About Infinity's Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization.

When I was working on my PhD. dissertation back in 1995-6 at U. C. Irvine, I developed a computer program to model how civilizations arise, compete and cooperate with each other, and then win or lose according to the strategies that they have chosen, and the learning incorporated in these strategies.  Perhaps 20% of the time, the program evolved a simulated international system in which one nation, initially a 'democratic' nation, garnered a disproportionate level of power over the others, and then became increasingly aggressive in its behavior towards the other nations in the simulation. Essentially, it ran amok until it collapsed amid pervasive system wide warfare, taking the entire simulated world system down with it.  At the time, I thought that this was an anomaly, but not something that actually had any relationship with our reality.  I scratched my head over the possibilities that it presented, and then went back to my dissertation.  However, that scenario played itself over and over again in my mind in the following years, and I decided to do a historical study of how civilizations collapse. 

But instead of writing about the past, I found myself writing about the present and the future, and Infinity's Rainbow was born.

Infinity's Rainbow grew out of the coming together of several factors:

1) My Ph.D. research into what I call "crisis driven evolution."  This refers to change in human societies occurring suddenly in response to existential crisis. Consistent with this hypothesis is a corollary assumption that the international system represents a complex adaptive learning system. I discuss these ideas comprehensively in my book.

2) My political activities following the December 2000 awarding of the U.S. Presidency to G. W. Bush, in explicit violation of the U.S. Constitution by the U.S. Supreme Court.  How, I wondered could such a thing happen?  Why had the institutionalized checks and balances of our political system failed?  I discuss the answers to this query fully in the book as well.

3) My growing alarm during the past decade about the accelerating pace of climate change across the world. This too is fully discussed and explained in the book.

4) My increasing unease about peak oil and the precariousness of our civilization's prospects for maintaining a sufficient energy supply. Again, I discuss this set of issues comprehensively in the book.

I had planned to extend my Dissertation research into a popular book which would lay out my theory of crisis driven evolution and then demonstrate how the process had operated across human history in a series of historical case studies. However, as factors 2-4 above became increasingly important in my thinking, I began to re-think the direction of my book. Finally by the end of 2004, with my Congressional campaign behind me, I began researching and writing Infinity's Rainbow.

I had a "Eureka" moment after the invasion of Iraq, when I realized that the behavior of the US closely matched the unanticipated behavior of the dominant power in my simulation models in which, after reaching a dominant position in the international system, a power would rapidly become increasingly undemocratic while rapidly instigating warfare to control the entire world system, leading to systemic collapse. As my simulations had not incorporated variables for peak oil and rapid environmental change, the actual real world situation was far worse than even those dire simulations would suggest, I realized.

In order to understand, and hopefully, redress our civilization's plight, it was first necessary to comprehensively describe it--including the manifold interrelationships between the key variables which were in sum generating the potentially civilization terminating crises.

The result of efforts to clearly provide this description was Infinity's Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization. The book offers tentative suggestions as to initial strategies to redress the root causes of the crises. These tentative suggestions lie within the scope of conventional politics.

A more detailed strategic and tactical agenda will be presented in a future book The Path Through Infinity's Rainbow. In it I will articulate a multi-track strategy which ranges from conventional political actions to, given the existential nature of our accelerating series of crises, revolutionary ones.