area became what is commonly called an urban wasteland.
Having a miniature rust belt did nothing for the island’s reputation whatsoever. The island I live on, you see, has always been the target of snobbery. In medieval times the contents of Copenhagen’s chamber pots were brought here and spread on the land as fertilizer, and henceforth the island was known as lorteøen – or shit island. By most accounts, it was populated by a particularly coarse breed of pig farmers, and in 1521 King Christian II, who was a great fan of everything Dutch, gave the southern section of the island to some farmers from Holland. His reasoning was that they could supply the royal table with quality fruit and veg – something he believed Danish farmers to be incapable of. They didn’t have to pay taxes and perhaps because of it all of Denmark hated them.
Amager (pronounced ‘Ama’ – the ger bit is silent – Danish is like that) continued to be unpopular. On the opening page of Søren Kierkegaard’s manifesto of existentialism Either/Or he declares that he’d rather live on Amager talking to the filthy pigs than live among the uncivilized philistines of contemporary Copenhagen society. I’m not sure if that was meant as a complement or not.
Anyway, today the pig farms are gone and covered in apartment blocks, 7-11s and pet grooming parlours. The shore line, where the old acid factory was, has been given an extreme makeover in the last six years, with a huge offshore island being built and fancy flats springing up here there and everywhere. You’re more likely to see a fashion shoot or a skateboarding contest than a blue-overalled worker down there these days. But one bit that nobody ever seemed like getting around to doing anything to was where the old acid factory had been. It covered quite an area, and there were the remains of many other factories there too, although I don’t know what they produced. Urban legend had it that the land was poisoned, which may well have been true.
 
Amager beach in 1950, when the area was a bustling industrial zone
 
Amager beach in 2012, now given over to leisure
Poisoned or not, nature had been allowed to take its course over the last 40 years and, until quite recently, a forest had grown up there. I used to go there regularly to recharge my psychic batteries. Denmark, you see, is a remarkably manicured country with barely a blade of grass out of place. Maybe it’s because the land was so flat and easy to tame that a culture grew up that could accurately be described as the cult of ‘neatness’. You know that picture of the American family with the picket fence? They were no doubt settlers from Denmark.You see it everywhere. Sometimes I think that the ideal home in these parts is a square Lego-type house on an immaculate lawn with not a single other living organism on the premises other than maybe a supermarket bought orchid artfully placed on the dining room table. Something a bit like this:
 
An idealised Danish house … for some
But the Acid Factory Forest was different. Here, there was a profusion of life. Through the concrete factory floors and the tarmac carparks and roads an army of saplings had burst forth, soon burying what remained of decades of human endeavor beneath a blanket of leaves and twigs and earwigs. It was a place of tall silver birches, adolescent oak trees, apple trees (perhaps from people tossing apple cores out of passing car windows), elberberry bushes, hawthorns, rosehips and many more. The trees were alive with birds, and I saw birds there that I never saw anywhere else in Denmark. But mostly it was populated by a sizeable unkindness of ravens, who sat looking down philosophically from the posts that held the rusty razor wire fence to keep people out up. Every time I saw these ravens I made an effort to say hello to them. After a time they grew used to me and, although I never managed to get a response out of any of them, I’m pretty sure that they understood some rudimentary English phrases after a while.
I loved visiting my urban forest and seeing all the wildflowers there in Spring and the amazing bounty of fruits and berries in the Autumn. I didn’t dare eat any of them, of course, as the warnings about poisoned soils were all too clear in my mind. Once, after reading a book about wild food, I decided to harvest some snails. The snails there were unlike any others I have seen in Denmark – they were giants! And they were everywhere. I picked up about 20 and put them in a huge jar, feeding them lettuce and parsley (tutored by my Italian father in law who is an expert snail eater – he said it would remove any ‘toxins’), and had big plans to fry them up in butter and garlic and invite a couple of friends around for a wine and escargot evening. I watched them slithering around for a week or two, and they watched me back with their slimy eyes on stalks. They looked so trusting. I grew to like them, and even had names for some of the more recognizable ones. Inevitably I couldn’t bear to eat them.
After a period of desperate rationalization, I rode back down to the Acid Factory Forest and gently placed them back where I had found them, bidding them a fond farewell as I left. The community of the forest had been reunited again. (Would the snails tell others of their adventures? Would the others believe them? Was I going crazy?)
But then, one day last year, something dreadful happened. An invasive species penetrated the nature zone – a predator so ruthless that it could only spell doom for all of the ravens and foxes and squirrels and hares that called the place home. Yes, an ape-like creature wearing a hard plastic hat and a fluorescent yellow jacket was seen surveying the site with a sextant and talking into a mobile phone. After only a few days more came, as if lured by this initial colonist. They worked methodically, and smoked cigarettes as they drove long white stakes into the ground at 100m intervals, dividing the land up in preparation for it being brought back into the orbit of human control. The ravens remained perched on the fence and watched all of this with their beady eyes, occasionally squawking something to one another in their indecipherable tongue. It was a bad omen to be sure.
But then, just as quickly as they had come, the men went away. For the entire winter and spring, nothing happened, and the denizens of the wasteland carried on living their lives in relative peace. But then, this summer, I went away for a week, and when I came back I noticed something odd. All of a sudden my flat had a sea view. Where before there had been the green froth of leaves there was now the icy blue of the Baltic Sea. I got on my bike and went down to investigate. When I got there it was a scene of utter destruction. A large machine was parked there which seemed to have some kind of giant double chain saw pincer attached to the front. It had evidently been over the whole area because nothing now rose more than a foot from the ground. The ‘debris’ was still there, and so were the ravens, who were all sat on the fence surveying the wreckage. Somewhere in it were all their nests, presumably with their young still in them.
I felt shocked, as if a family member or friend had been violently murdered. How could they do this? And to rub salt into the wound, they then sprayed the entire area in some kind of herbicide to ensure than no living thing would be left alive. It seems to succeed and after a few days the whole area was wilted and dead as if it had been sprayed with agent orange – which maybe it had.
I was depressed. The Acid Factory Forest had given me succour and strength throughout the times I had been depressed in the past, and now it was gone. There was nothing I could do. I mentioned it to a few local people but they were all unsympathetic. ‘Oh it was just an eyesore – a wasteland,’ they said in so many words. It attracted crime, it was being used to dump trash, teenage joyriders burned cars in it, somebody had been attacked there … it seemed like the place could do no good at all. There was nothing for it but to rehabilitate it and bring it back to a state of purity.
I wondered what had happened to all the resident wildlife. There was literally nowhere for it to go as the Acid Factory Forest had been surrounded variously by a beach (intersected by a busy road), Copenhagen Airport, a yachting marina and sterile suburbia. Only the ravens, I imagined, could get away – and they did. After a couple of weeks of staring at the devastation and cawing to one another they just left, en masse. I wonder how they made the decisions. When to go. Where to go. There is so much we don’t understand on this planet.
Over the coming weeks work went on at the site. The tree stumps were ripped up by another fearsome machine and bulldozed into great tangled piles before being loaded onto trucks and driven away. Then the ground was levelled and some kind of yellow plastic gauze was spread over the, perhaps, 40 acre area. After this hundreds – perhaps thousands – of truckloads of building debris was brought in and spread on the ground. Maybe it was the tower blocks they have been enthusiastically dynamiting around Denmark recently.  Then on top of the debris went about a metre of clay. Beneath that huge mass of concrete, plastic and clay was a substrate layer of dying matter that was once a 40 year old forest. And some snails that had once been on an adventure.
A sign was erected outside the new barbed wire fences, showing what was to be done there. The land, it said, was being turned into a nature reserve as part of the city’s commitment to sustainable development. A CAD generated image showed what it would look like. It showed mostly immaculate grass with a few neat trees here and there with ‘contemplation benches’ for the computer generated Danes who were strolling around with shopping mall type contentment on their computer generated faces.
It was all too much and it caused me to think about all of the human follies to which we are susceptible. The greatest mistake of our age, it seems to me, is our inability to recognise that a linear accomplishment is trumped by a cyclical one. Every time we take a natural system and unleash a cataclysm upon it we are turning it from a very complex system with hundreds of different types of organisms (probably thousands if you go down to the micro level, which microbiologists tell us where it’s really at) into a very simple one of a handful of selected species which would never coexist in the natural world. To maintain the new equilibrium – in this case neat grass, a few selected trees and some water features – means a constant battle against the forces of nature which ‘want’ to turn it back into a ‘wasteland’ i.e. a piece of land that is useful to many species, but not us.
The wasteland of the Acid Factory Forest lives on on Google Earth, incidentally, which is yet to be updated.
This battle costs energy and money. It will take a few personnel with a variety of power-hungry machines to prevent the new ‘nature reserve’ from turning into a, well, nature reserve. And we know where the energy will come from to power those machines, and we know that using energy on hedge trimmers, leaf blowers and chainsaws for ornamental gardens will not be high up on the list of priorities during an energy crunch.
I have come to regard the whole Acid Factory Forest fiasco in a philosophical way. 40 years is but a blink of an eye in natural time, and one day this place, and plenty more besides it, will again be rich in life. I’ll be long gone by then.  Wastelands like this will become wilderness one day. And many of the cities and towns that we live in will be a part of it if we truly extend our temporal range of consciousness to the far future. Who knows, maybe in the rubble of this flat on ‘Shit Island’ where I am typing this will one day be snuffled over by packs of wild pigs, hunting for acorns from the oak trees I have been surreptitiously planting in municipal parks and on road verges around the area. Or, more likely, the rubble will be home to crabs and oysters and the bricks of the kitchen wall I now see before me will be covered with seaweed and barnacles – the island is, after all, only a couple of metres above sea level, with much of it actually below.
 
After the trees had been removed the site was covered in plastic gauze
 
An adjacent area was left standing
 
The end result, standing with my back to the sea looking towards my apartment block
Postscript: After I wrote this a couple of days ago it has emerged – according to my well-placed source – that the local council has found itself with no money for planting trees or further developing the site. Work, for now, has stopped. In the meantime, some interesting new pioneers are forcing themselves up through the lifeless clay and rubble … pictures to follow.


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This is a shout out for my friend David Edge. I first met David in Spain when I interviewed him and his wife Aspen at their farm high up in the Sierra Nevada mountains for my very first newspaper article. They had bought a run down farm on a degraded piece of no-good desertifying land and through sheer hard work and determination turned it into a veritable green oasis in a parched yellow wilderness. David and Aspen used permaculture techniques and were heavily influenced by Allan Savory and his concept of ‘Holistic Management’ – and it was truly inspiring to see what they had achieved in the face of conventional wisdom.
Sadly, Aspen was struck down with cancer and died a couple of years ago and David was left with Semilla Besada, their farming project. He passed the project onto some new guardians and returned to his roots in Devon and he has now started a website with the aim of putting people in touch with one another who are seeking to buy or sell land or property that is suitable for living in in a sustainable manner. You could say that he is the first holistic real estate agent.
Anyway, please have a look at his new site and see if you can spare a minute to help him spread the word. As readers of this site will be aware, finding a place to live in which you can be a useful part of the ecosystem is one of the most important challenges we face. He is not doing it for money, although he does accept donations if it all works out for the buyer or seller.
You can see his site Sustainable Properties for Sale by clicking here and his Facebook site can be followed here. The site is fairly new but it covers properties worldwide – so it doesn’t matter where you live.
Posted in Environment, Home | Tagged ,

Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen

Published September 26, 2012 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on September 22, 2012

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasboard inside the Diner

Today I joined a gym. Yes, I know. I haven’t set foot in one for 15 years but the time had come to do so again. I apologise to regular readers who might be expecting something along the lines of some subject matter that is at least tangential to peak oil, global hegemony or environmental meltdown – that will all have to wait until next week. I should probably say now that if you’re of a sensitive disposition you might not want to read certain parts of this post, because today’s post is about … (drumroll) … violence!
 
But first, let me explain a little something. When I say I haven’t set foot inside a gym for 15 years, that’s not because I am some kind of couch potato who can’t walk up a flight of stairs. In fact, I run around 20km a week, bike about 100km and I’m even training for a half-marathon. Don’t forget, part of preparing for a future of limited medical care and inaccessible or ineffective drugs is the ability to keep fit and try and heal your own body. And just like sex, poetry and friendship, exercise is one of those things that you shouldn’t have to pay for. In any case, I have to exercise because if I don’t then the chronic pain I live with gets worse.
I’m not sure how it happened or what it is, but I live with an endless pain in my chest. It could have been when I had a snowboarding accident, or maybe it was the time I was infested with a tropical parasite that gnawed away at my insides unchecked for two years, but it’s been with me for this past decade, and sometimes it is debilitating, but usually it is just a low level ache in the upper left side of my chest. I’ve been to doctors and hospitals aplenty and they’ve run numerous tests on me and the conclusion is always the same: there’s nothing detectably wrong with me. Except there is. At times the pain spreads right up through my neck into my head and leaves me finding it painful to breathe and sleep. It isn’t fun.
 
I don’t know how it started or how to fix it. People have suggested acupuncture, visiting a chiropractor or various homeopathic treatments. Alcohol and coffee make it worse, whereas rubbing a pressure point under my left eye makes it go away temporarily, as if by magic. Very intense exercise also makes it go away for a few hours, as do strong pain killers. It’s a pain, but apparently not a fatal one.
 
So that’s why I go running. The only thing is that it seems to be getting more and more dangerous to go running where I live. Some people might think that it doesn’t get much safer and cleaner than Copenhagen – that is how the city likes to present itself to an international audience. That’s probably what the unfortunate American tourist thought last week who met a grisly end after an automated street cleaning machine suddenly developed artificial intelligence and went amok, sucking him up and ramming his head against the wall of a bank, thus killing him in a most unexpectedly unpleasant way. But anyone who has ever lived here or watched the superb TV series Forbrydelsen (renamed ‘The Killing’ in English) won’t be entirely surprised by what I am about to say. This has been my experiences in the past ten days or so:
 
  •     A man was murdered with a single shot to the head outside the office I work in. The attack was thought to be a revenge attack for a hit on some people walking out of a mosque a year ago (also next to my office) which I heard. At the time I had thought somebody was throwing heavy things into a skip – that’s what it sounded like.
  •     A couple of days later I went running at night. On a particularly dark street near the beach a car pulled up next to me and a man yelled something obscene at me. I ignored him and he drove off. Ten minutes later the whole place was full of police cars and it was on the news later that a man on that street had been randomly cruising around and stabbing passers-by. One victim was stabbed in the chest but managed to walk to hospital.
  •  I also went running the next night and surprised two men doing something suspicious at a deserted building site – they didn’t take it well and I had to put a sprint on.
  • Three nights later I encountered a gang of youths, one wielding a metal pole outside a grim local shopping precinct. They were dressed in the American ‘gangster’ style of pants hanging down and covered in bling. They were also smashing the place up and again I had to sprint to get away from them as they shouted after me.
  • Then last night – the final night I went out. Half the police force of Copenhagen descended on the island of Amager where I live after violence flared up between the two main Hells Angels gangs who are Denmark’s de facto mafia. One man was thrown out of a moving car, and another was found kneecapped in the back seat of another. Just another night in Copenhagen.
 
Sporadic random cases? Maybe.  But I used to regularly attend crime scenes in my capacity as a reporter here a couple of years ago, so I know very well that there’s a very dark underbelly in this city. Here are a few of the scenes I attended during that time:
 
  •         A cold blooded murder of a Somali man who was leaving his flat for work and was gunned down from a passing car in front of his children.
  •           A local bar (very close to my flat) invaded at night by a machine gun wielding gang hunting for junior members of a Hells Angels club. After shooting up the bar they dragged one unfortunate punter outside, pulled his trousers down and put the gun up where the sun don’t shine. I photographed the blood spattered plants pots and gore covered latex gloves of the paramedics.
  •          The assassination of a powerful Chinese businessman in a restaurant outside the office.
  •          The aftermath of a drugs turf war related grenade attack on some people enjoying a quiet beer in the alternative commune of Christiania. The grenade landed on the table and blew a young man’s jaw off.
  •          The attempted assassination of a biker leader as he sat in a Joe and the Juice café drinking a milkshake. The bullet went through the window into his back, where he was sitting, although he didn’t die.
 
Apart from those there have been dozens, perhaps hundreds of others. Just across the water from where I live, in the Swedish city of Malmø, they also had to contend with a serial killer who was shooting dark skinned people at random. Luckily he was caught, but the fact remains that these kinds of people just seem to pop up over here with unnerving regularity. How long before we get Denmark’s answer to Anders Breivik?
 
But now the police fear a new biker war. Forget Islamic terrorists, Scandinavia is plagued with home grown ones with blonde hair and blue eyes.  It brings me back to the happy days on the mid-nineties, when I first visited Denmark. In those days the various biker gangs, who ride around on shiny $80,000 Harley Davidsons and control the lucrative drug trade in these parts, were taking part in some pretty spectacular public battles. Who could forget the machine gun battle at Copenhagen Airport, for instance, or the RPG attack in central Copenhagen which launched a victim through a plate glass window as shoppers stood by gawking?
 
I should probably say that the leader of the Hells Angels, convicted killer Jørn Jønker Nielsen, is particularly web-savvy and on occasion phoned the office I used to work in to politely point out factual errors in our stories. So, if you’re reading Jørn, er, hello.
 
This is all very puzzling. The statistics don’t bear out my observations – Denmark has, on average, 0.9 homicides for every 100,000 people, making it the 21st safest country in the world (the US rate is about five times higher). It could be that victims are treated well in state of the art hospitals and usually recover, combined with the observation that most attacks tend to leave people half-dead rather than fully. And, of course, most violent crime tends to occur in the capital city, and most of them are premeditated attempts on the lives of various gang members and religious minorities.
 
So I have no particular desire to get caught up in all that again – hence my decision to join a gym in an international hotel near where I live. It’s a peculiar place to be. Everyone is so focussed on themselves and whatever is playing on their headphones, and they hardly seem to notice one another. It’s a kind of anti-community, where the lycra clad denizens drink only from plastic water bottles and nobody says a word but instead focuses on the numerous flat screen TVs affixed to the walls spewing out their 24 hour news and MTV feeds. Paper towel dispensers are much in use as every drop of sweat is quickly dealt with, and occasionally one of the gym employees will come round and empty the bins which quickly fill up with these and the plastic bottles. Various tattooed meatheads lift the free weights and flex their muscles in the mirrors, and afterwards there is a pool to cool off in, or a sauna to heat up in if you prefer. I quite like it.
 
It’s all very artificial and contrived, but for the time being it’s where I’ll be spending several evenings a week. What exactly am I doing as I run my standard 10km like a rat on a treadmill, dripping sweat onto the iPhone docking station? I’m writing my new sci-fi novel in my head, if you must know.  And not getting shot up the backside or stabbed or having my jaw blown off by a grenade.
 
Normal service will resume next week.
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