Worldchanging has a great post on new terms coming out of the climate energy crisis. One of them, Super-spikes, refers to circumstances where change occurs very rapidly due to a cascading effect. In a previous post I talked about how rising gas prices were adding to indebtedness as large car and SUV owners see the value of their vehicles plummet. This an example of how a super-spike works, in this case rapid rise of energy costs doing a serious number on the economy. Another example is the implosion of financial markets as liquidity dried up due to fears about the viability of banks and mortgage lenders.

The problem with super-spikes is that they are often unpredictable in the speed and range of their effect. Given that we’ve been living with our heads in the sand, we’ve missed the window of slowing things gradually and easing into a new worldview. Instead we’re in the super-spike model where change will be catastrophic with no amount of wealth making any difference in our ability to change. We cannot throw dollars, technology or science at the problem and expect a neat solution. Instead we will be fighting trench warfare for the foreseeable future.

Another example of a super-spike is the current fire season in California. Already the worst season on record even though it is really just starting, there are hundreds of fires burning thousands of square miles of forest. This shows another characteristic of super-spikes: They are exponential- which means the effects multiply at very rapid rates once a critical mass is reached. It is literally a wildfire effect.

A big part of the problem is that politicians are very poorly equipped to deal with super-spikes as we saw with Katrina and 9/11. They stall, hoping to pass responsibility onto the next Congress, President or City Council. Unfortunately super-spikes require immediate, decisive action.

Finally, super-spikes force us into a reactive position where we are so busy responding to immediate threats that we have no breathing room to build a strategic response. The politicians currently in office and previous Republican Presidents back to Nixon, with their caving in to energy and automotive lobbies, have made it impossible to develop a strategic, long term response to climate change. Instead we are literally putting out fires.

I’m finally getting back to BT after getting absorbed into my new job at Techrigy where I’m spending a lot of time in social media. It’s fascinating to see the evolution taking place from a techie novelty to an entire sea change on the web. But that’s not what this thing is about…

There’s a major set of changes taking place, driven by rising energy costs, so many changes that it’s hard to comment on all of them. The first change is directly related to that: press coverage of climate and energy issues is far more widespread and far more critical than in the past. Finally. The cost of fuel is the biggest story for 2008, eclipsing the election. It is bigger because it is going to drive many people’s decisions about many fundamental things including who runs our country. This election is Barry Obama’s to lose- if he can’t beat McCain he probably can’t run the country.

But what I really want to talk about is space, not outer space; the space we live in, our space. Americans have always taken space for granted and accumulation of space is a sign of prosperity. We moved out of crowded cities into more spacious homes in the burbs with big lawns. We drove ever larger and more luxurious cars. Travel to far off places was the norm as we became more affluent.

Poverty on the other hand was denoted by a lack of space. Tiny crowded apartments. No privacy. Being unable to afford a car or travel expenses means that poor people seldom leave their neighborhoods- meaning they live within a proscribed world, more of an ancient village than a global community.

We have space because of two things: We’re a very large country and we had cheap fuel. We’re still an enormous country but it’s gotten a lot more expensive to get around, to heat big houses and to commute to suburban office parks. A lot of people are rethinking their desire for space.

What this tells me is that we’re going to be living in a lot closer proximity to each other, riding together in carpools and on public transport and living close enough to our neighbors to actually need to get to know them. I hope this brings about a greater sense of shared purpose and a lessening of the terrible divide between the haves and have nots of our world.

My friend Franke does it again, riffing on her experience seeing Malcolm Gladwell and Mark Kingwell (don’t know who he is) talking about initiating social change. Her illustrations tell the story much better than I can so I’m just going to add a little of my perspective to her observations.

Franke is Canadian so maybe things are different across the lake but I doubt it.  Simply put, Gladwell argues that awareness is not enough to change behavior and Franke notes that sometimes a threat or pain point must be reached.

I’ve been noticing a lot more Euro-versions of cars appearing on the streets in Rochester- little tiny Hondas, Toyotas, Fords, etc. These cars are literally a fraction of the size of the SUVs they are hopefully replacing. So why are they appearing now? Could it be $4.25/gallon gas? Even a wealthy SUV driver might have issues with paying five bucks for gas to run out to the store or a movie…

A point I’ve belabored here is that change and response to  climate issues will only be driven by economics. Americans don’t want to believe it will affect us so our politicians won’t act. Awareness and acceptance of the issue is there but there isn’t any urgency- until we get hit in our wallets, painfully.

With oil hitting the $120/barrel mark today and local gas prices here in Rochester hovering around the $4 level, Dan Dorfman of the NY Post is predicting prices reaching $7-10 gallon by next year based on a move of oil prices over the $200 level.

A number of things reinforce this beyond those things he covers in his op-ed piece. First, much of the world’s oil production takes place in extremely unstable geopolitical regions. Exxon Mobil has shut down its 800,000 barrel a day Nigerian sources due to strikes. A UK union strike has shut down a BP oil pipeline that supplies one quarter of that country’s oil. Oil production in Iraq is corrupt and undependable due to the war, Iraqi incompetence and the US failure to modernize and repair war damaged facilities. Venezuala’s Chavez sees oil as a weapon to advance his nutty authoritarian agenda. And on and on.

Demand worldwide has skyrocketed and this will only increase. It appears that we have reached the tipping point on oil energy costs. A doubling of fuel prices means a doubling of the cost of virtually everything else except wages. And there is no going back.