Half Full or Half Empty? A Look at Renewable Energy and First World Demand

There are many basic presuppositions, conclusions and concerns within the circle of well-known figures studying Peak Oil, ecological degradation, resource constraints and the financial ramifications of these things. These conclusions and concerns form a body of commonly accepted “received wisdom” within this circle, and they frame the discussions regarding the seriousness of our energy and environmental predicament and the appropriate response to that predicament.

But those within the circle must beware of the tendency to form a closed society or “ghetto” that is cut off intellectually from the larger society. In view of the seriousness of the energy, economic and environmental challenges facing us, I think it's valuable to engage intelligent decision-makers within the mainstream in order to start and maintain a conversation regarding these challenges. (That is one reason why I like doing interviews – that I may ask, “Are we starting to see the same things?”.)

Thus I recently found myself conducting an interview with Dr. Slobodan Petrovic, a professor who is part of the Electrical Engineering and Renewable Energy programs at the Oregon Institute of Technology (OIT). Dr. Petrovic recently returned from a humanitarian mission to Tanzania, where he and several students from OIT designed and installed several small-scale solar photovoltaic projects for schools and hospitals. (You can read about it here.)

During our interview, we discussed small-scale renewable energy installations, the present peak of global oil production, and renewable energy prospects in the United States. My questions were as follows:

• Tell us a little about your renewable energy work on the African continent.

• It sounds like your work concerns renewable energy solutions applied at a local scale (neighborhood, district, or village) rather than a national scale. What constraints exist in African nations that prevent the execution of large-scale renewable projects scaled at a national level?

• Do you see such constraints at work here in the United States, particularly in economically depressed areas? Why or why not?

• Given the present contraction of the global economy and the continued decline of its resource base, what do you believe the most likely direction of renewable electric energy generation will be in the U.S. over the next 20 years?

• Do you believe that renewable energy technologies have a good chance of supplying a major portion of present U.S. energy demand in the near future? Why or why not?

• Is it possible that the U.S. will have to do some permanent "load shedding" in the near future in order to cope with a drastically lower availability of energy? What form would such permanent cutbacks take, and how can local neighborhoods prepare?

• What resource constraints affect current renewable technologies, particularly regarding strategic minerals located in poor countries with large indigenous non-European populations?

• In a time of economic contraction and resource depletion, what advice do you have for people who want to be engineers?

A podcast of the interview can be found at the Internet Archive, here. Feel free to listen and see whether we adequately answered the questions I posed above. Also, for those who live in the Portland metro area, Dr. Petrovic will be giving a talk in the near future on his work in Tanzania. I will post details as they become available.

Making The World Sick, One Country At A Time

(Warning: this is a long post.)

The predicament that marks the probable end of our industrialized society has two stages. The stage most easily visualized by many of the first thinkers on this subject has its roots in the Limits To Growth scenarios first analyzed by the Club of Rome. Its most popularized images look like scenes from a dystopian science-fiction movie starring Charleton Heston or Will Smith or Mel Gibson or Harrison Ford – famine and the failure of technology; poisoned landscapes and cities with zombies running in the streets; “World of Warcraft” meets “Survivor” – in short, a “hard crash.”

However, there is a prior stage to the effects of resource scarcity: economic upheaval and contraction. The images that fit this are found in Dorothea Lange Depression-era photography; scenes from John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath; the Dust Bowl; tent cities; people losing jobs as the economy contracts; people being priced out of oil-based “necessities” as prices continues to increase; and people being thrown out of their homes, having their things repossessed and living under bridges due to “lack of sufficient funds.”

The second stage may be coming shortly, but the first stage is where we are now. The response to the onset of this first stage on the part of leaders in government and commerce by and large is as follows (there are, of course, exceptions): 1. A refusal to rearrange the social/political/economic systems under their control to make them more resilient in the face of the disruptions of Stage Two; and 2. A manic attempt to sustain their existing systems, which are unsustainable, and for which the writing is already on the wall. The leaders in government and commerce are now diverting all available public resources to this attempt to sustain the unsustainable.

Preparing for industrial and economic collapse in all its stages is therefore up to individual citizens. The captains of finance, economics and government will not institute the necessary changes, because such changes would reduce their power, prestige and access to wealth. This is why it's up to citizens. Yet the very nature and policies of the existing systems and their masters actively hinder the efforts of ordinary people to become resilient in the face of collapse. This hindrance comes either through government policies and laws that make resilience difficult, or through economic arrangements that bleed ordinary people dry so that they have no resources left for building resilience.

Such is the case with health care in the United States, that act of formerly selfless service embodied by the family doctors of decades ago and television doctors such as Dr Kildare, Ben Casey and Marcus Welby. This “service” has metastasized into a money-sucking “industry” so expensive that whereas the normal delivery of a live baby cost less than $100 in 1950, it now costs anywhere from $6000 to over $12000 today. According to one source, American national health spending is expected to reach $2.5 trillion in 2009, accounting for 17.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Health expenditures are expected to increase at a rate of 6.2 percent per year from now to the year 2018, which is faster than even the most optimistic estimates of growth in GDP for this period. Part of the expense of American health care is due to exploding administrative costs. But there are other contributors, such as costs for prescription drugs that are rising at over twice the rate of inflation, cost increases for medical equipment and consumables, and inflation in employer-sponsored health insurance premiums which have risen at four times the rate of inflation during the past decade.

There's been much controversy this year over the possibility of Federally mandated health care reform. I really don't expect the Democratic or Republican Parties at any level of government to craft genuine reform of the sort that would lighten the economic burden for the recipients of that care. Some of our expectations regarding American “health care” may also be unrealistic, including the expectation that the Government can afford to pick up the tab for health care as it is currently practiced in the U.S. for all residents of the U.S. My suspicion is based not only on the unjustifiable rate of rise in American health care costs, but also on the fact that most of the wealth we could have devoted to equitable Government-backed health care and other safety nets has been squandered on covering the monetary losses of the rich. Our remaining tax revenues will largely be dedicated to servicing our large public debt, and the ability of our government at all levels to borrow additional money will shortly be severely curtailed.

I think it is also unrealistic for the masters of the health care “industry” - the doctors, hospitals, HMO's, insurance providers, drug companies and providers of medical technology – to expect that the system they have created can survive unbroken and unchallenged once almost no one but the rich can afford to use it. Already that system has priced 86.7 million Americans out of health care from 2007 to 2008. In 2008, at least 46.3 million Americans were without health insurance for a full year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2009 these numbers will only increase, due to the explosion of job losses, exhaustion of workers' unemployment benefits and continued escalation of insurance costs.

In short, I expect the nature and experience of health care to change drastically in the United States over the next several years. Increasingly, it will resemble the care provided in many Third World countries. Hopefully we will witness the adoption of some of the more beneficial and fair systems now operating in the Third World. Yet before we all rush to the countries of the developing world for inspiration and guidance, we need to see how the architects of the present American system of health care have attempted over the years to wreck viable, low-cost Third World alternatives. These attempts at wreckage were intended to protect and increase the revenue streams from the world's poorest people to the First World providers of expensive medical intervention and treatment.

The History of Western Medicine in the Third World

In his paper, “The Life And Death Of Primary Health Care,” David Werner writes that from colonial times until recent decades, the providing of Western medical service to the Third World was not equitable. The most expensive services were directed to the privileged, whereas health services directed at the “natives” were few, and were designed mainly to keep them healthy enough to work for the rich. But in the post-World War II era, there was a dawning awareness of health and health care as fundamental human rights. This led to efforts by rich countries to make Western medical practice more widely available in Third World countries.

However, this approach to expanded health care proved to be unsustainable, since Western medicine was too expensive even then for most Third World governments to widely support, or for indigenous peoples to use. This was partly due to the influence of budding multinational pharmaceutical corporations whose advertising induced a dependence on expensive treatments while eroding traditional forms of self-care. By the late 1970's it was widely recognized that the standard Western model of health care was failing in the developing world. This realization led to an international health care conference hosted by the World Health Organization in Almaty (formerly Alma-Ata) in the former Soviet Union in 1978.

Alma-Ata And Its Aftermath

The Alma-Ata Declaration of 1978 defined health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity...” This declaration set forth this health as a primary goal to which governments should strive, and deemed existing health inequalities to be unacceptable. In order to achieve the goal of universal health, the declaration proposed a “Primary Health Care” which was defined as “...essential health care based on practical, scientifically sound and socially acceptable methods and technology made universally accessible to individuals and families in the community through their full participation and at a cost that the community and country can afford ...”

The implementation of this Primary Health Care was to involve all major elements of community life, such as sanitation, the provision of safe and healthy food, access to clean drinking water, housing and other basic needs. Very importantly, this implementation was to be community-based, “...requiring and promoting maximum community and individual self-reliance and participation in the planning, organization, operation and control of primary health care, making fullest use of local, national and other available resources; and...developing through appropriate education the ability of communities to participate ...”

The Alma Ata Declaration was revolutionary its emphasis on addressing the root factors of health and giving ordinary people more control over their health and lives. It proved to be too revolutionary for the heads of the governments of the First World, who systematically transformed Primary Health Care into merely another program for extending conventional Western, top-down health services into the Third World. This was accomplished by the promotion of “selective” Primary Health Care by donor countries; by the increased shifting of costs of Western medicine onto end users (ordinary poor people) via “Cost Recovery”; and the takeover of health and social policies of Third World governments by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which enticed many countries into taking loans with ruinous repayment terms, then forced those debtor countries to dismantle their social safety nets as part of their repayment.

One word on “selective” Primary Health Care: one of its initiatives was the so-called “Child Survival Revolution” that focused on growth monitoring, oral rehydration therapy (ORT) (for diarrhea), breast-feeding and immunization. The approaches implemented in this “Revolution” favored expensive treatments sold by pharmaceutical corporations – especially the pre-mixed ORT packets that were pushed instead of homemade foods and liquids.

The gutting of Primary Health Care as a viable option, combined with the World Bank's forcing debtor countries to dismantle government-sponsored social safety nets, led to a deterioration of health in the developing world. In addition, the World Bank has insisted on privatization of services formerly provided by governments, and has been an active agent in expanding the role of private health insurance in Third World health care.

American-Style Health Insurance – Coming To A Country Near You

Private health insurance is a very fast-growing worldwide market. The insurance “industry” is especially interested in the developing world, where it grew more than twice as fast as in the First World from 1994 to 2004. The promotion of private health insurance is especially attractive to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), an association of thirty nations, most of whom are the richest in the world, and whose member countries are home to the largest multinational insurance and investment firms. One OECD study notes the extensive penetration of private health insurance in Latin America, while discussing strategies such as subsidized coverage in order to boost penetration in East Asia. However, even the authors of that study admit that the introduction of private health insurance “...might also lead to cost escalation, a deterioration of public services, a reduction of the provision of preventive health care and a widening of the rich-poor divide in a country's medical system.”

Private health insurance is threatening to displace other options, partly through advertising that seeks to induce dissatisfaction with public health care, and partly through the promotion by the World Bank of so-called “free market” policies and privatization of social services in Third World countries. In fact, since 1993 the World Bank has pushed a view of Third World health care as simply a means of enhancing worker productivity for economic growth – a view that is very similar to the colonial view of the purpose of medicine in the Third World: to keep the natives healthy so they can work for the rich.

Conclusion

Because of the power held by the medical and insurance industries in the United States, I expect that the present attempts by our leaders to “reform” our health care system will turn out as badly as the attempt by the WHO to implement the Alma Ata Declaration. As that declaration was thwarted by the rich, I expect that our health care “reform” will also wind up as simply another means of moving money from the pockets of poor people into the coffers of the rich. Ah, but that's what our health care system is already...

Sources:

• “Health Insurance Costs,” National Coalition on Health Care, http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml

• “Paying The Price: The High Cost of Prescription Drugs For Uninsured Americans,” Maryland Public Interest Research Group, http://www.marylandpirg.org/home/reports/report-archives/health-care/health-care/paying-the-price-the-high-cost-of-prescription-drugs-for-uninsured-americans

• “Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance Erosion Continues, Will Likely Accelerate Through 2009,” Elise Gould, Economic Policy Institute, September 2009, http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/jobspicture_20090306/

• “The Life And Death Of Primary Health Care,” David Werner, International People's Health Council Global Summit, 1995, www.healthwrights.org/.../Life_and_Death_of_PHC-Global_Summit_Sweden.pdf

• “Health for All Beyond 2000: The Demise of the Alma-Ata Declaration And Primary Health Care in Developing Countries,” John Hall and Richard Taylor, The Medical Journal of Australia, 7 November 2002, http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/178_01_060103/hal10723_fm.html

• “Declaration of Alma-Ata,” International Conference on Primary Health Care, Alma-Ata, USSR, 6-12 September 1978, World Health Organization, www.who.int/hpr/NPH/docs/declaration_almaata.pdf

• “Rich Countries and World Bank Must Stop Pushing Privatized Health In Poor Countries,” OXFAM International, 12 February 2009, http://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressrelease/2009-02-12/rich-countries-world-bank-must-stop-pushing-privatized-health-to-poor

• “The IMF And The No User Fees Policy In Health,” Sandra Graham, Jamaica Observer, 15 August 2009, http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/20090814T200000-0500_157495_OBS_THE_IMF_AND_THE_NO_USER_FEES_POLICY_IN_HEALTH_.asp

• “Private Health Insurance for the Poor in Developing Countries?”, Denis Drechsler and Johannes Jütting, OECD, August 2005

• “Is there a role for private health insurance in developing countries?”, Denis Drechsler and Johannes Jütting, German Institute for Economic Research, October 2005

Small Scale Manufacturing - Practical Resources

I had originally intended to discuss sources of practical knowledge in small-scale manufacturing at a later time. This week, however, I've been getting a lot of very good feedback from readers in the U.S. who are interested in small-scale manufacturing. Some of these people are even operating their own small-scale enterprises. So I thought I'd list the resources mentioned by these readers, in addition to listing a few other sources I have discovered.

First, there is the Open Source Machine site (http://opensourcemachine.org/), a source mentioned on another website by two posters who call themselves Fleam and Jokuhl. The Open Source Machine site is dedicated to providing potential manufacturers with small, easily-built manufacturing machines that can be made from recycled and reused parts. Plans for these machines are developed for free and published on the Web without copyright or royalty or intellectual property restrictions, so that anyone can use them. One of their projects is called the “MultiMachine,” described as “...a humanitarian, open-source machine tool project for developing countries.” The neat thing about the MultiMachine is that it provides many metalworking functions in one device that can easily be made from used vehicle engine parts. The Open Source Machine project site also has links to plans to build other machines, including plans to build an air compressor from scrap.

The Fab@Home wiki (http://fabathome.org/), contains information on buying or building desktop-sized“fabs” (computer-aided manufacturing devices) that can “print” 3-dimensional objects. Some of these fabs have been used for making watchbands, bicycle chainrings and sprockets, and bottles.

Then there is the Open Source Ecology Wiki (http://openfarmtech.org/), a site created by Marcin Jakubowski and others. Marcin has dedicated himself to advancing the field of open-source appropriate technology, and his wiki is a compilation of tools and knowledge useful to those who are trying to build safety nets to replace the present breaking economic arrangement. He also has a blog, http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/, and there is a podcast interview with him available at http://agroinnovations.com/component/option,com_mojo/Itemid,182/p,39/lang,es/.

There is also a site run by “Greg in MO,” who left a comment on my first post on this blog concerning small-scale manufacturing. He has a garage business which manufactures clothes drying racks and hand tools. He has some interesting insights on simplifying the manufacturing process so that it can be in essence, a “cottage industry.” His site is www.easydigging.com.

The Practical Action website (http://practicalaction.org) is hosted by the Practical Action group, “...a development charity with a difference,” which focuses first on development of local peoples in the Third World, then on matching appropriate technologies to their needs. They have a lot of technical information available for use, covering such topics as climate change adaptation, agriculture, construction, crop and food processing, manufacturing, information and communication, waste and recycling, and much more.

Village Earth (www.villageearth.org) is a “consortium for sustainable village-based development,” whose website also contains links to many appropriate technology resources, especially those related to small-scale industry. Payment is required to access some of their resources, however.

The AfriGadget site (www.afrigadget.com) is a blog which details the ways in which Africans are “...solving everyday problems with African ingenuity.” One post describes how an Ugandan woman made a homemade cell phone charger. Other features of this blog include its emphasis on “grassroots reporting” by Africans concerning African issues and African responses. These people are actually doing the things I detailed in an earlier post, “A Safety Net Of Alternative Systems – Citizen Media.” They also have posts on reuse of metals in the Kenyan ironworks industry, and the fabrication of hand tools.

Lastly, I would be remiss if I did not mention the work of bloggers Jeff Vail (www.jeffvail.net) and John Robb (http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/), who examined the topic of small-scale manufacturing in great detail long before I did. (See http://www.jeffvail.net/2008/06/rhizome-platform-design.html by Jeff Vail and http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2008/09/resilient-com-1.html by John Robb.) Their particular focus is on the “fab” machines I mentioned above. My only concern with these machines and others is that new, ready-made machines of this type may be out of the price range of many Americans, who would be forced to build such machines from scrap and used parts if they wanted to manufacture things as these machines do – as 3-dimensional “prints”. I think, however, that I may have a solution to that concern, as follows:

There are plenty of old computers that are not being used anymore because constant “innovations” and “enhancements” to the proprietary products made by major commercial software vendors requires constant changes to the hardware people use. These “enhancements” rapidly render older machines obsolete. However, these old computers can be put back to use for a wide range of applications, if they are run using a Linux or open-source Unix operating system. They can also be programmed with open-source software to function as the controllers in a computer-aided manufacturing process. There are also old appliances being discarded even though they have perfectly good single-phase motors. The relays needed to operate such motors could be scavenged from old relay panels used with legacy programmable logic controllers that are replaced with new models in industrial plants. An enterprising tinker with a knack in computer programming and systems integration could make his own “fab” from an old computer and the motors from such things as a refrigerator, a house fan, a blow-dryer, etc. As long as the parts made by such a fab were not critical to life and limb (no cardiac stents or jet aircraft parts, for instance), the things made by such a fab would probably be perfectly adequate.

Of course, there would be the need for machine interlocks and kill switches to make the fab safe. This would not only be to meet codes and OSHA requirements, but to prevent the very real possibility of losing body parts in the works of the fab. An understanding of good machine safeguarding principles would therefore be essential. But it might be possible for someone to construct their own homemade fab for less than $1000.

Where Does The 40 Percent Come From?

It is widely reported by several reputable sources that the United States contains five percent of the world's population, yet consumes 25 percent of the world's energy. According to the book Science And Technology in World History by McClellan and Dorn, in 1998 the U.S. consumed 40 percent of the world's oil, and in 2002, the U.S. consumed 25 percent of the world's electricity. And according to the book Globalization or Empire? by Jan Nederveen Pieterse, the U.S. spends 40 percent of the world's total military spending. If one digs a little, one can find statistics that show that the U.S. consumes a grossly disproportionate share of many of the world's resources. As a result, there are more cars than registered drivers in this country, there are more shopping malls than high schools, and 66.7 percent of Americans are overweight, with over half of these now being classified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as obese. (Source: http://www.ukmedix.com/weight-loss/the_fat_are_getting_fatter_in_america4370.cfm)

We are a nation that is busy pigging out and chowing down the American way, with no guilt or qualms over our conspicuous consumption, yet few people ask, “Where does the 40 percent come from? Or where does the 25 percent come from? If we only comprise five percent of the world's population, how is it that we get to consume so much of the world's resources? How did we get our hands on them? And what is happening to the people in the rest of the world? What do they get to consume?”

These are hard questions of the sort that are not encouraged by the masters of empire, lest consciences should be awakened. If the questions are addressed at all, the wrong answers are given. But if most Americans knew the conditions and arrangements under which such generous helpings of the world's wealth were delivered to them, many of them would never again get a peaceful night's sleep – at least, not if they had consciences that were in any way functional. For the answers to those questions have everything to do with lies, conquests, murders, unjust military adventures, crooked contracts, exploitative trade treaties and the support of corrupt, stooge foreign governments whose leaders sell out their own citizens for profit. And the mainstream media in this country do not report on these things. Do you want to see how American excesses of consumption affect citizens of Third World countries? Do you want to see the conditions under which many of these people are forced to live? You won't find much coverage of these stories in papers like the Oregonian or Wall Street Journal or Orange County Register or USA Today.

Too many of us are like my mental picture of a child of the First World living at the turn of the 20^th century in a large house in Africa or India, a child with all the material possessions that money could buy, who looks out his window every day at the poor native children in the street without ever asking why those children are poor and unhappy. But as for me, I'd like to know where the 40 percent comes from, and how we get it.

And it looks like there are a few people who are willing to tell the answer to anyone who is willing to listen. I am thinking particularly of a few noteworthy moviemakers who have chronicled the rape of the Niger Delta in Africa by multinational oil companies. One of their projects is Poison Fire, a movie made by Lars Johansson and others. This movie details how multinational oil companies turned the Niger Delta into an environmental and ecological disaster in order to satisfy the First World's thirst for oil. You can find out more about it at http://www.poisonfire.org/.

There is also Sweet Crude (http://www.sweetcrudemovie.com/), a film directed by Sandy Cioffi, which also documents the human cost of oil extraction in Nigeria – a cost about which the American and European mainstream media are loudly silent.

Watch these movies – if you dare.