turd eating ants

TURD EATING ANTS


The Oil Age can be simply described as turd eating ants. Our future is going to be that of leaf eaters. I’ll explain shortly. I’m sure the authors of “Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle And Our Energy Dilemma” didn’t intend this to be the main lesson their book conveyed, but the message they tried to impart, namely that the deep water drilling in the GOM is typical of the energy we have left ( hard to reach and expensive to extract ), is old hat to me ( as opposed to the targeted general audience ) so I focused on other things. That, and the observation of cultural conditioning which hinders most folks acceptance of Peak Oil. I do highly recommend this book, but be aware that it is hard to process. It might be meant for a wide audience, but it is so dense with information that it must be slowly consumed. I loved it, but it is rather the nerds/geeks guide to the oil age and the vulnerability to society through its acquired complexity ( almost all societies are complex, some are far more complex than others ) manual. It is a much easier read than Tainter’s earlier work ( which reads like the worlds most boring college text book ) and covers the same ground but updated and focusing on our energy dilemma. Also, it is no where near a doom and gloom book ( the authors- the other one is the petroleum engineer T. Patzek- seriously think pleas of logic will lead to change even after they make the case that complexity must increase, as the amount of energy needed to keep the old levels of complexity stays the same and new levels demand more- which I read to refute The Druid Dudes arguments against devolving peacefully although I’m sure this books authors would politely deny that ).

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There are different species of farmer ants ( ants that bring in fertilizer and grow fungus on it and then harvest that food ). Which is funny as hell to me because we think as humans we are so smart and special because we thought up farming like it was something special when all along these dumb as dirt ants were living off mushroom farms long before we even started eating carrion out of the savanna dirt. But I digress. There are dung farmer ants and there are leaf farmer ants. The dung dudes go a short distance from their hole, gather up animal feces, bring it back and start farming that treasure ball of nitrogen. The leaf ants on the other hand, must travel long distances to get leaves, a marginal source of fertilizer. The ants eating crap don’t need much energy, or specialization, or organization to eat because they have access to a highly concentrated form of fertilizer very close to their home. The ants having no other source of fertilizer other than leaves have to work a lot harder at feeding themselves. They have evolved into specialized workers to perform all the extra tasks, they must employ far more workers to haul a lot more leaves from farther distances ( because the yield in nitrogen is so small, there needs to be a lot more of it and over time the harvest takes place farther and farther away ). In short, they must use a lot more effort to get a lot less energy.
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Just as we are pretty blind to the fact that farming isn’t a trophy to our wonderful brains, we also overlook what kind of ants we are forced to become. Before, we were happily wallowing in a backyard full of crap balls. Just Texas alone used to provide most of our petroleum needs and a good portion of the globes. We even won half the globe off the richness of Texas oil. We strolled a short distance, gathered up a dung piece and started farming. Almost no effort, few workers, and all the other ants sat around enjoying the surplus. Well, we have, by necessity, now become leaf eating ants. We have been forced to specialize in order to harvest leaves far away ( turned to taking overseas oil as our primary energy ). And we are getting a heck of a lot less energy out of each barrel of oil ( we used to get by on 20 million barrels a day globally, now it takes 85 [ a lot of that is oil energy equivalent such as tar sands, ethanol, liquid gas, etc. ] and we have gone from using one barrel of oil to extract 100 to today’s one barrel to extract a mere 15. Total energy in BTU’s is way down ). One of the lessons is we have been forced to increase complexity in order to deal with this decrease in energy.

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Complexity is nothing more than a way to solve a problem. The cost to reward ratio is usually positive. Until the cumulative effects crash the whole system. When Rome ran out of territory to steal, it could no longer steal the accumulated wealth, both agriculture and precious metals. It turned into a much more complex system to start to tax and control its land owners. Of course, that wasn’t enough in the long run to substitute for the wealth that building the empire brought. Peter was robbed to pay Paul and eventually the whole imploded. As America today has no surplus wealth or energy, she has turned to complexity to start taxing and robbing the old wealth owners. It was overseas colonies, increasingly now our own middle class. Just the complexity of the financial sector alone ( not to even begin to dissect the military-industrial complex or others ) is far and away more than what used to be needed to manage our whole system back when oil and ore flowed freely.

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Another great insight I took from this book was the observation that most folks are indeed blind to our energy dilemma through simple cultural conditioning. A little bit of our training as children came from direct teaching from our parents. Perhaps a smidge came from formal schooling ( it almost has to happen by accident as schools are just regimentation programming ). But the huge bulk is just simple observation. What we are surrounded by is what trains us. The culture imprints its Xerox copy on our spongy brain, most of it not even conscious on the part of the imprinters. And what did we all grow up on? Energy abundance. Actions speak louder than words, right? We might holler about oil scarcity, but our actions, driving everywhere, eating fruit flown in from South America, throwing away tons of plastic, speak differently. Children are programmed to think oil is available their whole lives. Most of them bring it into adulthood. Okay, it hurts to say this, but people aren’t idiots about Peak Oil, that is just the way they were taught.

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