Friday, January 04, 2008

Over-Population and the Price of Gas in Flagstaff


Oil prices kissed one hundred bucks a barrel yesterday for the first time in history, only slightly mitigated by the fact that a buck ain’t packing all that much of a bang these days. But that’s a psychological barrier, so everybody starts waxing philosophical about the future of the planet, etc. Don’t worry about the planet. That’s the problem- human arrogance, to think that ‘the planet’ is all about us, and only us. The planet will do just fine. Don’t worry about you and yours either. You’ve never had it so good. Don’t even bother worrying about ‘life’. Bacteria are quite resilient, around almost as long as there’s been something liquid to swim in, even surviving ‘global freezing’ a full hundred million years before the Cambrian ‘explosion.’ ‘Global warming’? Piece of cake, at least for the gigajillions of bacteria that we host symbiotically. They’ll find other sources of food, even without our plumbing systems. If you want to worry about something, worry about the species. There’s good reason, not least of which is the fact that almost all that have ever existed are now extinct. The fact that our intelligence gives us an advantage is easily outweighed by the fact that it also causes most of our problems. A dumber species might do better in the long run, if only they’d stop breeding so much.

We’re victims of our own success. Evolutionary success is equivalent to reproductive success, usually. We humans have to change all these equations to suit current fashion, so that now cultural evolution is arguably more important than the biological kind. That’s too bad, because we sure now how to screw, up a good thing, that is. Will we ever be content just going through the motions? As always, time tells. For millennia the overriding principle of life was to reproduce it, the more the better, ‘family values’ defining our interactions and even reaching the status of religion Back East. Wars used to be fought to capture people for resettlement and lineage expansion, long before anyone thought of putting up borders to keep them out. So now that we’ve conquered the planet how do we conquer ourselves, our desires, our traditions, our obsessions? After all, global warming is only a problem because there are billions of us producing it. If there were only a billion of us world-wide, you could drive all the Buicks and Pontiacs you wanted. Over-population was an eighties problem, largely forgotten since China dealt with it, however haphazardly, on their own front. China’s good at seeing the writing on the wall, even in foreign alphabets. India will pass them in population soon, and others are making up for lost time also.

We sometimes worry about those billion or so ‘yellow devils’ ‘over there’ creeping through the cracks into Chinatowns and Chinese restaurants around the world, General Tso’s ultimate strategy of infiltration through the stomach and bowels, unlike the Western obsession with hearts and minds. Given their traditional obsession with cash income in all trade relationships, our mutual relationship runs sweet and sour. They invented it, after all, paper money and playing cards. The Opium Wars were more about currency than drugs, at least the first time. Opium was currency, the only product they would accept besides silver. The rest is history. I assure you they worry much more about those billion ‘white barbarians’ surrounding them on all sides, i.e. Europe, America, and Australia. India’s right there, equal in total numbers, especially if you add their sub-continent and cultural neighbors Nepal and Sri Lanka. Islam accomplishes with dogma what India failed to accomplish with karma, bringing Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia over to their camp to surpass a billion. The population race is in a dead heat, emphasis on ‘dead.’ Maybe it’s time to lay down our crosses and swords, penises and wombs, and call it a truce. Modern warfare certainly no longer depends on the human wave assault. Words defeat the sword; information defeats bombs.

Limit reproduction to two children ABSOLUTELY and see how many of our problems might go away. Instead of giving tax credits for more children, give tax credits for less. After all, cultural evolution allows for many forms of satisfaction, not just watching your sons and daughters grow up to despise you. The main ‘proof’ for global warming is that chart of ‘inconvenient truth’ showing a spike in temperature that coincides perfectly with the spike in the industrial revolution’s exhaust emissions, first coal, and then oil. Has nobody noticed that that graph also coincides with the spike in population that equally defines our epoch? After steady population growth since the origin of food production some ten thousand years ago, from around the year -500 BCE to around 500 CE the world population remained relatively stable, stuck at around a hundred million or so, at least a quarter of them in China. It only managed to double in the next thousand years, given devastating political turmoil and the growth of cities, a great career move for bacteria and viruses. Then the playing field went berserk. As the ‘Pax Britannica’ eventually won out internationally and Materia Medica won out internally, that stalemate changed radically. The Industrial Revolution created the wealth, in real terms, to sustain large families, with fewer of them now dying. Even Chomsky will admit that we’re richer than ever, albeit with lingering problems. Only Africa has been systematically left out of the prosperity, with life expectancies still hovering around the low forties in many countries. The world got its first billion simultaneously living inhabitants right around 1830. It got its sixth billionth right around… wait a minute…

What I want to know is why, with oil hovering at a hundred dollars a barrel, is gasoline hovering locally at three dollars a gallon, the same as when oil was selling between sixty and seventy dollars a barrel? That would be due to certain, uh, psychological factors, right? Supply and demand, right? Tell that to the poor guy trying to feed his family in the Third World outback. Don’t blame America. Prices, if anything, are MORE in the third world; the US, by comparison, tends to be cheap. In highly competitive Thailand, prices, at current exchange rates, are right at four dollars a gallon for the premium grades. In quasi-Communistic Cambodia, they are at least that for the low-grade blends, ditto for Canada and their integrated NAFTA economy. The recent riots in Burma were sparked by a sudden increase in gas prices. Riots had already occurred in Indonesia, an oil-producing nation, for the same reason. Without Communism to keep it honest, it seems that capitalism no longer is. Is Islamistan any better? The USSR used to subsidize her satellites; does Arabia? She must, if Egypt can sell gas at $.65 a gallon, less than Kuwait or Riyadh. Egypt doesn’t produce any. It’s only $.12 right now in Caracas. What does that say? How much is dependent on local real estate prices or political considerations or profit margins, and how much goes to government taxes anyway? Gasoline is currently selling at $1.74 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the U.S. commonwealth territory. It is exempt from most US taxes. Remember what the price of a barrel of oil was in 1998? I bet you don’t. It was twelve dollars. Have things changed that much in ten years, be it supply, demand, output, income, China, America, Europe, or Islam? Oh yeah, I almost forgot… 9-11, that explains everything.

We’ll lose the battle against global warming without renewed population control efforts. I can think of a thousand reasons to control carbon emissions, but that’s just not enough to reverse global warming. We will lose that battle. Any thought that the oil will run out before the heat becomes too much ignores coal, which is not only dirtier, but which will never run out. Any more questions?

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