Jeff Rubin's Shrinking World
The GM bailout is 'investment in obsolescence,' oil has peaked, says a top bank economist.
Rubin: radical changes ahead.
- Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization
- Random House Canada (2009)
After a quarter-century of increasing free trade and globalization, we have seen our prosperity suddenly stagger -- even in China, where mere six per cent growth is effectively a recession. While GM goes bankrupt, investors still dream of a return to "normal": the happy years before 2008.
Jeff Rubin, chief economist at CIBC World Markets for almost 20 years, makes it clear that those years were decidedly abnormal, a three-decade holiday from reality.
Globalization wasn't the result of wise economic theories brilliantly applied. And the recession didn't happen because American deadbeats took out mortgages they couldn't afford. Globalization thrived on cheap oil. When the price of oil went up, recession followed.
Without resorting to arcane formulas or jargon, Rubin shows how cheap oil permitted an Atlantic salmon, caught off Norway, to travel around the world to China for processing, then back to Europe or North America to be sold at a profit. He also traces the history of earlier oil-fuelled booms and busts, and makes a good case that "peak oil" is real.
Still a controversial theory, peak oil predicts that world oil supplies behave like any individual oil well: a surge of quick, easy oil, followed by declining production as pressure falls off. Eventually, extracting the rest takes more effort than the oil itself is worth. That's why we now dig out the tar sands and plan oil rigs in the Arctic Sea, because the easy oil is all gone.
The energy efficiency paradox
Earlier price hikes, like that in 1973, promoted more compact cars and more efficient engines. Rubin shows how fuel efficiency led directly to still more oil consumption: By spending less on gas for our cars, we have more money to buy other consumer goods. And those goods need gas and oil to be produced, packaged, and shipped.
Cheap oil has produced a very agreeable life for many of us here, but overseas it's created social change on a gigantic scale. Hundreds of millions of Chinese have risen from poverty to prosperity in 20 years.
South Korea, lacking oil, buys it by making computer chips (to make a standard 2-gram 32 MB DRAM chip requires 1.6 kilos of fossil fuel and 32 kilos of water). The chips also pay for over 150,000 South Koreans to study in the U.S. at any given time, and over 6,000 persons a day fly from the U.S. into Seoul International Airport -- 2,190,000 a year.
No more winter strawberries
This, says Rubin, is about to end. Yes, the latest recession pulled down the price of oil, but it's only relatively cheap. The price will go up again. It wasn't a fluke when oil hit $147 a barrel last year, and we will see higher prices still. The higher they go, the less we'll be able to afford strawberries in winter and Tuscany in summer.
We won't even be able to afford most of the imported food in the supermarkets, Rubin argues. So we'll tear out our suburban patios and grow our own vegetables, or buy locally grown food. It'll be expensive too, and only seasonal, but that will be part of a smaller world.
Meanwhile, the companies that went offshore in search of cheap labour will be coming home again to beat the high cost of shipping. What's more, Rubin foresees a kind of "carbon tariff" that will make overseas goods even more expensive. If the Chinese want to keep selling us stuff, he says, they'll have to stop burning coal and pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. A tariff will remove the competitive edge they get from their emissions.
Rubin talks to The Tyee
In a phone interview with The Tyee, Rubin saw benefits even for the Chinese in a small-world economy. "Their world gets smaller too," he said. "They're even better suited for a small world, because their domestic market is huge. They're leading the current recovery with industrial production for their own people." He noted that China's automotive market is already larger than that of the U.S.
If gasoline gets really costly, does that foretell the depopulation of rural Canada? Rubin didn't think so. "China won't be sending us $6 billion in food," he said, "so we'll have to grow our own." And while we'll spend more on food, jobs will keep coming home.
Rubin saw big problems ahead, especially for the air travel industry. "It will face an upheaval greater than automotive restructuring."
GM: 'An investment in obsolescence'
Speaking of cars, he didn't think much of the GM bailout by the U.S. and Canada: "An investment in obsolescence. We should be investing in the future, not the past, making a huge capital investment to build buses and public transit."
On balance, Rubin saw a "reasonable prospect" in a post-global small world. "Our economy will be more diversified and self-sufficient," he said, and the high cost of oil will be "better than a hundred Kyotos" in controlling greenhouse gas emissions.
Jeff Rubin's book doesn’t deal with all the implications of high-cost oil. Without air conditioning, where will Phoenix and Las Vegas go? And who will occupy Vancouver's hotels if international tourism implodes?
Your whole lot smaller world will be a protectionist world, and one with far less disposable income. It may have some bad, 1981-style inflation as governments try to pay off their deficits, and screw their creditors, with cheaper dollars.
Still, Rubin's radical vision of a small-world future is far more attractive than the vision we now have, in hindsight, of our last few squandered decades.
Related Tyee stories:
- Age of Oil is Over
And ending fast, within 50 years or less. Besides war, what's our response? - Trapped in Black Tar
Andrew Nikiforuk's Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of the Continent - 'The End of Suburbia'
After peak oil comes what fresh hell?
![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
VivianLea Doubt
02-06-2009
on balance, I believe
Rubin's vision of a future smaller world is more attractive... but thus is framed the debate between Malthusians and Cornucopians.
Paul Ehrlich, commenting on his current thoughts regarding The Population Bomb said:
"Some things I have predicted have not come to pass. For instance, starvation has been less extensive than I (or rather the agriculturists I consulted) expected. But it’s still horrific, with some 600 million people very hungry and billions under- or malnourished."
The U.N. estimate for that number is 874 million people right now… In our own Canadian cities large and small, thousands are homeless (exact figures being hard to come by) and hundreds of thousands use food banks. What will rising oil prices, rising food prices as a consequence, and even more food crops diverted to biofuels mean for all these people? What does it mean that 68 % of all the world’s oil reserves are controlled by 10 companies? Can we trust the reported reserves, not only for oil, but for metals such as copper that are integral to a vast number of products in the developed nations? Can we expect events like 9/11 to become ever more prevalent as the gap between the malnourished or starving classes and the throw-away classes becomes more glaring? Can we expect future citizens to be mining the landfills of North America?
The debate between what will or will not happen in the future seems a waste of time: there are too many variables for anyone to confidently predict what will happen. We have a reasonably good grasp of what is happening right now, however, and what the short term consequences are. Any vision of life of earth for humans must pay attention to aspects in addition to the economic to be meaningful to humans; it must pay attention to those who cannot afford to make the “consumption choices” that will keep them alive: it must, in other words, centre on people and not an arbitrary cultural construct. As it moves on, the debate is more and more on how to move people and their collective desires into the decision-making process, how to ensure a mechanism other than monetary (arbitrary cultural construct) defines what will happen to collective resources… in democratic countries we already have that mechanism: democracy. If 874 million people starving does not constitute a “population bomb”, it certainly constitutes a deeply shameful disgrace. If hundreds of thousands using food banks in one of the world’s richest countries does not constitute a crisis, it does constitute a national wound that we will be striving to heal for decades to come…
What happens on the way to that future?
dgiVista.org
02-06-2009
Agreeing with Rubin, critiquing his lame critics
Nice piece. But honestly, I don't think Peak Oil is controversial. Any finite resource will be exhausted. There will inevitably be a peak. The only valid debate is when it will happen and how much Big Oil and oil countries are inflating their reserve figures.
And this may be cynical, but I think the price of oil dropped last fall because of the imminence of the US presidential election. Big Oil used the price spike to conduct elasticity experiments on North American consumers, but they didn't want high prices to impede McCain's chances at the White House.
And Phoenix? It's going to be unsustainable very very soon. The amount of water they divert to sustain that population will reach a crisis point soon, but then we have to start talking about Peak Water. :)
Vegas will always have people flocking to the strip, though.
I saw Rubin on The Hour the other night and went to town on peak oil ending globalization:
http://politicsrespun.org/2009/05/peak-oil-will-kill-neoliberal-globalization-more-support/
Then a bud forwarded me the lame critique of Rubin at Maclean's, so I took that for a ride:
http://politicsrespun.org/2009/06/oil-status-quo-apologists-spin-weak-arguments/
I'm SOOOOOOOO happy this is on the public radar. I don't expect Rubin to be a messiah here, but I'm looking forward to reading his book to see if it is as useful as Monbiot's Heat. I'm hoping it is!
Yes, it's ALL about the vision!
http://politicsrespun.org/
Jeffrey J.
03-06-2009
Its About Time
As more elites wake up and see our world as it really is, we might just be able to change things. After reading this article one can't help but wonder, where was Rubin when he was in power for 20 years? But never mind, he's speaking out at last and that's a good thing. His 'conclusion' are so basic, so intuitive, and so well known outside of elite circles, it really defies description. In big picture terms, oil is a finite substance that will inevitably run out. Full stop.
And as we burn it in 3 ton chariots to go to and from the corner store, it is going to disappear fast. Our society will dramatically change. Soon.
Coverage like this will hopefully help society plan for the changes that are coming.
seth
03-06-2009
The Answer
So far all the answers we are seeing from the backsliders in the green movement is their foolish wind/solar/green tax mantras. None of these will have more than a tiny effect on greenhouse gas emissions. These so called Greenies like Pembina and Suzuki get millions in support from Big Oil/Big Coal as kind of a stupid tax.
Where is the push from Suzuki and Pembina and that Berman twit for a massive switchover to 3 day work weeks and telecommuting. These two alone could cut automobile emissions in half. Not proposed by politicians because the big campaign donators with downtown office space to lease would go broke and developers would have no bridges to build. Not proposed by mainstream self styled greenies because of their inherent stupidity and the the Big Oil stupid tax.
Solar, wind, and tidal power are too intermittent to make a serious dint in GHG's until there is a cost effective storage solution. There are none on the horizon. Alberta - seen all those Turner valley wind farms - is proposing nuclear as the provinces only solution.
Nuclear can save us it so many ways and do it within ten years. It would require a massive World War Two kind of effort with hundreds of new low cost gneration 3.5 and 4 reactors (2 cent a kwh) mass produced every year to have any effect. Ten years now we'd be off oil/coal and deCO2ing the atmosphere. GM would as they did in World War 2 retool and reemploy building the nukes. Nobody would be out of work - except in Saudia Arabia.
It is stupidity and corruption that is destroying the planet. Technology is the solution.
morechatter
03-06-2009
Societies Plan??????
Do societies have a say?????
I don't think so......
As its difficult to get society out to vote.
As they know they have no say.....
And I have heard much of what the people want.
I am seeing much of what industry wants.
Thats the first thing that needs to change.
Industry should not be dictating to people.
The people should be dictating to industry as its their bargaining ground not theirs as it their futures and that of the children and the country as a whole. Where industry is but a board of directors, as cold and unfeeling as you get.
As Industries plans on immense profits and greed destroys lifes around the world as economic meltdown is devastating on third world countries.
Did society plan on that?
Or did society plan on TILMA, as government signs an agreement with industry that if society gets in the way of profit society will be held accountable and will be on the hook.
And changes are needed in are news delivery as media is busy doing the Olympics and has no time for the news as citizens are left in a spin.
Did society plan on leaving thousands homeless on their streets as left to eat the cities garbage?
As the news room goes back in time to move ahead in time in nano seconds. And communties look at delivering the news as they realize the importance of kowing whats going on as call it getting fit for the future.
brandX
03-06-2009
Uh Huh
The ramifications of Peak are far broader than many people can contemplate. Just as an instance - what happens to the behemoths of consumerism, like Walmart - or even those "immune to bricks and mortar concerns" web companies like Amazon or E-Bay? They use the same shipping as everybody else.
Getting "stuff" from A to B was a large part of 20th century growth. Multi-billion dollar companies were built solely for that purpose (Fed Ex, UPS, TWA, American airlines, etc, etc etc...).
These 20th century firms don't really have a "Plan B" at hand for the 21st century, when the simple certainty of massive price increases in their underlying costs will drive them straight into the ground.
It's inevitable. Unescapable.
You can count on this - when the economy "picks up", the price of oil will rocket upwards again and cause another "slump".
Guaranteed.
I figure this cycle will repeat itself over and over until someone (and it will have to be a brave and practical politician) actually tells the truth.
Like telling children there's no more candy...
Unfortunately, the public has to take a big part of the blame; "we" aren't getting better transit or better rail from Vancouver to Seattle (things that we will actually require) - a few brain dead fools in the suburbs of Langley and the fossilized business morons at the Vancouver Board of Trade are paving over farmland and building car bridges to make a few lunkheads commute easier and cheap plastic junk from China easier to ship around.
I find it hilarious that "we" got a skytrain running to an airport. In about 20 years or so, it should be a lot of fun to head out there and see the Air Flight Museum - because cheap flying is *so* 20th century...
Frankly I think any politician alive right now should be vilified in perpetuity if they ignore this problem. And yes... I'm talking about the childless Mr Falcon - who doesn't have to bother considering what kind of world he's leaving behind for his (or anyone else's) kids. (Here's a hint: It's paved and you can't grow anything on it) He and Mr. Campbell will leave behind a far more impoverished province than the one they were blessed to govern.
The end is over - it's the beginning we should be focused on.
Frank
03-06-2009
Full circle
"On balance, Rubin saw a "reasonable prospect" in a post-global small world. "Our economy will be more diversified and self-sufficient," he said, and the high cost of oil will be "better than a hundred Kyotos" in controlling greenhouse gas emissions."
Gee, sounds like what the anti-globalization movement has been saying for the last decade.
Cheap oil shouldn't have been allowed to trump smart social-economics but it did. No doubt the dinosaurs on the Right will fight this tooth and nail.
Yammer
03-06-2009
Things will be different
...Though I don't believe they will be completely disasterous.
Humans adapt and innovate.
In the short run, it means that GM had better start building electric vehicles. In the medium run, we can replace a lot of air cargo planes with air cargo airships.
Even more than replacing our inefficient forms of transit, we have to think about growing food. Petrochemicals are used for fertillizer, permitting high yields. If they go, so do a lot of people.
So in the medium-to-long run, I think that more and more countries will be adopting China-style population control, if not in exactly the same way, as an alternative to starvation.
There's no doubt that the First World are over-consumers but the rest of the world are over-breeders on a massive scale. Jon and Kate's family of 8 is freakish and weird in our society, but it's less than the average family size in Gambia.
Religious leaders, for example, ought to extend the virtues of modesty and neighborliness into the realm of family growth. I ain't holding my breath.
anarcho
03-06-2009
Let's hope Jeff is right and
Let's hope Jeff is right and this ridiculous system is finally due for the historical garbage can.
RickW
03-06-2009
Where Goeth the Convention Centre?
Will conventioneers bike to this soon-to-be white elephant?
RickW
03-06-2009
Yammer
Except that the quality of the food is compromised. For instance, a typical off the shelf apple today has only 1/10th the nutrient value of 50 years ago.......
RickW
03-06-2009
The Author............
.......ought to send this book to Stephen Harper............
doggone
04-06-2009
If words were bullets
We'd have won this skirmish long ago.
Bullets also being very inefficient at wining skirmishes but if you can launch enough at a sustained rate - who knows?
The problems show up when your Skirmishers get too far ahead of their supply lines - in the Wordies case that would mean running out of IDEAS to put the words to and falling back to a position where you simply use a number of new words to express the old concerns.
In fact I agree that this stuff needs to be written and published and talked about again and again but I miss Che
(and I read Comrade Fidel on
www.granma.cubaweb
faithfully)
doggone
04-06-2009
And looky hyar
This is a quote from "Comrade Fidel's" recent "Reflections"
President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, in a visit to Honduras on the eve of the OAS meeting stated: "I think that the OAS has lost its reason to exist; perhaps it never had a reason to exist."
Now just how current are YOUR information sources???
Stump
05-06-2009
oh, the humanity
"In the medium run, we can replace a lot of air cargo planes with air cargo airships."
Looks great in a Tom Swift novel for young boys. Not so easy to implement in real life, where storms, winds, etc make airships very difficult to operate on scheduled flights. A better pie-in-the-sky idea is equipping large ships with the various new generations of wind power such as kites and generating turbines spun by airfoils.
Even better is waiting a couple extra days for that book to show up from Amazon by train instead of plane.
The Dead Kennedy's said it best with the title of a greatest hits compilation that sums up our suicidal attitude toward consumption as a religion and economic bulwark:
"Give me convenience or give me death."
realisticman
05-06-2009
Yawn
Fuel cost per kilo of fish from Rotterdam to Qindao. When ship's fuel costs $450/t (today) is 2 cents. When the fuel price rises to $1000 (top of the market in 2008) it becomes 4½ cents per kilo.
When sockeye is $30 a kilo mail-order from Alaska (http://www.fishex.com/fish-market/salmon/wild-alaska-sockeye-salmon.html) and $160 a kilo in London (http://www.londonfoodfilmfiesta.co.uk/smoked-salmon.htm), the price of oil will have to go up quite a bit more than even Jeff can imagine before this has a any impact. The hypothesis is shrinking fast but I guess it is a very trendy gig.
bpither1
07-06-2009
John K. Galbraith once
John K. Galbraith once said,
"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."
I've been studying economics for over 40 years and as with everything in life our response to the moment encompasses 10% agenda and 90% circumstance. As an investor I used to watch Rubin on BNN when he was chief economist at CIBC and thought, "what a lot of rubbish." Again as with most he never predicted the crash of 2008.
Intuition is almost as beneficial an attribute as "technical analysis" or any other industry related forecasting model.
NicS
07-06-2009
Price of oil is everything
Back in 2007 when oil started its ascent to $147/barrel, there were many of us who were not suprised by the end result 1.5 years later, when our fuel at the pumps reached $1.50/litre last summer, some of us couldn't understand why it was not higher relative to the barrel price. After all, the barrel price increased 3 fold in 1.5 years and the pump price only increased roughly 50%.
The world prices for oil from the earth averaged $100/barrel in 2008, double what they where in 2006. Still a price difference not reflected at the pumps. Certainly there was a huge adjustment being made by the world's oil industry to maintain an even keel in light of these decrepancies in price and one of the results was the financial market meltdown. The straw (actually bales of it) that broke the camel's back.
Matt Simmons, a banker to the oil industry, likes to compare a cup of oil to a cup of coffee. 25 cents will buy you a cup of gas which will take the average car, filled with 4 persons, about 2 miles. Both cost about the same, now think how much energy 4 or us would expend walking 2 miles and how long it would take. 25 cents starts to look like quite a deal.
The other perspective is the amount of energy in one barrel of crude oil and how it stacks up to human energy expended when doing physical work. The most widely accepted and used example is 1 barrel of oil is equal to 6 people working for one year or 12000 hours of physical work. This example I first came upon on The Oil Drum website. A site you can be sure Jeffrey Rubin has been to over the years, as well, he would have had access to many expensive, subscription only sites.
ME2
07-06-2009
Smoke and mirrors
Given the shadowy world of monopolies, cartels, political deals, manipulated production such as a shortage of refineries, competing national interests, stock market shenanigans and so on, it is my belief that anyone who thinks the price of gas at the pump is directly reflective of the cost of producung a barrel of oil, needs his or her head read.
For example, I recall reading press releases from Suncor around 10 years ago stating that they had the cost of production from the tar sands down to $12 a barrel, and expected to bring it down to $10.
Now they say they can't do it for under $70? But the South Africans can make money getting oil from coal at $30? C'mon, lets take all these figures now being bandied around, with a very libeal "grain of salt"
realisticman
07-06-2009
Frank
"dinosaurs on the Right"
I guess you're watching the demise of the the dinosaurs on the Left in Europe, Frank.
BBC - European voters punish the left.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8088309.stm
One thing that you and the left NDP in Canada can be thankful for is that you are fashionable. Going down - and fast.
As ME2 points out regarding coal, this is now a contender. There is estimated to be an ultimate coal resource available for surface or shallow underground mining of over 20 billion tonnes in the province of British Columbia. The coal resource to a depth of 2000 metres that is of interest for coalbed methane (CBM) exploration is over 250 billion tonnes. Along with the oil sands we will have oil for many years yet.
G West
07-06-2009
New Labour
Are certainly not 'the Left'...but they certainly are dinosaurs....besides, the significance of who gets to sit in the European Parliament - as opposed to national governments - is largely irrelevant.
As you most certainly know.
If we have oil for many years yet more the pity for the planet and its people.
Want to see real dinosaurs at work?
Watch a few of GM's new ads.
If you want to read something worthwhile why not dig up Michael Moore's 'Letter to GM'.