Title quote from Roger Martin, chairman of Population Matters.
Oct 232011
Oct 042011
Guest post by Guy McPherson:
My recent foray to Wisconsin and Michigan had me staying five different homes, hence sleeping in five different beds and eating at many different tables. It was quite an exciting adventure, spent with wide-awake people, and I hope to repeat the experience as many times as the industrial economy allows.
I’ve embedded one of the thirteen presentations I delivered over a span of eight days. It’s my final presentation, excluding Q&A (which might come later), which partially explains my on-and-off incoherence (the remainder is inexplicable, as usual).
The presentation includes a half-hearted pitch of my final book. The book is available, a couple months earlier than anticipated, and can be found at this link as well as the usual online outlets. If all goes according to plan, I’ll receive a few copies later today. The book has already been reviewed by Sandy Krolick, the kulturCritic and Cameron Conaway, the poet. Krolick’s review was picked up by Transition Voice, and Conaway’s review was run by Examiner.
I’m trying to produce video from my presentation at a Harvest Gathering Festival with a barn as venue. I may post it at a later date, if all goes according to plan. It includes no slides, and the material differs considerably from the one above.
Reaction was mixed, as usual. Some people, such as this college student, found my messages unbelievable. Others quibbled with the timing of the sources I presented (I carefully avoided pushing my own predictions). Standing ovations were rare — even though I begged for them — but in the end several people understood the importance of collapse if we are to extend our run as a species.
If we ever encounter a superior alien race, we better f@cking hope they’re nothing like us.
Sep 152011
For almost as long as I can remember we have been saying that the United States, with 5 percent of the world’s people, consumes a third or more of the earth’s resources. That was true. It is no longer true. Today China consumes more basic resources than the United States does.
Among the key commodities such as grain, meat, oil, coal, and steel, China consumes more of each than the United States except for oil, where the United States still has a wide (though narrowing) lead. China uses a quarter more grain than the United States. Its meat consumption is double that of the United States. It uses three times as much coal and four times as much steel.
Guest post by Guy McPherson, professor emeritus at the University of Arizona. His site: Nature Bats Last
This essay is rife with the type of self-indulgence I try to avoid, often unsuccessfully. It’s a summary of my life’s story. It begins by insulting the readers, before the end of this first paragraph, and it ends with an unavoidably maundering, self-absorbed synopsis of recent, personal events. I doubt it’s worth your time to read. But I’m a poor judge of what works for people here. My latest essay was a thoughtful collaboration with three brilliant scholars (and me), and it generated little attention. So maybe the readers of this blog are similar to the rest of the world’s industrial citizens, more interested in personal-interest accounts than serious information that impacts your lives.
____________________
During my youth, I was immersed in a culture of extraction and consumption. I was born in the heart of the Aryan nation in a small mining town in the panhandle of Idaho and I grew up in a tiny, redneck, back-woods logging town. Consumption was, and is, the prevailing culture in the United States. As with the extraction of ore and timber needed to support the unquestioned goal of economic growth, the consumption of materials and the costs associated with that consumption rarely are brought before the citizenry for critical evaluation. We live in the Age of Entitlement, assuming we deserve all we unquestioningly consume.
Although a majority of my school-age classmates denigrated education and wound up working in the mines or in the woods, I took a different route. Inspired by the words and examples of my parents — both lifelong educators — I vigorously pursued advancement through education, and completed a Ph.D. only nine years after I graduated from high school. Not surprisingly, my university degrees in forestry and range science focused on the production of natural resources. Higher education led to a twenty-year career at a major research university, where my teaching and research focused initially on management of natural resources and, later, on a life of excellence.
During my final decade in the classroom, I took a strongly Socratic turn, asking my students how to pursue a life of excellence. Bound together as a corps of discovery in the classroom, we focused on the six questions Socrates found so relevant to the human condition and a life of excellence: What is courage? What is good? What is justice? What is moderation? What is piety? What is virtue?
Throughout my career in higher education, I nurtured the personal and professional growth of students and I questioned myriad aspects of contemporary American culture, typically via guest commentaries in various newspapers. Neither individual attention to students nor questions about culture were welcomed by university administrators, but my tenured status and international reputation for excellent scholarship allowed me to pursue the work I loved. In addition to writing numerous articles and books, I delivered about ten presentations each year to a wide range of audiences, from student anarchists to the U.S. Department of Defense.
Working at a major research university required me to live in a in a city, the very apex of empire. For years, I avoided the nagging voice in my head as it pointed out the horrific costs of imperial living: destruction of the living planet, obedience at home, and oppression abroad. Eventually, though, I could no longer ignore the powerful words of Arundhati Roy in her insightful 2001 book, Power Politics: “The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.”
And then there’s the philosophy of Camus, which reminds us about the absurdity of our existence as well as finding worth in the act of rebellion. Rebellion cannot be meaningfully pursued while one is shackled to an imperial institution, as Chris Hedges points out in this week’s excellent essay, “Calling All Rebels.”
I departed university life for many reasons, among them to dedicate more time informing the world’s citizens about the consequences of the way we live. My message centers on the twin sides of the fossil-fuel coin: global climate change and energy decline (commonly known as “peak oil”). After all, the most important race in the history of humanity is under way, although the world’s governments and the mainstream media have failed to give notice. The world’s climate is changing at an accelerating rate, with profound implications for nature and the humans who depend on the natural world. In addition, the world’s energy supply is rapidly declining, which is leading to significant contraction of the world’s industrial economy. These unprecedented phenomena impact every aspect of life on Earth, notably including our ability to protect the living planet on which we depend for our own survival. Time is not on our side.
If we continue with business as usual, we likely are committed to a 4 C rise in average global temperature by mid-century. Such a profound and rapid rise in global temperature will reduce, to near zero, human habitat on Earth. A reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 80% represents the single remaining hope to save the living planet on which we depend. Such a reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases will require either a near-term trip to the post-industrial Stone Age or a rapid accounting for the actual costs associated with consuming fossil fuels. The latter will require immediate recognition of the explicit links between environmental protection, social justice, and the human economy and therefore an unprecedented transition to physical economics. Either way, we’re nearing the end of the Age of Entitlement and drawing inexorably closer to the Age of Consequences.
Although ecological forecasting is fraught with uncertainty, there is little doubt that some options have been permanently closed and others pose significant challenges in the years ahead. For example, long-term economic growth is precluded by inaccessibility to inexpensive sources of energy, and we are committed to at an average global temperature increase of at least 2 C. Dealing with the two sides of the fossil-fuel coin — global climate change and reduced energy availability — will require enormous courage, compassion, and creativity.
In addition to inspiration and motivation, we need practical, local solutions to mitigate for climate change and energy decline (it is too late for societal-level solutions to either predicament). Local solutions must be based on a realistic set of assumptions about climate and energy, and my message centers on the moral, philosophical, and pragmatic aspects of climate change and energy decline. My writing and presentations describe the nature of our predicaments, offer a series of assumptions based on forecasts for climate change and energy decline, give a general template for action, and then deliver a series of practical solutions within the realm of strengthening the links between environmental protection, social justice, and the human economy.
But, as should be obvious, I’m having damned little impact. I know exactly three people who, influenced by my message, have changed their lives in any way at all. I am one of them. The other two made minor changes in lifestyle when they began sharing their property with me. Considering how difficult it is to change ourselves, we shouldn’t expect to be able to use words to change others.
At the height of a productive career characterized by frequent awards for teaching and research, my moral compass drove me away from the relative ease of a highly paid job in exchange for the joy of stewarding life in a small community. More than two decades after I started down the academic path that led to a productive career in the ivory tower — and much to the amazement and criticism of my colleagues — I returned to my rural roots to live in an off-grid, straw-bale house where I practice my lifelong interest in sustainable living via organic gardening, raising small animals for eggs and milk, and working with members of my rural community.
I am fully aware that rural life has its benighted side. Walking to school at the tender age of ten, a classmate three years my senior aimed a rifle out his bedroom window at the base of my neck. I kept walking, and failed to mention the unremarkable event to my parents for two decades. It simply never came up. But society has changed during the last forty years, and my new rural community is not as benighted as the community of my youth. We understand and appreciate diversity in various forms, and members of the community seek to emphasize the attributes that bring us together, rather than those that drive us apart.
As I look out the picture windows of the mud hut this overcast morning, snow-capped mountains in the nearby wilderness provide a stunning backdrop to the last few sandhill cranes in this small valley. The cranes are among the last to leave their winter home before heading north for an Idaho summer. They remind me that some things are worth supreme sacrifices. Some things are worth dying for, the living planet included.
It’s not at all clear that my decision to abandon the empire was the right one. I know it will extend my life when the ongoing economic collapse is complete, and I know it is the morally appropriate decision (as if a dozen people in this country give a shit about morality). But Albert Einstein seems mistaken, at least in this case: “Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others, it is the only means.”
My own example has generated plenty of scorn, but essentially no influence. On the other hand, the imperialism of living in the city and teaching at a university has rewards that extend well beyond the monetary realm. I miss working with young people every hour of every day. I miss comforting the downtrodden, notably in facilities of incarceration, every day. And I miss afflicting the comfortable, notably hard-hearted university administrators, at least weekly.
So here I sit, alternately staring at the screen of empire and staring out the window into timeless beauty. I contemplate the timing of imperial collapse and the implications for the tattered remains of the living planet. Half a century (and one week) into an insignificant life seesawing between service and self-absorption, I wonder, as always, what to do. My heart, heavy as the unbroken clouds overhead, threatens to break when I think about what we’ve done in pursuit of progress.
Spring’s resplendence lies ahead, with its promise of renewal. Is there world enough, and time? Will we yet find a way to destroy a lineage 45 million years old, or will the haunting call of the sandhill crane make it through the bottleneck of human industry?
Sep 062011
Guest post by Guy McPherson, professor emeritus at the University of Arizona and author of Nature Bats Last.
The U.S. Department of Defense consumes 360,000 barrels of oil each day. Yet corporate Amerika wants you to conserve, no doubt to save the last drops for the military (to be used to secure more oil). We’re being fleeced, folks, and the fleecing continues unabated at all levels. Here’s a minor example of the fox guarding the financial chicken coop, but it’s hardly extraordinary.
As a result of runaway fossil-fuel consumption, the amount of carbon released to the atmosphere is still going up, even as the industrial economy is buried in a depression. We haven’t observed below-average temperatures on this planet for 25 years. Even high oil prices can’t keep a bad country down.
The response of the government and its sponsors at the Federal Reserve Bank remains unchanged: print money. Quantitative Easing (QE, i.e., printing money) has been a complete failure. But because Ben Bernanke has adopted levitating the stock markets as the Federal Reserve Bank’s prime directive, I’ve no doubt we’ll see QE 3, QE 4, and so on, right through to QE infinity until the U.S. dollar joins every other fiat currency in the dustbin of history. Alan Greenspan warned about the worthless paper certain to result from the ongoing Ponzi scheme, back in 2005.
The debt problem is as bad as they say. And probably worse than anybody is saying. Reducing U.S. debt causes the stock markets to fall profoundly. Increasing U.S. debt makes a dire predicament worse, but a missed payment on U.S. debt leads directly to junk status for the dollar, so Benny and the Inkjets will continue to print until the dollar is dead.
What are the options, after all? We’re on a train going over a cliff, and the cabin smells of natural gas. We can ride out the train wreck or jump out, sans parachutes. The banksters in charge have posed a third option: light a match. As economist Mish says, “Expect chaos.”
Every additional brick in the wall of civilization, placed there by the fascists in charge, has two profound consequences. First, each brick enriches the financially wealthy at the expense of the rest of us, even as economic collapse looms. Second, every brick further destroys the remnants of the living planet. Let’s kick Barack Obama — the American Gorbachev — out of the way so we can tear down this wall.
Aug 032011
Invest a couple hours and watch this…
New article points to data that says we’re f@cked:
The world population, currently at seven billion, is well beyond Earth’s ability to sustain. By 2050, with a projected population of 10 billion people and without a change in consumption patterns, the cumulative use of natural resources will amount to the productivity of up to 27 planet Earths, the study found.
…and I bet you thought that recycling your crap would save the world.
Sustaining the current seven billion people on the planet requires a major shift in resource use. At present, the average U.S. citizen’s ecological footprint is about 10 hectares, while a Haitian’s is less than one. The planet could sustain us if everyone’s footprint averaged two ha, Mora said.
If there are more people, then there are simply fewer resources available for everyone, so population control will be needed along the lines of “one child per woman”, he said.
“I’m from Colombia, it blows my mind that some governments in the developing world pay women to have more children,” he added.
If World War 3 doesn’t prevent this from happening, this will be the cause of World War 3.
Jul 202011
Throughout history, big extinctions have left winners and losers…the winners aren’t necessarily the species that survived the extinction, but the species that adapted best to the altered environment. Mankind has kicked off the 6th great extinction, which will warp our air, water, biochemical systems. We may need to adapt (e.g. grow gills) to survive:
The history of life on Earth is punctuated by several mass extinction events (2), during which global biological diversity was sharply reduced. These events were followed by novel changes in the evolution of surviving species and the structure and function of their ecosystems. Our planet is presently in the early to middle stages of a sixth mass extinction (3), which, like those before it,will separate evolutionary winners from losers. However, this event differs from those that preceded it in two fundamental ways: (i) Modern extinctions are largely being caused by a single species, Homo sapiens, and (ii) from its onset in the late Pleistocene, the sixth mass extinction has been characterized by the loss of larger-bodied animals in general and of apex consumers in particular (4, 5).
The loss of apex consumers is arguably humankind’s most pervasive influence on the natural world. This is true in part because it has occurred globally and in part because extinctions are by their very nature perpetual, whereas most other environmental impacts are potentially reversible on decadal to millenial time scales. Recent research suggests that the disappearance of these animals reverberates further than previously anticipated (6–8), with far-reaching effects on processes as diverse as the dynamics of disease; fire; carbon sequestration; invasive species; and biogeochemical exchanges among Earth’s soil, water, and atmosphere.
Never mind Fitch, Moodys and S&P and the sovereign debt crisis…planet Earth is getting downgraded.
Source: Trophic Downgrading of Planet Earth
Jun 042011
“I have said it’s worse than Chernobyl and I’ll stand by that. There was an enormous amount of radiation given out in the first two to three weeks of the event. And add the wind and blowing in-land. It could very well have brought the nation of Japan to its knees. I mean, there is so much contamination that luckily wound up in the Pacific Ocean as compared to across the nation of Japan – it could have cut Japan in half. But now the winds have turned, so they are heading to the south toward Tokyo and now my concern and my advice to friends that if there is a severe aftershock and the Unit 4 building collapses, leave. We are well beyond where any science has ever gone at that point and nuclear fuel lying on the ground and getting hot is not a condition that anyone has ever analyzed.” — Arnie Gundersen
Listen to audio interview by Chris Martenson
May 182011
Why isn’t this on mainstream news?
May 102011
Our water use has the potential to reach peak limits. Water expert Peter Gleick said that we’ve already hit peak limits on water use in many parts of the world.
According to Gleick:
As much as 40% of the water humans use come from non-renewable resources, like northern China groundwater, or groundwater in the state of California, or in the Great Plains of the United States, or groundwater in India – anyplace where we’re pumping groundwater much faster than nature recharges it.
“I have no doubt that slavery will return as the world’s energy resources get increasingly scarce.”
Did slavery end because we simply found a substitute for all that free/cheap human power?
How many energy slaves does a typical Canadian have at his or her disposal? Dave Hughes, perhaps Canada’s premier energy analyst and the nation’s former coal specialist at Natural Resources Canada, has done the math and we are not an emancipated people.
Hughes calculates that one barrel of crude (non-renewable sunshine captured in plants over the past 500 million years or so) contains approximately six gigajoules (six billion joules) or about 1,700 kilowatts of energy.
Now a healthy individual can pump out enough juice to light a 100-watt bulb or (360,000 joules) an hour. With weekends and holidays off and a sensible eight-hour day, Hughes figures that it might takes one person 8.6 years on a bicycle (or treadmill) to produce the energy now stored in one barrel of oil. (Source)
(Of course we could work those slaves 12 hours a day, seven days a week with no holidays, argues Hughes. In that case a barrel is equivalent to 3.8 years of human labor. But this columnist favours a more humane treatment.)
Given that the average Canadian now consumes 24.7 barrels of oil a year with scarcely a blink of the eye, every citizen employs about 204 virtual slaves. That’s a spectacular amount of power for any mortal to wield and much more than any Roman or Egyptian household ever commanded. Or five times more than average 19th century U.S. plantation owners.
(Source)
In a past article, I comment that the (link to article) industrial revolution ended slavery – not a newfound sense of empathy.
The BBC recently did a show ‘The Human Power Station’ which disconnected an unsuspecting family from the power grid and substituted the coal/natural gas-fueled power-plant electricity with human power. Watch this to see the amount of human energy needed to fuel a simple shower:
Somewhat ironically, “Its crew had a 20 megawatt generator to keep the lights and cameras going. So you will need around 1,000 slaves to make an hour of TV.” (Guardian)
May 012011
We hear it all the time – green jobs, energy independence, eco friendly, etc. The future is green…or is it? Have we been sold a marketing gimmick and political rhetoric?
Andrew P Morriss examines this in his book ‘The False Promise of Green Energy‘:
What green energy promises to provide is just so alluring-more jobs, a cleaner environment, a more stable economy, clean and bountiful electricity, fewer toxins and pollutants and, of course, the gratitude of generations to come. There’s just one problem. It isn’t going to happen that way. This book critically and realistically evaluates the claims of green energy and green jobs proponents who argue that we can improve the economy and the environment, almost risk-free, by spending billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars in return for what are ultimately false promises.
Listen to a recent interview with the author.
Apr 082011
Mar 292011
1. Here you go: Fukushima is in ‘no danger of Chernobyl-style catastrophe’. Now for the bad news: However, experts fear a major radioation leak from the site, as the power plant appears to have melted through the bottom of its containment vessel.
2. No good news here…The housing market is in rough shape:
- US loan delinquency rate: 8.8%
- US foreclosure inventory rate: 4.15%
- Total non-current inventory: 6.9 million
- Foreclosure inventory = 30 times monthly foreclosure sales volume
- 23% increase in Option ARM foreclusures over the past 6 months
- Average US loan in foreclosure has been delinquent for 537 days
- 30% of loans in foreclosure haven’t made a payment in 2 years
3. Or here…We’ve reinforced a system that promotes moral hazard. The next financial crisis will be the true test.
4. Or here…A debt crisis in Portugal is ‘inevitible‘.
So where are you going to put your money?
Peak oil has gone mainstream. Many governments, militaries, investment banks…and even energy companies have fessed up to the risks. Now HSBC…whether they realize it or not.
50 years of supply sounds great, but it’s actually not and it doesn’t debunk the peak oil theory. Peak oil theory isn’t about running out of oil…it’s about running out of cheap, easily accessible oil. The peak in EnergyROI is what we should be concerned with. We may have oil for another 50 years, but it’s going to be damned expensive and hard-to-get.
Yes, mainstream media has shifted away from Japan. No, the problem is not solved.
Tokyo – one of the world’s largest cities – is living the nightmare scenario with a contaminated water supply.
Mar 232011
