verging_on_random

The hidden costs of peak oil

In typical capitalist fashion, we are being told that the market will resolve any problems caused by the looming oil shortage. As oil becomes more expensive, the argument goes, it will become more economic to produce biofuels. Hundreds of square kilometres of crops like sugar cane that has to be propped up by public subsidies and grapes used to make cask wine will become valuable sources of fuel for cars, once they have been transported to the Middle East and buried in the sand … or something, I’m not completely au fait with the technology involved.

Unfortunately this move to biofuels threatens to have unanticipated consequences. Crops that are currently used to make food that is actually useful might get appropriated for the biofuel industry. The first such casualty is the Italian spaghetti industry.

The pasta crisis is the latest in what may soon be a regular rise in global prices. In January, Mexican consumers were hit with a tortilla crisis, as grain prices doubled and tripled the cost of tortillas and caused riots in some places. Beer prices in Germany ticked upwards in May partially due to the increased production of biofuels.

Soon, the sight of shapely Italian women harvesting the spaghetti that has ripened overnight might be just a memory.

The art of al picente, or knowing exactly which strands of spaghetti are ready to slip off the tree with minimal effort from the picker may soon be a thing of the past, like barrel making and changing typewriter ribbons.

It’s enough to make a man sell his car and look for a good sound horse.

Grow local

One of the minor joys of winter in this part of the world is that it’s custard apple time. I don’t think supermarkets like custard apples much; they come in unpredictable shapes and sizes, they bruise easily and they go black if they’re stored in a coolroom (which is where supermarkets like to store all their fruit and veg, thus ensuring that things like onions end up slimy and rotten a short time after you get them home … but I digress). Anyway the custard apples you can buy at our local roadside stalls are terrific; whoever named them ‘apples’ had a vivid imagination but the ‘custard’ bit is spot on.

Thinking about local specialities reminded me that there are so many vegetables that should be grown in the semi-tropical regions of Australia instead of all those English things that we’ve been eating since the 19th century. Some that i found did marvellously included okra:

Lima beans (they produce virtually all year round with none of the diseases that hit French beans in the humid weather):

Snake beans (similar comment, although they need hot weather so only do well from December through to May); I used to grow the dwarf variety but can’t find a picture. Others that thrive are gourds,

yam beans,

various eggplant varieties that you rarely see in shops,

and a climbing zucchini called tromboncino.

The best find of all was called Malibar spinach; it grew as a vine and you could eat the leaves raw or lightly cooked. It made a terrific substitute for lettuce in summer, which tends to run straight to seed in this climate.

Oh and tomatillo, which kept producing through autumn when most ordinary tomato plants can’t cope with the humidity,

and soybeans.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few others, but these are the vegetables that people should be growing up here in the warmer months. Yet most of my neighbours used to prod suspiciously at these foreign-looking things, politely refuse the offer to take some home and try them, and keep whining that mildew and rust and other tropical diseases were defeating their efforts to grow the peas and beans and silverbeet that used to do so well in Melbourne. They’d sniff at a beautiful shiny gourd and ask plaintively “But what do you do with it?” “Cook the fuckin’ thing and eat it” I was tempted to reply.

I used to think that sooner or later some enterprising grower would begin producing this sort of local produce and people would learn to love it, just like my parents’ generation learnt how to enjoy exotic stuff like zucchini and capsicum, but I fear it will never happen. It’s too easy to truck things in from other states (or countries) and I’m afraid people will keep buying this imported produce no matter how many concerts Al Gore organises. What’s even more ominous is that some of the seeds I mentioned are no longer listed in the specialist suppliers’ catalogues where I used to get them, suggesting that even home growers are no longer interested.

One day when I retire to my rural paradise I’ll go and haunt the ethnic enclaves of Brisbane. I’ll bet I’ll find seeds there for a whole Aladdin’s cave of exotic semi-tropical delights, all rejected by the masses cos they didn’t come out from Blighty on the First bleedin’ Fleet.

Forget the good job, get a good financial adviser

A bloke I used to go to school made contact with me a few days ago. It started me thinking about where all the people who I’d known at school had ended up.

It was a good middle class public high school and it seems to have produced good solid middle class alumni. I’ve lost track of a lot of them of course but the ones I know have mainly had good solid middle class careers as doctors, public servants, teachers, managers and so on.

One thing that struck me was that none of them, to the best of my knowledge, have been too obsessed with getting rich. Sure they’re comfortably off, so far as I know, but they don’t have three investment properties and a share portfolio that they discuss with their financial advisers. The universal infatuation with acquiring wealth for the sake of it only seems to have become a widespread affliction of the generations that have grown up in the 1980s and since.

It’s a significant change when you think about it. For most of recorded history, people had wealth because they were either born into a class that owned land or because they were lucky (maybe brave and lucky in the case of adventurers like gold diggers and pioneer settlers). But for most people – or men, really - life’s main challenge was to make a career by getting educated, working hard and diligently, saving money and looking forward to a satisfying life and a chance to indulge oneself a bit in retirement.

This has all changed dramatically but our culture hasn’t quite kept up. I talk to my undergraduate students about it and they generally agree that somebody’s job is no longer regarded as the key to success in life. The important thing now is to be a successful trader. I’ve had 19 year olds tell me about the unit they’ve just bought to rent out while they still live at home.

It’s become the norm, at least for some young people, to regard the primary wealth-generating activity in their lives as the buying and selling of assets. Work remains important but it’s become a subsidiary source of wealth – it just provides a cash flow to cover routine living expenses. The important business of life is to acquire things that can be sold at a profit. Borrowing to fund these speculative activities is regarded as perfectly normal because the assets being bought will always appreciate in value.

I have no idea how sustainable this is economically – not very, I suspect, and when it ends it’s likely to be very ugly, but I don’t claim to have any special expertise to back up my gut instinct – but it has interesting implications for social beliefs and values.

When wealth depends not on the job you have but on how good you are at speculative investment, new patterns of status and class will presumably emerge. It will be interesting to watch it happening – but I don’t think I’ll like the results.

National emergencies

It’s been a while since we had Howard’s mob trying to persuade us that we were living in a state of permanent crisis but they must believe it helps them win elections because they’re at it again. It’s only a few days since we were told about the indigenous child sexual abuse national emergency that has suddenly erupted after a mere 200 years in the making. Now we have the Don’t panic stay calm the doctors won’t hurt you crisis … which is so scary they keep telling us it’s not a crisis at all.

Well if there’s nothing to worry about, why do so many important people keep telling me there’s nothing to worry about? I mean I’d dismissed this Islamist doctor thing as a bit of a non-event … a few seriously deranged guys from the Middle East make right dills of themselves getting their car bombs towed away by parking police and making a Quixotic charge at Glasgow Airport terminal … god only knows what that was supposed to be about but it didn’t seem to have any implications for me. I don’t even wear a kilt. So I kind of put it out of my mind, I mean there are way worse terrorist events in Iraq every single day of the week and I never worry that they might presage a local catastrophe. Wasn’t that the whole point of invading Iraq in the first place: so we could fight the bastards over there and stop them coming here?

But I began to realise my mistake when the prime minister bobbed up on television whenever I turned it on assuring me that there was no need to increase the level of terrorism threat in Australia … but do stay alert won’t you, just in case. Well it had never occurred to me that there was any reason to increase the threat level, but if he was considering it … gosh, maybe there was more to this than met the eye. Especially when the leader of the opposition came on national television and told us all not to worry, and Laughing Phil Ruddock gave a solemn assurance that there was nothing to worry about, and in the same bulletin Peter Beattie said nothing to see here folks, just go about your normal business.

Anyway after all that I was starting to shit myself but I still hadn’t realised how big an issue these botched outrages were on the other side of the world where nobody was hurt except for one of the dipshit wannabe bombers … where was I, oh yeah … I never realised what a big deal they were until today when the prime minister announced solemnly that there was no need to cancel APEC. Now you know it had really really never crossed my mind that because some ratbag leaves a Merc full of nails parked in London that the leaders of APEC are in so much danger that the whole thing should be called off but Howard obviously thinks it’s a sensible suggestion. Otherwise why would he make so much public noise about announcing he wasn’t going to do it?

The prime minister said people were understandably concerned about the potential for attacks following the Gold Coast arrest of an Indian doctor in connection with a series of failed bombings in London and Glasgow.

But he said cancelling the event altogether would send the wrong message to the world.

“We won’t say to the rest of the world, ‘Oh, Sydney isn’t going to have APEC because it might be dangerous’,” Mr Howard said during a visit to the NSW far south coast town of Bega.

“What we will say to the rest of the world is ‘Yes, we will have APEC, we will welcome the leaders of our region to the wonderful, beautiful, international city of Sydney, and we will provide the adequate security’.”

Eat your heart out Winston Churchill. J W Howard’s not gunna be cowed by any number of doctors self-immolating in their fancy Jeep Cherokees.

Well it’s OK for him in his bullet-proof vest and all but he’s got me packing shit now, I don’t mind saying. Cos it would be appallingly irresponsible to over-react to a few bumbling loons in England by trying to make political capital out of their Keystone Cops terrorism, would it not? I mean even acknowledging the possibility that APEC might be cancelled because of the actions of these clowns gives them an importance and a seriousness that could only serve to encourage others to copy them. And our prime minister would never ever place political self-interest above the security of the nation … perish the thought.

When he announces that there’s no need to declare martial law, it will be a signal that Armageddon is nigh.

Karma

For decades, countries like Australia and Great Britain have been shamelessly cherry-picking the middle classes of developing countries. With never a thought for the morality or long-term consequences, immigration programs have been tailored to entice doctors, engineers and other professionals away from countries where they are in critically short supply to make up for our failure to invest in the training and education of our own population.

Enormous numbers of Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and sundry Middle Eastern nationalities have been lured to our shores by the promise of a material standard of living far beyond anything they could realistically hope to attain in their own countries. Peter Beattie was quite open about it on The 7.30 Report a few minutes ago: Australia didn’t train enough doctors in the 1970s and ’80s to look after our ageing population, so we need to poach them from other countries where they’ve never been able to train enough doctors to provide even basic health care to anyone. The practice isn’t limited to doctors of course - there’s a whole industry helping immigrant wannabes get permanent residency by getting whatever vocational qualifications the Australian government deems to be in short supply from time to time.

So the news that the latest amateurish terrorist events in the UK were apparently the work of immigrant professionals must be alarming to anyone who thinks topping up our skilled labour needs by endless immigration is good policy. Moreover it would be the ultimate irony if this army of imported professionals proved to be a fertile recruiting ground for terrorists and their accomplices. It would demonstrate in stark terms how short-sighted has been the vision of the Howard Government concerning the basic future infrastructure of this country.