Mike says:
I don't agree with George Monbiot's tendencies and solutions in general, I disagree with the remedy he has at the end of this article - and what could you say on this topic in one of our exams?- but in this article the problems he points to are quite well-founded, you can research them all across internet etc.
I have.
The following practice was pre-WWII, but the cold war gave it great stimulus.
Britain and the USA and some other countries used to have very large strategic stocks of fuel. food, raw materials, emergency elecrical generating sets ( sets = grupos) etc. They were a hedge. One of my friends used to work in an enormous store, acres in area,with its own generators etc for emergencies, packed several stories high with frozen fish. It was one of a network. (The fish were periodically sold off and replaced.)
All such precautions, and their undoubted cost, were constantly criticized, mostly by that part of the left that followed or worshipped or could be influenced by the Soviet Union, not just the miniscule or nonexistant communist parties, or believed in appeasement, such as the late Ted Kennedy. To the Soviets all such things were one thing and one thing only : war readiness, so they didn't like them and used every possible way to influence the West against them, just as much as against weapons.
So they spread the idea that to be in favour of "peace" you have to drop all precautions against anything from anywhere.
This "just-in-case, hedge" mentality was lost when the Berlin wall fell and the cold war ended. I don't believe plans and stocks have been wholly abondoned, just not updated nor well-funded nor even thought about.As if no other human or natural threats existed!
at the end I add a rather contrasting video
What links the banking crisis and the volcano?
my fisking in red
We rely globally on over-complex, over-strained systems. Act now, or wait for the much more brutal corrective of nature
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- guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 April 2010 20.00 BST
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- Article history
Man proposes; nature disposes*(* this saying was originally: Man proposes, GOD disposes. MEn(= males, as opposed to MAN = Mankind, humankind, humanity) shortly changed it to Man proposes, woman disposes. How long anyone has written Nature for God, I don't know.). We are seldom more vulnerable than when we feel insulated. The miracle of modern flight protected us from gravity, atmosphere, culture, geography. It made everywhere feel local, interchangeable. Nature interjects, and we encounter – tragically for many – the reality of thousands of miles of separation. We discover that we have not escaped from the physical world after all.
Complex, connected societies are more resilient than simple ones – up to a point. During the east African droughts of the early 1990s, I saw at first hand what anthropologists and economists have long predicted: those people who had the fewest trading partners were hit hardest. Connectivity provided people with insurance: the wider the geographical area they could draw food from, the less they were hurt by a regional famine.
But beyond a certain level, connectivity becomes a hazard. The longer and more complex the lines of communication and the more dependent we become on production and business elsewhere, the greater the potential for disruption.
This is one of the lessons of the banking crisis. Impoverished mortgage defaulters in the United States – the butterfly's wing over the Atlantic* (* part of Chaos theory: a final small incremental input in a system triggers a change of state, prverbially, one flap of a butterfly's wing in the Amazon is what unleases the cyclone which had been building up, then the cyclone crosses the Atlantic, ) – almost broke the global economy. If the Eyjafjallajökull volcano – by no means a monster – keeps retching(=vomiting) it could, in these fragile times, produce the same effect.
We have several such vulnerabilities. The most catastrophic would be an unexpected coronal mass ejection – a solar storm – which causes a surge of direct current down our electricity grids, taking out* (military jargon, * =Kill, destroy, eliminate, make useless )the transformers. It could happen in seconds; the damage and collapse would take years to reverse, if we ever recovered. We would soon become aware of our dependence on electricity: an asset which, like oxygen, we notice only when it fails.
As New Scientist magazine points out, an event like this would knacker* (informal slang, used for contrast and impact: * = to tire out, kill, maim, injure , damage almost irreparably. Originally, to knacker meant to slaughter old horses, a knacker's yard was a horse slaughterhouse. The British don't eat horses: the meat was for pets or was sent abroad. and old useless horses- now we apply it to cars, fridges, etc- were" fit for the Knackers'" or "sent to the knackers" If I say "I'm Knackered " when I arrive home, I mean I'm far too tired to do anything until I recover-if ever) most of the systems which keep us alive. It would take out water treatment plants and pumping stations. It would paralyse oil pumping and delivery, which would quickly bring down food supplies. It would clobber* ( slang again: * = to hit very hard and effectively, probably repeatedly) hospitals, financial systems and just about every kind of business – even the manufacturers of candles and paraffin lamps.
Emergency generators would function only until the oil ran out. Burnt-out transformers cannot be repaired; they must be replaced. Over the past year I've sent freedom-of -information* (* Both the Uk and the USA have FOI laws which require institutions etc receiving public money to make public their non-personal data, plans etc when so requested by any citizen) requests to electricity transmitters and distributors, asking them what contingency plans they have made, and whether they have stockpiled transformers to replace any destroyed by a solar storm. I haven't got to the end of it yet, but the early results suggest that they haven't.
There's a similar lack of planning for the possibility that global supplies of oil might soon peak then go into decline. My FoI requests to the British government reveal that it has made no contingency plans, on the grounds that it doesn't believe it will happen. The issue remains the preserve of beardy lentil-eaters ( in the UK lentils are not normal food , so this denotes vegetarian idealistic dreamer-types, and beards are uncool, unmilitary, and unbusinesslike) such as, er, the US joint forces command. Its latest report on possible future conflicts maintains that "a severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity".
It suggests that "by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall (= insufficiency) in output could reach nearly 10m barrels per day". A shortage of refining and production capacity is not the same thing as peak oil, but the report warns that a chronic constraint looms behind the immediate crisis: even under "the most optimistic scenario … petroleum production will be hard pressed to meet the expected future demand". A global oil shortage would soon expose the weaknesses of our complex economic systems. As the cultural anthropologist Joseph Tainter has shown, their dependence on high energy use is one of the factors that makes complex societies vulnerable to collapse.
His work has helped to overturn the old assumption that social complexity is a response to surplus energy. Instead, he proposes, complexity drives higher energy production. While complexity solves many problems – such as reliance on an exclusively local and therefore vulnerable food supply – it's subject to diminishing returns. In extreme cases the cost of maintaining such systems causes them to collapse.
Tainter gives the example of the western Roman empire. In the third and fourth centuries AD, the emperors Diocletian and Constantine sought to rebuild their diminished territories: "The strategy of the later Roman empire was to respond to a near-fatal challenge in the third century by increasing the size, complexity, power, and costliness of … the government and its army. … The benefit/cost ratio of imperial government declined. In the end the western Roman empire could no longer afford the problem of its own existence." The empire was ruined by the taxes, and levies(= forcible collection by government ) on manpower, Diocletian and Constantine imposed to sustain their massive system. Invasion and collapse were the inevitable result.
He contrasts this with the strategies of the Byzantine empire from the seventh century onwards. Weakened by plague and re-invasion, the government responded with a programme of systematic simplification. Instead of maintaining and paying its army, it granted soldiers land in return for hereditary military service: from then on they had to carry their own costs. It reduced the size and complexity of the administration and left people to fend for themselves. ( to fend for onself =buscarse la vida, vivir/sobrevivir autonomo, sin ayuda, tipo recien viudas, jovenes eman cipandose, etc). The empire survived and expanded.
A similar process is taking place in the UK today: a simplification of government in response to crisis. But while the public sector is being pared* down, ( to pare = to cut very thin, especially cheese, to cut off thin slices or shavings from something. It's the RIGHT way to cut Jamon serrano!--> to pare down = slowly decrease, with a series of small cuts. Cheeseparing is considered the epitomy of meanness and pennypiching by the British, who often apply it to the French. So cheeseparing, mean, and pennypinching are synonyms) both government and private enterprise seek to increase the size and complexity of the rest of the economy. If the financial crisis were the only constraint we faced, this might be a sensible strategy. But the energy costs, environmental impacts and vulnerability to disruption of our super-specialised society have surely already reached the point at which they outweigh the benefits of increasing complexity.
For the third time in two years we've discovered that flying is one of the weakest links in our overstretched system. In 2008 the rising cost of fuel drove several airlines out of business.( to drive s.o. out of business = to make s.o bankrupt or make their business impossible) The recession compounded the damage; the volcano might ruin several more. Energy-hungry, weather-dependent, easily disrupted, a large aviation industry is one of the hardest sectors for any society to sustain, especially one beginning to encounter a series of crises. The greater our dependence on flying, the more vulnerable we are likely to become.
Over the past few days people living under the flight paths have seen the future, and they like it. The state of global oil supplies, the industry's social and environmental costs and its extreme vulnerability mean that current levels of flying – let alone ( let alone approximately = not to mention) the growth the government anticipates – cannot be maintained indefinitely. We have a choice. We can start decommissioning this industry while there is time and find ways of living happily with less of it. Or we can sit and wait for physical reality to simplify the system by more brutal means.
A contrasting view:
Complex, connected societies are more resilient than simple ones – up to a point. During the east African droughts of the early 1990s, I saw at first hand what anthropologists and economists have long predicted: those people who had the fewest trading partners were hit hardest. Connectivity provided people with insurance: the wider the geographical area they could draw food from, the less they were hurt by a regional famine.
But beyond a certain level, connectivity becomes a hazard. The longer and more complex the lines of communication and the more dependent we become on production and business elsewhere, the greater the potential for disruption.
This is one of the lessons of the banking crisis. Impoverished mortgage defaulters in the United States – the butterfly's wing over the Atlantic* (* part of Chaos theory: a final small incremental input in a system triggers a change of state, prverbially, one flap of a butterfly's wing in the Amazon is what unleases the cyclone which had been building up, then the cyclone crosses the Atlantic, ) – almost broke the global economy. If the Eyjafjallajökull volcano – by no means a monster – keeps retching(=vomiting) it could, in these fragile times, produce the same effect.
We have several such vulnerabilities. The most catastrophic would be an unexpected coronal mass ejection – a solar storm – which causes a surge of direct current down our electricity grids, taking out* (military jargon, * =Kill, destroy, eliminate, make useless )the transformers. It could happen in seconds; the damage and collapse would take years to reverse, if we ever recovered. We would soon become aware of our dependence on electricity: an asset which, like oxygen, we notice only when it fails.
As New Scientist magazine points out, an event like this would knacker* (informal slang, used for contrast and impact: * = to tire out, kill, maim, injure , damage almost irreparably. Originally, to knacker meant to slaughter old horses, a knacker's yard was a horse slaughterhouse. The British don't eat horses: the meat was for pets or was sent abroad. and old useless horses- now we apply it to cars, fridges, etc- were" fit for the Knackers'" or "sent to the knackers" If I say "I'm Knackered " when I arrive home, I mean I'm far too tired to do anything until I recover-if ever) most of the systems which keep us alive. It would take out water treatment plants and pumping stations. It would paralyse oil pumping and delivery, which would quickly bring down food supplies. It would clobber* ( slang again: * = to hit very hard and effectively, probably repeatedly) hospitals, financial systems and just about every kind of business – even the manufacturers of candles and paraffin lamps.
Emergency generators would function only until the oil ran out. Burnt-out transformers cannot be repaired; they must be replaced. Over the past year I've sent freedom-of -information* (* Both the Uk and the USA have FOI laws which require institutions etc receiving public money to make public their non-personal data, plans etc when so requested by any citizen) requests to electricity transmitters and distributors, asking them what contingency plans they have made, and whether they have stockpiled transformers to replace any destroyed by a solar storm. I haven't got to the end of it yet, but the early results suggest that they haven't.
There's a similar lack of planning for the possibility that global supplies of oil might soon peak then go into decline. My FoI requests to the British government reveal that it has made no contingency plans, on the grounds that it doesn't believe it will happen. The issue remains the preserve of beardy lentil-eaters ( in the UK lentils are not normal food , so this denotes vegetarian idealistic dreamer-types, and beards are uncool, unmilitary, and unbusinesslike) such as, er, the US joint forces command. Its latest report on possible future conflicts maintains that "a severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity".
It suggests that "by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall (= insufficiency) in output could reach nearly 10m barrels per day". A shortage of refining and production capacity is not the same thing as peak oil, but the report warns that a chronic constraint looms behind the immediate crisis: even under "the most optimistic scenario … petroleum production will be hard pressed to meet the expected future demand". A global oil shortage would soon expose the weaknesses of our complex economic systems. As the cultural anthropologist Joseph Tainter has shown, their dependence on high energy use is one of the factors that makes complex societies vulnerable to collapse.
His work has helped to overturn the old assumption that social complexity is a response to surplus energy. Instead, he proposes, complexity drives higher energy production. While complexity solves many problems – such as reliance on an exclusively local and therefore vulnerable food supply – it's subject to diminishing returns. In extreme cases the cost of maintaining such systems causes them to collapse.
Tainter gives the example of the western Roman empire. In the third and fourth centuries AD, the emperors Diocletian and Constantine sought to rebuild their diminished territories: "The strategy of the later Roman empire was to respond to a near-fatal challenge in the third century by increasing the size, complexity, power, and costliness of … the government and its army. … The benefit/cost ratio of imperial government declined. In the end the western Roman empire could no longer afford the problem of its own existence." The empire was ruined by the taxes, and levies(= forcible collection by government ) on manpower, Diocletian and Constantine imposed to sustain their massive system. Invasion and collapse were the inevitable result.
He contrasts this with the strategies of the Byzantine empire from the seventh century onwards. Weakened by plague and re-invasion, the government responded with a programme of systematic simplification. Instead of maintaining and paying its army, it granted soldiers land in return for hereditary military service: from then on they had to carry their own costs. It reduced the size and complexity of the administration and left people to fend for themselves. ( to fend for onself =buscarse la vida, vivir/sobrevivir autonomo, sin ayuda, tipo recien viudas, jovenes eman cipandose, etc). The empire survived and expanded.
A similar process is taking place in the UK today: a simplification of government in response to crisis. But while the public sector is being pared* down, ( to pare = to cut very thin, especially cheese, to cut off thin slices or shavings from something. It's the RIGHT way to cut Jamon serrano!--> to pare down = slowly decrease, with a series of small cuts. Cheeseparing is considered the epitomy of meanness and pennypiching by the British, who often apply it to the French. So cheeseparing, mean, and pennypinching are synonyms) both government and private enterprise seek to increase the size and complexity of the rest of the economy. If the financial crisis were the only constraint we faced, this might be a sensible strategy. But the energy costs, environmental impacts and vulnerability to disruption of our super-specialised society have surely already reached the point at which they outweigh the benefits of increasing complexity.
For the third time in two years we've discovered that flying is one of the weakest links in our overstretched system. In 2008 the rising cost of fuel drove several airlines out of business.( to drive s.o. out of business = to make s.o bankrupt or make their business impossible) The recession compounded the damage; the volcano might ruin several more. Energy-hungry, weather-dependent, easily disrupted, a large aviation industry is one of the hardest sectors for any society to sustain, especially one beginning to encounter a series of crises. The greater our dependence on flying, the more vulnerable we are likely to become.
Over the past few days people living under the flight paths have seen the future, and they like it. The state of global oil supplies, the industry's social and environmental costs and its extreme vulnerability mean that current levels of flying – let alone ( let alone approximately = not to mention) the growth the government anticipates – cannot be maintained indefinitely. We have a choice. We can start decommissioning this industry while there is time and find ways of living happily with less of it. Or we can sit and wait for physical reality to simplify the system by more brutal means.
A contrasting view:
Notice the useful vocabulary should you wish to present or mention a contrasting view on this or any other topic:
to ratchet up* - a ratchet is a toothed wheel that will only move in one direction, so* =irreversibly increase, probably by a succession of increments
to overreact
a kneejerk reaction , which as an expression derives from the most standard medical test of involuntary (let alone unthinking!) reflex action.
a worst-case scenario
to assess risks---> risk assessment
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