Moral Short Circuits

This week I've been doing some research on the next article in my series on digital fabbers and small-scale manufacturing. The next article will tackle the subject of organic and printable semiconductors and electronics. While I was digging up reference sources, I came across a very interesting article by Brian Martin, Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and an associate of Whistleblowers Australia, an organization devoted to protecting those who uncover corruption within our present systems of social power.

The article that caught my interest is titled, “Scientific fraud and the power structure of science,” and it deals with the fact that the great majority of scientific research being performed at present is funded by and produced for the dominant holders of political and economic power. He also states that this produces a strong tendency in the scientific community to produce statements that are not entirely truthful, even though they are usually convenient for the agenda of the agency or corporation funding the research. Those scientists who become genuinely convinced of a point of view contrary to that of the dominant interests usually find their careers wrecked if they voice their views too loudly.

All this has an interesting bearing on the present debate about the reality of climate change, and what, if anything, should be done about it. The “Climategate” controversy has been the rage lately, with right-wing voices crying loudly that “Climategate proves that all this 'climate change' talk is just a ploy to deprive us of prosperity and the American way of life!” But the truth doesn't support their assertions.

The “Climategate” denouncers say that e-mails stolen from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia prove that the scientists who say that global warming is real and that it is caused by our industrial society are deliberately falsifying data to make their case more compelling. I haven't read all of the e-mails; but let's assume that these assertions are true. This still leaves several troubling facts unanswered. First, the e-mails span a period from thirteen years ago to the present. But the CRU has been in existence since 1971. From the mid 1970's onward, it has been doing research on the effects of greenhouse gases on the earth's climate. Are the critics on the right going to tell me that the CRU had been doing bogus science all that time?

Secondly, the CRU was hardly alone in studying the effects of human activity on climate. The United Nations World Meteorological Organization also studied the issue, and in 1976 issued a warning that “a very significant warming of global climate was probable.” (Sources: Wikipedia and the World Meteorological Organization.) In fact, the study of man-made climate climate change has a rather long and distinguished history, starting from Svante Arrhenius in 1896 through G.S. Callendar in 1938 to the Cold War scientists of the 1950's and 1960's who sought to provide military planners with accurate models of potential changes to climate, to the scientists from the 1970's onward who built on the work of these pioneers. Are the critics on the Right going to tell me that all of these people were conspiring to “promote socialism and wreck the American way of life!”?

Third, though I haven't read all the e-mails, I have read at least one. It isn't the dramatic “smoking gun” that Fox News would like me to believe it is.

What does this have to do with scientific fraud, some may ask. Only this: the acknowledgment of the reality of global warming, and the role human activity plays in global warming, would present a huge moral problem to those whose activities most strongly promote global warming. Moral problems are inconvenient. Thus we have “scientists” who are handsomely paid to either deny that global warming is happening at all or to deny that human industrial activity plays such a pivotal role, and workers in scientific organizations who are handsomely paid to sabotage real science. Then there is the politically motivated watering down and temporizing of the reports that actually manage to get published. The denial or watering down of climate change facts does not threaten the powerful interests who are the patrons of modern day science.

For the record, I believe that climate change is real, and that it is caused by human activity. When my family first moved to So. Cal., there were many days in the winter that were decidedly cold. One October when I was in high school, the temperature dropped to the low 30's. Much later, in the 90's after I been through the Army and gone to college and had a few more “miles under my belt,” I was surprised to witness heat waves in November. I never had a problem believing in climate change (nor did I ever doubt the man-made damage to the ozone layer, especially after I, a black man, started getting sunburned in the summertime.) But then again, maybe I was hallucinating. Or maybe I'm part of some conspiracy to wreck the American way...

For further information, check this out:

• World Meteorological Organization

• The Discovery of Global Warming - A History

The Song Of The Coal Mine Canaries

The Association for the Study of Peak Oil has just released two new videos addressing the present reality of constrained global oil supply. One video is titled, “Acknowledging the Reality of Peak Oil.” Another is titled, “Peak Oil Reality - Production & Depletion Issues.” These videos feature interviews with oil industry experts Chris Skrebowski, Jeremy Leggett, Jeremy Gilbert, and Sadad al-Husseini. Mr. Skrebowski's credentials are impressive, as he is a fellow of the British Energy Institute and an advisor to the British All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil and Gas. Mr. al-Husseini is the recently retired executive vice president for exploration and production for Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia's national oil company. Mr. Gilbert is the former chief engineer of British Petroleum. Jeremy Leggett's career began with a background as a geologist.

These people know what they are talking about. In these videos, they don't speak in wildly emotional, intentionally alarmist tones. Yet the things they say should alarm every rational hearer of their words. Their message is basically that world oil supply will likely not grow any further, and is due very shortly to start declining. This decline will be due in part to geology (the exhaustion of existing productive fields), and partly due to the inability of the global financial system to provide capital needed to develop new, extremely challenging reserves (such as ultra-deep water and polar fields, shale and tar sands). Chris Skrebowski estimates that the yearly decline in production from existing fields amounts to 4 million barrels per day. Jeremy Gilbert states that, “...Peak Oil is happening as we speak, or...has happened...”

Meanwhile, the problem of continued American access to refined petroleum products is growing. Over the last few years, an increasing number of American refineries have been shut down due to inadequate profit margins for their owners. What happened initially is that there was a spike in the price of refined petroleum products that began in 2005 due to constrained oil supply. This spike was initially tolerated by American consumers. But as gasoline prices stayed consistently above $3.00 per gallon, the ability of the American consumer to bear this cost was eroded. The spikes and general steady rise in refined petroleum prices from 2005 to 2008 led to the general economic collapse we are seeing today.

That collapse has made it very hard for refiners to charge prices for their products that would lead to acceptable profit margins for them, as a large number of American consumers are no longer willing or even able to pay such prices. This is why industries that depended on cheap motor fuel, from airlines to automakers, and even to drive-in coffee shops and restaurants, all took a substantial hit from 2007 to the end of 2008, and it is why exurban housing developments built far from places of work in 2006 and onward began to wither.

But it is also why refiners based in the United States began losing some serious profits from the latter half of 2007 onward, due to their inability or unwillingness to charge enough for their products to maintain the sort of profit margins they had enjoyed in the years just prior to 2007. To illustrate my point, let's take a price of $3.25 a gallon, typical of the price of unleaded regular gas in the Los Angeles area around say, April 2007. In April of 2007, crude oil cost around $65 a barrel. Now $3.25 a gallon represented the price needed to return a certain percentage of profit to the refiner of the gasoline, after expenses such as plant operations, worker salaries, and the cost of the crude itself were paid. (Independent refiners are required to buy their crude before they can refine it.) If any of these operating costs rose, this would require the refiner to raise his price in order to maintain his profit margins.

Now in July 2008, the cost of crude oil was $147 a barrel. If refiners had felt the liberty to raise their prices to cover the full impact of this increase in cost of their raw material, the price of regular unleaded gasoline should have been around $7 a gallon. What happened instead is that gas prices rose to less than $4.50 a gallon in most of the United States. This meant that refiners were subsidizing American mobility by sacrificing their profit margins.

This sort of thing could not go on forever. The predictable result has been the shrinkage of American refining capacity, as smaller independent refiners have been driven out of business and larger refiners have begun to consolidate, selling off or closing plants in order to reduce excess capacity and cut operating costs. It has also led to an increase in American imports, not only of oil, but of refined products such as gasoline, diesel fuel and aviation fuel.

And it has led to a tightening of refined product supply and an increased likelihood of shortages in the near future. Gail Tverberg, an actuary and oil industry analyst, recently posted an online article titled, “As Refineries Close, New Stresses are Added to the System.” In her article, she describes how refinery shutdowns in the Northeast are causing one of the major pipelines on the eastern seaboard to be used at maximum capacity in order to maintain adequate flows of gasoline from Gulf Coast refineries. She notes that while there seems to be adequate gasoline supply at present, the system does appear to be nearly at its limit, and thus extremely vulnerable to disruption.

So it appears that the US (or at least parts of it) could be in a major bind at some time in the near future, and that this is due not only to our reliance on imports from a falling global oil supply, but to the outsourcing and shutdown of an increasing portion of our own refining capacity. What has been the U.S. response to this? “Cash for clunkers” and the bailout of GM and Chrysler, who have rewarded us for our involuntary generosity, not by building rail rolling stock or reviving our passenger rail system, but by continuing to build gargantuan monster trucks ans SUV's, and muscle cars like the new Chevy Camaro – a car that will easily do 0 to 60 in a few days once the oil runs out and you have to get a crew of young, strong bucks to push it up to the top of a hill to get it rolling. Sometimes I think we'd be better off if we had chimpanzees running the Federal government.

Meanwhile, if you live on the East Coast and you are reading this, I'd like to ask a favor. It seems that disruptions in petroleum supply are not widely reported in the mainstream media. This became apparent during Hurricanes Gustave and Ike, and I expect that it will be the same story if there are future petroleum supply disruptions. Since you all live in areas whose delivery systems may be nearly overstressed right now, you may find yourselves facing gasoline shortages again. If that happens, please let the rest of us know so that we can have an informed assessment of our national petroleum supply situation. Feel free to leave a comment on my blog, if you'd like. If on the West Coast or elsewhere I notice similar shortages unfolding, I will be sure to publicize them on this blog.

For Further Reading

• “Valero to shut down Del. refinery”

• “Valero posts steep loss on shutdown costs, margins – MarketWatch”

• “Dismantling the U.S. refining sector MarketWatch First Take”

• “Bloomberg news: Sunoco, Valero Shut Plants as Fuel Glut Beats Winter (Update2),” (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aZfIACtKTlSk)

When Decency Confronts Predation

Fellow blogger Stormchild recently wrote a thought-provoking post on her blog, Gale Warnings. The title of the post is “The Underground Railroad, 2010.” Her post makes a point about the role of decent people in protecting their fellow humans from the predations of the powerful. In making this point, she uses the historical events of the Underground Railroad in pre-Civil War America, the hiding of Jews from their Nazi persecutors in occupied France during World War II, and her own experience of being rescued from an abusive work environment by the intervention of kind and perceptive senior managers.

Speaking of workplaces, she writes, “A band of uninformed 'nice guys' does not a decent workplace make; it takes an understanding of the psychodynamics of abuse, sufficient perception to know that manipulative and abusive individuals are plentiful in organizations, and sufficient moral courage to resist manipulations and see through efforts to 'set up' non-abusive individuals to be exploited. This is a tall order, and when it happens, it usually happens because one or two people, placed where they can have an impact, are willing to see, understand, and refuse to play.” She closes with a prayer that this nation (yes, our own U.S.A.) might begin to experience an outbreak of decency, that people might rise up who are willing to “...recognize abuse, call it what it is, and do what they can to oppose it and to support those targeted by it...”

I say “Amen” to that prayer. My focus is the larger society at this time of economic contraction, resource constraints and widespread man-made environmental damage. We are facing an historic transition, and there are preparations that should be made by as many of us as possible, to insure the survival and well-being of as many of us as possible. Yet the making of those preparations is being thwarted for most of us by a rich, powerful minority whose members seek to continue fattening themselves by making a prey of as many of the rest of us as possible. Whereas the abuse that occurs in smaller group settings is often due to complex psychological factors, the abuse that is being perpetrated on a large scale in our society is due mainly to the sociopathic greed of the rich. “Resilience” is hard to achieve when you're constantly having to defend yourself from people who want to turn you into lamb chops.

A typical and repugnant example of large-scale abuse and predation was recently posted on another blog, Shalom Bayit. The author, Ahavah Gayle, wrote a piece titled, “Class Wars, followed by Return of the Robber Barons. Will the Serfs Strike Back? ,” in which she cited a news article about two towns in Kentucky whose water utility was bought by bailed-out insurance giant AIG in 2005. From 2008 onward, the utility began a program of raising water service fees to a level so high that at present, many residents are threatened with choosing between continuing to receive water versus being able to buy food. In November 2008, the utility announced that it was raising water rates by 51 percent, in an attempt to collect an additional $750,000 from a customer base of 8000 persons. By the way, Kentucky is not a rich state, and the residents of these towns are poor in comparison to the rest of Kentucky.

Such predations as these are taking place with ever-increasing frequency all across America. Yet there is very little visible outrage, as most people still seem to be hypnotized by television and deluded by the “American Dream” that promises that just about anyone can get rich – and by Gum, everyone should want to! If there was a genuine outbreak of decency in this country, what would it look like?

For one, it might look like people suddenly becoming willing to inconvenience themselves and link arms with each other in order to stop supporting predatory systems run by predatory masters. If I lived in one of those Kentucky towns whose water service decided to raise its rates to crushing levels, I'd be motivated to get together with my neighbors to create a safe, workable alternative to the water and sewer service. I'd save what cash I could, and use it to buy things like multiple copies of the Humanure Handbook. I'd invite people over to my house and we'd form study groups to learn how to compost our own waste and re-use graywater. I'd form a “rain barrel club,” and we'd be buying, refurbishing, scrounging or making rain barrels like nobody's business. I'd do my best to create an activist community of decent people whose “refusal to play” was able to bring down the strategies of those wanting to make a prey out of them. And it would be work, and it would be inconvenient, but in the end it would be worth it.

There are many systems, many providers of consumer “stuff,” many wealthy captains of commerce who by their sociopathic predation show that they deserve to be boycotted. But righteous boycotts almost always involve some inconvenience, because the targets of these boycotts have done so much to make themselves all-pervasive and seemingly indispensable to modern life. The more you turn your back on these providers and the goods they provide, the harder you will have to work to create alternatives for yourself. A point comes when you can't do it all alone; you need to rely on neighbors and friends, and they need to be able to rely on you, in order to create sustaining alternatives to the things that must be boycotted. I think of the black boycott of the bus service in Montgomery, Alabama, one of the hottest conflicts of the American Civil Rights movement. There is also the boycott of British goods instituted by Gandhi during India's struggle for independence from Britain.

May there be indeed such an outbreak of decency in this country that huge numbers of us turn our back on the predators who now dictate our course, and that we learn to oppose their predations. Let us not be lulled by false promises of ease or convenience into a continued silent support of these predators, a refusal to rock the boat, a default into just “going with the flow.” And may there be many who rise up to defend poor, abused people from their abusers – whether that abuse is relational, societal, political or economic.

Small-Scale Manufacturing and Digital Fabbers - The Question of Electronics

One of the consequences of the decline of available fossil-fuel energy is the contraction of our large-scale, global industrial economy. The decline in supplies of fossil fuels will make globalism prohibitively expensive as time goes on, due to the ever-increasing energy cost of shipping bulk-manufactured goods thousands of miles from their point of manufacture to their point of final sale. Many elements of modern society will therefore only survive via the revival of local, small-scale manufacture of goods.

The creation of small-scale, do-it-yourself digital fabricators (referred to from here on as “fabbers”), has been promoted as a key to the revival of modern-day small-scale manufacturing. According to many fabber proponents and enthusiasts, the rise of fabbers promises to do for manufacturing what inexpensive consumer entertainment electronics did for the creation of media. Whereas cheap consumer electronics enabled everyone to be a potential creator of art, education or entertainment, fabbers might enable everyone to be a potential creator of useful manufactured goods.

But for fabbers to serve as a true long-term solution to the breakdown of centralized industrial production, they must be able to create everything needed for sustainable localized economies – including parts to make more fabbers. To the extent that the making of fabbers requires parts or components that can only be made by large-scale plants in today's economy, to that extent fabbers are not really sustainable. One item of concern is thus the microelectronic components used to control fabbers, as these microelectronic controllers are now made in large, energy-intensive semiconductor chip plants. There are many issues of concern for those who want to try making microprocessors on a small scale, such as the very demanding and exacting conditions required for manufacture (vacuum chambers, ultrapure materials and clean rooms), and the energy required to achieve these conditions.

These conditions apply to all semiconductor-based microelectronics, though their impact varies depending on whether we are considering organic or inorganic semiconductor materials. Today's post will consider manufacture of inorganic semiconductor microelectronics. In this post, I do not promise to come to definite conclusions, but rather to raise important questions. It seems to me that these questions are too often not addressed by those who enthusiastically promote a “fabber revolution” as a solution to economic collapse. My posts on this topic are designed to provoke a conversation on this subject. There are four questions which I'd like to see addressed:

The Question of Energy

Almost all semiconductors in use at present are inorganic. (Liquid-crystal displays, some flat-panel screens and some RFID tags are notable exceptions.) Most inorganic semiconductor electronics are silicon-based.

In its natural form, silicon is literally dirt-cheap. However, the silicon found in sand and dirt is not nearly pure enough for use in high-speed electronics. The process of purification is not nearly as cheap. Metallurgical grade silicon (98 percent pure and above) is created by the reaction of high purity silica with other materials in an electric arc furnace heated to over 1900 degrees C. A method also exists for extracting pure silicon (purity greater than 99 percent) from silica by molten salt electrolysis. But this process also requires high temperatures (around 900 degrees C).

Electronic-grade silicon must be millions of times purer than 99 percent pure. The processes of this purification start with the aforementioned metallurgical grade silicon as a feedstock. They are all very energy-intensive, with the Siemens process (Chemical Vapor Deposition) having the highest energy requirement. Getting from beach sand to electronic-grade silicon is not cheap!

Once the silicon is at the right purity, it must be doped with trace elements in order to produce the desired semiconducting properties. This process is also energy and equipment-intensive, and requires a vacuum chamber containing pure silicon rods heated to 1000 degrees C. Many of the dopant chemicals are extremely poisonous, and some are also explosive.

Once the properly doped silicon has been created, it is cut into wafers which are etched and deposited with other dopants and contact metals in vacuum chambers in order to make the final microelectronic chips used in almost all modern digital devices. The processes of this manufacture are all quite expensive, both in labor, capital (machinery required) and energy. Modern digital devices are as cheap as they are simply because not much semiconductor material is needed anymore in order to make chips of great computational power. Yet energy is generally becoming more expensive as time passes, and shortages of dopant materials are also beginning to appear.

The Question of Dopants (And Other Exotic Materials)

The dopants used to alter the conducting properties of silicon and other semiconductors are themselves hard to find, hard to mine and relatively scarce in many cases. Antimony is one such dopant, used for both silicon and germanium semiconductors, and it has found extensive use in newly developed rewritable memory for digital devices. Most of the remaining antimony in the world is produced by China, and there is no U.S. domestic antimony production. Gallium is another material whose manufacturing users experienced a recent shortage, as was the case with indium also. Thallium is yet another metal whose supply has become constrained at nearly the same time that demand for the metal has increased. Many dopants and other industrial metals have witnessed Hubbert production peaks and are now in decline.

It may be that the electronics industry will experience a dead end in the use of certain elements within the next few decades, as the available supplies of these elements run out. This will mean a stop to the making of microelectronics that depend on these elements for doping. If continued advances in electronics are to continue, the industry will have to find alternatives to expensively produced inorganic semiconductors doped with scarce materials.

Hope On The Horizon? (The Promise of Exotic Materials)

Within the last few years, there have been exciting announcements of the discovery of exotic forms of common materials, forms whose properties hold the possibility of creating wonder microelectronics which don't need exotic dopants. One such development is the creation of silicon nanotubes, which have recently been fabricated into dopant-free nanotransistors by crossing the nanowires over each other and adding tiny metal contacts known as “Schottky contacts.”

However, the creation of these exotic nanowires requires a correspondingly exotic process. The first step is the production of silane from metallurgical grade silicon at a temperature exceeding 300 degrees C. The resulting silane is pyrophoric and explosive, and must be carefully handled. Then the silane is passed over a metal catalyst in a special chamber heated to at least 400 degrees C. This step is what produces the silicon nanowires. While the process can yield nano-transistors and other nano-components that do not require dopants, the process itself is still quite energy-intensive. One publication states that the silicon nanowire breakthrough may lead to “printable electronics” that can be produced by an inkjet printer. I myself am a bit skeptical. If someone could kindly explain to me how this would work, I would happily listen.

Concluding Questions:

The promoters of one particular fabber project state that their concept is the key to “wealth without money,” and that a society supplied by fabbers can “create wealth with a minimal need for industrial manufacturing.” They even talk of a society that is able to provide its own stocks of raw materials by turning crops into polymer feedstocks for fabrication by their fabbers, so that a cycle of wealth could be perpetuated (while reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the same time – a neat bargain!).

I remain unconvinced (but not dogmatically so). I think that, at least as far as energy and the resource-intensive microelectronics needed to run these fabbers, their promoters have overlooked the effects of looming scarcity, and the difficulties posed by the breakdown of our present industrial society. Has anyone made a do-it-yourself garage fabber that can make silicon nanowires? How about a DIY garage fabber that can even make metallic silicon? Are there fabbers that can make high-quality vacuum deposition chambers? Are there fabbers that can dope pure silicon without the risk of toxic gases leaking out and poisoning a few households in a neighborhood? Has anyone rigorously addressed the problem of obtaining large supplies of metallic silicon in an energy-constrained future? (This is the BIG question.) Most importantly, how much energy will all of this take? How long will we retain access to that kind of energy? The future I envision for electronics looks rather different from that of the optimists, but I would welcome further discussion and enlightenment on this subject, including some more rigorous numerical analyses.

The next time I address this topic, we will consider organic (polymeric) electronics. Stay tuned...

Sources:

• “Silicon” – Wikipedia

• “Materials and Processes for Silicon Technology” - University of Kiel, Germany

• “Metals Shortages” - Scitizen

• “NamLab Creates Dopant-free Transistor” – Printed Circuit Design And Fab, 1 October 2009

• “Nanowires key to future transistors, electronics” – PHYSORG, 26 November 2009

• “A Breakthrough in Silicon Nanowire Synthesis” sdf – Sensors Magazine, 6 November 2009

• “Wealth Without Money (BackgroundPage <>Reprap)” – Reprap.Org, 24 February 2006

A Year Of Consequences

There has been much to chew on recently for those who have been following the discussion of limits to global oil production. The latest round of news started with the widely publicized news that two unidentified whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency were accusing the agency of painting a much more optimistic picture of remaining petroleum reserves than is warranted by the facts. According to the whistleblowers, it was pressure from the United States that induced the IEA to make misleading and false statements, in order to prevent “panic” or the emergence of threats to American access to the world's oil supplies.

This was followed by a statement from Professor Kjell Aleklett of Uppsala University in Sweden, in which he flatly stated that the IEA prediction of 105 million barrels per day by 2030 is “unrealistic.” In Mr. Aleklett's view, global petroleum production is more likely to be 75 million barrels a day in 2030. The salient point of the Uppsala forecast is that in their view, global oil production has already passed its peak, and will decline from here onward.

An increasing number of independent analysts, academics and oil industry insiders is saying the same thing – that the world has passed Peak Oil and that we are now living in the twilight of the petroleum age. More and more “coal mine canaries” are singing from the same sheet of music. The only matter of debate among these experts is whether the decline will be gentle and lengthy, or whether it will be drastic and sudden.

I'm not an oil industry expert or a geologist. But I have always been partial to the Oil Report of the German Energy Watch Group. Part of my preference has been that this report contained some pretty drastic near-term predictions, and thus it would be easy to see fairly soon whether the Energy Watch Group was on the right track. Their salient prediction was that global petroleum liquids production (consisting of the sum of conventional crude, natural gas liquids, “oil” from tar sands, and biofuels) would shrink from around 85 million barrels per day in 2007 to around 58 million barrels per day by 2020. This is a fairly steep decline, and if the Oil Report is correct, we should begin to see the proof fairly soon.

Now another analyst has generated a report containing similarly drastic predictions. Tony Erickson, a volunteer analyst at the website The Oil Drum, has just posted his latest “World Oil Production Forecast - Update November 2009‎.” His key points are that crude oil production (excluding biofuels) has already peaked, and that global oil production will decline by 2.2 million barrels per day each year between now and the end of 2012. Thus the German Energy Watch Group has been joined by another voice predicting a drastic near-term drop in global oil production.

If Mr. Erickson is correct, this means that by the end of 2010, the world will be producing 2.2 million barrels per day less than it is producing now. Due to the critical role of oil and petroleum products in the global economy, this means the very real probability that the global economy will shrink involuntarily and uncontrollably. Many things that people in the First World are used to having will become much more expensive and/or unavailable. 2010 may well be the year of another oil price superspike. Thinking of the implications for the fragile global economy may wreck your sleep tonight.

In America, many of us may have to make sudden, drastic adjustments for which most of us have not been forewarned, and which most would have rationalized away even had they known. Whereas some European nations like Germany and the Netherlands will be structurally more suited to a world of lower energy (think bicycles and mass transit, just for starters), we may find ourselves scrounging for hastily thrown-together means of adaptation. Better make sure your bike has a good lock.

Some might say that predictions like these are unnecessarily “alarmist” or even “apocalyptic.” Maybe so, maybe not. We won't have long to wait to find out. As Wallace Stevens once wrote, “Let be be the finale of seem...”

The War Against Resilient People

Sometimes, I feel so low down and disgusted,

Can't help but wonder what's been happening to my companions.

Are they lost or are they found?

Have they counted the cost it'll take to bring down

All their earthly principles they're gonna have to abandon?

– Bob Dylan, Slow Train Coming

I'm not yet ready with a follow-up post on fabbers and small-scale manufacturing (I have to work a bit this weekend, just like last weekend), but I thought I'd comment on a couple of news stories I saw this weekend. There's the latest mainstream media report on backyard chickens, from USA Today: “Chickens come home to roost in backyards around the USA.” The article contains the usual photos of blond-haired children cuddling feathered “pets,” as well as listing the familiar benefits of increased food self-sufficiency.

But it also contains statements by politicians in various locales who oppose allowing city dwellers to have backyard chickens. Their objections are ostensibly about the potential for odor, nuisances, abandoned animals and unsanitary conditions. But Iowa City Mayor Regenia Bailey was quite a bit more honest about the real reasons for her opposition: her fears that the achieving of food self-sufficiency by city dwellers might undercut “regional” farmers in her state.

Then there's this article, “Saving The Bed-Stuy Farm,” about a New York inner-city urban farm that is now being threatened with demolition in order to make way for “affordable housing.” The trouble is that the farm has allowed many urban poor people to have inexpensive access to good, healthy food, whereas the “affordable” housing that threatens to replace the farm will most likely simply be “affordable” only in the initial terms of the loans issued to first-time buyers. The housing itself will probably be overpriced in terms of dollar amounts, and will require decades of payments in excess of $1000 a month for homeowners to pay off the loans they incur in order to buy this housing.

The icing on the cake is this item: “Senate Democrats Assured Of 60 Votes To Debate Health Bill.” The so-called health care “reform” legislation they are debating is not really about reform, but will require all Americans to buy health insurance. The only provision for any sort of publicly funded health care is the possibility that the Federal government might provide health “insurance” for people to buy. If the insurance industry can kill that provision, then “health care reform” will mean nothing more than forcing all Americans to give their money to private, for-profit insurance companies. These companies have embarked on a policy of raising their premiums at a rate that far exceeds the rate of inflation. The passage of this legislation will bankrupt large numbers of poor Americans.

The only real sort of health-care reform – a single payer system funded entirely by the U.S. Government – was never even considered by the people in Washington, who are much more interested in spending taxpayer dollars on bailing out gambling-addict mega-bankers, fighting unjust wars, and buying toys for the Department of Homeland Security, who now have their own police force patrolling the streets of major American cities like Portland, Oregon.

All of this is a sorry, yet accurate proof of a statement I made long ago on this blog, that we live and function under a corporatist system that forces as many people as possible into dependence on it, and that it actively opposes anyone who would create a safety net of alternative systems. Yet we seem to love it so. People I talk to at work don't pay much attention to politics or other deeper issues. Anymore, when I talk to them I can see the eyes of many of them glaze over. Maybe it's because they're lazy, or because they're scared of the unpleasant truths they'd have to confront if they did pay attention to deeper issues. Lately, I keep most of my thoughts entirely in my head.

I go to the store, and when I see the magazines in the magazine section, most of them are aimed at getting grown-up adolescents to buy stuff. When I get to the checkout counter, all of the magazines there are taken up with sex and celebrity – full of pictures of airhead doofus adolescent “grown-ups” consumed with their own “cuteness.” This is becoming true even at places like Whole Foods Market and New Seasons – stores which used to prominently feature magazines like Utne, Yes, Adbusters and Mother Jones. Even the so-called “progressive” flavor of mainstream media is increasingly used to maintain a corporatist status quo. The word “progressive” is being redefined to remove any threat to the continued concentration of wealth in the hands of an unrighteous few. The victims of these wealthy are increasingly left without a voice. Yes, there are blogs – but it seems at times that no one reads blogs.

Sometimes I feel so low down and disgusted...

A Place In Fabland?

Several months ago, I wrote a series of posts discussing small-scale manufacturing as part of a strategy of adaptation to economic collapse due to Peak Oil. My position then was that small-scale manufacturing would primarily be employed to make the simple low-tech tools needed for a much simpler life. In this role, it would enable us to continue to have reasonable access to things such as hand tools and bicycles. I had not seriously considered small-scale manufacturing as a means of maintaining widespread access to the gadgets that define modern life in advanced industrial society. But that was before I knew much about the global community of “fabbers.” As I wrote my earlier series, I devoted a small amount of space to the fabber phenomenon, but I didn't have time to do it justice. A couple of news articles over the last month have caused me to turn back again for a more complete exploration of this subject.

According to Wikipedia, a digital fabricator (also known as a “fabber” or “fab”) is basically a “small, self-contained factory that can make objects described by digital data.” According to many enthusiasts, fabbers have great potential for democratization of the means of production in industrial society. This is because of the following advances:

• The invention of small, inexpensive machines capable of producing three-dimensional parts

• The digital definition of three-dimensional part manufacture as an act of three-dimensional printing

• Increases in computational power of consumer electronics, including PC's and printers

• And lastly, the invention and widespread availability of new materials that can be easily formed, machined and “printed” into parts, in ordinary, non-clean room environments.

All of these things are now being combined into machines that promise to do for manufacturing what cheap and powerful consumer electronics have done for media. As powerful and inexpensive consumer electronics have combined with the Internet to turn everyone into a potential creator of entertainment or news or art, so the digital fabber revolution promises to turn everyone into a potential creator of useful manufactured goods. Just as the consumer electronics revolution has weakened the power of traditional producers of media, so the fabber revolution has the power to displace traditional, capital-intensive, large-scale manufacture of goods.

Thus some fabber enthusiasts tout these machines as technological miracles that will enable every garage to be a high-tech small-scale manufacturer of high-tech products. These devices are put forward as the definitive answer to our present economic collapse, and the key to continued prosperity over the long haul. But are they all these things after all? Are they any of these things? If fabbers are the miracle that their enthusiasts claim, this leads to a near-term future that potentially looks quite different from the darker future of enforced simplicity and technological retreat envisioned by many collapse-watchers.

What role will the fabber revolution play in the near-term future of industrial society, particularly in the First World? How will the fulfillment of that role affect our society farther on, over the next several centuries? Do fabbers have the potential to preserve widespread access to highly advanced manufactured goods? Or are there limits on all advanced industrial activity that ensure a collapse of industrial society? I'm sure that everyone has their own, instinctive, gut-level answer to these questions. Yet such gut-level responses must be examined to determine whether they are fact-based or merely faith (or sometimes, wish) based.

I don't know that I will be able to offer a definitive answer to these questions. But I thought a good starting point would be to lay out what we already know about fabbers, and to put forth pertinent questions that would have to be answered in order to accurately define the true potential of fabbers in dealing with our present collapse. My observations and pertinent questions are listed below, in outline form:

1. What can fabbers make now? (These are things whose manufacture has been reliably and repeatedly demonstrated.)

• Gross machine parts made of plastic and some metals

• Rudimentary control components, such as “printed circuits”

• Objects d'art

2. What things can fabbers not make now?

• Ultrapure microelectronic substrates (that is, substrates made from inorganic materials like silicon)

• Inorganic microelectronic circuits (maybe a fabber will be developed that can do this, but it requires creating ultrapure “clean room” conditions inside the average Joe's garage)

• Other fabbers. (They can make most of the machine tool parts, but they can't yet make the microelectronics used in control of fabbers.)

• Note: if fabbers are only practically useful when they have great computing power (needed for rapidly fabricating complex parts in 3D), then one won't be able to use a fabber to build another fabber until a fabber can also produce all of its own control circuitry and microprocessors.

3. What will fabbers will need in order to be self-replicating (or build their own replacements), with present-generation computational abilities?

• Feedstocks of ultrapure materials

• A source of electric energy

4. Ultrapure inorganic materials as a restricting condition

• Energy, Silicon and the Siemens process (and other processes). (All processes now used for purifying silicon and associated dopants, and combining these materials into appropriate semiconductors, require large amounts of energy. As access to fossil-fuel energy declines, these processes will become increasingly expensive.)

• Other microelectronic ingredients, like dopants, are increasingly scarce

• Less-pure forms of these materials are less and less remarkable, until in the limit, they are no more remarkable than the natural states of these materials. Useless for high-speed electronics below a certain level of purity. (Example: a galena crystal, commonly found in nature, can be used to build a crude AM radio receiver. But it takes much purer materials to build high-speed, high-performance microelectronics.)

• If energy is the limiting factor in producing these materials, energy is a limiting factor in a “fabber” revolution.

• Has any work been done in recycling microelectronics, beyond simply reclaiming the metals used in them? What is the energy cost in extracting and re-purifying the silicon, metals, dopants contained in an IC or larger chip?

5. Question: In a resource-constrained future, can suitably fast microelectronics be printed using less exotic materials? Can these be easily programmed to provide the sort of production control currently exercised by the electronics in today's fabbers?

• Answer: polymeric organic semiconductor materials are being developed for use in possible thin-film, printable microelectronics.

• Transistors and integrated circuits have been made with these organic semiconductors. How fast can they be made to operate? Current silicon-based MOSFET's can be switched at speeds well over 1 GHz (one billion cycles per second). Can organic transistors and microcircuits be made as fast? At present, they are not. (Circuit speed is a factor in processor speed, and thus in the speed with which a fabber controlled by such a circuit can turn out complex parts.)

• Are there impending resource limits on organic semiconductors?

6. In the spirit of the Precautionary Principle, are there any moral or ethical or other downsides to the fabber revolution? Are there potential negative outcomes or uses of this technology that haven't been widely forseen?

Anyway, those are the points for consideration that I was able to think of in a short time. Over the next several weeks, I may try to take a stab at a few of them, as time allows. Unfortunately, time doesn't allow this weekend, as I worked a bit extra on Friday and I have to go in again tomorrow for a few hours. If anyone else wants to take a stab at tackling these questions, feel free.

For further reading, check out these links:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-large-scale_integration

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_fabrication

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopants

• http://seekingalpha.com/article/55959-the-tellurium-supernova

• http://www.coolcomputing.com/article.php?sid=3334

• http://www.laserfocusworld.com/display_article/206960/12/none/none/Feat/Semiconductor-ink-advances-flexible-displays

• http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/homemade/0

• THALLIUM (a PDF from the USGS)

• “http://reprap.org/pub/Main/HintsForUsingTheStratasysDimensionRPMachine/DesignforRPmanufactureStratasysDimension.doc”

• “Wood's metal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”