Siberian Gold

"For help was coming from an unexpected dimension. In 1961, the first oilfield had been discovered in western Siberia, and by 1969 geologists - many working out of Akademgorodok - had identified almost sixty of them, brimming with saleable crude. The were just about all on-line and pumping in time for the 1973 oil shock, when the world price for petroleum rose by 400%. Suddenly, instead of being a giant autarchy, trying to bootstrap its way to prosperity, the Soviet Union was a producer for the world market, and it was awash with petrodollars. Suddenly, it was possible for the Soviet leadership to buy its way out of some of the deficiencies of the economy. If the collective farms still couldn't feed the country, then food could be quietly imported. If the people wanted consumer goods, you could buy the technology to produce them, like the complete Fiat car plant assembled on the banks of the Volga. The Brezhnev regime managed to make some everday luxuries available. There were thirty million TV sets in Soviet homes in 1968, and ninety million at the end of the 1970s; by which time, too, most Soviet families owned a fridge and majority had a washing machine. Vacations to the sunny beaches of the Black Sea became ordinary. Cigarettes and vodka and chocolate and perfume were usually on the shelves, even when milk and meat were not."

Francis Spufford, Red Plenty: Inside the Fifites' Soviet Dream

More oil, here, and an interesting peak oil talk between Simon Reynolds and Justin Buckley here.

Black Gold/Black List

Monday 12 March 1979

"... Now the oil companies tell us they want the Government to use the Criminal Records Office and Special Branch - with its link with Northern Ireland - to check people employed on oil rigs. The companies would give us the names, and we would be expected to check them out and blacklist them if necessary for previous convictions or political reasons.
      It would mean moving towards a police state as a by-product of having oil. I put this bluntly to Jasper Cross [civil servant], who said that, if we refused to help out, the Government would get the blame if anything went wrong."

 Tony Benn, Conflicts of Interest: Diaries 1977-1980

Back To The Future 2

"The essence of Tao is reversal"
- the Tao Te Ching

As Western civilisation begins its long, slow powering-down (or at least let’s hope it’s long and slow rather than short and fast), then we will more and more experience the uncanny feeling of time moving backwards, of technologies and habits that we had thought long consigned to the past mysteriously reappearing through a gradual process of osmosis. It might even be the case that those under the age of 30 experience some of these re-appearances as examples of genuinely new phenomena, and like the Romans, whose 400-year decline could barely be detected in normal daily life, mistake them as evidence of yet more progress.

The recent upsurge in oil prices, caused by the political turmoil in the Middle East, has provoked amongst the British public and its government that occasional and somewhat incoherent recognition of the reality that our technologically advanced, dynamic, globalised economy is pathetically reliant on a single resource, fed by a fragile infrastructure from a volatile region of the world that is made volatile by the very exploitation of that resource. If oil prices maintain or exceed their current high level, these are some of the technologies and habits of the 1970’s I expect to see gradually returning:


Scooters



Contrary to popular myth, most of two-wheeled motorised transport of the 1970’s didn’t consist of chic Italian Vespas or muscular Triumph superbikes, but this kind of deeply unsexy machine - the Honda CL90. Usually used as transports to and from the workplace, and rarely ever cleaned or serviced, their users eschewed leather suits and ballistic crash-helmets for flasher macs, sou’westers, and curious brimmed crash-hats with goggles mounted atop.

Nowadays these kind of machines are usually associated with third-world countries, and their mass re-appearance on British roads should be taken as confirmation that, yes, Britain is indeed becoming a third-world country.


Hairdryers



"Hairdryers" was the derisive term given to the kind of low-powered motorbike (100-125cc) chosen by many working-class adolescents as their first mode of personal transport. Looking and sounding like feeble impersonations of standard motorbikes, their users would often attempt to infuse the bike with an intimidatory presence by removing the exhaust silencer, resulting in a piercing, rasping sound that would induce belly-laughs from onlookers as they cruised around provincial market squares.


Three-wheeled cars



The Reliant Robin (always called the Robin Reliant in the popular discourse of the time) was of course given iconic status in the sitcom "Only Fools And Horses", and the fact that it was the Trotter’s mode of transport was deeply symbolic. As an icon of a kind of hopeless British crapness, its adoption by the Trotters as their mode of transport was an indication that for all their striving, these guys were going nowhere.

It may be a baffling concept to us now, but at the time it made a certain kind of sense. Having only three wheels, it was classed as a motorbike for road tax rates, but could be driven by the holder of a car licence. Its lightweight construction and small engine were also of great advantage in terms of fuel consumption, a precious advantage in the fuel-starved 70’s. During the great oil glut of the last twenty years, gleeful "petrol-heads" like Jeremy Clarkson have taken great joy in destroying old Robins in weirdly atavistic acts of sacrifice - as though the car represented a kind of ancestral stain that had to be ritually repudiated so that the gods of Neoliberalism would ensure the endless bountiful flow of BMW’s and the magical mana-juice to power them.



Jeremy, expect some kind of three-wheeler to return as fuel prices steepen and road taxes escalate. Only EU crash-test standards can possibly stop them.


Dray Horses



You might think these disappeared sometime in the late 19th Century, but they were still an occasional sight in the 1970’s. Horses are of course deeply magical animals with a strange and mysterious affinity to humans, and the reappearance of working horses on our streets is something that I expect will have a profoundly uncanny affect. It will effectively signal that our Faustian delusions of boundless growth into infinity are over, and the re-enchantment of the world has begun.


Rag And Bone Men

Very common in the 1970’s, and already starting to make a re-appearance as far as I can tell. When they switch from white vans to flat-bed carts pulled by an old horse that has been reprieved from the knacker’s yard, then you will know that the new 70’s have begun.


Bus Conductors



See Carl’s post below. Up until the late 70’s, the vast majority of people would travel to work either by bicycle or bus, and factories and offices would often have bus bays where they now (if they still exist) have vast floodlit car parks. As public transport once more becomes the prime mode of mobility in the economy, the Government will be forced to reluctantly admit that it is too important to be left to the inefficiencies of the private sector, and it will gradually come back under either national or regional government control. One important increase in efficiency will result from the realisation that it’s much quicker to sell people tickets once they’re on the bus than making them queue to buy them off the driver.


Sunday Closing

As British people find that increased fuel and food costs erode their disposable income, they will have fewer opportunities to visit out-of-town superstores and buy cheap Chinese-made tat. The result will be an epic contraction in the retail sector, followed by a realisation amongst the surviving outlets that it simply isn’t cost-effective to be open morning-to-evening, seven days a week. Sunday closing will therefore quietly and surreptitiously return with perhaps the only people noticing being pious Christians, who will attribute the phenomenon to God’s wisdom.

Back To The Future

For those of you of tender age the device above is called a Slide Rule. It is a mechanical device that was used to make complex calculations before the age of computers, and, unimpressive though it may appear, it was these contraptions that put men on the moon and built Concorde.

I was a member of probably the very last generation of schoolchildren who were taught how to use a slide rule, but even in our day they were seen as a curiosity, as the new-fangled pocket calculators started to appear. Nevertheless, quaint as this item may appear, not only is it the technology of the past, it is also the technology of the future.

As the world's oil resources enter the depletion stage, there will be greater pressure to convert other types of fossil fuel resource, such as coal and natural gas, into forms suitable for the maintenance of our transport infrastructure. This increased demand burden will be felt most heavily in the domestic sphere, especially with regard to heating and electricity production, and the tariffs charged for their provision. We're starting to see this even now, although the trend is partly hidden by private monopoly price-gouging.

This crisis in the provision of energy will also result in a re-assessment of what aspects of our complex society we can safely jettison and still maintain a reasonable quality of life. Almost certainly the first victim will be the internet, as Western civilisation will reluctantly recall that such trivial activities as sending thank you letters, ordering bargain clothes and perusing pornography can just as easily be done on paper. Home computers and even business computers will follow thereafter, as our spheres of activity necessarily become more localised, and the economies of scale needed to build and ship these items make their production prohibitively expensive. Eventually, this squeeze will even reduce the availability of more utilitarian plastic items such as the humble pocket calculator.

If you're a gadget fan, or rather what Morris Berman terms a techno-buffoon, you are going to find the future at best somewhat disappointing, at worst an incomprehensible nightmare. If you're the sort of person who likes collecting antiquated machinery and putting it back in working order again, you are going to find yourself very much in demand in the years to come.

Death Of A Princess, Birth Of Enemies

"On April 9, 1980, Associated Television showed Death of a Princess to an estimated 10 million Britons. Although "rejecting Saudi pleas that the film be amended or scrapped..." ATV agreed to include an introductory comment that said: "… The program you are about to see is a dramatized reconstruction of certain events which took place in the Arab world between 1976 and 1978. We have been asked to point out that equality for all before the law is regarded as paramount in the Moslem world. …" And the next day, the British Foreign Office released a statement saying: "We profoundly regret any offence which the program may have caused in Saudi Arabia. We have, of course, no power to interfere with the editorial content of programs, still less to ban them."

"On April 11, the Saudi Embassy in London called "Death of a Princess": "… an unprincipled attack on the religion of Islam and its 600 million people and on the way of life of Saudi Arabia, which is at the heart of the world of Islam." On the twenty-third of April, the government of Saudi Arabia requested Great Britain to withdraw its Ambassador to Jeddah, James Craig. Although a serious step, it was thought to be temporary. The British Foreign Office said that the Embassy staff would stay in Jeddah and the Embassy would remain open."

"The decision to make this request, reached at a meeting of the Council headed by then Crown Prince Fahd was, according to the government-owned Saudi press agency: "… in the light of the British Government's negative attitude toward the screening of the shameful film." At that time, the Saudis also issued a statement saying it had carefully examined economic relations between the Kingdom and Britain, and especially the activity of British companies in the Kingdom. …"

Oil And Peanuts

Crisis? What Crisis?

Most people will tell you that we're a Capitalist Economy that runs on oil.

They're wrong.

We're actually an Oil Economy that's run by capitalists.

Because the end of oil will have more effect

On how we live

Than the end of Capitalism.