Leaders and Liquids
by Dmitry Orlov
Editor's Note: Today's guest post comes from Dmitry Orlov, who most of you are probably already quite familiar with. For those who aren't, Dmitry has written two of the most insightful pieces on "life after peak oil" ever published: "Post Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century" and "Thriving in an Age of Collapse." Dmitry is one of only two person persons writing about Peak Oil and societal collapse who has actually lived through the collapse of an industrial economy. (the other being Dmitry Podbortis) Thus, he brings a particularly relevant point of view to our discussion.
Blog proprietors and news aggregators, please note: the article is Dmitry's intellectual property, I'm paying him for the privilege of being an exclusive licensee for a period of six months. This means quoting brief passages (50 words maximum being a general rule of thumb) and/or linking is perfectly fine. Republishing the entire article is not. For any who might protest, please investigate what it takes to run a "sustainable business"
-Matt)
In his 2006 State of the Union speech, President Bush said that "we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil.: After saying a few words about "incredible advances" in technologies that will have no effect on the demand for oil, he did propose an alternative transportation fuel: incredibly cheap and plentiful ethanol. I don't make much of his proposal, and suspect that it is just a bit of retail politics: Bush simply threw a bone to his friends in agribusiness. But I find it interesting for a different reason: I believe that, in tying together addiction and ethanol, Bush accidentally spoke his mind.
You see, ethanol is also known as ethyl alcohol or grain alcohol, and is found in alcoholic beverages. It is often simply called alcohol. When diluted with water, it is called vodka. Although it is most efficacious when consumed directly, mixed into a great variety of delicious, euphoria-inducing concoctions, ethanol can also be used as a gasoline additive. But putting it to such a use should seem like a bit of a waste, if not a sacrilege, to a former drinking man like our President. In essence, the President's suggestion for controlling our oil addiction is to pour a little vodka in the gas tank. And the question that arises in my mind, just as it must have in the President's, is this: “Why the gas tank? Why not the gullet?”
I find that many useful insights can be gained by drawing parallels between different empires, eras, and historical personae, and, as it happens, Bush's talk of addiction reminded me of another leader who also spoke to his people about their addiction to a certain liquid. That leader was Mikhail Gorbachev, and the liquid he was talking about was not oil but ethanol: he was kicking off his anti-alcoholism campaign. Being something of a teetotaler himself, he preached temperance, and instituted an alcohol rationing scheme. It was not a great success: a few years later, in many parts of Russia, not a sober soul was to be found, and Gorbachev's position had been eliminated, along with the rest of his government.
Isn't it an uncanny coincidence that the leaders of two great nations (one by now significantly less great) responded to dire circumstances by choosing to speak to their people about, of all things, addiction? And the coincidences and similarities do not stop there: as it turns out, Bush now faces many of the same problems that Gorbachev faced.
One particularly vexing problem, and probably the one that prompted Bush to speak of addiction and ethanol, is declining oil production. In Gorbachev's case, it was Soviet oil production that peaked, in 1987, a mere three years before his downfall. In Bush's case, it is global oil production, which has reached a plateau, and is now poised to begin a relentless downward slide. For Gorbachev, this implied that the Soviet economy could not continue growing, implying that his government could not continue going ever deeper into debt, in turn implying that his country as a whole was going bankrupt.
The implications for Bush are similar, because, just as Gorbachev did, he faces out of control budget and trade deficits, and unsustainable levels of foreign debt. The Soviet Union depended on oil exports for much of its revenue, and a drop in global oil prices, coupled with falling domestic production, proved lethal. The United States imports more than 60% of its oil, and rising oil prices, coupled with a dropping dollar, portend a similar outcome.
Gorbachev found himself mired in a disastrous war in Afghanistan, where his army battled an intractable insurgency. His shady arch-enemy was someone named Osama Bin Laden. The goal of the war was to install some expedient approximation of democracy, subservient to the needs of the empire. If you replace Gorbachev with Bush, and Afghanistan with Iraq, this will bring you up-to-date. (To be fair, it was Brezhnev, not Gorbachev, who was responsible for blundering into Afghanistan.)
Bush is hamstrung by his ideology just as Gorbachev was by his: free-market capitalist fundamentalism for Bush, central planning and socialism for Gorbachev. When key commodities such as oil or natural gas become scarce, free markets turn perverse, giving obscene windfalls to a few companies, while others are forced to lay off workers, shut down plants, and move production overseas. But then the free market is the only tool in Bush's toolbox, just as centrally planned socialism was the only tool in Gorbachev's.
Facing this strangely symmetrical set of problems, the two leaders reacted in an eerily similar way: they told their people that they are addicts and that they must overcome their addiction. The substance in question was in each case their source of national mojo: oil for Americans, vodka for Russians. In some ancient era, and in similarly dire straits, some archaic ruler might have told his subjects to undergo a purification ritual, to prepare body and soul for their kingdom's inevitable demise, or to perform sacrifices to appease angry gods. But these two leaders, their nations being in the forefront of science, opted for medical terminology: their citizens are addicted; they need treatment.
We all know what happened to Gorbachev: his anti-alcoholism campaign failed, as did his other attempts at reform, and he was thrown out of office by the old guard, who for a couple of days controlled Moscow streets using tanks. Their coup attempt soon fell apart, and then the Soviet Union was no more. Later, Gorbachev spent some time visiting with papa Bush in Kennebunkport, Maine, and, being a voluble sort of person, no doubt reminisced at great length about these events. One would hope that some of Gorbachev's hard-won wisdom had somehow rubbed off on baby Bush, who was presumably standing over by the bar mixing cocktails.
But then let us not forget that baby Bush is an authority on addiction in his own right. He has had plenty of personal experience with substance abuse, and this may have made him more congenial toward his fellow men, and more realistic about their chances of recovery. And so perhaps the subconscious message that is lurking behind the empty and pompous phrases of his State of the Union address goes something like this:
"Listen up, people! I got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that you are addicted to oil, which is running out, so you better get hooked on something else instead. The good news is that there will be plenty of alcohol. So stop driving, and start partying! Heh-heh-heh."
