There are dark clouds gathering on the horizon. They are the clouds of six hugely troubling global trends, climate change being just one of the six. Individually, each of these trends is a potential civilization buster. Collectively, they are converging to form the perfect storm--a storm of such magnitude that it will dwarf anything that mankind has ever seen. If we are unsuccessful in our attempts to calm this storm, without a doubt it will destroy life as we know it on Planet Earth!

There is a popular saying that "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result." If we keep doing business in the same way as we have for the past century, each of these six trends will continue their steep rates of decline, collapsing the natural systems that form the foundation for our civilization and the lifeblood of the global economy. Perhaps the current Gulf oil spill is the wake up call that mankind needs to snap us out of our complacency, realize that we are soiling our nest and that continuation of "business as usual" will destroy the world as we know it? Time will tell whether we heed this warning, go back sleep once the oil spill is contained, or simply tire of the endless media coverage, numb ourselves, and set these critical issues to the side.

The Perfect Storm: Six Trends Converging on Collapse

The difficulty now is inspiring enough people that collapse doesn't have to descend into chaos. Certainly there will be places that will not do well at all. But there will be other places that will muddle along and some may even do well if they make the correct choices now.

From an individual perspective, the biggest challenge is the end of the current highly-specialized economy. As our civilization gets poorer (basically as the world economy contracts — a situation not many of us have experienced for more than a few years at a time), the economy will no longer need most of the job skills that are needed now. 

As we fully enter the Scarcity Economy (resources will be expensive and scarce), we are about to undertake what some people call The Great Reskilling. We will live once again like our grandparents did, within our financial means certainly, but also growing our own food, helping our neighbors, and similar. These skills have atrophied during the fossil fuel fiesta (to borrow a term from Kunstler) but resilient people are learning them once again.

André Angelantoni
Founder, PostPeakLiving.com

Doug,

     Not really clear on where exactly the platform landed:

A day later, on April 22, the $365 million rig sank 5,000 feet and came to rest on the seabed next to the Mississippi Canyon 252 oil well that has been spewing at least 210,000 gallons of crude a day into the Gulf of Mexico.

Obama blasts oil industry over spill as engineers still baffled by ...

An American Chernobyl 
by Dmitry Orlov at Club Orlov

The drawing of parallels between industrial accidents is a dubious armchair sport, but here the parallels are just piling up and are becoming too hard to ignore:

An explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 spewed radioactive waste across Europe
A recent explosion and sinking of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform is spewing heavy oil into the Gulf of Mexico

These accidents were both quite spectacular. At Chernobyl, the force of the explosion, caused by superheated steam inside the reactor, tossed the 2500-tonne reactor lid 10-14 meters into the air where it twirled like a tossed penny and came to rest back on the wrecked reactor. The cloud of superheated vapor then separated into a large volume of hydrogen gas, which detonated, demolishing the reactor building and adjoining structures. At Deepwater Horizon, a blowout of a recently completed oil well sent an uncontrolled burst of oil and gas, pressurized to over 10,000 psi by the 25000-foot depth of the well, up to the drilling platform, where it detonated, causing a fire. The rig then sank, and came to rest in a heap of wreckage on top of the oil well, which continues to spew at least 200,000 gallons of oil a day. Left unchecked, this would amount to 1.7 million barrels of oil per year, for an indefinite duration. This amount of oil may be enough to kill off or contaminate all marine life within the Gulf of Mexico, to foul the coastline throughout the Gulf and, thanks to the Gulf Stream, through much of the Eastern Seaboard, at least to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and possibly beyond. A few tarballs will probably wash up as far north as Greenland...

...The political challenges, in both cases, centered on the inability of the political establishment to acquiesce to the fact that a key source of energy (nuclear power or deep-water oil) relied on technology that was unsafe and prone to catastrophic failure. The Chernobyl disaster caused irreparable damage to the reputation of the nuclear industry and foreclosed any further developments in this area. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is likely to do the same for the oil industry, curtailing any possible expansion of drilling in deep water, where much of the remaining oil is to be found, and perhaps even shutting down the projects that have already started. In turn, this is likely to hasten the onset of the terminal global oil shortage, which the US Department of Energy and the Pentagon have forecast for 2012...

I have seen a number of stories comparing this accident to the partial core meltdown that happened in the United States at Three Mile Island. I think in this instance, Mr. Orlov has it correct.

At TMI, at the end of the day, the final safety systems held. The core didn't melt through the pressure vessel, the public was not exposed to high doses of radiation, there was no "China Syndrome," and, in the end, due to the massive reforms it forced onto the industry, it may have very well saved the U.S. nuclear power industry by forcing it to adhere to stringent best-practices. That all came at the cost of severe damage to public perception and a few billion dollars worth of investment, but the end result was probably net neutral, if not slightly positive.

Chernobyl cost the world far more dearly. It put the nail in the coffin of nuclear power development in Europe for decades, it helped undermine the legitimacy of the Soviet state and the mood associated with the "Chernobyl meme" was irrevocably tied to negativity, anger, suspicion and fear and that meme helped kill any hopes of rationally evaluating nuclear power from the mid-80's on. Plus, it helped kill advanced reactor development in the U.S. - the kinds of reactors that would now be up for licensing consideration - fast breeders, compact liquid metal designs, thorium designs, etc.

Deepwater Horizon could very well do the same for the United States. There are experts who are loudly doubting the official leak rate number of 5,000 barrels per day. The government and BP claim that they are more worried about sealing the leak than measuring it - which makes no sense as you need to have an established leak rate to know whether or not your remediation efforts are working. If we later find out that the leak rate truly has been an order of magnitude higher, we could see every BP gas station on the Gulf Coast firebombed to smoking rubble in days.

The show trials that will fall out from this accident will feed anger at corporations and government, will give new life to the eco movement and will severely curtail future domestic petroleum production.

This one is bad, folks.

Monbiot: industrial civilization trashing the planet

By nemo | May 22, 2010

Industrial civilisation is trashing the environment.
Should we try to reform it or just watch it go down?
by George Monbiot
Published in the Guardian (May 11 2010)
Those who defend economic growth often argue that only rich countries can
afford to protect the environment. The bigger the economy, the more money
will be available for stopping pollution, investing in new forms of
energy, preserving wilderness. Only the wealthy can live sustainably.
 
Anyone who has watched the emerging horror in the Gulf of Mexico in the
past few days has cause to doubt this. The world’s richest country decided
not to impose the rules that might have prevented the Deepwater Horizon
oil spill, arguing that these would impede the pursuit of greater wealth
{1}. Economic growth, and the demand for oil it propelled, drove companies
to drill in difficult and risky places.

But we needn’t rely on this event to dismiss the cornucopians’ thesis as
self-serving nonsense. A new paper in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences calculates deforestation rates between 2000 and 2005
in the countries with the largest areas of forest cover {2}. The nation
with the lowest rate was the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The
nation with the highest, caused by a combination of logging and fire, was
the United States. Loss of forest cover there (six percent in five years)
was almost twice as fast as in Indonesia and ten times as fast as in the
DRC. Why? Because those poorer countries have less money to invest in
opening up remote places and felling trees.

The wealthy nations are plundering not only their own resources. The
environmental disasters caused by the oil industry in Ecuador and Nigeria
are not driven by Ecuadorian or Nigerian demand, but by the thirst for oil
in richer nations. Deforestation in Indonesia is driven by the rich
world’s demand for palm oil and timber, in Brazil by our hunger for timber
and animal feed.

The Guardian’s carbon calculator reveals that the UK has greatly
underestimated the climate impacts of our consumption of stuff {3}. The
reason is that official figures don’t count outsourced emissions: the
greenhouse gases produced by other countries manufacturing goods for our
markets. Another recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences shows that the UK imports a net 253 million tonnes of carbon
dioxide, embodied in the goods it buys {4}. When this is taken into
account, we find that far from cutting emissions since 1990, as the last
government claimed, we have increased them {5}. Money wrecks the
environment.

So the Dark Mountain project, whose ideas are spreading rapidly through
the environment movement, is worth examining. It contends that “capitalism
has absorbed the greens” {6}. Instead of seeking to protect the natural
world from the impact of humans, the project claims that environmentalists
now work on “sustaining human civilisation at the comfort level which the
world’s rich people – us – feel is their right” {7}.

Today’s greens, it charges, seek to sustain the culture that knackers the
planet, demanding only that we replace old, polluting technologies with
new ones – wind farms, solar arrays, wave machines – that wreck even more
of the world’s wild places. They have lost their feelings for nature,
reducing the problem to an engineering challenge. They’ve forgotten that
they are supposed to be defending the biosphere: instead they are trying
to save industrial civilisation.

That task, Paul Kingsnorth, co-founder of Dark Mountain, believes, is
futile: “the civilisation we are a part of is hitting the buffers at full
speed, and it is too late to stop it” {8}. Nor can we bargain with it, as
“the economic system we rely upon cannot be tamed without collapsing, for
it relies upon … growth in order to function”. Instead of trying to
reduce the impacts of our civilisation, we should “start thinking about
how we are going to live through its fall, and what we can learn from its
collapse … our task is to negotiate the coming descent as best we can,
whilst creating new myths which put humanity in its proper place” {9}.

Though a fair bit of this takes aim at my writing and the ideas I
champion, I recognise the truth in it. Something has been lost along the
way. Among the charts and tables and technofixes, in the desperate search
for green solutions that can work politically and economically, we have
tended to forget the love of nature that drew us into all this.

But I cannot make the leap that Dark Mountain demands. The first problem
with its vision is that industrial civilisation is much more resilient
than it proposes. In the opening essay of the movement’s first book, to be
published this week, John Michael Greer proposes that conventional oil
supplies peaked in 2005, that gas will peak by 2030 and coal by 2040 {10}.

While I’m prepared to believe that oil supplies might decline in the next
few years, his coal prediction is hogwash. Energy companies in the UK, as
the latest ENDS report shows, are now beginning to deploy a technology
which will greatly increase available reserves{11}. Government figures
suggest that underground coal gasification – injecting oxygen into coal
seams and extracting the hydrogen and methane they release – can boost the
UK’s land-based coal reserves seventy-fold {12, 13}; and it opens up even
more under the seabed. There are vast untapped reserves of other fossil
fuels – bitumen, oil shale, methane clathrates – that energy companies
will turn to if the price is right.

Like all cultures, industrial civilisation will collapse at some point.
Resource depletion and climate change are likely causes. But I don’t
believe it will happen soon: not in this century, perhaps not even in the
next. If it continues to rely on economic growth, if it doesn’t reduce its
reliance on primary resources, our civilisation will tank the biosphere
before it goes down. To sit back and wait for what the Dark Mountain
people believe will be civilisation’s imminent collapse, without trying to
change the way it operates, is to conspire in the destruction of
everything greens are supposed to value.

Nor do I accept their undiscriminating attack on industrial technologies.
There is a world of difference between the impact of windfarms and the
impact of mining tar sands or drilling for oil: the turbines might spoil
the view but, as the latest disaster shows, the effects of oil seep into
the planet’s every pore. And unless environmentalists also seek to sustain
the achievements of industrial civilisation – health, education,
sanitation, nutrition – the field will be left to those who rightly wish
to preserve them, but don’t give a stuff about the impacts.

We can accept these benefits while rejecting perpetual growth. We can
embrace engineering, while rejecting many of the uses to which it is put.
We can defend healthcare, while attacking useless consumption. This
approach is boring, unromantic, uncertain of success, but a lot less ugly
than the alternatives.

For all that, the debate this project has begun is worth having, which is
why I’ll be going to the Dark Mountain festival this month {14}. There are
no easy answers to the fix we’re in. But there are no easy non-answers
either.

www.monbiot.com

Batten down the hatches

If you’re indebted to the federal government and its evil twin the industrial economy for your financial well-being or, like most Americans, for your very survival, the coming storm will not resemble a monsoon so much as a hurricane-style downspout. And of course it will come as a total surprise to the typical neoclassical economist, who has declared the recession over (and hasn’t recognized that the recession has been replaced with an ongoing depression that will be replaced by complete economic collapse). The industrial economy is circling the drain, and a hard rain is on the way.

I’ve been writing about the ongoing collapse for a few years, and have developed a comprehensive set of arrangements to deal with its ultimate endpoint. At first, I was deemed insane. Then fringe. Suddenly, collapse has gone mainstream. I’m not such a whack job after all, if recent news is any indication. This post provides a brief and partial overview of the dire straits facing the industrial economy age.

Let’s start with the housing market, on which the U.S. economy depends for economic growth. The last time the housing bubble popped, it rocked our suburban world. So the federal government blew up the bubble again, and it just might bring down the entire industrial economy when it pops anew.

Then there’s sovereign debt. Currently, Greece is the primary concern of most economists. That alone should tell you the irrelevance of Greece. The entire Eurozone teeters on the brink, with Greece being one of the few countries of such minor economic significance that it can be bailed out. Japan — the world’s second largest economy — could easily be next in line. And Greece’s debt to GDP ratio is downright tiny compared to that of the U.S. (112% vs. 421%, respectively), suggesting that the U.S. economy could take the Grecian route in the blink of an eye. The only difference between Greece and the U.S. is a printing press, and that alone cannot keep the U.S. from following Greece’s lead. Add to the world economic woes that 49 of 50 U.S. states are underwater, which hardly bodes well for entities that cannot go deeper into debt by printing money to kick the can down the road. The end of fiat currency looms large.

The American stock markets are about to go over the edge. A major crash lies right around the bend, as the entire industrial world is hitting the wall. The government stimulus is about used up, and China is ridding itself of fiat currencies and opting for gold instead (a move that could destroy the world’s industrial economy all by itself). Four big banks rule the American financial world and they keep getting bigger, but I doubt they can keep the show going much longer, even though they can essentially print their own money today (they borrow from the U.S. government at zero interest, and loan it back at three percent or more).

In short, the panic is on. The collapse of industrial society is imminent. Even Ben Bernanke is getting scared as the ultimate Ponzi scheme nears its end.

Among the more important issues we face: The industrialized world cannot live without deepwater oil, and the living planet cannot live with deepwater oil and its side-effects. This seems like a no-brainer to me, and the White House is covering up the extent of the gusher, but few people agree that the living planet on which we depend for our own survival should be a high priority. I’m a big fan of hastening the empire’s decline, if only for the selfish reason of saving our species.

Call me silly. But I think we’re on the verge of killing the beast.

How do industrial humans survive the coming storm? Or do we?

http://guymcpherson.com/2010/05/batten-down-the-hatches/

...

Avoiding Collapse – Possible Solutions

“A framing premise of this paper is that the sustainability dilemma is not merely an ecological or technical or economic crisis as is usually assumed, but rather it is a crisis rooted in fundamental human nature. More specifically, it is a crisis of human evolutionary success – indeed, we have reached the point where our success is killing us!” – Is Humanity Fatally Successful? – William Rees

Limits to Growth, The Thirty Year Update – A Systems Theory Approach

In The Limits to Growth – The 30-Year Update, the authors describe the results of a systems theory model [World3] that was used to generate “broad sweep” future scenarios using the following key global metrics:

• natural resources
• food
• population
• pollution
• industrial output
• life expectancy
• consumer goods per person
• food per person
• services per person
• human welfare index
• human ecological footprint

Nearly every scenario modeled by the authors lead to an overshoot of the earth’s carrying capacity resulting in a collapse in population and human welfare.  Only one scenario’s underlying assumptions were successful in avoiding collapse and only if the assumptions used for the basis of the model were implemented in time.  The three critical assumptions in that scenario included:

1. All couples limit their family size to 2 children and have access to effective birth control technologies
2. A fixed goal of industrial output per capita (i.e. a steady-state economy)
3. The development  and investment in powerful technologies for pollution abatement, land yield enhancement, land protection and nonrenewable resources (assuming 20 years for full implementation)

When this model was run with a start date of 2002:

“The population leveled off at less than 8 billion people, who remained at their desired standard of living throughout the century.  Their life expectancy is high…per capita services grow to 50% above year 2000 levels.  By the end of the century there is sufficient food for everyone.  Pollution peaks and falls before it causes irreversible damage.  Nonrenewable resources deplete so slowly that nearly 50% of the original endowment is still present in 2100.”

To see the effect of start date on the scenario the author’s ran the same model with start dates of 1982 and 2022.  As you would expect the 1982 model results in a lower ultimate population, improved life expectancy, and a higher standard of living.  However, if action is delayed until 2022, resource and pollution problems reach an unmanageable level and it is too late to avoid decline and collapse.

However grim the outlook, at it’s writing, the authors held out hope that collapse could be averted.  Factoring in a margin for error in the model and the passing of eight years, one might conclude that we now have anywhere from zero to less than two decades before we pass a point of no return.

Post Carbon Institute – The New Real Deal
In the New Real Deal, the Post Carbon Institute outlines a plan to transition the industrial world to a post fossil fuel economy.  To be fair this is not a prescription to avoid collapse but more of a plan to minimize the impact of the inevitable industrial decline due to the depletion of fossil fuels.  The key elements of the plan include:

1. Make a massive and immediate shift to renewable energy
2. Electrify the transportation system
3. Rebuild the electricity grid
4. De-carbonize and relocalize the food system
5. Retrofit the building stock for energy efficiency and energy production

The focus of this comprehensive post carbon plan is consistent with the third assumption of The Limits to Growth scenario discussed above.

From a Failed Growth Economy to a Steady-State Economy — Herman Daly – An Economic Policy Approach to Avoiding Collapse
At the bi-annual conference of The United States Society for Ecological Economics in June of 2009, Herman Daly was honored for his many contributions to the field of ecological economics.  During his acceptance speech, in which he vilified the religion of growth hardwired into mainstream economic thought, he offered ten policy proposals directed at transitioning us to a sustainable steady-state economy and by implication, saving us from our own “ecological suicide”.

1. Use a Cap-Auction-Trade system for basic resources – Caps would limit biophysical scale by quotas on depletion or pollution, whichever is more limiting. Auctioning the quotas would capture scarcity rents for equitable redistribution. Trade would allow efficient allocation to highest uses. This policy has the advantage of transparency. It would limit  the amount and rate of depletion and pollution that the economy can be allowed to impose on the ecosystem. Caps are quotas or limits to the throughput of basic resources, especially fossil fuels. The quota would typically be applied at the input end because depletion is more spatially concentrated than pollution and hence easier to monitor. The resulting higher price of basic resources would promote more economical use at each upstream stage of production.
2. Institute Ecological Tax Reform (as an alternative or supplement to cap-auction-trade)
   Shift the tax base from a tax on value added (labor and capital)  to a tax on “that to which value is added”, namely the entropic throughput of resources extracted from nature (depletion), and returned to nature (pollution). This internalizes external costs as well as raises revenue more equitably. It prices the scarce but previously un-priced contribution of nature. The value added by labor and capital is something we want to encourage, so stop taxing it. Depletion and pollution are things we want to discourage, so tax them.
3. Limit the Range of Inequality in Income (establish a minimum income and a maximum income)
   Without aggregate growth poverty reduction requires redistribution. Complete equality is unfair; unlimited inequality is unfair. Seek fair limits to the range of inequality. The civil service, the military, and the university manage with a range of inequality of a factor of 15 or 20. Corporate America has a range of 500 or more. Many industrial nations are below 25. Could we not limit the range to, say, 100, and see how it works? People who have reached the limit could either work for nothing at the margin if they enjoy their work, or devote their extra time to hobbies or public service. The demand left unmet by those at the top will be filled by those who are below the maximum. A sense of community necessary for democracy is hard to maintain across the vast income differences current in the US. Rich and poor separated by a factor of 500 become almost different species. The main justification for such differences has been that they stimulate growth, which will one day make everyone rich. This may have had superficial plausibility in an empty (resource abundant) world, but in our full world (resource limited) it is a fairy tale.
4. Free up the Length of the Working Day, Week, and Year
   Allow greater freedom for part-time or personal work. Full-time external employment for all is hard (impossible) to provide without growth. Other industrial countries have much longer vacations and maternity leaves than the US.  For the Classical Economists (versus today’s neo-classical economists) the length of the working day was a key variable by which the worker balanced the marginal disutility of labor with the marginal utility of income and of leisure so as to maximize enjoyment of life. Under industrialism the length of the working day became a parameter rather than a variable. We need to make it more of a variable subject to choice by the worker. And we should stop biasing the labor–leisure choice by advertising to stimulate more consumption and more labor to pay for it. Advertising should no longer be treated as a tax deductible ordinary expense of production.
5. Re-regulate International Commerce
   Move away from free trade, free capital mobility and globalization, and adopt compensating tariffs not to protect inefficient firms, but to protect efficient national policies of cost internalization from standards-lowering competition. We cannot integrate with the global economy and at the same time have higher wages, environmental standards, and social safety nets greater than the rest of the world. Trade and capital mobility must be balanced and fair, not deregulated or “free”.
6. Reduce and amend the authority of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the World Trade Organization
   Transition to something like Keynes’ original plan for a multilateral payments clearing union, charging penalty rates on surplus as well as deficit balances. This arrangement would seek balance on current account, and avoid large foreign debts and capital account transfers. For example, under Keynes’ plan the US would pay a penalty charge to the clearing union for its large deficit with the rest of the world, and China would also pay a similar penalty for its surplus. Both sides of the imbalance would be pressured to balance their current accounts by financial penalties, and if need be by exchange rate adjustments relative to the clearing account unit, called the bancor by Keynes. The bancor would serve as world reserve currency, a privilege that should not be enjoyed by any national currency. The IMF preaches free trade based on comparative advantage, and has done so for a long time. More recently the IMF-WB-WTO have started preaching the gospel of globalization, which, in addition to free trade, means free capital mobility internationally. The classical comparative advantage argument, however, explicitly assumes international capital immobility! When confronted with this contradiction the IMF waves its hands, suggests that you might be a xenophobe, and changes the subject. The IMF-WB-WTO contradict themselves in service to the interests of transnational corporations. International capital mobility, coupled with free trade, allows corporations to escape from national regulation in the public interest, playing one nation off against another. Since there is no global government they are in effect uncontrolled. The nearest thing we have to a global government (IMF-WB-WTO) has shown no interest in regulating transnational capital for the common good.
7. Move to 100% Reserve Requirements instead of Fractional Reserve Banking.
   This would put control of the money supply in hands of the government rather than private banks, which would no longer be able to create money out of nothing and lend it at interest. All quasi-bank financial institutions should be brought under this rule, regulated as commercial banks subject to 100% reserve requirements. Banks would earn their profit by financial intermediation only, lending savers’ money for them (charging a loan rate higher than the rate paid to savings account depositors) and providing checking, safekeeping, and other services. With 100% reserves every dollar loaned would be a dollar previously saved, re-establishing the classical balance between abstinence and investment. The government can pay its expenses by issuing more non interest-bearing fiat money to make up for the eliminated bank-created, interest-bearing money. However, it can only do this up to a strict limit imposed by inflation. If the government issues more money than the public wants to hold, the public will trade it for goods, driving the price level up. As soon as the price index begins to rise the government must print less and/or tax more. Thus a policy of maintaining a constant price index would govern the internal value of the dollar.
8. Stop treating the Scarce as if it were Non-scarce, but also stop treating the Non-scarce as if it were Scarce.
   Enclose the remaining commons of rival natural capital (e.g. atmosphere, electromagnetic spectrum, public lands) in public trusts, and price it by a cap-auction–trade system, or by taxes, while freeing from private enclosure and prices the non-rival commonwealth of knowledge and information. Knowledge, unlike throughput, is not divided in the sharing, but multiplied. Once knowledge exists, the opportunity cost of sharing it is zero and its allocative price should be zero. International development aid should more and more take the form of freely and actively shared knowledge, along with small grants, and less and less the form of large interest-bearing loans. Sharing knowledge costs little, does not create un-repayable debts, and it increases the productivity of the truly rival and scarce factors of production. Existing knowledge is the most important input to the production of new knowledge, and keeping it artificially scarce and expensive is perverse. Patent monopolies (aka “intellectual property rights”) should be given for fewer “inventions”, and for fewer years. Costs of production of new knowledge should, more and more, be publicly financed and then the knowledge freely shared.
9. Stabilize Population
   Work toward a balance in which births plus in- migrants equals deaths plus out-migrants. This is controversial and difficult, but as a start contraception should be made available for voluntary use everywhere.  Support voluntary family planning, and enforcement of reasonable immigration laws, democratically enacted in spite of the cheap labor lobby.
10. Reform how we measure and manage national well-being
    Separate GDP into a cost account and a benefits account. Compare them at the margin, stop throughput growth when marginal costs equal or exceed marginal benefits. In addition to this objective approach, recognize the importance of the subjective studies that show that, beyond a threshold, further GDP growth does not increase self-evaluated happiness. Beyond a level already reached in many countries GDP growth delivers no more happiness, but continues to generate resource depletion and pollution. At a minimum we must not just assume that GDP growth is “economic growth”, but prove it. And start by trying to refute the mountain of contrary evidence.

Daly concedes that these policy prescriptions are radical, but also offers that they are amenable to gradual application.  The question is whether we have the luxury of time.  If the Limits to Growth model is anywhere near correct we have no more than about twenty years and that assumes that we start a coordinated and global effort immediately.  If we take climate change as a example of our ability to take action on a global scale, it has been more than 20 years since we first recognized the problem and we have yet to forge and began to implement an integrated global plan of action.

Given that the prescriptions to avoid or mitigate collapse offered by the authors of the Limits to Growth, the Post Carbon Institute’s New Real Deal, and Daly’s Steady State Economy are orders of magnitude more disruptive and contentious as those proposed to combat climate change, the prospects for any meaningful and timely action are near zero.

In all likelihood, change will only come in the face of crisis as we begin  to stair step down the uncertain and painful face of collapse.  By then we will have crossed the threshold from the possibility of averting collapse over to the unstable ground of mitigating the effects of the fall.  The signs that growth is no longer economic and that we have entered Tainter’s zone of negative marginal returns are all around us.  Couple that with resource depletion rates that exceed replenishment rates and we have met Greer’s criteria for Catabolic Collapse.  Add Peak Oil to the mix and we are in the early stages of the collapse of Catton’s “Phantom Carrying Capacity”.

Even in the context of crisis and decline, all the “solutions” discussed in this post are still  valid, however their value will diminish with the passing of time as resources and capital become increasing dear, our choices begin to narrow, and vested interests continue the fight to retain advantages that are destined to slip away.

Whether our future turns in the direction of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the more hopeful but still difficult direction of Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand, or a more sustainable future anchored in renewable energy, re-localized agriculture, with higher levels of satisfaction, and with much lower levels of consumption will depend on the choices that we make.

Avoiding Societal, Economic, and Ecological Collapse? Too late ...

The movie Collapse has been pirated more than 2 million times. It officially goes on sale June 15th.

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Human Industrial Civilization is collapsing, period..... It cannot be reversed. It is not possible to sustain the way of life that we have known. No green, lefty, liberal, feel-good, politically correct, kum-ba-yah fantasies are going to prevent it. No wishful thinking will prevent it. It is not a political issue. It is a scientific, Darwinian issue that applies to everything from bacteria in a petri dish with an unlimited food supply to caribou on an Arctic island. When a species encounters a favorable set of circumstances, it will breed and multiply and grow and expand; the history of every bubble is that they all crash and die. And that is exactly where we are at today.

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http://blip.tv/file/3653298/

That video:

http://blip.tv/file/3653298/

has some good info in it.... like "Collapse Part II." Scary sh*t. Talks about the current Gulf oil spill and the infinite money growth paradigm (betting on our failure) , Greece here we come, etc....

Obama is a servant of the Federal Reserve, plain and simple. No mincing words here:

....

What is happening in Greece, what will happen in Spain and Portugal, what is starting to happen here in states such as California, is the work of a global, white-collar criminal class. No government, including our own, will defy them. It is up to us. Barack Obama is simply the latest face that masks the corporate state. His administration serves corporate interests, not ours. Obama, like Goldman Sachs or Citibank, does not want the public to see how the Federal Reserve Bank acts as a private account and ATM machine for Wall Street at our expense. He, too, has helped orchestrate the largest transference of wealth upward in American history. He serves our imperial wars, refuses to restore civil liberties, and has not tamed our crippling deficits. His administration gutted regulatory agencies that permitted BP to turn the Gulf of Mexico into a toxic swamp. The refusal of Obama to intervene in a meaningful way to save the gulf's ecosystem and curtail the abuses of the natural gas and oil corporations is not an accident. He knows where power lies. BP and its employees handed more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

We are facing the collapse of the world's financial system. It is the end of globalization. And in these final moments the rich are trying to get all they can while there is still time. The fusion of corporatism, militarism and internal and external intelligence agencies--much of their work done by private contractors--has given these corporations terrifying mechanisms of control. Think of it, as the Greeks do, as a species of foreign occupation. Think of the Greek riots as a struggle for liberation.

...

The Greeks Get It ‎

Mass Delusion:

....

Ahhhh … Safely in the American national illusion, where all the world's a shopping expedition. Or a terrorist threat. No matter, as long as it is colorful and wiggles on the theater state's 400 million screens. Plug in and be lit up by the American Hologram. This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a Möbius loop from which there is no logical escape. Logic has zilch to do with what is going on. The smallest part holographically recapitulates the whole, and vice versa. No thinking required, we just cycle and recycle through an aural dimension. Not all that bad, I guess, if it were not generated by forces out to fuck every last pair of eyeballs and mind plugged into it.

The investing class has put thousands of billions into movies, TV and other media to keep the hologram lit up over the past six decades. Which is to say, keep the public in an entertained stupor, awed, mislead, and most importantly, distracted. But the payoff probably runs in the trillions. For the clear-eyed citizen, there is a growing inner horror and despair in all this, with nowhere to turn but the Internet. The Net is a cyber reality, no more real than the hologram, and indeed a part of the hologram, though not quite yet absorbed and co-opted by capitalism. We take what relief we can find.

However, for the unquestioning rest, the hologram, taken in its entirety, constitutes the American collective consciousness. Awareness. It enshrouds every citizen, defining through its permeation the daily world in which we all operate. Whether we love or hate it, there is no escape. Go live in a shack in the woods. Call that escape. But everything in the outside world continues to run in accordance with the humming energy of the hologram. There is no cutting our umbilical link to the womb of this illusion, this mass hallucination. There is only getting a longer umbilical cord, closing your eyes, and pretending that what the rest of the nation does has no effect on you. We were all born and raised in that womb. We can no more divorce the neurochemistry and consciousness it shaped in us, than we can deny that we had an earthly mother and are of her tissue. Our consciousness is born of the hologram's connective neural and electrical tissue.

That common womb of American consciousness is dying. Slowly or rapidly, depending on how you assess the global ecocide and peak everything, it is dying. There will be resuscitations along the way, more massive infusions of money, fear and the rawest sort of fantasy fed to a mood and commodity drugged public. Still, its condition is terminal, because the hyperdrive consumer culture it was built to sustain, is itself unsustainable. Its appetite ate the world. In fact, so voracious is its appetite that even if our "consumer economy," (legalized feudal theft) sees a recovery, and resumes the level of growth required just to keep capitalism alive, it will die just that much faster. It is not in capitalism's DNA to care about the death of the earth. Nor is it in the brain chemistry of an American satiated on prime beef and sailing across the landscape at 70 miles per hour in a $40,000, steel exoskeleton from General Motors, to care. Hominid gratification is what it is - hard wired - and there is no circumventing it.

....We accepted the hologram's one voice to the many as truth (not that we had much choice, The ‘Gram was all we knew), then let our souls and national character necrotize in the warm bath of self-gratification and statist hubris.

.....The big problem at the moment though, for us as sentient beings, is: What to do when I get out of bed each day? Give money to the Democrats? Move out of the country? Stay and fight the bastards? Throwing money at frauds and fools doesn't work. Moving to Mexico or Canada takes money in a time when money and jobs are scarce everywhere. As for staying and fighting, really fighting, there is not one person reading this who is going to go strangle the sleazy bastards having martinis on Wall Street with their pet Senator. Nobody reading this is going to instill genuine physical fear, which is the only thing such lizards might respond to. We are left to work within the system, as per the hologram's directive. Their system. Ha!

The answer, to me at least, is to do the most obvious thing first. And I do mean obvious in the most mundane sense. Like fixing breakfast with all the contemplative awareness possible. Seriously. The tiniest right action, the action in complete unself-conscious natural awareness, connects to all the rightness in the universe. And the universe is always right. Because it owns all of us, plus black holes, and those teensy pinholes in time that physicist say make you an immediate neighbor of Shakespeare and mastodons only you don't know it. It owns the molecules of the ages. Everything.

"Lit Up By the American Hologram Theater"

 

Outrage, anyone?

By JOYCE MARCEL

 

Have you noticed that Tea Baggers and anti-government activists seem to be worrying about all the wrong things? For example, they are still questioning President Obama’s birthplace. Really? He could have been found as a baby floating in the reeds in a basket and it wouldn’t matter now. He’s firmly ensconced as president, and just as firmly overwhelmed by his job. Meanwhile, the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

The Louisiana wetlands are disappearing because of a huge, ever-flowing plume of crude -- something we once worshipped as a precious resource, but are now watching spill into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of upwards of 5,000 barrels a day. This disaster, which is threatening one of the world’s richest ecologies, is now about to hitch a ride on the Gulf Stream up the Florida coast.

Where’s the outrage over that, Mr. and Mrs. Tea Bagger?

Then, we might be in for a remake of the popular television show "M*A*S*H." Why? Because North Korea appears to have torpedoed a South Korean patrol vessel on March 26, leaving 46 sailors dead or unaccounted for. In retaliation, South Korea has said it will cut off most trade with North Korea.

North Korea denies it sunk the ship and warned that any attempt to punish it could lead to "all-out war." North Korea has been testing delivery systems for nuclear weapons. Feeling any outrage yet? Then there’s the European economy.

Greece has already imploded because its government, in collusion with large multinational financial companies (Yes, Goldman Sachs again), has looted the till.

"The right-wing government of Kostas Karamanlis, which preceded the current government of George Papandreou, did what the Republicans did under George W. Bush," writes author Chris Hedges this week. "They looted taxpayer funds to enrich their corporate masters and bankrupt the country... They used mass propaganda to make the population afraid of terrorists and surrender civil liberties, including habeas corpus. And while Bush and Karamanlis, along with the corporate criminal class they abetted, live in unparalleled luxury, ordinary working men and women are told they must endure even more pain and suffering to make amends. It is feudal rape."

Ireland, Spain and Portugal are on the waiting list. Outcry, anyone? Hedges wants to believe that "there has to be a point when even the American public -- which still believes the fairy tale that personal will power and positive thinking will lead to success -- will realize it has been had."

But that’s not true. Not when so many angry Tea Baggers are saluting Rand Paul’s win in the Kentucky Republican U.S. Senate primary.

Paul, filled with anti-government rage, is supporting the company which caused the oil spill and says the government has no right to tell any business what to do. MoveOn jumped on this statement in an e-mail appropriately headed "’Whites Only’ Lunch Counters?" They go on to note that "on Saturday, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell joined Rand Paul at a rally and unequivocally endorsed him."

Then there’s my new hero, Rep. Alan Grayson, the Florida congressman who introduced a bill in the House called "The War is Making You Poor Act," designed to make us ever more aware that America has been flushing its wealth down the toilets of fear and violence since the beginning of the Second World War. (He quotes Eisenhower’s warning about the "military-industrial complex" as an inspiration.)

"The purpose of this bill," wrote Grayson last week, "is to connect the dots, and to show people in a real and concrete way the cost of these endless wars ... War is a permanent feature of our societal landscape, so much so that no one notices it anymore ... The costs of the war have been rendered invisible. There’s no draft. Instead, we take the most vulnerable elements of our population, and give them a choice between unemployment and missile fodder. Government deficits conceal the need to pay in cash for the war. We put the cost of both guns and butter on our Chinese credit card."

Oddly enough, this bill, which demands that the Pentagon live within its budgeted means, cancels next year’s $159 billion budget allocation for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and gives everyone a $35,000 income tax credit (couples get $70,000), is being supported by Rand Paul’s father, Texas congressman Ron Paul.

The libertarian fantasy that the world would be run better if there wasn’t government is just that, a fantasy. Men and women aren’t angels. They don’t always act rationally and out of enlightened self-interest. That’s why there are traffic lights, at least a cursory inspection of our food before it goes into the supermarket and a testing of that pill before Grandma takes it.

Tea Baggers and their ilk are right to be furious. We should all be furious. The disappearing jobs, the foreclosures, the crumbling of the social contract, the tanking global economy, the oil spill, North Korea -- there is much to be fearful about. But worrying about where Obama was born, or hating all Muslims and immigrants? Seems like a waste of time to me.

‎

Actually Chris Hedges used that term first. JM borrowed it.

Deciphering why we are in Afghanistan:

... 5-26-2010

Which brings us to the real mission, actually obliquely referred to here by Schumer:

"We can achieve victory in Afghanistan when we have an environment that is conducive to economic development and most importantly when the Afghans have a security infrastructure that permits them to independently fight off and neutralize the Taliban insurgency in that country."

Putting aside what he relegates most importance to, the two operative words are "economic development", and it is not theirs that we are interested in. If we are not interested in helping Cuba’s economic development, 90 miles from our shore, why would we care about Afghanistan, halfway around the world.

All the troops, all the missiles, all the Predator drones are there to bring Afghanistan under American dependence, consolidating U.S. presence in the oil and gas rich Caspian Basin with its geopolitical significance toward potential enemies Russia and China, and encircling Iran. We’re fighting them “over there” not so we don’t have to fight them “over here”, but because that’s where the oil and gas are. Try telling that to the American public and see if it turns up a few less patriots.

The vaunted “stability” that Washington yearns for in foreign countries has nothing to do with stability. What country has been more stable than Cuba for the past 50 years? Stability in the State Department sense means compliance with U.S. instructions, access for U.S. investment, access to the country’s raw materials, and the necessary military basing these entail. The cheapest asset of U.S. multinationals is the U.S. military, serving to protect foreign investment with costs of blood and limb, paid for in full by the commons.

http://www.countercurrents.org/rothenberg260510.htm

http://www.tomdispatch.com/books/175165/the_complex%3A_how_the_military_...

http://motherjones.com/politics/2008/04/real-life-matrix

A passive, submissive mindset grips America: "the silence of the ... ‎

Yes, this is yet another article about the deafening silence, a most critical problem, that plagues our nation. America's wars rage on endlessly; nine years in Afghanistan, seven in Iraq, with Iran being the next potential target. War is now a part of our national psyche, deeply embedded within our culture. And as we go from one war to another I am struck by the eerie silence that emanates from the American people; it is the silence of the lambs.

No matter how many years these wars have been going on, no matter how much they have cost, how many troops have needlessly died, or how much destruction they have inflicted on the nations that we have invaded and occupied, the people of America remain in a state of passive silence; seemingly unwilling, unable, or afraid to express any form of protest or dissent.

How did we in America ever get to this point? It's not really difficult to explain. Over time the American people have been subjected to a process of patriotic mind conditioning primarily carried out by the government and the various elements of our national media. We have been taught that we must support our troops and every war, and accept and condone all military actions without exception or condition; and we have done that, time and again, except in the case of the Vietnam War which will be discussed below....

So what are the specific elements or institutions in America that have, over time, contributed to this insidious process of patriotic mind control. To begin with, let's take our mainstream national media; radio, TV, and newspapers that are largely controlled by corporate America. Do you ever hear or read anything of real substance being reported or discussed relative to America's military actions around the world? Of course not, for the corporate monopolies that control our airwaves and newsprint have effectively muzzled their anchors and reporters.

You can watch TV and listen to radio 24/7; but you will not get the truth, the real facts or any in-depth analysis of what is really going on with these wars that have brought shock and awe to selected nations or the massive military costs that our sucking the lifeblood out of our nation. No one ever talks about war; it is taboo, something that we simply have no time to discuss. And, God forbid, that we should speak out against war by patriotic dissent. Why, someone might accuse us of treason!

Does CNN ever discuss the pros and cons of our current wars, the exact reasons why our military is in Afghanistan, why we are illegally sending our drones of war across the borders of Pakistan, why our peace president continues to reject diplomacy in dealing with Iran? Does MSNBC, the supposed liberal-leaning network? Does Fox News, the ultra-conservative right wing mouthpiece of corporate America and the GOP? The answer is no, no and no! Never, not ever; that is entirely off limits and it must be tightly controlled.

What about the U.S. Congress? What a laugh, what a joke to think that this body of corporate owned and controlled pseudo legislators would take the time to discuss these wars and the extreme costs. How could they even think about challenging America's war agenda for it would be labeled as non-patriotic and almost treasonous to do so; and because it would result in the immediate stoppage of corporate contributions to their campaign war chests? Except for a handful of true patriots in Congress, the vast majority of our elected representatives have decided to pledge allegiance to corporate power, to the military-industrial complex, no longer to this nation or the people....

As Chris Hedges has said, "Empires crumble when they expand so far that they neglect the needs of their own citizens at home, becoming hollowed out from within."

Chris Hedges: The Terror-Industrial Complex - Chris Hedges ..

and the charade goes on....

Jan Lundberg is a former oil industry analyst who, among other functions, formally studied offshore oil drilling's potential for California on behalf of the oil industry -- resulting in Congress's immediate lifting of the moratorium there in the mid 1980s. He ran Lundberg Survey which published the Lundberg Letter, then known widely as “the bible of the oil industry.”

....The Natural Resources Defense Council's (NRDC) president Frances Beinecke appeared on the PBS TV Newshour on May 27 along with the American Petroleum Institute's (API) chief economist John Felmy. They had a similar message regarding future energy alternatives, except that Felmy warned that oil is still to be heavily relied upon, and any pause in offshore oil drilling has economic impacts.

Rather than take a stand for slashing energy use, Beinecke came out for a clean energy transformation. She mentioned "oil addiction," but implied that solar panels, etc. are the answer. Her ignorance of energy technologies' ability to replace petroleum, based on assumptions about continued energy and agricultural-chemicals' & fuels' availability for the present overpopulation, is only typical. Thus, her ecological ignorance is almost as dangerous as the American Petroleum Institute's and President Obama's. Beinecke’s praise for the just-announced brief moratorium on offshore oil drilling buys into calming the public while setting the stage for a resumption of full-on oil addiction and energy gluttony. NRDC wants something better, but lacks the vision to offer it.

It was API, not NRDC, that brought up the fact that there are 250 million motor vehicles on U.S. roads. The opportunity for a real environmentalist to say we need to cut back on the number of vehicles by adopting a car-free lifestyle was missed, deliberately. The auto is as sacred to the major environmental groups as it is to API and its friend the government.

The U.S. is missing an historic chance to question oil dependence and to actually do something about it -- instead of scrambling to react to the moment and gazing off into the haze to some Holy Grail of clean energy for perpetual consumption. Worse, the business-as-usual approach to the present Gulf oil disaster continues the national pretense of ecological stability. The ongoing assault against nature cannot be denied, except by those holding their ears and eyes closed while they continue to shell out dollars to buy cars, gasoline and plastic. They wish to continue uninterrupted their lives of shopping, paying their bills, and imagining they have the best leadership in Washington and state capitals that money can buy.

Petrocollapse that stems from the effects of global peak oil extraction has been raised a notch and clarified by the Gulf disaster. But make no mistake: the uncounted millions of gallons of rampaging oil and chemicals are just par for the course, slated to enter the ecosystem anyway. The idea that things were under control before the BP blowout, or that soon things might again be under control, is as delusional as the continuation of the oil wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: keep on fighting, killing, and wasting while we hope for some positive result. But in reality, we have no business over there -- even if we could afford the trillions of dollars spent. Similarly, we have no business extracting and refining oil or other fossil fuels -- unless our business is death and the unraveling of nature. Count me out. How about you?

President Obama's May 27 news conference was almost a convincing performance, suggesting with his deep, clear voice that he is doing his best to deal with a crisis. However, he doesn't understand the true nature of the crisis. The crisis was raging before the blowout, when our commander-in-chief and "nut case at the wheel" called for more offshore oil drilling. Does he now warn of worse-case scenarios, now that they’re possible? No, he’s a pacifier -- except with his war machine.

When the President brings his little daughter Malia into the news conference, to depict himself as a regular guy shaving and assuring a child (emblematic of the American people) that he is on top of the situation, he is surely desperate. Obama tries to exude confidence over handling the BP oil disaster, but is he really so unshakable when the evidence is clear that BP's handling of the event and clean-up have been less than competent? And when the government has been predictably slow and inefficient? On-the-ground reports tell more than official assurances. Aside from protecting one's job performance as a politician or corporado, there is a public relations campaign to tranquilize the American people and fool the world. Except, people are not as simple minded and gullible as BP and Obama hope. The question is whether people will get beyond blaming and hand-wringing to the point of taking wise action.

Until then, Drill Baby Drill is mostly alive and well. This is excused among pseudo progressives such as the Democratic Party leadership, and people buy it because the Republicans are a tad worse and might invade Iran. To believe in such non-solutions is to hope that the march of the sheople to the slaughter house can be slowed down a bit -- with a clean energy miracle coming along some day or decade to save us from having to make lifestyle change and experience the collapse of the American Empire.

No matter what Obama does or does not do, no matter how much he or the public "get it" or don't get it, the Gulf oil disaster is an historic, watershed event far greater than Exxon Valdez. Collapse of the system has gotten a big boost.

* * * * *

Ecological Denial On The Gulf Oil Disaster: US Policies Continue ...