Tag Archives: Pop Culture

Cars and More Cars …

 

Progress is always cars, more and more cars.

It was a bit shocking to discover John Mauldin does not have a Wikipedia page. Wikipedia pages are the measure of how important individuals and events are in the general scheme of things. Not being on Wikipedia is a bit like being a medieval serf. Gerald Celente and Jeremy Grantham have pages as do Root Boy Slim and Ed Gein. I almost feel sorry for Mauldin because he’s a nobody.

Economic Undertow likewise lacks the all-defining Wikipedia page, but this makes sense. The distance between the cheerleading, relentlessly propagandistic Mauldin and the dour Undertow couldn’t be greater. Mauldin has made a career in marketing, telling everyone within hailing distance we are living in the best of all possible worlds because of technology, that this- or that clever gadget is going to undo the damage we have done to ourselves with all of our other clever gadgets. Stingy Undertow makes a career telling everyone within reach how Mauldin and his ilk are wrong, that the sorts of items Mauldin pitches are actively making everything worse, that given enough Mauldins- and gadgets we will arrive at worst, a literal hellscape nobody in their right mind will wish to inhabit.

Yet Mauldins are multiplying like Mickey Mouse’s broomstick helpers in Fantasia. Time marches on, the shadows lengthen across our endeavors requiring an ever-more insistent chorus of straw man arguments, comforting lies and circular reasoning from fresher, younger voices. ‘Gadget spam’ becomes more persuasive coming from young and glamorous shills for young and glamorous Silicon Valley entrepreneurs … whose job isn’t limited to siphoning as much credit as possible in the shortest amount of time but to Saving the World.

The siphoning occurs when entrepreneurs offer narrative myths as collateral for financing which is diverted to the greatest degree into their own pockets. The gadgets are props.which tend to refer to older, well-established narratives that have become familiar by way of repetition. One reason for the “stagnation of physical technology” is that actual products are secondary to the myth-narrative marketing processes which offers immediate returns.

Saving the World is a standardized myth alongside the science fiction-y ‘city of the future’, a pastiche of memetic clichés retrieved from the waste-basket of Roaring Twenties pop culture:

We all know what the future looks like because we saw it in one of Dad’s old comic books. It ‘s the ideal of urban colonialism: goofy towers and gated neighborhoods for the rich, slums or sidewalk sleeping space for the non-rich. (Graphic from Arconic via InHabitat)

Why I’m So Excited About Solar and Batteries

Atoms technologies might bring back fast productivity growth (They won’t)

By Noah Smith

In the 70s, innovation shifted toward information technology. What had seemed like a constant march toward faster transportation and more useful appliances broke down. When technologists grouse about flying cars or writers ask where our hoverboards are, they’re really talking about the stagnation in physical technology, and the shift in innovation from “atoms” to “bits”. Instead of the Jetsons future, we got the cyberpunk future.

Why did that happen? One potential answer is “regulation”. But while building codes undoubtedly kept us from building as many gleaming Jetsons towers as we might have liked, regulation wasn’t powerful enough to stop us from sprawling out into the exurbs or doubling floor space per person. And the productivity slowdown was global; other countries got bullet trains, but they didn’t get flying cars or robot housekeepers.

‘The Jetsons’ was a cartoon TV show from the early 1960s. ‘Cyberpunk’ is a derivative of 1950s and 60s New Wave science fiction. Our future turns out to be our past, our works are monuments to nostalgia. “Regulation” is a straw man. The practical reasons for  ‘post-modernistic’ urban schemes as well as exurban sprawl is the  spacial requirements of the automobile industry. We don’t have hoverboards or robot housekeepers — or bullet trains for that matter — because we lack the physical, temporal and financial resources to have these things plus a billion cars at the same time. We made the fool’s choice, at every opportunity we’ve chosen cars. We are now living the consequences, one of which is systemic bankruptcy. Empty narratives and Ponzi schemes are all we can afford:

Noah: And there’s no end in sight to this revolution. New fundamental advances like solid state lithium-ion batteries and next-generation solar cells seem within reach, which will kick off another virtuous cycle of deployment, learning curves, and cost decreases.

John: I have written for years that Peak Oil is nonsense. Longtime readers know that I’m a believer in ever-accelerating technological transformation, but I have to admit I did not see the exponential transformation of the drilling business as it is currently unfolding. The changes are truly breathtaking and have gone largely unnoticed.

There was no end in sight for the hydraulic fracturing revolution, last season’s magic trick aimed at ushering an extended period of practically unlimited, low-cost energy and fast productivity growth. Something happened on the way to the orgy: a lot of oil and natural gas was extracted from 2 million wells largely in the US, but … The country is still reliant on fuel imports, the promised GDP growth never materialized and the fracking enterprise itself has been unable to generate a profit. Since 2009, prices for crude oil and gas have remained stubbornly below the level needed to meet the actual top line money-costs of the fracking process. This left frackers dependent on their own lenders compared to the conventional oil giants such as Exxon and Saudi Aramco who rely on the borrowing capacity of their customers. As loans dried up, the fracking industry flat-lined leaving  hundreds of bankruptcies and questions about whether fracking can ever be a going concern.

Meanwhile, the industry’s non-money costs continue to compound: extreme depletion rates of fracked plays, accelerated resource depletion generally (including climate change), opportunity- and time related costs, high well decommissioning costs x millions of wells; excess water use, aquifer contamination, excess methane- and other toxic gas emissions, wasteful flaring, soil erosion, damage to the landscape and other infrastructure, loss of goodwill, public- and political opposition, regulation, lawsuits and injunctions, etc. All of these costs were intended to be catapulted into the distant future (or ignored). Fracking does access otherwise useless reserves as intended  but the aggregate costs threaten to undermine the solvency of the entire petroleum industry, hastening its ruin and making economy-killing fuel shortages a matter of decades if not years.

The battery industry is faced with a similar array of costs plus its own, such as the expense to dispose of depleted batteries. Like other science fiction-y gadgets of our post-growth era, batteries are a complex, high-technology substitute for relatively simple existing system. A Tesla Model S lithium battery pack stores 100+ KwH of power, the Toyota Camry’s 15.8 gallon gasoline tank stores 532.5 KwH equivalent: the Toyota won’t brick if the tank runs dry. At issue is the low energy density for batteries relative to the higher density of liquid fuel. This factors to GDP growth as returns on the energy dense liquid fuels have been faltering for some time. It is difficult to see how substituting low density batteries will accomplish anything but to kill off growth entirely.

Noah does not have a Wikipedia page, either, but he does lead a platoon of straw men:

We Will Not Ban Cars

Electric vehicles are crucial for fighting climate change

By Noah Smith

I must also sadly point out that the anti-car rhetoric now proliferating among certain circles is overdone. For example, writing in the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo, citing many of the problems I describe above, dismisses the idea that electric vehicles should be our main tool for decarbonizing transportation. And my friend Darrell Owens, who is one of the activists I respect most, has similar thoughts.

Meanwhile, “ban cars” has become a Twitter slogan, and the notion that electric cars are overrated as a tool for fighting climate change has become commonplace in the world of op-eds.

Anyone who has been to Japan knows that their entire urban model is based around trains. Instead of talking about what street a shop or restaurant is on, Japanese people will tell you what train station it’s near. When you search for an apartment in Japan, “distance from train station” is one of the major variables you put in.

And yet despite building their entire country around trains, Japanese people also own quite a lot of cars!

‘Banning cars’ is a straw man, so is the notion that any second-guessing car hegemony in New York Times or on Twitter is meaningful. Moral objections to the car enterprise and its destructiveness will certainly gain force but not now. Opposition to cars generally is microscopic when held next to the gigantic marketing efforts and structural subsidies of- and for car makers and their dependencies. Japanese car use is a straw man insisting there are but two choices, buying slightly fewer cars or buying more of them. So is the notion electric vehicles are crucial for fighting climate change; this is an unprovable assertion from another straw man. What is provable by way of coronavirus is driving less reduces vehicle emissions overall and lowers fuel consumption. It follows zero cars means reductions far below those levels across the entire auto- related industry ambit.

Noah is right, we won’t ban cars, instead, we will do whatever we can to keep them including shoveling our economies, our planetary life support system and ultimately ourselves into the fire. Auto use has become so integral to human life anything other than its continuation is unthinkable, even in 3d world countries. Cars have become the axle around which the modern world spins; the largest single industry, the great consumer of fuel and other resources, Our kitchens have migrated 15 miles from the bathrooms; we’re stuck. Meanwhile, we are confronting peak oil related fuel shortages and disruptions due to carbon emissions that are an existential challenge to the car enterprise. This is in addition to long-rationalized external costs; mass highway deaths, air– and water pollution, non-climate resource constraints, the undermining /slash/ overthrowing of decision making institutions and credit dependence.

An actual emergency would require something other than marketing gestures, Experience shows societies will do what they need to when conditions warrant. The only question is whether our current state of decline requires something other than trivial adjustments at the margins. Noah and John Mauldin want to sell more cars. Undertow knows we have no choice but to get rid of them before they get rid of themselves and take us with them. At some point our pointless, non-remunerative ‘investment’ in auto use will be undone by force of events. The  American way of waste has run aground on the rock of its own costs. Pressing onward with more extreme and expensive gambits won’t lead the way to Japan but to Venezuela or Syria or worst.

What you done for your car, today? We can’t know the future but the present offers clues: a relentless and violent deterioration of the human condition around the world. Syrian government armor prowls the ruins of Homs in 2013. By 2016 the Syrian army had been largely destroyed by Islamic militants. Unknown photographer

Beginning in the 1960s, US oil reserves began to decline and the country found it necessary to import fuel, Dependence increased on external sources such as Mexico, Canada and Middle East countries. The 1973 oil shock followed by the 1980 Iran-Iraq war stunned an American economy that had become dependent on car manufacturing and development. Depletion — a scale related real cost — had not been expected to emerge until the far distant future. Innovators in the 60s and 70s could not imagine a technology that could displace gas and oil  and they still can’t. That’s why the focus is on batteries, a technology from the 19th century!

There were frantic attempts to cope, everything but conservation and abandoning the car-based lifestyle. There was wage arbitrage, the offshoring of US jobs — more jobs were shipped out than would have been lost if the car industry had shut down — the opening borders to millions of undocumented workers, deregulation of finance and industry, neoliberalism generally. There was union busting, bubble economies, China opening, the jettisoning Bretton-Woods international monetary regime for the Plaza Accord depreciation of the dollar, the rise of the euro and the EU, the Carter Doctrine, the emergence- then dominion of central banks, decades of futile, ruinous US wars. All of these were intended as hedges against real fuel price increases and declining energy returns on our (massively expanding) car investment. Comes now ‘New, Improved’ battery cars, full of spammy sound and fury: another miserable hedge.

The idea that electric cars will break our trajectory of decline is the face of experience is either dumb or purposefully, misleading. Cars cannot earn, driving the car does not pay for it. Driving is a distraction, a form of entertainment, cars are status symbols by intention. Driving cannot pay for the rest of the enormous car ecosystem; what pays is debt, in in increasingly astronomical amounts. Greater numbers of more complex and costly vehicles equals more debt. Nobody can say when the regime breaks down but when it happens it will be too late to do much (or anything) about it.

What does this mean for our children? The alarms from those who interest themselves in longer-term outcomes are sobering. The debts — both the money kind and the environmental variety will be repaid one way or the other. An unlivable planet; for what? A goddamned car?

Smith, Mauldin and the rest appear not understand how industrial economies work.  Processes are singular, uni-directional, constrained by thermodynamics and capital (resource) availability. No power of will can outmaneuver entropy which is a law unto itself. The so-called visionaries of the comic book world made believe that it is possible to cheat physics by simply inventing claims then pressing them home against third parties. The third parties are us, there is no one else. At some point there becomes an excess of claims: third parties are too poor, the debt collector is at the door, capital is out of reach, society itself is bankrupt.