{"id":248,"date":"2014-07-04T14:36:50","date_gmt":"2014-07-04T20:36:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/?p=248"},"modified":"2014-07-04T14:37:13","modified_gmt":"2014-07-04T20:37:13","slug":"season-of-the-witch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/2014\/07\/04\/season-of-the-witch\/","title":{"rendered":"Season of the Witch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Season of the Witch<\/a><\/p>\n

Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences. We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So said Winston Churchill in 1936.\u00a0 So it is now. What\u2019s a bit spooky is that for most of us, life may seem somewhat normal despite what educated persons know to be mortal ecological threats, not to mention the other threats, including nuclear war. We know we have sown the wind; what whirlwind must we endure, or fail to endure? We see portents, with greater or lesser clarity. We know something\u2019s brewing. These are wyrd<\/a> times, when we are especially conscious of our own fates and those of our communities and our world.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile quite a few \u201cbest-laid schemes<\/a>\u201d of the powerful \u2013 our corporate captains and our custodians of empire, who harrow lives as the poet\u2019s plow overturned the mouse nest \u2013 are going \u201cagley<\/a>.\u201d This is especially true in the Department of Energy (DOE). But the outcomes for us and for them are much more complicated than simply \u201cgrief an’ pain,\/For promis’d joy.\u201d<\/p>\n

So many plans are failing now that it seems the ground-rules of history in the making \u2013 the kind of history we in the U.S. have taken for granted since the Second World War \u2013 are shifting. Perhaps they are just becoming more visible.\u00a0 Like the poet, we \u201cbackward cast [our] e’e, on \u201cprospects drear\u201d \u2013 like the end of the Cold War, an event now revealed to have applied, as far as the U.S. foreign policy establishment is concerned, to the Soviet Union but not to us.\u00a0 Ending the Cold War bilaterally<\/em> just didn\u2019t quite happen, an interpretation to which our Ukrainian putsch<\/a> is just the latest testimony.<\/p>\n

\u201cAn’ forward, tho’ I canna see,\/I guess an’ fear!\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of the ground-rules we might not have seen have to do with thermodynamics \u2013 with the annoyingly compelling fact that our economy, beneath the froth of money, has a physical and an energetic basis.\u00a0 Our economy depends in particular on oil \u2013 cheap<\/em> oil.<\/p>\n

We mention energy and oil in particular first among the crises we could list because oil is a master economic and foreign policy driver. Its role in our economy is \u201chard\u201d \u2013 there are no scalable substitutes \u2013 and because the oil supply situation, even in the well-endowed U.S., is deteriorating very quickly.\u00a0 The quest for oil, and geopolitical advantage to control oil, has lured the U.S. into two wars in this century already, which have exhausted the American empire. Industrial civilization, including agriculture, depends helplessly on fairly cheap oil.<\/p>\n

The year in which the all-time maximum production of conventional oil occurred, worldwide, was 2005.\u00a0 (That year also may have seen the peak in actual crude oil production \u2013 oil exclusive of natural gas condensates, from which fewer products can be made.) In any case oil prices are now four times higher<\/a> than in 2002, and the capital expenditure necessary to produce a new barrel of oil has risen five-fold since 2000<\/a> for independent oil companies.\u00a0 The portion of GDP devoted to obtaining energy is rising fast in the U.S. and most countries, as is the energy necessary to obtain energy and raw materials.<\/p>\n

In the U.S. at least, no economic recovery has ever occurred under these circumstances and none, we believe, can or will occur<\/a>.\u00a0 This conclusion made stronger by massive and rising inequality, the offshoring of most of our productive industry and skills, and the cancerous growth of finance.\u00a0 Real capital formation in U.S. society as a whole has very likely already come to an end, or will do so in the present decade.<\/p>\n

The present shale oil bubble will definitively pop very soon, by 2016 we believe, plus or minus a year (this is not the place to go into this in detail).<\/p>\n

Not only is real (as opposed to nominal) capital formation ending, but critical infrastructure is not being well-maintained, with consequences that could become irreversible.<\/p>\n

As for U.S. natural gas, prices must increase dramatically to hold onto today\u2019s production levels for a few more years.\u00a0 There is no long-lived U.S. shale gas bonanza.<\/p>\n

Worldwide, the liquid fuel situation is worse.\u00a0 The International Energy Agency (IEA) warned<\/a> of potential oil shortages this year<\/em> if OPEC \u2013 by which is meant Saudi Arabia, the other OPEC members being already maxed out \u2013 cannot find a way to provide an extra 1 million barrels per day.\u00a0 This concern predates the recent conquests by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). World crude oil production is increasing only very slightly now (condensates included), and only because U.S. shale oil production has been rising quickly \u2013 for now.<\/p>\n

Food prices are strongly correlated to oil prices, and political instability to food prices.<\/p>\n

Climate issues tend to be couched in normative terms (\u201cwe should do X to avoid Y\u201d).\u00a0 Climate implores<\/em> that we act, to save ourselves and our planet.\u00a0 Oil, by contrast, and energy in general, commands<\/em>, independent of anybody\u2019s views about anything.<\/p>\n

All notions of stability and prosperity, and of rising federal tax returns under the present taxation paradigm (so important to federal planning and budgeting, including in the nuclear weapons business) are now out the window.\u00a0 We have written about this a little at Forget the Rest<\/a>.\u00a0 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) growth projections have been too optimistic in recent years.\u00a0 Federal spending caps are set using these projections under the Budget Control Act.<\/p>\n

The real pie is not growing.\u00a0 There is no rising tide that will lift all boats, and there will never be henceforth.\u00a0 \u201cProgressive\u201d liberalism as we know it today has no foundation in reality.\u00a0 There will be no more real overall economic growth.\u00a0 How will the pie will be cut?\u00a0 The question of justice, and responsibility, and of the social and environmental contract, is now primary.\u00a0 We can\u2019t avoid it by positing growth that won\u2019t occur.<\/p>\n

What this means for nuclear weapons policy is simple.\u00a0 Ever-growing nuclear weapons budgets, as currently projected (which will need to be augmented because of inevitable \u201cordinary\u201d cost overruns and \u201cextraordinary\u201d additions to cover management fiascos, now almost routine) can be sustained only if the nuclear weapons enterprise and the broader military\/homeland security complex grow relative to non-military spending.<\/p>\n

Successful nuclear weapons modernization, if it is possible at all, requires further erosion of the U.S. social contract.\u00a0 In budgetary as well as in other ways, this would describe a politics of human disposability.\u00a0 We are at that point now structurally, as well as culturally.\u00a0 Our nuclear life-extension projects (LEPs) compete with human and planetary life extension, not just in terms of money but more so in terms of attention, career investment, and culture.\u00a0 We are entering a time when we have to make some responsible decisions about our national commitment to mass destruction.<\/p>\n

Make no mistake: current U.S. foreign policy aims to control as much of the world\u2019s critical resources as possible, with little regard for the fate of others.\u00a0 This is not working out well for us.\u00a0 The failures and blowback will only get worse if we persist.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile back at the DOE ranch, the \u201cpivot to failure\u201d that started more or less with the failure of Building 371<\/a> at the Rocky Flats Plant in the early 1980s, ramified throughout the DOE empire (\u201cU.S. Spent Billions on Atom Projects That Have Failed<\/a>,\u201d Keith Schneider, NYT, December 12, 1988), is still evident today in the stupid mistakes that led to the closure of the WIPP site, and in so many other ways.<\/p>\n

LANL\u2019s rush to meet a deadline this year stirred up \u2013 literally \u2013 chemical ghosts from the Cold War that had lain quiet for decades.\u00a0 We do not need the final results of multiple months-long investigations to know how dumb those chemistry mistakes were, and how negligent management was.<\/p>\n

There will be other such normal accidents<\/a>, at LANL and elsewhere in the nuclear weapons complex.\u00a0 A dozen (or 30 or 40) other examples could be cited, but the fact is that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), an agency that has been captured by its contractors and especially its three big labs, cannot manage large, complex projects well.\u00a0 The risk of failure in any given case is high.\u00a0 Yet failure is constantly rewarded.<\/p>\n

NNSA and DOE are sailing into a hurricane of converging crises, quite possibly led by inexorably peaking oil supplies and its financial and economic sequellae, with far too much sail aloft.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Season of the Witch Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences. We cannot avoid… Read More »Season of the Witch<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","neve_meta_reading_time":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2ZtEt-40","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":252,"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions\/252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lasg.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}