The economy is like a circus. It comes to town, and eventually it leaves town. We get paid in tickets to this circus. As long as the circus stays in town, we can use our tickets. Once the circus leaves town, we are pretty much out of luck.1
The reason the circus stays in town is because the economy stays in sufficient balance that the economy can go on. This is much like the way many other self-organized systems function. For example, our bodies continue to function as long as there are suitable balances in many different areas (oxygen, food, water, air pressure). Ecosystems continue to function as long as there is sufficient rain, adequate temperatures, and enough sunlight.
There are many different views as to what limits we reach in a finite world. Some people think we will “run out” of oil, or of energy products. Some think that the energy return will fall too low, as measured in some manner. I see the adequacy of the energy return as being very much tied to the financial system. Thus, the forecast by US Atlanta Fed GDPNow indicating that first quarter 2017 US GDP growth will only be 0.5% is likely to be a problem, assuming it is correct.
Our economy operates on economies of scale. Once we get too close to shrinking, or actually start shrinking, we reach a point where the economic circus starts to leave town. At some point, we will discover the circus is gone. The economy we thought we had, will have left us. If some people are survivors, they will need to pick up the pieces and start over with an entirely new system.
What the Economy Needs to Do to Keep Functioning
For our economy to continue functioning, a number of variables are important:
- Prices of commodities – Prices cannot be too high for the consumer to afford goods made with them. They also cannot be too low for producers. If prices of oil and other commodities are too low for producers (as they are now), producers need to keep raising debt levels to stay in business. There is a risk that production will stop from lack of adequate new investment, or from the bankruptcy of producers.
- Wages of non-elite workers – These wages need to be high enough so that workers can afford goods made with commodities, such as cars, homes and computers. These big purchases tend to use commodities even after they are made, adding to “demand” for commodities. If commodity prices such as oil are too low (as they are now), it is likely related to the inadequate wages of non-elite workers.
- Mandatory payments required of non-elite workers, such as taxes, health care, and education – It is not just wages of non-elite workers that are important. So are required payments, such as payments for taxes, healthcare and education. Clearly, the lower these payments are for non-elite workers, the better the economy functions.
- Interest rates – Low interest rates are helpful for some parts of the economy, while high interest rates are good for other parts. Low interest rates help create affordable monthly payments for goods such as homes and cars. If interest rates decline, the market prices of assets such as real estate, shares of stock, and bonds tend to rise. These rising values are of great benefit to owners of these assets, since they can sell these assets and use the proceeds to add to current consumption. Conversely, high interest rates are important to pension plans and to others depending on investment income. Banks have a problem if there is not a big enough “spread” between short and long interest rates.
- Increase in debt – An increase in debt indirectly makes the economy “look” much better. Increasing debt acts to raise wages, since some of this growing debt adds to funds available for wages. The higher wages tend to increase demand for goods, and thus indirectly raise commodity prices. A virtuous circle starts, pushing up economic growth, provided an adequate quantity of very cheap energy products is available (under $20 barrel oil, for example) that can be used to make goods and services. Increased debt works less and less well, as the price of energy products increases.
- Inflation rates – The higher the inflation rate, the easier it is to repay debt with interest, since most debt is not adjusted for inflation. Also, high inflation rates help keep prices of homes and other buildings from falling as they age, making the use of mortgages more feasible. If the price of a commodity, such as oil or coal, is high and then falls, debt based on the prior high value of the commodity is likely to become a problem.
- Quantity of energy products affordable by economy – It takes energy products to produce goods and services. If the price of commodities is low, it is possible for buyers to purchase a large quantity of these products, even on a low budget. Current relatively low prices tend to help the economy, even if producers cannot afford to make adequate investment in new production with such low prices. Thus, today’s low energy prices make the economy look good for at a short time. Afterwards, the outlook is less rosy.
Ultimately, the issue at hand in determining whether the “circus will leave town” is whether non-elite workers are able to adequately make a living. We know from biology that the return on the labor of animals must be adequate (animals must be able to get enough food by walking, swimming, or flying) or their populations will collapse. The same thing is true for humans. We also know that prior civilizations that collapsed often had wage disparity problems. When this happened, non-elite workers were no longer able to pay adequate taxes. Their nutrition became poorer. They tended to become more susceptible to epidemics. These were things that pushed the economy toward collapse.
The goods and services that non-elite workers can buy with their wages represent the benefits of our fossil fuel powered energy system, as distributed to the most vulnerable workers in the system. Once these benefits start falling too low, the system can no longer function.
There are some indications that benefits are already too low for the economy to keep functioning in a “normal” manner. A major such indication is the fact that energy prices have remained far too low since mid-2014. It is becoming increasingly clear that there really is no oil price which is both high enough for producers and low enough for consumers. We may be living on “borrowed time,” using an increasing amount of debt to support energy producers.
Thus, world economic growth rates may already be too low to keep the world economy operating. Regulators who consider only the US do not seem to understand the world situation. Because of this, they can easily make moves that make the situation worse, rather than better. For example, they have already started raising interest rates and are planning to sell securities currently held by the Federal Reserve.
A Few Graphs Giving Hints of Our Problem
Economists have not understood what our problems really are, so they have tended to omit some important issues from their analyses. I put together a few graphs that might give a little insight as to what is happening.
Interest Paid by Households
Interest paid by households is important because this money is transferred to banks, insurance companies, and pension plans. It leaves the households who paid this interest poorer. Buying goods using debt is convenient, but it has a cost involved.
BEA Table 7.11 shows a category called, “Interest Paid by Households.” If we compare this to BEA “Wages and Salaries,” we find the relationship shown in Figure 1. Admittedly this is not an exact comparison; there are some people who are not wage earners who are making interest payments, for example. I have not tried to offset “interest paid by households” against “interest received by households,” because the households benefiting from interest payments are likely very different households from those making interest payments. They are likely richer, and at a later stage in their lives.
Figure 1. US Household Interest Paid (from BEA Table 7.11 Interest Paid and Received by Sector and Legal Form of Organization) divided by Wages and Salaries from BEA Table 2.11, “Personal Income and its Disposition.”
The pattern might be described as follows:
- A rapid run-up in interest payments that took place until about 1986
- A general flattening, with new peak in 2007
- A rapid fall starting in 2008
It seems to me that the pattern up to 1986 reflects the general run-up in consumer debt levels during this period. The amount of interest paid is also affected by interest rates, such as ten-year treasury rates.
Figure 2. US Federal Bonds 10 year interest rates. Graph produced by FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data).
Interest rates started falling in 1981. These higher rates only gradually worked their way into the system because many people had bought houses earlier and were able to keep their existing mortgages at low interest rates. The amount of debt outstanding continued to rise, allowing the total amount of interest paid to continue to rise until 1986.
After 1986, rising debt amounts and falling interest rates came closer to offsetting each other (Figure 1). By 2008, the economy was in a severe recession. In order to help get out of the recession, interest rates were lowered through Quantitative Easing. These lower interest rates, besides helping the economy in general, helped oil prices gradually increase back to the $100+ per barrel price level that they needed to be profitable. Oil prices had temporarily dropped below $40 per barrel in December 2008.
Figure 1 shows that interest payments for several years amounted to about 12% of wages for households. Interest payments are now down to 8% of wages. Even at this level they are significant. They are likely higher than this for those with low wages and high debt. If interest rates rise significantly, the most vulnerable are likely to find their discretionary income reduced.
Rising Healthcare Costs
Figure 3 shows a comparison of US healthcare costs to GDP and to wages. A huge increase in costs is evident in the 2001-2005 periods, and also in the 2008-2010 period, especially compared to wages.
Figure 3. US Healthcare costs as a percentage of GDP and as a percentage of wages. Healthcare costs from cms.gov. Wages and salaries and GDP from BEA.
The increase in healthcare costs since 2008 is one of the costs putting pressure on the economy, and leading to a need for lower interest rates.
The Affordable Care Act should be affecting amounts for the latest years, since the ACA started increasing the number of people with insurance starting about 2014.
Figure 4. Kaiser Family Foundation chart of percentages of non-elderly people without healthcare insurance, from this Source.
A person might wonder why 2014 and 2015 costs didn’t rise more, with so many more people added to the system. Perhaps care that was being given “free” by hospitals is now being charged back to patients. Or perhaps many of the people choosing to purchase coverage through the program were already insured elsewhere in the system, so were not really added to the healthcare system through the Affordable Care Act.
One very recent US healthcare change is the addition of an automatic penalty for not having healthcare insurance. This penalty began for tax year 2016, filed in the beginning of 2017. This provision particularly hurts young people, because rates are structured in such a way that the rates for young people subsidize the rates for older people. Thus, young people often find that buying health insurance is far more expensive than their out of pocket costs for health care would have been, without insurance.
Young people who are affected by this new requirement will find that they need to cut back on other expenditures (such as restaurant visits), if they are meet the requirements of the law–either buy healthcare insurance or pay the mandated penalty. This change will begin to adversely affect the economy in 2016. Bigger impacts are likely in early 2017, when taxes are filed.
Falling Wages Relative to GDP, and Rising Wage Disparity
The path to lower wages as a percentage of GDP has been a bumpy one. The general pattern is that when the economy is booming, wages tend to grow as a percentage of GDP. Recession tends to send wages down as a percentage of GDP. US wages seem to have increased somewhat since 2013, perhaps because the price of oil is down, and the US dollar has risen to a relatively high level. This is part of what allows some people to talk about the “tightening labor market,” and gives them confidence in the economy.
Figure 5. US wages and salaries divided by US GDP, based on BEA data.
There has been significant growth in wage disparity since about 1980, both in the US and in many other developed countries. Figure 6 shows some data for the US.
Figure 6. United States Income Distribution_1947-2007 in 2007$. The data source is “Table F-1. Income Limits for Each Fifth and Top 5 Percent of Families (All Races): 1947 to 2007”, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplements. Graph is from Wikimedia Commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distribution_1947-2007.svg
As the economy becomes more “complex,” in other words, “specialized,” wage disparity tends to be more of a problem. Work that could previously be done by manual laborers is done by machinery, or is transferred to low wage countries. Many people lose their jobs, and have difficulty finding good-paying replacement jobs. All of this contributes to inadequate wages for non-elite workers.
Role of Inflation and Rising Commodity Prices in the Economy
We rarely stop to think how important inflation is to the economy. For example, if inflation is sufficiently high, it will slightly offset normal depreciation in values of homes and business properties. Thus, home and business property values will tend to slightly rise over time. If banks can count on values of structures rising, rather than falling, over time, lenders can assume that mortgage loans are fairly risk-free, because the lender can count on getting its money back through the sale of the property, if the mortgage-holder defaults.
This same principle holds when energy properties, such as coal mines and oil fields, are financed. As long as energy prices keep rising, there is a good chance loans can be repaid. Once energy prices fall, debt defaults become a problem. Oil exporting countries also find that the taxes they can collect fall significantly. As a result, energy-exporting countries are in a far worse economic position once energy prices fall. Exporters of other commodities, such as metals, have a similar problem if prices fall.
In the last two paragraphs, I mentioned the impact on lenders and governments of rising or falling prices. Owners of properties are also affected by rising or falling prices. If prices rise, these owners can sell their assets, and make a profit. In fact, these owners have often purchased their properties with debt. If the price of the property rises, but the amount of debt is unaffected by inflation, the owner of the property can often get a disproportionate benefit of the price rise. Of course, if the value of a property falls, the property-owner is disproportionately affected by the fall of the price.
We are so used to a rising-price scenario that we have little understanding of how a flat or falling price scenario might work.
To get a little idea of how much inflation has in the past been working through to asset prices in the United States, I looked at some information provided by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. I compared these amounts to GDP, rather than asset prices, to get an idea of how much impact they have, relative to each current year’s activities (Figure 7). There is about $3 of assets of the types BEA analyzes for every dollar of GDP, so the impact, relative to GDP, is about three times as high it would be, relative to the asset prices themselves.
If this same relationship holds elsewhere, a person can see why a commodity-producing country might have a big problem, if the price of that commodity suddenly falls. There is huge “balance sheet” impact that doesn’t directly affect current GDP as reported (since GDP has to do with current goods and services produced). But it can have a major impact on the country, as it goes forward, because affected loans are much less likely to be repaid. Countries often try to be lenient with lenders, hoping that commodity prices will rise again. But if the drop in prices is permanent, countries must use more and more extreme measures to hide the problem of loans that have a low probability of repayment in a low-priced commodity environment. Eventually, these loans seem likely to default, if prices do not rise sufficiently. China and many commodity-exporting countries seem to be affected by this problem.
Figure 7. Changes to US Fixed Assets, based on BEA Table 5.10, Changes in Net Stocks of Produced Assets.
BEA shows three amounts of interest with respect to US assets (Figure 7):
- Inflation – Changes in asset values based on changes in the general price level
- Re-evaluation total – Changes to asset prices in particular; includes changes because assets are taken out of service because of disaster or because a business is no longer profitable. Note the spikes related to the housing bubble of the 2003-2006 period and the corresponding dip during the Great Recession of 2007-2009.
- Depreciation – Expected amount of new investment needed to offset “consumption of fixed capital.” This rate is quite high, (about 15.7% of GDP recently) because the asset base includes fairly rapidly depreciating assets, such as cars and computers, besides buildings of all types, and intellectual property such as computer programs.
The last year shown is 2015. Inflation (relative to GDP) was only 1.2%, and the re-evaluation total was only 0.3% of GDP. (Calculated as percentages of the assets involved, these inflation rates would be only a third of these amounts.) These low inflation rates make it very difficult to operate a debt-based economy. A shift from inflation to deflation would be a major problem. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to get much inflation, if the wages of non-elite workers remain very low.
Conclusion
We have kept our economy expanding through growing debt use and growing energy use. I described this process in my post, What has gone wrong with oil prices, debt, and GDP growth?
Now we seem to be reaching the end of the line. The economy is getting very close to shrinking. When this happens, we are getting close to economic collapse–the economic circus is starting to “leave town.”
People who think our only problem is “running out” and “high oil prices” don’t see the problems the economy is developing right now. These problems are much more subtle, but they can have a devastating effect. The Federal Reserve talks about inflation rates above 2% being too high, but inflation rates below 2% are at least equally problematic. Somehow, the debt system needs to keep operating for the whole system to work.
We are now at the point where the economy is decidedly unstable. Little things can affect it, like the Affordable Care Act requirement that uninsured people buy healthcare insurance, or pay a penalty. Low commodity prices make debt repayment more difficult in countries producing those commodities.
We should not be too surprised if the economic circus starts to leave town. There are simply too many pieces that are now unstable. The US Government is facing a shutdown in the near future, unless its debt ceiling can be raised and funding can be enacted. The world is depending on China for economic growth, but China’s debt is becoming unmanageably high. Japan’s debt is also unreasonably high. Oil exporters are becoming increasingly unstable, with continued low prices. We can find problems in almost every country of the world. It looks like it is only a matter of time, until one of these problems starts a downward spiral.
Note:
[1] Thanks to commenter “Lastcall” for this analogy.
Global crude oil discoveries plunge to record low, and it’s gonna get worse
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/27/global-crude-oil-discoveries-plunge-to-record-low-and-its-gonna-get-worse.html
Well, it’s not a problem, you see, because we’ll just go electric:
https://robertscribbler.com/2017/04/27/with-mass-vehicle-electrification-on-the-horizon-new-oil-development-hits-a-70-year-low
If I open a few electricity factories, I’m bound to become a billionaire virtually overnight. 😉
If we do a little simple math which is something Musk avoids we find a major problem. Identified lithium resources are 34 million tons. These are not reserves just identified. Reserves are about 14 million tons. A Tesla battery that produces a measly 70kwh requires 150 lbs of lithium. ( BTW you still have to find a source of energy to charge them ) So if you could convert all the identified lithium into Tesla batteries you end up with 450 million cars. And at current production of lithium it would only take 1000years.
Does anyone see a problem here with a battery that’s life cycle is only 10 years? 🤔🤔🤔
The only way the industrial world got this far has been internal combustion engines.
I would recommend everyone book a flight to Italy then rent a private yacht and go to Capri. Enjoy the last moments of the FF world. Or live in a container.
Your choice.
https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/lithium/mcs-2016-lithi.pdf
Reserves depend a whole lot of prices. If lithium prices were 10 times what they are today, I would be willing to bet that some new source of lithium would be found–perhaps filtered from seawater, taken from deposits on the moon or Mars. Of course, prices don’t keep rising. In fact, lithium prices will probably fall, if governments stop subsidizing electric car prices.
You are right, though, that scaling up anything is likely to lead to shortages of lithium or some other necessary material rather quickly.
Scaling up is the real problem in almost all these wonderful developments.
Recently saw a report that scaling up the use of EV’s in British towns by even a very modest amount would quickly lead to damage to the grid and blackouts.
It’s really very amusing how little any of this has been thought through.
Also, as an example of non-thinking, in very many British towns it’s often quite impossible to park outside your little toy house, or even anywhere near it. Quite what one would be meant to plug into I don’t really know……..
I’ve come such a long way since I first heard about the domestic rooftop wind turbines -marketed by the PM Cameron – and thought ‘I want one of those!’ 🙂
I think the idea of electric cars fits in best with the wealthier group in the United States–the ones who buy homes with three car garages, and can afford to have an extra vehicle for short trips. If the government will subsidize the third (or even second) car, so much the better. There are electric plugs in garages to plug them into. A big reason for buying electric cars is to impress the neighbors. Thus, a Tesla is much better than an “ordinary” car or SUV.
According to 2015 data, there are more homes being built with 3 car garages than there are one-bedroom apartments being built. America Is Building More Three-Car Garages Than One-Bedroom Apartments. In 2015, 24% of newly built homes had three car garages.
The whole idea does not translate well to the rest of the world, or even to the many young people in the US who can barely afford apartments. Thus, it is hard to figure out a market for used electric cars. The lower income people who might theoretically use them tend not to have a place to charge them. They can work around the problem of the cars not going very far by renting a car with an internal combustion engine for long trips. In fact, quite a few people do this today.
Low prices and low wages
The only thing our central planners ..central banks have been able to inflate are asset prices and the prices of services in inefficient sectors such as education and healthcare…Only in the last three years has there been any serious attempt to raise wages. There has been little to no success to raising wages… All feedback loops within global industrial civilization are forcing employers to offer low wages or lower wages. (the easiest solution to economic problem is to lower wages. Increasing workloads is a very subtle way of lowering wages for expensive workers but very few educated and expensive workers will admit to doing more and more work for the same amount of money because it is embarrassing so it remains a hidden wage cut) One thing Cornucopians and Doomers agree on is that in the future most people will be earning lower wages. So far, both Corncuopians and Doomers have been right.
This is absurd!
The article you mentioned ends with the statement:
Part of the answer to this question has to do with how long banks and other lenders will hold on in the US, to support the growth in US shale. Prices are at this point still not very good for it. The contractors for drilling rigs have temporarily offered lower prices, but they can’t really afford to offer very low rates for long. And of course, oil companies go after sweet spots, to keep cash flow as good as possible. But it is not very sustainable, either.
The economy grew at sluggish 0.7 percent in first quarter of 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/28/the-economy-grew-0-7-percent-in-trumps-first-quarter-federal-data-show/?pushid=590343e005210a3c0000002e&tid=notifi_push_breaking-news&utm_term=.7caf33bac4ca
The Wall Street Journal also reported that there is a known overstatement in the 0.7% growth rate, in a blog called, Why the U.S. GDP report could make growth look rosier than it is. Apparently, early estimates of core retail sales growth were used, even though more complete estimates had already been published. The revised numbers came out too close to the date when the calculation would be published to be incorporated. According to one economist, the better retail sales estimates would have reduced the GDP growth rate by 0.2%. According to the report,
The new first quarter data for the US shows aggregate Disposable Personal Income increasing by 4.2%, over the same period a year ago. So I suppose that that might have been used somehow in leading to the early estimate of sales. But oil prices are definitely higher than in the first quarter of 2016. These have both direct and indirect impacts on prices. There may also be more healthcare costs cutting into retail spending.
Also, upward changes in interest rates or in apartment rents would cut into spendable income.
Great points and article Gail! Thank You
I remember Catherine Austin Fitts mentioned on an interview there is no better slave than one who doesn’t know he is one from the book the half was never told and lo and behold if that isn ‘t what Washington wants of us all. great read follows:
There is only one course of action for freedomists: secession. The only other alternative is slavery.
And people need to understand that the spirit of secession is sweeping the globe. Currently, there are 42 separatist movements underway in Africa; 68 in Asia; 107 in Europe; 16 in North America; 18 in Oceania; and 9 in South America. That’s a total of 260 active separatist movements going on RIGHT NOW.
http://sgtreport.com/2017/04/no-hope-in-trump-no-hope-in-dc/
Enslave someone to an idea, a slogan, and they won’t even see who is pulling the strings and benefiting.
As far as secession goes, it’s often out of the frying pan into the fire.
People tired of being in a big ‘oppressive’ state (some are of course- Turkey and the Kurd for instance) should consider what the fate of micro-states can be. It is often no more than the prelude to civil war, when support for secession is not 100%.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/business/retail-industry.html?nytmobile=0&_r=0
The job losses in retail could have unexpected social and political consequences, as huge numbers of low-wage retail employees become economically unhinged, just as manufacturing workers did in recent decades. About one out of every 10 Americans works in retail.
Now, many of these once celebrated malls are emptying out or being turned into trampoline parks and community colleges. “The retail industry built too much space,” said Bruce Batkin, chief executive of Terra Capital Partners, a commercial real estate lender.
While these distribution centers could replace some of the work lost in stores, they likely won’t make up the entire difference. That is because much of the operations are automated and require different skills and sensibilities than selling jeans.
——————–
I wouldn’t be surprised if these “different skills and sensibilities ” were centered (or potentially centered) on art. I worked with a friend to put large, movable murals in storefronts, but wasn’t at a point of awareness to see what economic impact it had on the large distribution of vacant stores. However, I get the sense that mine and subsequent storefront art by the artist community did make a difference, including the institutionalizing of an artist/downtown-development relationship.
Below is an example of something close to a blend of high-ish art and commerce. I find the place delightful:
http://www.gumps.com/?aitrk=searchc&cm_mmc=Bing%20Paid%20Search-_-gumpsTM-_-brand-_-gumps%27&teng=bi&geng=gumps_brand&aeng=ad3&utm_source=mediappc&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=gumps_tm&beng=b&deng=c&keng=gumps%20departmnt%20store,%20sand%20francisco&meng=p&ieng=4719968274
Unfortunately the efficiency of online shopping is rendering many retail outlets unnecessary. People will still buy coffee and other food items on the run at retail outlets, but most items can now more easily be bought from Amazon. We have Prime which provides free shipping on most items. If you don’t like something all that’s needed is go online and click a few times, then print out a return tag and drop the sucker out front of your door. Sure beats going all the way back to a retail store then explaining yourself and asking to return it.
This is a trend that will only accelerate and yes, millions of people will become unemployed, replaced by robots helping to find stuff in massive warehouses to ship to people. Far fewer people employed to get the same stuff to people.
In 1937 the Golden Gate Bridge opened and not long afterwards the giant wood ferry boats that took cars/people to SF became obsolete. Many decades later the roads got so congested, aluminum ferries for people only made a comeback. Things change and this change for retail will be a rough ride but there’s no going back now.
It’s not so much the effiency of buying online, it’s the lack of paying taxes out of State in the US that has seen the effects of mall shopping dying off. Street retailer, Best Buy took the title of: Amazon’s showroom until Best Buy fought back with Amazon price matching. Now Amazon charges taxes in pretty much every State in the US with an exception of a few and that supposedly will change to “every” State.
Amazon produces virtually NO jobs but people flock to it because of their low prices and not paying sales tax. People don’t seem to get that consumption at brick and mortar stores is what keeps them employed. When enough businesses close eventually they in turn will lose their jobs and won’t have enough money to pay for the useless trinkets they want on Amazon.
There is also a practicality problem. There get to be so many choices for different things, a person has to run all over to try to try find what a person is looking for. Years ago, when people lived in small towns, the choices were pretty much what was available in the few stores in town, plus the Sears Roebuck catalog. Now, there are a huge number of choices, and a huge number of specialized parts (for example, sizes of batteries). If a person goes to a department store, it becomes clear that they have chosen to stock the most popular sizes. A person needs to order online to get unusual sizes. I find myself ordering online, simply because any alternative approach will take a huge amount of driving around, trying to find the right product.
This is one of the few ‘growth hubs’ in the Britain: as a result, over-crowding, street pollution and absurd traffic-jams means it’s far simpler, nicer – and often cheaper – to order standard things online, including food.
Ironically for a growth hub, it’s one of only 4 cities in the UK with a falling retail footfall in 2016 – wonderful achievement! And it’s so crowded that going even to a cafe seems rather unpleasant and would probably require standing in line to be seated, so on the whole we don’t anymore. Lots of people seem to have the patience of cattle, though!
Lots of retail redundancies coming soon, I suspect.
But to a Luddite (who barely knows how to tun on his computer), the choice is stark: buy as little as humanly possible; avoid online shopping by all means; don’t look for the best, just the barely-good-enough, and barely try to muddle through (with the emphasis on muddle). If you’re not a perfect mess, you may be missing out on something. 🙂
If this does come to pass, it will be great tragedy, as since the earliest days of hunting for our sustenance human beings have needed to get up and go out with other people to do something constructive to sustain themselves,and which they believe is constructive at least – however dreary a job in shopping mall might seem to be, it does fulfill that function. It also socialises people.
A human being lacking this structure will fall to pieces: self-obsession, drug addiction, alcoholism and despair.
I have no trouble in getting up and walking downstairs to my workshop at home, and work very irregular hours, but most people I know tell me that they need a structure, regular set hours and to travel some way to work to get started each day, or they fall to pieces,and they also need to see people – even though Hell, is of course Other People: we are Neolithic.
The role of the energy is to concentrate the resources on the desired places.
The collapse is the inability to concentrate the resources on the desired places.
The culprit is the availability of the energy: the energy of the fuels, the energy of the human or animal muscles, the energy of the sun, the wind, the gravitational force etc.
The higher the price of the energy, the less amount of the desired places available for the existence of the human species.
The call for love thy neighbor in the Bible reflects the inability of the system to produce energy surpluses that can be used for the expansion of the human environments. It implies giving your energy and resources to the existing human individuals instead of keeping them for your own growth or even existence.
Thus, the comming of the Christianity marks the start of the implosion. The atheism is the stage, when there is no more to share. No external energy exists that can save the human species.
I don’t exactly agree. I agree that energy resources don’t grow without limit. What seems to grow, almost without limit, is population. As a result, population per unit area rises. In order to avoid collapse, the population needs greater “complexity.” Religion helps very much with the need for complexity. It gives the person in charge (king or judge) some higher power to point to, who is the ultimate authority. The higher power can provide rules for the population to follow, so they do not go around killing their neighbors and family members, whenever they are a bit unhappy, and they do not take things that are not “theirs.” The rules help define who is their particular group or tribe. This is related to the territorial instinct that many of the larger animals have. The territorial instinct helps hold down total world population, because religious groups fight each other, just as packs of dogs . If it weren’t for this instinct, it is quite possible that humans would have exceeded the world’s carrying capacity long ago.
The call to “Love your neighbor” came in Old Testament Times (long before Christianity). For example, see Leviticus 19: 9 – 18. The last part of this passage says:
Other religions seem to have similar beliefs. This website talks about dozens of religions believing in what they call, the ethics of reciprocity, in other words, treating others as you would want to be treated yourself. (I presume the others are other member of your own in-group, not others who are keeping you from obtaining as many resources as you think you would like.
Now we have lots of substitutes for religion. We have the belief that technology will save us. We can worship Elon Musk. We don’t need to worry about the future of this earth, because we have our bank accounts, and we have Janet Yellen to guarantee that all of the government benefits we think we have will actually be there. Also, it is convenient to blame past religions for all of the past problems we have had.
People who grow their own food and are in constant contact with nature have a hard time believing that there is not a god that is behind the miraculous growth they see every day. Atheism comes from the belief that if there were a good god, he would act in a different way than what is actually happening. He would provide a way for humans to live on the world forever. He would make rules “fairer” for everyone. Religions sometimes believe that there will be a fairer ending later, to try to fix this problem.
Well, when the energy supply falls, many roles in the society created and maintained thanks to the energy supply, become unsustainable. The complexity maintained thanks to the energy supply disappears. The things created thanks to the energy supply become irreparable and useless. In that situation, the whole population is so weakened that fighting for something and killing for something makes no sense.
Often, the relegion tries to preserve the existing structures that are no longer sustainable, as it does not realize that the problem is the missing energy, e.g. in our catholic parish there is a priest who organizes and stimulates zilions of activities, but the declining purchasing power due to the ageing population calls for other approaches, namely simplification.
Such approach seem to me like the communism in the East Europe: let us work more, so that we will have a better future – which was often ridiculed by the people themselves. Such approaches simply do not work, they do not bring better future without the corresponding affordable energy.
The religion simply can not guarantee ethical behaviour, as it was seen during the fall of the Medieval period, when the Church sold indulgences to get the financing or today, when a person who gives money to the church is welcome despite his or her immoral behaviour. Or the scandals among the priests, the multiple divorces of one person, non-marital cohabitation etc.
This is the problem: the organized religons need money (energy, resources) for their functioning. I would say that what we experience today are in many cases rather philosophies than religions as the religions have no power to maintain the order. They fail in the same way as the governments fail.
There is simply not enough energy to keep existing the structures that were created thanks to the rise of the energy supply. E.g. the churches in Slovakia are heavily dependent on the state subsidies or the tax allowances.
Religious organizations are dissipative structures. They start from small beginnings, reach a plateau level, and then collapse. They depend on energy and other resources to build their buildings and pay their workers.
We know that as one dissipative structure fails, other tend to replace them. People have to have faith in something, so they follow other approaches that are cheaper, and fit in better with the current culture. Governments seem to sponsor their own feel-good version of religion. Governments will take care of you, now and forever. Governments can handle any problem, from medical to income in old age. With the help of technology, all problems will be fixed. Just pay taxes and elect “good leaders,” and things can go along forever.
Back in early days, church and state were pretty much one. I think we are headed back the same direction. Now, Elon Musk is the high priest of the new religion.
In other words, religions are tools to certain ends – personal, tribal, societal, organizational, – as much as they are spiritual entities, however one may conceive of that.
I think the ancient Greeks and Romans more or less recognised three levels of this:
1/ State religion, everyone has to conform or get the chop, the ultimate authority; 2/ Local religion – town, tribe, again everyone has to play along or you are not a good member of the community; and, 3/ Private religious and philosophical beliefs and cults, more or less free choice (exception being persecution of Christianity and some other cults if deemed a threat to state or barbaric) – eg Mithras, Stoicism, Mysteries of Eleusis, etc. The last stage was the most refined and personal.
Religions are part of the way the networked economy is put together. In many ways, they are essential. They have gradually changed over the years, and people’s “need” for them gradually changes. As less energy is available, young people increasingly “opt out” of organized religion, indirectly because the energy cost is too high for them to participate. Also, they cannot meet their parents’ standards–they can’t afford to marry and have children, and do the things that are expected both by organized religions and by most economies in the world.
I love the http://www.Solari.com website and the work of Dr. Catherine Austin
Fitts. One will find some truly astonishing if not mind-blowing information but nothing beats what was found thereon today at least not in quite some time:
Trump Signs Executive Order Targeting National Monuments, Could Open Up Lands for Oil and Gas Development
http://www.ecowatch.com/trump-antiquities-act-bears-ears-2379688298.html?utm_source=EcoWatch+List&utm_campaign=50afe10f43-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_49c7d43dc9-50afe10f43-85364217
It looks like the US economy just ground to a halt
http://www.ecowatch.com/trump-antiquities-act-bears-ears-2379688298.html?utm_source=EcoWatch+List&utm_campaign=50afe10f43-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_49c7d43dc9-50afe10f43-85364217
It is this video however that has to become a must watch by everyone:
https://youtu.be/nEpcY5JU120
I’d support fracking the garden of eden if it would buy us another month….
That said – this does indicate some serious desperation ….
I don’t have the time to sit through this whole thing. will someone please summarize for me please?
It’s about a guy who worked the financials for the elite, doing all the shady stuff that wealthy entities couldn’t do officially.
It was all rather vague, but the interviewee claimed the world is secretly run by a bunch of Loociferians (Saytanists) who want to end all life on earth. When he had risen high enough up the ladder, he was asked to partake in child sacrifice in order to guarantee his loyalty, at which point he had a crisis of conscience and wanted out. He also touched on Eddy’s Protokols of Zaion, which he claimed were true and ought to read by anybody wanting to understand how the world really works.
Nonsense: I’ve just been reading a magazine article about a charming country residence newly built for the Rothschilds: very simply decorated, ‘eco-friendly’, in sustainable materials, solar panels and so on – I can’t imagine child sacrifice going on there, they seem like such nice, modest people, and I’m sure a living planet is the most precious thing to them. …..
Yer pays yer money…
LOL!
cliffhanger go here for the condensed version
https://www.henrymakow.com/2017/04/Illuminati-want-us-dead.html
We may be reaching the point where the masses have outlived their usefulness. However, there is a critical mass of people needed to maintain BAU though. So, if there is an “illuminati” they must know that they cannot kill too many people off without putting themselves at risk of shortages.
Our big problem is more oil than consumers can afford. The solution is drilling “more” oil. Somehow, this doesn’t make sense to me. I am not sure the rest of the things you are posting do either.
The latest episode of extinction radio did a great interview with anti-nuclear journalist/activist/podcaster Libbe HaLevy. She said that spent fuel containers in Germany were 20 inches thick steel and concrete, while in the US they were using 5/8 inch thick steel barrels.
https://extinctionradio.net/extinction-radio-episode-79-19th-april-2017-hambone-littletail-forrest-palmer-libbe-halevy/
I am flying back from a two week visit with my grandson. He is cute, as only a two year old grandchild can be. When I look at him I see two images of humans. One, the humanistic-spiritual one says that every life is infinitely precious. It certainly holds for me, my friends and family. The other is that we a part of nature. In nature, whenever a population outgrows it resources, it is corrected by population shrinkage with a massive die-off. I then distract myself by reading him a Berenstain Bears book, fot the upteenth time.
My son and I both know that our BAU is fragile, but we do not talk about it. What is there to say? (That doesn’t seem to be a problem here at OFW ). I, halfway between the biblical three score and ten and four score (Psalms 90:10), am mostly yesterdays and can be philosophical about it My grandson is mostly tomorrows and that hurts me.
I know exactly what you mean. Individuals are precious. They are our own attachments, our families, the people we care about. And they are also the humans who are consuming the resources on our planet, polluting it, and jeopardizing the future of the species. We are all everything at once. Our own survival and social instincts are just not a match for the challenge we face.
Maybe take your philosophical attitude a bit further to lessen the hurt. The preciousness of human life is an illusion. We are instinctively expert at illusion, it orientates our day to day survival. But can delusion be avoided? Can we enjoy the illusion of preciousness and still aceept that it really does not “matter” in itself if everyone dies, even if the entire cosmos ceases to exist?
Can we maitain a dual perspective on reality, the dissonance of an illusion lived and enjoyed and the likely ahuman truth? Easy to say but harder to feel when a 2 year old grandchild is in front of one? The Stoicism of the likes of Marcus Aurelius is interesting, to be calmly unperturbed in the face of inevitable ultimate ruin.
Is there a Stoic manual out there somewhere on grandparenting in the face of the collpase of civilization? Quite possibly, given their attitude to the state of the Roman Empire.
When I wrote for TheOilDrum.com, I once hosted a letter from a young man in Kenya. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5282
Kenya has (or perhaps had) a much higher death rate for children, and a generally much lower per capita income than the US.
He talked about being able to grieve for a short time (a day) about a lost child, but then the ability to move on, as if nothing had happened. And the ability to each day rejoice in whatever good happened. I expect those characteristics will help us as well.
I think we in the developed world have too much time to dwell on things. Unlike countries where it is a daily struggle just to survive. So many of what folks in the developed world consider “issues” are really petty by comparison.
Thank you for this link. Very interesting discussion in the comments as well.
I guess it’s no coincidence that people on OFW (or other doomer sites) are mostly westerners. Walking around, not owning a car, bartering for stuff, no AC, saving water and power. That’s a scary collapse scenario for us affluent europeans/americans, but it’s just BAU for people in Kenya and the like.
I don’t have a car, so my commute to work takes 80 minutes, instead of 40. I also don’t have AC, so in summer it’s 27-28 degrees in my flat.
Yep, we should all rejoice everyday, come what may! Amen to that!
I remember reading about interviews with very old women who had lived in homesteads on the American prairie. (Sorry, can’t remember the source.) When the women were asked how many children they had, they couldn’t remember. They knew they had lost a few in infancy or early childhood, but these memories weren’t emotionally charged for them. I compare this to how modern women react to something like a first trimester miscarriage, regarding the loss as the death of a child. Clearly our perspective on these events has changed radically. We now feel *entitled* to have our offspring survive, and become emotional about the loss of *potential* when a baby dies, or when a fetus is miscarried. Unfortunately, in reality, nature offers us no such entitlement.
I also found it interesting how people reacted to the death of Harambe, the gorilla who was shot in Cincinnati when a boy fell into his enclosure. I was shocked at how many commenters said that the boy’s life was “obviously” more “precious” than that of the gorilla. Precious to whom, exactly? Precious to accomplish what ends? Fascinating how humans think we are so objective, but we have a strong bias in favor of our own species and the objectives of our species.
Insurance companies regularly make settlements in the case of the death or injury of a child. These can be for a variety of things, including claims arising from an auto accident or from alleged medical malpractice. The EPA, when it figures out regulations, is another one that needs to determine the “value” of a human life, in order to determine what kind of pollution regulations to make, so that the cost/benefit calculations work out properly.
My general impression is of a lot of escalation over time in what the value of a human life is considered to be. I remember hearing that at one point (perhaps 1960s), if a child died in an automobile accident the usual settlement was about $1,000 per year of life (equivalent to at least 10 times that much now). The theory was that there was relatively little loss, because the mother could always have another child to “replace” the one who died. There are calculators on line now, that help a person figure out how much they can expect to get as a death claim settlement. http://www.injuryclaimcoach.com/car-accident-death.html
Permanent injury claims are always “worth” a whole lot more than death claims. There are all kinds of escalating medical expenses, plus lost wages of the mother, if the mother has to stay at home to take care of the child. These costs go on for the entire lifetime of the child (long after the mother has gone). If there is a deep-pocketed defendant (like a hospital), the total cost can go well into the millions.
This WSJ article says,
Clearly, if we set regulations much more strictly, based on higher values of human lives in the US, it will send jobs overseas.
That’s interesting. I’m a humanities person, so I don’t tend to think of the value of life in financial terms, but it doesn’t surprise me at all that it is so high in first world societies. We look down on other regions of the world for being cavalier about the value of life — easy come, easy go. Ultimately, the fact that we can value life so highly is a product of our fossil fuel lifestyle. We have normalized this kind of thinking even though it’s not even remotely sustainable. The idea that human lives are all precious and that as many of us should survive every adverse condition as possible is incompatible with our well-being as a species in the long haul; that kind of thinking is an outdated instinct from when we faced many natural threats and survival was actually questionable.
Sometimes Marcus Aurelius gives the impression that even he was -sometimes – only just holding it all together….
I’ve found him very useful recently.
I am confounded. If the oil production cuts that have been in place manage to get prices to eventually rise, what good will that do. When the prices rises production will increase again as oil exporters need the cash flow and money. But, at the same time the economy stagnates or contracts!!! Then global inventories of oi go up and the price of oil falls again. Rinse and repeat. It seems like a dog chasing its own tail. But, I have had an epiphany – continue reading to see what I mean.
Occasionally we will read some EROEI analysis that says as EROEI drops we will reach a point where oil just becomes useless because it will require so much energy to extract that all you can do is look at it. At that point there is no longer a net energy gain by extracting oil to burn it.
Now, with those two paragraphs firmly in mind you have to ask yourself: are we reaching the point where all we can do is extract oil and look at it? If oil production cuts lead to increasing oil prices, then gluts of oil, isn’t that exactly what is happening? Is there really not enough net energy left in oil extraction to do anything useful with it other than extract it and grow inventories (look at it)? Now that is an interesting thought.
Interesting indeed. If this EROEI number would include society’s ability to make use of the energy (to produce growth) then it would seem like we are approaching 1:1. We want to produce more oil but are not able to put it to use, we would store it and look at it, as it were.
I agree Greg. It’s a little hard to wrap your head around but it seems that the EROEI dropping would indicate that the best use would be acquiring more oil from an energy perspective than using it in any industrial process. The first natural reaction is to think that the oil industry would have to grow to offset the decline of EROEI. But if it’s constrained by scarcity then the rest of the system will have to shrink relative to the EROEI decline. What has been suggested is the EROEI is appearing in refinery output declining relative to input do to poor quality oil being delivered. If we compare crude consumption to finished product consumption we find that finished product is falling while crude is flat. So the real economy is shrinking at an amazing rate. It’s projected that this year 8600 retail stores will close. I can’t see how this isn’t a big drag on consumption.
This site has interesting charts.
https://beforethecollapse.com/2017/03/17/charts-of-us-gasoline-sales-the-us-is-bleeding-out-badly-retail-sales-by-refiners-have-collapsed-by-up-to-90-in-some-states/
And as stores close stock prices soar.
So is the bet that the scale down will increase profits? If this becomes the new norm are we witnessing a race to the bottom? Whoever can close the fastest wins? It seems like it to me. Traders have lost all reality look at Tesla.
So if I can close my stores faster then my peers my valuations go up my compensation increases. The investors only read the stock price unaware that there is something called sales and profits. By the time they figure it out I’m retired.
All the chart with respect to retail sales by refiners says is that refiners have chosen to sell the gas stations + convenience stores with their names on them to other investors. I presume that they don’t think that consumers will be as willing to spend on “extras.” Perhaps they think that the margin on oil sales will be low, because the oil price will be high. Or maybe they think that the margin on oil sales will be low, because consumers can’t afford even low-priced oil.
We clearly need more cheap-to-produce energy products. The fact that coal consumption is down is a huge problem, in my view. This is part of what is driving our oil problems.
I am afraid the EROEI analyses don’t really get you very far. Think about cost of extraction and affordability. Once the cost of extraction rises too high for people to afford goods made with it, it is a problem.
We are not paying for the cost of extraction now.
Right! We are living on “borrowed time.” Banks and others are willing to extend credit for a while longer, sometimes in far flung parts of the world. The credit (1) helps the oil companies keep from collapsing, and (2) helps keep the demand up, so prices don’t fall even lower.
Ooops – GDPNow for Q1 2017 is …. wait for it … 0.2%
https://www.frbatlanta.org/cqer/research/gdpnow.aspx
Oil not having a great week either:
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/27/oil-futures-are-down-nearly-2-in-a-brutal-week-for-crude.html
Oh that doesn’t matter…. this is all that matters!!!
Nasdaq closes at a record high
If GDP contracts then the stock market will soar.
Welcome to the new normal. Enjoy it while it lasts
Yep FE, cuz it won’t be long…this whole Industrial Civilization experiment is quickly coming to a close…I’ll tell you what though, it was great fun for many of us (not everybody and I’m sorry for those that were not at the trough of IC): belly full (and easily at that) on a daily basis, trips to wherever on the drop of a dime, buying all kinds of toys (totally useless but fun nonetheless), etc..
I am happy I got to live in this period (even though it came at the cost of the whole biosphere)…
I am reading this http://www.audible.com/pd/History/The-Silk-Roads-Audiobook/B01B6OC0NS
There was a reference to peasant life hundreds of years ago…. a women was lamenting the brutal conditions she was living in (cold, damp, hungry…) — and wishing her child would die — so the suffering could end….
We are the lottery winners…. and those here who are 70+ won the grand prize…. they got to make it to old age under the gale force of BAU…. and as a bonus — they get to witness the end of days.
Talk about winning….
http://www.bobcesca.com/files/2013/09/Duh-Winning-55132393261.png
You’re right we did win the lottery…if we do some very rough “back of the envelope” calculation there has been about 107B humans in all our short 200k history..and right now out of the 7.5B, you only have a fraction making a living that enables a First-World middle-class lifestyle (acquiring food at a fraction of your salary, trips, house, car, etc..)
And for most of the 107B who have ever lived/living, life was/is to partially quote Hobbes “nasty, brutish, and short”….so a winning ticket it was, and for most that frequent this blog as well (if you’re commenting here or even just reading this blog, chances are you’re (relatively) well off!)
The article I saw stated GDP was .7%
Right. 0.7% is the published US first quarter GDP. “GDPNow” is a computer model of what GDP will ultimately be. There will be a revision of first quarter GDP coming out in a month. It may more closely track the GDPNow number.
Taking in to account 5% inflation that gives us 4% decline annualized.
So, it starts, banks being bailed out with pension plans and retirement funds. This is coming
the US soon:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-27/crashing-canadian-mortgage-lender-bailed-out-321000-retired-ontario-healthcare-worke
Oil Shortage Feared by 2020 as Discoveries Fall to Record Low
https://www.wsj.com/articles/iea-says-global-oil-discoveries-at-record-low-in-2016-1493244000
Thanks, Cliffhanger. Economy-crushing price-spikes in circa three years then – assuming the financial system holds together that long.
The German Army Peak Oil study that was leaked online concluded oil shortages would collapse the global economy…
The German study just didn’t understand “how” oil shortages would collapse the economy. Like everyone else, they were expecting high prices and shortages. They should have been looking for wage disparity, low prices, and energy gluts.
I think the financial system and oil production will collapse in unison. In hindsight It will be difficult to tell which failed first, finance or oil production. I really think the whole system will fall apart pretty quickly once either finance or oil production falter.
Well, if we say we live within a system of systems, then the “social” would have to be considered along with “finance and oil?” And the social seems to have MOL collapsed. Coincidentally or otherwise, we have with Trump what appears to be a fundamental dismantling of the social system–constitutional, political, etc.–that we’ve been used to for a couple centuries. Not necessarily without its own novel opportunities, IMO.
I suppose it is mostly a facade now anyway. A thin veneer of civility at best.
Reagan was a definite step in the same direction as Trump. He was the first divorced president. His wife was very involved with astrology. Reagan signed bills at strange times of day, depending on when the stars were aligned correctly.
Agreed!
I see this is a new story on the subject, thanks to another year of low discoveries. Low prices make for low discoveries. If the price had been $200 per barrel, I am sure that more would have been discovered.
I am not sure how things will “look” in 2020. We may have a temporary spike in prices; we may have collapse even before then, or about then. Low oil supply can manifest itself as low job availability and, as a result, low prices.
Abstract
Climate science as we know it today did not exist in the 1960s and 1970s. The integrated enterprise embodied in the Nobel Prizewinning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change existed then as separate threads of research pursued by isolated groups of scientists. Atmospheric chemists and modelers grappled with the measurement of changes in carbon dioxide and atmospheric gases, and the changes in climate that might result. Meanwhile, geologists and paleoclimate researchers tried to understand when Earth slipped into and out of ice ages, and why. An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists’ thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth’s climate on human time scales. More importantly than showing the falsehood of the myth, this review describes how scientists of the time built the foundation on which the cohesive enterprise of modern climate science now rests
Thomas C. Peterson
NOAA/National Climatic Data Center, Asheville, North Carolina
William M. Connolley
British Antarctic Survey, National Environment Research Council, Cambridge, United Kingdom
It was the same climate scientists who understand natural cycles who understand that the dynamics of those cycles have been overwhelmed by dumping 1.5 trillion tonnes of CO2, a known greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere resulting in the levels that have not be around for 3-5 million years
The food crops of humans evolved and was domesticated in an atmosphere that never exceeded 300 ppm CO2 for the past 800,000 years at least.
CO2 fertilization also requires that sufficient other plant nutrient are available. Otherwise the nutrient are stripped out of the soil
The history of science demonstrates that if we wish to judge the level of a scientific consensus and whether the consensus position is likely to be correct, the only reliable source is the peer-reviewed literature. During 2013 and 2014, only 4 of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles on global warming, 0.0058% or 1 in 17,352, rejected AGW. Thus, the consensus on AGW among publishing scientists is above 99.99%, verging on unanimity.
Skeptics are also funded by the National Science Foundation. Richard Lindzen got over $3,000,000 in awards trying to prove his debunked Iris theory
Svante Arrhenius predicted Global Warming due to the burning of FFs all the way back in 1896…not that anybody would have listened to him…like Norman has said repeatedly even if there was as big sign on FFs back then saying “WARNING BURNING OF FFs KILLS PLANETS”, we still would have proceeded with burning everything we can…
http://www.lenntech.com/greenhouse-effect/global-warming-history.htm
+++++++++a Fast Eddy thumbs up,👍
There also could have been a sign, “Having children is bad for the planet.” I don’t think that that would have fixed the population problem, either.
Hahaha Gail absolutely no doubt…then again they are intimately tied together..we went from 1B pre-industrial times to 7.5B today (and counting) through the burning of FFs…we could say that all 7.5B of us (except a few pockets in the thousands of Kalaharis, Bushmen,Amazonians etc..) have FFs running through our veins 🙂
And in the late 19th century the novelist and nature-writer Richard Jefferies suggested that our civilisation – he was thinking of London – would collapse into a toxic lake of the pollutants generated by Victorian industry, posioning its surroundings for generations. Not far wrong.
Except now London is the whole planet 🙁
Looking at the ethnic diversity of London now, that’s doubly true: an extraordinary moment in history. Only Ancient Rome can have been so varied.
I am pretty sure I was told about global warming in the early 80s, but then I’ve been bathing in the lake next to Svantes home.
Oh the irony, global warming/climate change creates new jobs for scholars to study it. They burn more energy in the process of studying global warming/climate change. But, we gotta have those jobs. Need more jobs than last year. Gotta keep growing.
Greg, the real irony for me is we, as a species, have the ability to determine the cause/effect of burning fossil fuels and yet we are inept to change our collective course to avert disaster. Suppose we can chalk it up as part of the tragedy of existence.
Also, there is a definite bias toward putting out a report that indicates there is a problem, because this is where climate change scientists get their funding.
Global Climate Models have successfully forecast:
That the troposphere would warm and the stratosphere would cool.
That nighttime temperatures would increase more than daytime temperatures.
That winter temperatures would increase more than summer temperatures.
Polar amplification (greater temperature increase as you move toward the poles).
That the Arctic would warm faster than the Antarctic.
The magnitude (0.3 K) and duration (two years) of the cooling from the Mt. Pinatubo eruption.
They made a retrodiction for Last Glacial Maximum sea surface temperatures which was inconsistent with the paleo evidence, and better paleo evidence showed the models were right.
They predicted a trend significantly different and differently signed from UAH satellite temperatures, and then a bug was found in the satellite data.
The amount of water vapor feedback due to ENSO.
The response of southern ocean winds to the ozone hole.
The expansion of the Hadley cells.
The poleward movement of storm tracks.
The rising of the tropopause and the effective radiating altitude.
The clear sky super greenhouse effect from increased water vapor in the tropics.
The near constancy of relative humidity on global average.
That coastal upwelling of ocean water would increase
Skeptics are also government funded. Lindzen received over $3,000,000 in NSF grants during his career. Curry, Pielke Jr., Legates, etc. have received NSF awards.
Spencer and Christy get all of their research money fro DOE, NOAA and NASA.
Not one Science Academy disputes the conclusions of the IPCC.
Unfortunately, even if the models are 100% right, there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.
To humans, the economy is everything.
The thing that most scientists don’t realize is that all forecasts are heavily dependent on forecasts of fossil fuel use. These are ridiculously high. If the economy crashes, future fossil fuel consumption may go to zero fairly quickly. (We may burn down all of our trees instead!)
The models are very certainly wrong, regardless of what 99.99% think. If you asked people on the street about our energy problem, they would be as clueless as these researchers.
Gail, unfortunately we are in a situation in which we have past the danger point.
Remember, there is a lag time of say 25/30 years before what we burn today and is impacted on the vast climatic system. The rate of rise of Greenhouse Gas concentration has never occurred in the Earths geological past determined by paleoclimatic researchers
The last time atmospheric CO2 was at 400 parts per million was during the ancient Pliocene Era, three to five million years ago, and humans didn’t exist.
– Global average temperatures were 3 to 4 degrees C warmer than today (5.4 to 7.2 degrees F).
– Polar temperatures were as much as 10 degrees C warmer than today (18 degrees F).
– The Arctic was ice free.
– Sea level was between five and 40 meters higher (16 to 130 feet) than today.
– Coral reefs suffered mass die-offs.
“The extreme speed at which carbon dioxide concentrations are increasing is unprecedented. An increase of 10 parts per million might have needed 1,000 years or more to come to pass during ancient climate change events. Now the planet is poised to reach the 1,000 ppm level in only 100 years if emissions trajectories remain at their present level.”
http://scienceblogs.com/sig…
WHY FACTS DON’T CHANGE OUR MINDS
New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason
“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”
Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted. In this case, the failure was “particularly impressive,” since two data points would never have been enough information to generalize from.
Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiment
Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”
http://www.newyorker.com/ma…
Part of the puzzle of why we don’t…
A discussion of AGW is about as interesting as reading an IKEA manual on how to set up a dining table.
If we are causing it then great — I’ll have more of that. Because AGW is an integral part of BAU.
And I LOVE BAU.
If you’ve got it, flaunt it baby, flaunt it…
https://youtu.be/SP3QDczTxXg
Thank you Fast Eddy for bringing up the AGW topic in the first place. I kinda enjoy it, myself, another nail in the coffin to BAU and any hopium that DeLUNies hold on to in making a transition for either themselves or offspring.
It is just fascinating how the MSM can twist the public’s perception both directions.
Divide and conquer as they say!
WHY FACTS DON’T CHANGE OUR MINDS – I guess I am different here and they did not interview me. In my short period of life – 44 years to be exact, I have countless 180° turn in my beliefs. It is this turns that make me aware of the predicament. I reject whatever is being spoon fed to me. Will only believe after some research.
CTG
Rather rare qualities of mind: most people seem like to chant what everyone else is chanting.
Even ‘anti-system’ people are sheepish in their anti-sistemic slogans and beliefs.
Of course, in a sectarian society, there is some safety element in this kind of conformity.
I wish that was the case as far as AGW, CTG. I posted that article because I have years of encounters with Denialists fixed on the concept of “Lukewarmism”, meaning climate-change-impacts is on the low scale of sensitivity.
There is a massive campaign funded effort to promote such and it is very entrenched, oddly matched by a person’s political views.
Or it could be that one gets sick of Warmists banging on about it all the time. If you agree with Gail’s writings, we’re going to be long gone before it matters much anyway. And it’s a damned cold spring again in the UK.
Lizzy, pardon just because it is “cold”, doesn’t mean there is no change in the climate.
Actually, you need to comprehend these facts.
The number of U.S. daily warm records is trouncing the number of corresponding cold records so far in 2016, according to a government database.
Through October 18, there have been 49,038 daily warm records tied or broken in the U.S., consisting of either record warm high or low temperatures, according to data from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.
By contrast, NOAA/NCEI data found only 11,656 daily cold records tied or broken over that same year-to-date period, consisting of either record cold high or low temperature.
In short, there have been just over 4 daily warm records for every cold record in the U.S. so far.
Without climate change, the ratio of daily record highs to daily record lows should be in balance when looking over years and decades — although there will still be swings to cold and hot years. However, over the last several decades in the U.S. record highs are significantly outpacing record lows, which indicates a long-term and sustained warming trend.
Also, the Artic North is warming much, much faster as models forecasted
This was most definitely not the case in 2016 though, when warmer than average days outnumbered cooler than normal days by an amazing 9 to 1 ratio. Nearly all of the cooler than normal days were
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NOAA has been shut down by the Trump Administration….
Looks like the Lukerwarmers are getting desperate.
The reason why we don’t, is because we can’t. Perhaps the story needs to be changed to “How we adapt to the changes around us.”
You are 100% correct, Gail. Thank you.
As you like to state….its already baked in the cake.
Even the Economist gets it.
Climate change – The Arctic as it is known today is almost certainly gone
On current trends, the Arctic will be ice-free in summer by 2040
“THOSE who doubt the power of human beings to change Earth’s climate should look to the Arctic, and shiver. There is no need to pore over records of temperatures and atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations. The process is starkly visible in the shrinkage of the ice that covers the Arctic ocean. In the past 30 years, the minimum coverage of summer ice has fallen by half; its volume has fallen by three-quarters. On current trends, the Arctic ocean will be largely ice-free in summer by 2040.”
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21721379-current-trends-arctic-will-be-ice-free-summer-2040-arctic-it-known-today?fsrc=rss
It’ll be ice free earlier than 2040.
It will be “interesting” how the survivors “adapt”…. Thankful I will NOT be one of them.
Sorry, survivors,
When talking about facts here is another one: correlation doesn’t prove causation.
Miha M, here is another one to be mindful of, “proof” is for those in the alcohol sales or mathematics. Those in Science research require a body of evidence to support theories and other means as the Scientific Method.
Example: Gravity is a theory, actually it is two very different theories. Feel free to test either by step off a tall building
Its funny you talk of proof. Where is experiment that proves existence of AGW? I want to do independent verification. Where is the control group? You use argument of “CONSENSUS” as if science is some kind of democracy. You dont deserve to speak about science.
if you heat a volume of water, it expands
Check data on rising sea level over the past 100 years.
If you heat ice it melts
Check pictures of glaciers retreating world wide over the last 100 years
Even photos of Kilimanjaro, on the equator, show vast snow retreat.
There are 000s of datasets in diverse fields, I could go on–but if you are fixed in your opinions, i would be wasting my time and yours
oh—and you can’t have a control group—that would mean finding another planet to do it on
problem there
Norman, there is no dispute that humans are responsible for increased level of CO2 and that co2 level and temperature have been in strong correlation. All Jeremy890’s arguments are based on this correlation and I just want to point out that corelation doesnt prove causation. To put it bluntly: it hasnt been proved with scientific method that increased CO2 levels are causing climate change.
There is no dispute that climate is changing. But it has been changing for long time on its own and there is no scientific method to calculate our share of responsibility. It could be 1% or less or it could be 50% and more. There is no proven method to determine it.
I am not saying AGW is or isnt real, but many people here take it as a god given fact and they keep bringing it up. This blog is about unsustainability of exponential growth in a limited environment. This is easily verifiable fact. All this kvetching about AGW is ridiculous and out of context.
If we are responsible for AGW then I’ll have more of that …. AGW = prosperity = life
Miha M it is very easy to make such a statement as you did without any backup.
“There is no dispute that climate is changing. But it has been changing for long time on its own and there is no scientific method to calculate our share of responsibility. It could be 1% or less or it could be 50% and more. There is no proven method to determine it.”
What is your reference, please?
Climate Science IS NOT settled and ongoing to determine what you claim is “unknown”
I would like to point out to you that ALL knowledge is limited, and I do stress ALL!
The fact is there are projections based on the body of scientific evidence, research, data, with Physics and Chemistry along with worldwide collaboration through Science Universities, Academies, Governmental bodies like NOAA and the IPCC.
United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been studying global warming for years. Their most recent report, issed in February 2007, (see Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis (summary for policymakers), U.N. Report Confirms Human Activity to Blame for Earth’s Warming Climate (from Voice of America), and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), concludes that “The global increases in carbon dioxide concentration are due primarily to fossil fuel use and land-use change, while those of methane and nitrous exide are primarily due to agriculture.” The report goes on to note that these findings come with a “very high confidence rate [words emphasized in italics in the report summary] that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming.”
Standford University has this webpage for more to clear up your misconceptions,
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/glob-warm.html
Those who provide you with the knowledge that climate has being changing for a long time are the same climate scientists who tell you that what is happening now is not due to natural variability.
Jeremy,
There are many issues that the IPCC does not understand. One of these is the fact that the same things that make the growth of human population possible are the same things that cause global warming. If we stop growth in fossil fuel consumption, we collapse our economy, and greatly reduce our population, perhaps bringing it to zero.
Another thing that the IPCC misses is that regardless of what we do, the system cannot continue growing much longer. The system will collapse, and with it the use of fossil fuels. So their models are deeply flawed.
Third, we do not really have any “solutions” that do not use fossil fuels. So called renewables basically do not work. They are very fossil fuel dependent. Intermittent renewables cannot be used without huge subsidies for fossil fuel backup. They tend to produce electricity rates that are way too low, leading to potential collapse from low electricity prices. “Capacity charges” do not adequately fix this problem.
The result of all of this is that the conclusions that regulators come to, after reading the IPCC report, are just plain wrong. There is absolutely nothing we can do from an energy point of view to fix the situation.
If there is anything we can do, it might be from a birth control point of view, but even this is doubtful. Or from restrictions on meat eating, but again this is doubtful.
If we thought that there would be a huge number of us around, it would make sense to start building further from oceans, but even this is doubtful.
Humans have lived through many ice ages. They no doubt can adapt to rising temperatures, if there are some left, and their number is relatively small.
Thank you Gail for your reply.
Here is a reply of your concerns by Bill Moyer’s
http://billmoyers.com/story/not-a-scientist/
Politicians deploy the certain uncertainty on several specific climate-related topics. Climate science is a broad and complicated field, so there are many specific topics on which one can claim a lack of proof. For a first example, let’s look at what Jeb Bush had to say in 2015:
I don’t think the science is clear of what percentage is man-made and what percentage is natural. I just don’t — it’s convoluted. And for the people to say the science is decided on this is just really arrogant, to be honest with you.1
We’ll ignore the fact that doubting what the entirety of the world’s scientists say on an issue seems a tad more arrogant than those scientists explaining what is known. Focus on the message here: the science is not “clear” as to humanity’s contribution to warming; the science is “convoluted.” By casting doubt on what we know, Bush argued essentially that we know nothing. He was, of course, wrong.
Science does, in fact, have a good idea of how much of the observed warming is due to human impacts. Spoiler: pretty much all of it.
Science does, in fact, have a good idea of how much of the observed warming is due to human impacts. Spoiler: pretty much all of it.
Here’s how the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarized this question in 2013:
It is extremely likely that human activities caused more than half of the observed increase in [global mean surface temperature] from 1951 to 2010. 2
The report added that this conclusion is “supported by robust evidence from multiple studies using different methods.” In other words, we are really sure about this, and there is a lot of evidence for it.
Please read the article in its entirety that addresses your other concerns in more detail.
an excerpt from the new book Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent and Utterly Mangle Science.
As far as not being able to do anything about it, that is another different issue to look at.
As I suggested you are likely correct, more likely it will CORRECT itself!
In the last several years, I have read a lot of scientific papers. I have read a lot of them that were clearly wrong.
I have personally looked at some of the assumptions that go into the IPCC report, regarding future fossil fuel consumption. They are clearly wrong.
There have been studies on the share of scientific studies that have proved, in retrospect, to be wrong. Or that cannot be repeated. The share is quite high. All of us have seen the flip flopping, on what foods are supposedly good for us. And the changing views on which drugs to take. I think we have to assume that there is a fairly high error rate in “science.”
Like yourself, I also read a lot myself, and have an opinion about such, like yourself.
Since it is your Blog and clearly this exchange is going nowhere, you can have the last word.
Another day, another delusion..honestly the conversations that were having on a societal level is so disconnected with what is happening in front of our eyes, it’s incredible..
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/27/15436154/mars-soil-simulant-study-building-human-missions
Frank Zappa’s quote in today’s world is so on point…it makes even more sense if you replace “Freedom” in the quote by “Industrial Civilization”:
“The illusion of Industrial Civilization (Zappa said freedom) will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
🙂
It is hard to believe that we have researchers doing such ridiculous research!
https://medium.com/@ebonstorm/feudalism-and-the-algorithmic-economy-62d6c5d90646
“Welcome to the Algorithmic Economy, a future which uses machines to determine how effective you can be and how little they can pay you in the process.”
The question is, as always, how far can we go in this process…of extracting every last ounce of value from the productive economy.
My answer: late 2030s. That’s how far this process can go, and then we’ll all just be left to our fates, elites included.
Yep, my upper boundary as well..
Although, the immediate big challenge likely will be the worsening demography in the consumer age bracket and associated economic woes throughout the industrialized world by ~2025. If they manage to paper over that hurdle again, we have got bouncy plateau still almost 20yrs to muddle through counting from now, which is sort of good.. And obviously in some (semi-)peripheries it will likely turn very badly much sooner..
Interesting from the demographic point of view, the huge problem bearing down on us in Europe, and everywhere it seems, that the OECD is now talking about the need to reduce or even eliminate pensions paid to ‘better-off’ retired people, so as to increase SS payments to the mass of younger under/unemployed – the number of which is clearly due to increase quite sharply as retail starts to fail and automation advances.
There seems -from a brief scan of the news – to be a trend for manufacturing in Europe to drift away to Poland, so recently developed by EU infrastructure funds.
Macron in France was pointing out to striking workers affected by this that in effect nothing could be done about it, tough luck, and that things would be even worse without EU open borders and total corporate freedom – the line which these people have been peddling since the first mass industrial redundancies in the 1830’s in Britain.
The destruction of pensions is still being very vigorously pursued in Greece – one can’t help feeling that it is now a laboratory for repressive measures applied without any pity.
In weak economies with very high youth unemployment (Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, etc) and poor-quality contract work – insecure, poor pay – when you can actually get it, pensions are the last bastion of support for many families.
Pensions are of course payments to people who aren’t working. The whole pension system is not sustainable, unless an economy is growing quite quickly, so there aren’t very many pensioners relative to the working population.
The only way governments can pay pensions when there aren’t enough good paying jobs for their population is (1) raise debt levels even higher or (2) tax the working population at a higher level. These approaches aren’t sustainable. Having enough good-paying jobs for the population depends on having an abundance of cheap-to-produce energy.
Basically, not enough to go around.
Once can only imagine how even more dystopian the world will be by then….
Face it, the end will be tribal; millennials will blame the Boomers, left will blame the right, those within each faith will blame the outsiders/non-believers (faith may be religious, scientific, AGW, flying pigs, Tesla etc etc…).
Even on a site like this with much agreement on so many issues, there are strongly held differences resulting in tribal outbursts.
Blame and shame then more distraction with managed events, rinse and repeat….the perfect divide and conquer recipe
a fitting end to this ugly civilization tribal warfare will be the endgame for all of us as BAU unravels
While the Rothschilds,and others, simply laugh….
>> 5 minutes before their throats are ripped out…by their guards.
Millennial here. And I do blame the boomers. Have you ever met a group of people so disconnected from reality? The boomers used to be liberal. They were the Woodstock generation remember? Then they got old and sick, and now they swing to the right and voted for Trump. I guess when you get old you lose empathy and then you can vote for someone like Trump without feeling any remorse..
The “Woodstock generation” was to a large degree just an eruption of inter generational
“conflict”, more specifically the society acquired a novel twist to it after WWII, suddenly large pool of young people with some (maybe not that much) of pocket money inside the sea of consumerist plenty. So, they could almost freely experiment in many social and economic areas, party hard, make love and take drugs, loiter around without purpose and much concern for years..
Simply quite unprecedented time period in history, only some episodes of winning armies with giant loot to spend coming home and partying for years come close..
There are a lot of boomers commenting on this site, too. You can’t completely generalize.
This world was just fine until millenials showed up!
Senior boomer here. They keep saying that the healthcare plan needs all the young healthy people to buy in to cover the old unhealthy people. So that means that the young people are being taxed extra to pay the medical bills of the old. These old people are getting SS and Medicare already that’s already part the govt debt that’s being passed down to the younger people and I can’t blame the young folks for all the rioting in the streets and burned homes of the sock puppet legislators that pass these ridiculous laws.
Oh wait. These young folks are taking this? They aren’t up in arms? WTF? There are no young leaders to organize these people that are being victimized? This is way more crazy than the Donald is president. All these screen zombies accept being double taxed by the ACA without a peep. The Pharmoco Industrial Complex heaps even more financial burden on your head and not a peep. Its the boomers fault. Now back to Facebook.
As to voting. My good canine companion, Spike, would make a better Pres than either of those two we had to chose from.
I think a lot of people voted for Trump because the alternatives were horrible (Hillary? Really?) and no-one had listened to them for years. Same here in the UK with Brexit. People in London just didn’t give a thought about the fishing communities, the Welsh heavy industrial communities etc etc etc, that were stuffed, while they had their lovely lives.
The incredibly stupid assertion that you make in this post is that a entire generation has the same political views. Are you going to blame the boomers for this astounding lack of ignorance? A lot of Republicans didn’t like Trump. This is a fact that many people on the Left keep forgetting.
Furthermore, I fail to see how liberal policies will help us mitigate the eventual collapse of Industrial Civilization. How are Trump’s policies any worse than what the Left has to offer?
Bloomberg is littered with lies…
Bloomberg is filled with endless lies about Tesla… a new lie on just about a daily basis
Bloomberg is filled with endless stories about climate change – I count at least 3 on the home page today — and at least one just about every other day https://www.bloomberg.com/asia
It has to make one wonder if this man-made climate change thing is not just another big fat lie fed to us by the Ministry of Truth … given that there is no way to stop climate change if it is mad-made then what is the point in rubbing it in our faces every day….
Perhaps as has been suggested — the purpose of this is to distract us from the end of the world issues… it all ties in with the EV, renewable energy hopium plan
AGW is real, the trick is to figure a way to make $$$ on it. What we see is a two sided campaign my the Ministry of Truth. Even Dr. James Hansen stated, if we humans do not reduce our numbers, no solutions…
Dr Hansen,
If we’d started in 2005, it would have required emission reductions of 3 percent per year to restore planetary energy balance and stabilize climate this century. If we start next year, it is 6 percent per year. If we wait 10 years, it is 15 percent per year – extremely difficult and expensive, perhaps, impossible. But we aren’t even starting.”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/4/10/1651696/-A-word-from-James-Hansen-NASA-climatologist-on-climate-change
The thing is, Climate Change is so in our face now, it is impossible to ignore, unless one is holed up in an air conditioned office/room fixed eyes on a computer screen.
That would pretty much be all of us.
AGW is real – yes. Just be honest about it. No one can be that oblivious to the outside world to not notice the changes.
\When I was a little kid growing up in the Sixties in upstate NY snow would fall around Xmas time and the ground would stay covered with a thick blanket of snow until April. Every kid had their own sled, toboggan and skates. By February, lake ice would grow 2 to 3′ thick. In March the snow would get a layer or two of frozen rain. April 1, we would go out to fish for trout on opening day and it would be a waste of time with all the snow and ice everywhere along the stream bank. Lakes and ponds would not be ice-free until mid to late April.
Now, we are lucky to have 2 or 3 decent snowfalls a winter that last a couple weeks and then the ground is bare again. Lake ice doesn’t freeze as thick. Metal runner sleds are used as ornaments on front porches.
Also, with the warmer climate new species of birds have gradually migrated further north over the decades to become new seasonal or year-round residents of the area. This includes: cardinals, Carolina wrens, red-bellied woodpeckers, and others I can’t think of off the top of my head. The warming is real, the only question is – is it AGW. I think it is.
In climate records—for the North American an European regions at least—there are clear quasi 50~70-year cycles based on the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and the 1960s and 70s represented the bottom part of the last cycle. It’s unsurprising that there were snowier and colder winters in the US Northeast back then.
If you’d been growing up in the 1930s in upstate New York, back when Helen and Scott Nearing were Living the Good Life next door in the hills of old Vermont, you would likely have experienced winter conditions that were considerably less severe than in the 1960s.
Moreover, if you had been a bit further east in Main this year, you would have experienced snow cover reaching historic depths.
A trio of powerful winter storms pummeled communities from Maine to the Canadian Maritime provinces over the past week, leaving a blanket of snow up to 8 feet deep in some locations. The 1-2-3 punch of storms knocked out power, closed schools and businesses, caused numerous accidents and has generally crippled the region…
The town of Andover had a mind-boggling settled snow pack of 79 inches, or just over 6.5 feet. That now stands as the second deepest snow pack ever measured in Maine for a non-mountainous reporting station. Chimney Pond at an elevation of 2,900 feet, is stacked under 94 inches of the white stuff.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/02/17/after-three-straight-blizzards-snow-reaches-historic-depths-in-maine/?utm_term=.388d5ed6c9ac
The kind of weather variability you are talking about cannot reasonably be called “climate change”. Climate change is when a region changes from one climate zone to another—as when the climate of upstate New York changed from what might be described as glacial/frozen tundra to the current humid continental, or when the Sahara changed from savannah to desert. Wet, dry, warm or cold years or decades are just weather.
As I type this I am picking deer ticks off of me after having been out tree-planting. 3 ticks found, 3 dead so far. There is no record of deer ticks in this area of upstate NY in recorded history before about 10 -15 years ago. No one here ever saw, heard of, or got bit by deer ticks until then. The ticks moved north from CT on deer and mice and were able to survive the shorter, warmer, less snowy winters . Also, several new all-time high record daily high temperatures were recorded this past winter breaking the records set only recently – like last year. So I think it goes beyond weather.
As a species, we have never lived with CO2 levels this high.
We are in new territory.
Heavy duty galoshes 24/365 anybody? Unfortunately, it’s what it is out there..
I’m almost an old guy now, and I had to stop going barefoot or wearing just sneakers into the lush grass because of ticks threat many many decades ago..
Without all of our antibiotics, we would be in tough shape. Years ago there was a problem with typhoid fever. https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/observances/dww-graph.html
https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/observances/dww_2011/images/DrinkingWater-graph-577px.jpg
We are likely to have a lot of illness problems in the years ahead.
Malaria will resurface in many places….
And a long time ago there was a glacier covering most of Canada …. so yes the climate does change….
Except the things that allow us to have our civilization are the same things that cause climate change. There is nothing we can do except collapse our civilization.
The climate has been changing, pretty much forever. We started a story that it would stay the same, if we didn’t bother it. That is not true, either. The climate has mostly been in ice ages. If we let if follow its natural course, we wouldn’t like that outcome either.
You are right about wanting to make $$$ out of AGW. Also, make people feel powerful, when they implement new laws that will “fix” the situation. Actually, push the economy toward collapse sooner.
maybe its a good thing that we collapse sooner so that they can see the truth for what it is
once we collapse all we’ll see are long lines at the government dispensary and dark evenings by the campfire with rat-on-a-stick BBQ. see: Venezuela for a glimpse of things to come.
Edit: But with far fewer people.
Sooner or later, the climatic window which allowed settled agriculture and mass animal husbandry was doomed to close, what ever we did.
The only thing is to accept change as the only constant in existence, if one wish to stay even half sane.
For instance: Vulcano eruptions maybe caused The Little Ice Age:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2440039/The-13th-Century-volcanic-explosion-triggered-Little-Ice-Age-created-Far-Eastern-Pompeii-just-waiting-discovered.html
“Except the things that allow us to have our civilization are the same things that cause climate change.”
It boggles the mind that such a simple yet fundamental truth can be so overlooked. But it is, so we find ourselves with this weird situation wherein people are marching to protest the extraction and use of the very fuels without which they’d all be dead; or marching with the stated goal of achieving 350ppm carbon in the atmosphere when we have already crested 410ppm… The delusion runs deep.
Stupidity is limitless
You are so right, Gail.
Ya – it’s almost as much in our face as the news about how EVs and solar panels are saving the planet — and how we are all moving to Mars shortly….
man-made climate change was all made up by the ‘left’ to control the world and extract more taxes in the future from the world’s consumers. none of it is true fast eddie it just shows how gullible humans are to fall for all the climate-change propaganda.
I agree wholeheartedly with this comment—as long as we take the “the left” as comprising a very broad church of people who don’t all sing from the same hymnbook, including globalist elitists like Maurice Strong, George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, a bunch of post-modern pseudo-intellectuals named Naomi, a lamentation of self-identifying “science guy” talking heads, as well as the usual liberals, socialists, communists, Trotskyists, Stalinists, Maoists, ecofascists, ecoliberals, ecosocialists, ecocommunists, ecoTroskyists, ecoStalinsts, ecoMaoists, the usual rent-a-mob hate-filled misanthropic SJW do-gooders, and David Attenborough.
De James Hansen is an registered Independent voter…
Here is another aspect of the issue, Mr Groves
Just 90 companies are to blame for most climate change, this ‘carbon accountant’ says
“The results showed that nearly two-thirds of the major industrial greenhouse gas emissions (from fossil fuel use, methane leaks, and cement manufacture) originated in just 90 companies around the world, which either emitted the carbon themselves or supplied carbon ultimately released by consumers and industry.”
http://www.sciencemag.org/n…
I don’t blame those scummy corporations solely. Everyone plays a part, but the level of responsibility and impact varies. The main thing to realise is that the problems are systemic. So who is in charge of the system? Who has the power? Who calls the shots? Who corrupts the law makers? We all know who. Big ________.
When the hugely profitable industry corrupts the system and politicians/law makers it’s hard to argue that the consumer has all that much choice. Limited choices. We all have limited choices when living in complex societies and if changes are to ever occur it’s top down.
Fossil Fuel Funding to Congress: Industry influence in the U.S.
http://priceofoil.org/fossi…
88% of Congress On Gas Industry Payroll As Campaign Donations Hit Record Level
http://www.occupy.com/artic…
When wealth and power concentrate there is always mass corruption. When this happens the consumer/citizen/peasant/pleb has little or no choice. It does not matter what industry, what century or what kingdom or country. Same as it ever was except this will be the final collapse.
Ultimately, it is the 7.5 billion of us people who need to try to continue to live on this planet who are behind the need for the products that these companies sell. The system self-organizes toward more and more resource concentration. This is what leaves many people at the “bottom” without adequate resources.
We are dealing with laws of physics. You can complain, but I don’t think that you can do anything about the situation.
Sorry, but that’s not exactly correct. Independent of income level, not everybody is necessarily daily shopping lunatic, eating outside, flipping new carz every 4-5yrs, flipping primary residence house every 7-15yrs, doing multi thousand miles vacations regularly and so on.. Obviously we are all responsible to a degree for the overall system complexities, but only some of us are the “true warriors” of living and extending the bubble to the fullest..
David Attenborough, in particular, makes me at least simply shudder…. The Evil. 🙂
The horror….
David Attenborough…. I have an anecdote that involves this chap … indirectly…
A few years ago I went trekking in Ethiopia…. our guide was very pleased to inform us that he had guided Attenborough some years before….
My buddy and I finished up the trek and gave the guide – who was very amusing – a hefty tip…
His boss got in touch with us afterwards asking if we knew where the guide was as he had unplugged…. we told him the last we saw of him he was very pleased with his tip and was headed off to town…
His boss said – how much did you give him — I think we gave him 150 bucks or something — you could hear his dismay through the phone….
I see he said — he’ll be on a meth binge for some days on that amount of money…
Ah… sorry about that we said – he seemed to be such a nice fellow…
The timing of the big shift toward climate change discussion seems to have been influenced by the realization that there were, in fact, huge amounts of energy resources that could be tapped, if the price rose high enough. Prior to the prominence of the climate change discussion, the IEA issued forecasts that took into account the Peak Oil forecasts of Jean Leherrere. It seems like the year was about 1998, when the last IEA forecast mentioning Peak Oil as a likely problem was issued.
The IEA missed a year in its forecasts. I believe it was 1999.
Then in 2000, the United States Geological Service came out with its new evaluation of how much resources were in the ground–oil and natural gas. I am not sure if coal was included. This produced a very high amount of future energy resources available. When combined with the idea that we could extract 50% before peak oil, and 50% after peak oil, this produced (or supported) the idea that we had so much oil and gas around (plus coal) that our problem would be climate change.
Of course, the whole “Peak Oil” theory was wrong. The idea of being able to extract whatever we could technologically extract was nonsense. EROEI theory tried to get at this problem, but wasn’t able to really measure what needed to be measured. The whole economy is too interconnected, and it becomes impossible to determine what the minimum EROEI of “wellhead EROEI” should be. Also, the economy operates on a year-to-year basis. The issue is whether there is enough energy (or net energy) in each calendar year (or month or week) to adequately leverage the output of workers. Once energy per capita starts falling, the whole system collapses, and a huge amount of energy that seems to be available gets left behind. Low prices are a big part of what cause the problem, but this was not something even “on the radar” of peak oilers.
It is complicated but not impossible to detect defective EROEI. All industry’s must be self funded to be viable. Meaning business must generate profits. Once a business no longer can cover its cost of operation it is operating below minimum EROEI.
Let’s name a few.
Tesla
Twitter
Uber
Exxon
Chevron
And the list goes on once the system surpluses have been consumed by all these subsidized companies everyone will realize we past minimum EROEI sometime ago. This is precisely what Overshoot looks like and the mechanism that makes it possible.
Wind and solar belong on the list above as well.
What’s missing from the mainstream global warming narrative is the earth’s relationship with the sun.
See here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MvAnECkaME
“Sunspots going down, solar irradiance going down, flaring going down… the polar magnetic fields of the sun are weakening as well. This is partially what’s
leading to that speculation that we could be coming upon another grand solar minimum.”
“It all points to perhaps another little ice age. It seems likely we are going to enter a period
of very low solar activity and could mean we are in for very cold winters.”
– Ian Elliot formerly of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies
The video references an article published by The Irish Times, July 12, 2013, titled “Sun’s bizarre activity may trigger another ice age”:
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/sun-s-bizarre-activity-may-trigger-another-ice-age-1.1460937
As much as we humans would like to consider ourselves all-powerful and central to the universe there are far greater forces at play.
Here’s a novel idea though: forget the mainstream global warming narrative, which would have you living your daily life in fear and feeling guilty about how fuel efficient your car is, how much plastic you use, how often you recycle, etc. That’s the point of it: to keep you frightened and overwhelmed by a manufactured global problem that is so massive you can hardly wrap your head around it, much less do anything to solve it. Instead, how about focusing on reducing pollution and waste for the sake of maintaining a safer, healthier and more enjoyable ecosystem? “I’m a human being on this planet and I don’t want to live in a poisoned ecosystem.” Simple. No need for the end-of-the-world, doom-and-gloom, David vs. Goliath, man vs. nature mainstream global warming narrative whatsoever.
Spot the fake news…
Twitter Revenue Plunges for First Time Ever, Stock soars
US ad revenues collapse. So it’s cutting costs to manage its own decline.
http://wolfstreet.com/2017/04/26/twitter-revenue-plunges-for-first-time-ever-stock-soars/
Twitter Surprises by Adding New Users, Sends Shares Soaring
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-26/twitter-revenue-beats-estimates-amid-increase-in-monthly-users
How does Twitter lose close $61,000,000 in a quarter?
Could it be that massive PR bill that includes paying Bloomberg to present what is a horror story as a pleasant surprise?
Revenue plunges, stock soars is very strange!
https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2017/04/the-great-divides/
“But as these maps show, it’s not about Le Pen, or Trump, or Nigel Farage. It’s about people being left behind in ever larger numbers, susceptible to voices other than the ones they’ve known for a long time and who never listened to them. And nothing is being done to address these people’s claims; on the contrary, things are only getting worse for them.”
Right!
Humans cannot live without illusions. For the men and women of today, an irrational faith in progress may be the only antidote to nihilism. Without the hope that the future will be better than the past, they could not go on.”
― John N. Gray,: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
Progress is a fairly recent ‘goal’ in humanity’s history.
That’s debatable since we are at least on the year mark ~5000 of various civilization attempts. And way before that people explored, weighted different options in terms of moving to “better pastures, animal game, and tool rocks” over the next hill, learning, adapting along the way, always seeking betterment..
There are basically very few top options why this all happened:
– after all those mega yrs, nature wanted another potent terraforming agent of change, which would through sheer destruction and burning of fossil fuels help phase shift the next big era of something different
– it’s a retirement party of our neighborhood, the most complexity attaining capable species always come last, i.e. towards the latter part or maturity of given solar system, galaxy, cluster or whole universe
– our existence (and interactions with the world) is just some holly weird type of role playing simulation (many possible sub scenarios there as well)
I dont think there was much determinism in ancient times.
Folks stayed where they were until
a. energy sources ran out (or families/tribes got too big and had to split off)
or b, A stronger force drove them out–(climate, invaders and so on)
that was how humankind kind spread across the globe—nobody set out to find australia or america,—just the antelope over the next hill. add 10000 years to that incentive and you reach australia or america without looking for it.
if the shifting group didnt make it,they got eaten and recycled by other species, the ones that continually did make it, finished up as doomsters on OF World. Or president of the United States,
This is all over generalization
i dont think it is
you live where you do because your current needs are met
if you’re offered a better job—better schools–get divorced—any number of reasons, you are incentivised to move house
our ancestors were no different, motivation to move was the same, only they did it in pursuit of energy resources
The belief in ‘Progress’ as such surely requires, as its foundation, the comparatively rapid development and replication of ever-more efficient tools, themselves created from the resources excavated and processed by those very tools, and so on.
Hence the extraordinary and misguided vanity and hubris of 19th century man, whose delusions we are still living with.
Hence, also, the superstitious and unreflecting belief that every new device represents Progress and is a real and desirable advance, whereas it might simply be only another factor in complexity-induced Collapse.
t was tainter who said civilisations collapse through the weight of their complexity—or something like that
I keep wondering whether all of the cloud-related storage of files is a real advance. I would rather know that my files are on my computer, and the backup device connected to my computer, than depend on the “cloud” continuing indefinitely. There will clearly be an end-date for the cloud. We just don’t know when it will be.
CRAD
Complexity Related Anxiety Disorder.
What’s the solution?
Go fishing? Think about declining fish stocks, agro-industrial water-poisoning.
Go into the woods? Look at all the diseased trees.
Climb a mountain? Notice there is no snow anymore.
Finally, dig a hole in the ground and dive into, and…….wonder where all the earthworms went!
Interesting post, to say the least. But as to the terraforming aspect, it’s unlikely that this great evolvement would happen just in time for everything to disappear–nuclear holoccaust, going Venus, etc. But then, who really knows?
That’s one opinion. But Australian, having been in place for 50,000 might not have been all that preoccupied with progress. Then some early cultures though a lot in terms of cycles.
aborigenes
no real ”progress” is possible without surplus energy being available in large amounts
which is why humankind didn’t make universal progress untill the 17/1800s
Until that period nothing usable in productive terms could exceed the speed of a horse…after that we took speed and energy expenditure to be unlimited
Yes, and in the 19th century people assumed that the available energy was simply inexhaustible, due to scientific inventiveness in exploitation.
In the 18th century there were some experiments aiming to make some kind of condensed fertilizer, like soup condensed in cubes which was known then, so that more could be got out of the horse-drawn dung cart which delivered the fertilizer to the fields, and which was one of the most expensive items in the farmer’s budget.
Trained horse+ hand-made cart and harness +experienced labourer/horse man = enormous expense.
Although the cart could be expected to last maybe 60 years with regular maintenance and careful driving: if the driver didn’t grease the wheels properly, etc it could be severely damaged in one season.
And then the cart made lots of good firewood when it was beyond maintaining.
Perhaps “surplus energy” should be defined as “rising energy per capita”.
that’s more or less what i meant
if a man spends his entire working life ploughing the same land by the same methods, he will be unlikely to produce very much surplus energy, which will be essentially food.
what he produces will feed/clothe himself and his family, plus some extra to convert into rent —and that would be it in terms of ‘surplus’.
there couldnt be any rising energy per capita until a different means of food extraction was introduced–namely fossil fuels and tractors/fertilisers
Cliffhanger, have you been hanging out on this website?
I ask this because someone made a very similar comment.
The website where I saw it was Naked Capitalism, an economics blog with a heavy Progressive bias, where the writers write countless entries about how the Middle Class in the U.S. is disappearing while failing to see how unsustainable the circumstances that led to the creation of a large Middle Class in the U.S. .are
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/04/america-regressing-developing-nation-people.html#comment-2804589
Based on your posts on OFW, I would say that you’d fit in there. So. Are you one of them?
I definitely am from the FTE (finance, technology, electronics) sector. I am married to someone from the FTE sector, and my parents came from the FTE sector. (My grandparents did not.)
In US actuarial work, to a significant extent requires passing examinations. The examinations are to a significant extent self-study, although I understand that there are now some one-week cram courses a person can take, to try to fill in missing pieces. When people take the tests, they only write their “candidate number” on the examination, so no one knows what color they are, or what sex they are. When I helped grade examinations, essay questions were graded by two different graders, to try to be as objective as possible.
With this approach, the percentage of black actuaries is quite low. The percentage of actuaries of Asian descent is quite high. It would be hard to claim discrimination.
Of course, there can be big differences in the success of individual actuaries within a company, with the same number of exams. But if a person cannot pass the exams (the dropout rate is very high), he or she usually needs to find a different insurance specialty–underwriter, or claims, or something else.
I’m not sure what this is post is a response to, Gail. I won’t refute your assertion that Black people are underrepresented in occupations that require lots of long-term planing to get into that occupation. Asian people are well-represented in occupations that require lots of long-term planning because the market for occupations that require lots of long-term planning is global and Asian people make up about 50% of the human population.
I’m sure there are economic, cultural, and genetic reasons (personality traits, average IQ) that also contribute to why Asian people are so dominant in occupations that require a lot of long-term planning but the numbers, by themselves, suggest that in a globalized job market for occupations that require lots of long-term planning, that they would dominate because they make up a large share of the world’s population.
Aisans aren’t a huge share of the population in the US, though. The percentage of actuaries who are Asian seems to be higher than their US population share would lead a person to expect.
Another post by shortonoil from Peak Oil
When I was a kid in Vermont I worked in the Sugar House every spring. It was all fired with wood, and a lot of buckets were picket up and dumped by hand. It was hard, hard work but we didn’t seem to mind. They’ll get used to it. Of course, at 70 I’ll be leaving it to the younger generation. There is actually a lot of things that can be done with only a very little bit of oil. Quarries were dug, mines were run, cloth was spun with almost no oil at all. It will take a lot of time and there will be some serious suffering on the way, but we will probably get back to where we shouldn’t have left to begin with. Oil, and all that it had to offer was always an illusion that we shouldn’t have bought into in the first place. It allowed us to sit home, play on our cell phone, and get fat. That day is coming to a fast conclusion.
Like the line
. Oil, and all that it had to offer was always an illusion that we shouldn’t have bought into in the first place. It allowed us to sit home, play on our cell phone, and get fat. That day is coming to a fast conclusion
Shortonoil does not have a very accurate perspective of things. Oil is not extraordinarily important. It is energy products in general that are important–particularly cheap energy products. The things he talks about have little to do with fossil fuels. The earliest mines dated to hunter-gatherer days. Cloth has been created since long before the use of fossil fuels.
“There is actually a lot of things that can be done with only a very little bit of oil,” is simply not true. We need a rising total quantity of energy products, to keep our growing economy operating. If there is not enough, it collapses.
Gail, Thank you for your reply, and as far as BAU is concerned you are 100% correct, believe he would agree with you in that regard. He is correct as far as his statement doing a lot without oil, as witnessed by Ancient civilizations, which followed as ours certainly will also.
Those that carry on afterward, will indeed follow with a lot of “work”, without the illusion of those “Oil energy helpers”.
In all fairness to the both of you, the comment was taken from a series, and I presented it here in that vein, and wanted to give credit where due.
what does everyone think about the Saudi’s and IEA announcing there could be oil shortages by 2020? Will this collapse the global economy as the German Peak Oil study concluded?
the oil fuelled global economy is interlocked, each major part interdependent on all the others.
Saudi is a major producer, losing it will destabilise the rest.
pull out one part and the rest of the house of oilcards will follow
Without oil, the US will withdraw from the mideast. With the US power gone there will be a free for all. The saudis cannot defend themselves, so the entire region will go up in flames—literally–and the fantasy towers will disappear back into the sand whence they came.
With Iraq and Iran involved, that will take out another chunk of world oil
after that all bets are off—assuming anyone was daft enough to bet in the first place.
Won’t the US be forced to uphold the Saudi government?
what force could be used?
Without oil incentive, the US would be using taxpayers money to guard sand
Ring fence the oil and kill anything that moves anywhere near the wells….
Then throw some goat meat into the hordes — and watch them fight to the death over it….
Use CIA satellite technology to broadcast the mayhem in real time selling the broadcast rights to ESPN
I am working on the tag line for the promos — thinking : ‘You want reality tv – we’ll give you reality tv’
It depends on what shape the US government is in itself. If the US government is having trouble paying its bills, and can’t get its funding up, it may find itself forced to withdraw from the Middle East.
You may be right.
“what does everyone think about the Saudi’s and IEA announcing there could be oil shortages by 2020?”
It’s probably true due to a lack of investment via low oil price. At some point the glut will be used up and low supply relative to demand will drive price higher. But price as we know can only go so high then the consumer will tap out, demand will cave along with price and the situation will back itself into a corner as incentive for exploration will not be there. At that point taxpayers have to subsidize the oil industry or the FED have to QE to feed it the necessary funds to get oil supply back up at a consumer acceptable price to continue BAU. How long that last gambit can continue is anyone’s guess, but it is like the snake devouring itself.
Oil shortages by 2020 could collapse the global economy, if it hasn’t collapsed before 2020, because of other problems. We have a long list of problems to deal with: US government funding is short, compared to what it has promised; debt defaults in many places, including Italy and China; unwinding Eurozone. We have a choice of problems to deal with.
Canada’s biggest mortgage lender “Home Capital Group cratered by over 60%, its biggest drop on record”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-26/canadas-housing-bubble-explodes-its-biggest-mortgage-lender-crashes-most-history
Wow! I imagine Alberta with the low oil prices is part of the problem.
Is this not the crucial question -given that desperation measures we are all familiar with are alone keeping things afloat at the moment – when will non-elite workers start to default en masse on their debt? Mortgages, personal loans, car loans and so on.
When will mass redundancies -not just the steady trickle we can see now – which historically force them into default, really start?
Japan seems to have kept things going forever, despite nosebleed debt levels. It seems that “extend and pretend” or something similar can go on almost indefinitely. When businesses stopped borrowing enough, the government took over.
Extend and pretend debt use cannot overcome longtern physical exhaustion of essential resources. On that we at this site seem to have agreement. The essential issue is whether the world’s population overshoot can reverse during the time that debt is still functional or will some other resource runout cause collapse first. Liebig’s Lsw of the minimum applies to humans as much as to any other area of the world’s ecology. Though not originally intended to apply to the ‘ecology’ of tecnology, it will also apply there. Technology is poorly suited for retro-adaptability. Our dependence on tecnological solutions for our basic sustinance is where I think the chain of support will fail. Guessing where that will occur is a needle in the haystack quest.
“Guessing where that will occur is a needle in the haystack quest.”
Assuming that “we” can’t do anything about that, shouldn’t we be mostly concerned with as much of a Plan B as we can muster?
Extend and pretend can raise the price of commodities a bit–but probably not enough to enable continued extraction when the cost of extraction is high, and wages by themselves will not support extraction.
I agree that our dependence on technological solutions for our basic substance is a major issue. Food depends on our entire chain of products (oil for farm equipment and shipment to stores, fertilizer and pesticides, water for irrigation, metal fences to keep animals out). Our system also depends on antibiotics to keep ourselves and our animals healthy. We are already having trouble with microbes adapting their way away from existing antibiotics.
But the energy to enable this still has to come from somewhere?
thirty years ago the Japanese were riding (trading) faster than most other nations.
Thus they had more momentum in their economic system (call it freewheeling) after their energy input (pedalling) began to slow down.
Because of that, they are able to coast along further before they finish up in the ditch.
The end result will be the same, but in different places and times.
As it will be for every nation, because they all function at different speeds, and all deny that falling off is inevitable
You are one of the very few contributors here acknowledging (repeatedly) the diverse time and place components as underlying factors through the collapse processes, so I salute you for that.
^^ What worldofhanumanotg said. There seem to be some who view collapse as an event, while others view it as a process. I tend to think it is the latter. Even the loss of electricity could prove to be a process, depending how it plays out — rolling blackouts, brown-outs, intermittent recoveries, etc. Collapse *could* suddenly happen one day, but that is just one possible outcome. There are so many variables including how powerful the government is, what narrative they sell people, how much normalcy bias keeps people in a holding pattern, etc.
the ultimate problem will be denial I’m afraid
it is human nature to believe that ”something is bound to turn up”
then comes the time when nothing does.
But you may still believe otherwise till you’re dead
Also, a matter of culture, race, and past historical experience. The phenomenon of behavioural repetition in cultures, from which they never escape.
Human nature itself is by no means uniform, although there are important constants.
The decline phases will therefore vary for so many reasons: the people of some regions will turn to shooting one another up – and human sacrifice – quite early on, others to prancing around in silly homo-erotic uniforms, or banging their heads hard on the ground to prove how pious they are, (Egypt today!) etc. Here in Britain we have a return of the Victorian demonisation and bullying of the unemployed and sick by a callous and spoiled ruling class – utterly shameful.
It’s going to be quite a spectacle for so long as one can tune into what is happening elsewhere, and is in fact so now.
For instance, the recent mass migration of spear and Kalashnikov-wielding cattle herders in Kenya, massacring land owners -black or white – and being manipulated for electoral purposes by corrupt and cynical politicians and tribal bigwigs.
It will be rather boring when one no longer gets to enjoy that sort of thing – at a distance.
Back when Japan first added a lot of debt, and because of this was able to industrialize, they were able to grow quickly. Energy was inexpensive immediately after World War II. The people were bright and conscientious. Japan had already built small cars, before the oil crisis in the 1973-1074 period. Thus, they were in a good position to ramp up small cars to sell to the rest of the world. This was at least part of what helped them. They were also very able to make things like radios and televisions. For a while, they made a lot of cheap things that we now associate with China. Electricity from nuclear was fairly cheap, and this helped Japan in its industrialization.
Sounds a bit like dumb luck, but it still points to the effectiveness of doing sensible things BEFORE there is the crisis.
Extend and pretend debt can somewhat raise the price of commodities, such as oil. There is a gracious plenty of oil, coal, natural gas, uranium, and most any metal, if we can get the price up high enough. We have already been trying the debt. I doubt it will be successful in raising prices very much. You have no doubt seen the images I have posted in the past. This is one of many.
It certainly looks like desperation…
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-25/meet-real-emmanuel-macron-consummate-banker-puppet-bizarre-elitist-creation
Interesting new details, although wrote about it here few days ago..
From observing past or recent history, it’s actually very standard procedure of the elites to have a methodology in place how to fast track “Manchurian” candidates into sort of stables of talent pool, which is utilized as needed at the right time for given task.
For now, they want can kick the legacy system for few more years, before the true need arises for deploying – unleashing the real deal national quasi socialists vs. serious action oriented communists. More or less the point of open revolution, civil war threshold by then.
So, it all just continue shape as many of us here concluded that mid ~2020s brings the cataclysm proper. Obviously, some trends and events might get it sooner or bit later.
The amusing thing about ‘action-oriented communists’ and other such true radicals is that their very sincerity causes them to fragment and quarrel bitterly among themselves. Like religious fanatics. The advantage always lies with the status quo.
We can see that in Podemos in Spain – it has its Lenins and Trotskys and no doubt Stalins and they all want power over the Party here and now. It nearly always torpedoes them with never-ending internal power and doctrinal struggles.
My family are, except for me, ‘champagne socialists’ who think they are ‘radicals’,- something very common in Europe – which always makes me double up with laughter. ‘More Revolution with that caviar?’
In Britain, the champagne socialists tend to regard themselves as ‘caring’ but not radical. Much more sensible. They come more from the Christian socialists of the 19th century middle class.
But the serious revolutionaries do indeed exist. I wonder if we will see a re-run of the murdering revolutionary gangs of the 1970’s as inequality grows? Who wants to be Carlos the Jackal? My favourites were the ‘Autonomous Anti-Capitalist Commandos’:comic if they hadn’t killed people.
Lots of games for intelligence agencies to play in the years ahead…..
The people who want to run death squads on the Right do also exist, at least in Spain.
A mega-Collapse would spare us having to deal with all these idiots.
You are correct in that assessment. Every country-society is phased a bit differently time-space wise in these trends, but it definitely converges in one mega trend and focal point, let say ~2025-35. Speaking of France, worth noting the novelty of 80% votes divided more or less equally into 20% blocks each, where we have: BAU synthethic freakster kid, national socialist, communist and BAU nomenklatura corruptocrat.
This will obviously change as we progress on the down slope, it’s expected for the next rounds in 2020s that the BAU block votes will flow towards the real or phony radicals to the point in which the elites would have to start backing the national socialist in more visible form, e.g. prominent military/showbiz figures stepping up or speaking on their behalf. Basically, a replay of the 1920s-30s (and 1970s) turmoil, it would not be completely the same, but it will rhyme a lot..
These are one of the basic natural laws, sloshing formulas for homo politicus during upheaval societal cycles, known to us at least from antiquity..
I agree with the conclusion about Italy being the likeliest candidate to torpedo the Eurozone. Things looking shaky there:
* Fitch cuts Italy’s sovereign rating to ‘BBB’ from ‘BBB+’
* Move could increase market pressure on Italy’s debt
* Fitch says government is weak, political risk rising
* Cites high debt, bank woes, backloading fiscal consolidation
http://www.reuters.com/article/italy-rating-fitch-idUSL8N1HW0IC
Strange!
Just to goes to show you the extent to which TPTB are going to hide problems from the public.
Irrelevant to you guys since many of you are on your way out, but there is a widely promoted statistic is that there are more women than men “out there”, so men should have an advantage in the dating market.
This isn’t really true when this is broken down by age range. For people in prime child-baring range, there are more men than women, particularly in urban areas. The ratio of single men to single women 18-34 years of age ,in the U.S. is closer to that of China.
http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/02/where-in-the-us-are-there-more-single-men-than-women/385369/
The reason why this may not be apparent and why there have been several articles over the years about how ‘educated’ women cannot find enough men who are at their socioeconomic level is because women compete for the best men and this creates the illusion of a shortage.
Here it is approaching two on one, but most don’t wanna be done two on one.
That is because of a lot of immigrant men. Men are more likely to emigrate than women. If they become successful they will bring women from their home cultures.
The same phenomenon is occurring in China and certain parts of India.
Immigration is not being blamed in those areas. Migration is not being blamed in those areas.The standard explanation is that attempts at population growth
and family planning has meant favoring boys over girls,
I wonder if evolution of humans favors more men than women because natural selection happens more with men than women. As long as a woman can have children she is considered an evolutionary success because there, theoretically, will *always* be a man willing to impregnate her, regardless of her “fitness”. With men, there seems to be more work involved in passing on their genes. A slight gender imbalance can force the entire human species to disperse over a wider area in the search of females to mate with. Dispersing can also reduce incidences of inbreeding.
Not having as many girls is a good way of reducing population in the future, since the number of children born is more related to the number of available mothers than the number of available fathers. I understand that in some cultures with more makes than females, two brothers share a wife.
There are generally slightly more boys than girls at birth. I wonder if this is partly related to the death rate for boys/men being higher than women (with the exception of death from childbirth).
“There are generally slightly more boys than girls at birth.”
With a grain of salt: shorter/lighter chromosome make male swimmers faster.
Shorter chromosome causes larger variation (most often bad variation) among males.
Males are evolutions lab, if experiment doesn’t work it is discarded.
http://www.gifbin.com/bin/g65098109.gif
Even the cats might fight back!
This parasite must have been in Washington all along…? All that hot air creates the perfect environment for it. By the look of things it seems to take 90 odd days….sort of explains President Flip-flop huh!
‘Pretty much everything about this disease is nasty. Rat lungworm is a parasitic nematode (Angiostrongylus cantonensis) that begins its life as an infection in rat’s lungs, blood, and brains. From there, the rats defecate worm larvae that are spread to other creatures like snails, slugs and freshwater shrimp. Humans might eat one of these infected hosts or they might eat produce that has had the worm transferred to it by a host.
Next thing you know, your brain is being invaded….’
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/04/a-brain-invading-parasite-is-believed-to-be-spreading-because-of-climate-change/
Don’t worry about rat lungworm, chaps: ‘education’ is far more dangerous!
I am afraid the flip-flop phenomenon is caused by exposure to Goldman Sachs economists and pressure from businesses.
“The oil price is a big thing, but the other thing is they’ve also been helping themselves by taking operating costs out of the business,” said Jason Gammel, a London-based analyst at Jefferies International Ltd.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-25/oil-supermajors-dig-way-out-of-doldrums-as-cash-poised-to-surge
I am curious — how do you take out operating costs…
Operating (Operational) costs are the expenses which are related to the operation of a business, or to the operation of a device, component, piece of equipment or facility. They are the cost of resources used by an organization just to maintain its existence.
I read it as they are NOT replacing their reserves… In another words…having a going out of business strategy… Listen, the MSM will put a positive spin till the very day before SHTH!
Feed them to pension funds via the frbny.
We know that the drilling companies cut rates “temporarily” in the hopes of retaining at least some business, and thus, not have to lay off all of their employees and mothball their equipment.
We also know that part of their costs are fuel. To the extent that they are buying fuel from others, it will reflect the low oil and natural gas prices now in place. Electricity prices are low as well.
I understand that there have been wage cuts as well.
This whole model is not sustainable, though. Somehow, the real costs of operations must be covered, even if consumers cannot afford high-priced oil.
I think too that the oil companies and their employees think this is temporary and prices will rebound
There’s elon and then there’s the 120 million dollar venture capital for a juicer lol
Wow, something is defintly wrong.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-evidence-is-piling-up-silicon-valley-is-being-destroyed-2017-4
More concentration of wealth, and less concern about the many people of the world.
February 22, 2017
Deagel Forecast Predicts 81% US Population Reduction By 2025 14
Black Ops • Tags: deagel, depopulation
deagel-population-2025-forecast
DEAGEL.com is one of the most interesting pages on the Internet, Deagel.com’s Forecast for 2025, which is now only 8 years away.
What’s interesting about this forecast is that the Deagel website doesn’t have a dog in this fight. They are quite literally mercenary. The site analyzes which markets are going to have budgets allocated to buy military aircraft. That’s all they’re really care about. These predictions are based on a merge of publicly-available reports from institutions such as the CIA, IMF and the UN. They also include a small amount of data coming from a variety of “shadow sources” such as Internet gurus. But all these sources are from the Internet.The list is ever-changing. The forecasts for population growth or decline, military expenditures and Purchasing Power Parity in all of the world’s countries have fluctuated somewhat, since I first ran across the list in mid-2015 but one prediction has remained a constant: China will be the largest economy on Earth in 2025.
Certain things on this list are well-known and expected. We know that China’s population growth is peaking and that it will recede slightly. India’s population growth remains unchained and it will grow by nearly 100,000,000 people in 8
years.
Other things are in flux. A year ago, Brazil’s GDP was predicted to take a distant second place to China’s in 2025 but since the coup d’état of Dilma Rousseff and the ensuing nonviolent political and economic chaos, Brazil has since slipped behind India and Russia to take the number 4 spot. I suspect that the ramifications of the currency madness in India is not yet fully reflected in Deagel’s current list and that India’s position may soon change.
Yes. The US is not predicted to be among the 5 top GDPs, not even in the top 10.
There are some extremely radical and unexpected shifts predicted, particularly within the US, UK and Australia. Last Monday, I pasted the top 60 nations, sorted by GDP into an Excel spreadsheet and did some calculations in it, to try to make some sense out of this data:
deagel-population-2025-summary
Above: The top numbers are for 2025 with 2015 beneath
I gave color codes to show radical shifts in population and Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). “PPP” means the estimate of what the exchange rate between two currencies would have to be in order for the exchange to be at par with the purchasing power of the two countries’ currencies. On this list, it’s pegged to the US dollar. Brick Red means devastating changes, peach and yellow, devastating but less extreme. Green indicates improvement.
By far the most radical and catastrophic occurrences are Deagel’s predicted depopulation of the US by 81% or over 260M people and a PPP decrease also of 81%, with the US economy plummeting from today’s #1 spot to #11. This is up from#13, two years ago, but today, they’re predicting that the US population will decrease to 61M, down from 68M 2 years ago (!)
Mexico’s population will basically stay the same but their PPP will decrease by 31%. Canada, while it’s predicted to have a 54% loss of PPP, it will “only” lose 27% of its current population, according to Deagel’s predictions.
These figures are harrowing but not as bad as the catastrophic changes, which are predicted to be seen in the rest of the world’s most developed economies.
Here’s a short list of the most negative data:
US: population loss of 81% PPP loss of 81%
UK: population loss of 70% PPP loss of 82%
Spain: population loss of 51% PPP loss of 73%
Germany: population loss of 50% PPP loss of 64%
Australia: population loss of 49% PPP loss of 80%
Switzerland: population loss of 46% PPP loss of 60%
France: population loss of 31% PPP loss of 55%
Singapore: population loss of 25% PPP loss of 62%
Saudi Arabia: population loss of 12% PPP loss of 65%
Only three countries within the group of the top 60 GDP will experience significant improvement, while catastrophe is reigning in the countries listed above:
Russia: population loss of 2% ppp gain of 32%
Chile: population gain of 3% ppp gain of 23%
Colombia: population gain of 6% ppp gain of 22%
The countries with the top 10 highest PPP, in the following order are predicted to be Brunei, Qatar, Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, Norway, Finland, Chile, Taiwan and Malaysia – with only Russia’s increasing, the rest all decreasing – and in the case of Singapore, decreasing significantly.
The way the population losses and gains are distributed, it does not appear that these radical depopulations will be the result of nuclear bombs or hot wars. These look like the results of financial collapse and migration, although many are predicted will die, as well.
Brazil, whose GDP will almost triple, despite its ongoing political saga (which may soon be mirrored by that of the US) will also experience a population increase of 5%, in a country which has been experiencing a population decrease, with a current growth of .86%. In other words, ~10M people are expected to migrate to Brazil within 8 years.
According to these statistics, the two countries with the rosiest outlook are Russia and Chile.
(1 min Video):
Future of Chile: Deagel 2025
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I don’t buy any of it.
As far as I’m concerned they are just another run-o-the-mill group that thinks they can predict the future………..nobody can.
The smaller the future event is, the more it can be influenced and changed by minor events in the present and up until the prediction.
Very large events can be predicted, for example a large comet or asteroid on a collision course with Earth. We know that if the angle, composition and speed are great enough, it will be an extinction event, if it is estimated that the impact will be just below an extinction event what then will be predicted? Of course predictions will be impossible. We would just know the big picture, nothing more. What we cannot know is the little things that occur after impact.
To precisely know the future is to change it. If somebody knew the time and manner of your demise and told you, would you accept it? The only predictions anyone gets 100% correct are claims they predicted it but it always comes up after the event occurred.
My silly point is that I think we all understand the “big picture”. We know there is an exponential function….too many claims on ever decreasing slices of pie. We know it is going to end badly for the majority or all of us. All we are doing is discussing our perception of how events will unfold. Apart from a rosy future, for now anyone’s scenario guess, appears to be as good as the next joe’s.
This link http://allnewspipeline.com/Biggest_Mystery_On_Internet_Solved.php says that Deagel says their web site was hacked. They do not support the information you show.
The current deagel.com website does not have this information on it.
I can assure you, 70% of the people in my charming English village would none of them be missed, not one.
The future, therefore, looks rather rosy to me.
This might be a rather English sentiment.
But as 50% of Spaniards generally want to do away with the other half, it all looks rather promising there too.
Every cloud has a silver lining……
one wonders how they come up with 81%—not “around 80%”
deagel seems to be a military hardware site?
deagle rhymes with beagle
and smeagul
so they got that going for them
Don’t dismiss all talk of different monetary systems. After all, we know with 100% certainty that the present financial system will collapse.
Having said that, it seems we are incapable of managing self extinguishing, debt free currency, so to say. There are always people who take advantage, mainly those who are able to generate and receive debt. Which are, of course, banks, big governments, and corporations.
My prediction: our monetary system will collapse and be replaced by basically chaos and perpetually fluctuating currency valuations, regional wars, etc. until all that’s left of industrial civilization is gone. By that point, whatever we do or don’t do with money won’t matter, because we will be living in a post-industrial, scarcity age, until the end of our species, whether that takes centuries or millenia.
We are a really tragic species, there is nothing you can do.
Yes, but most of us remember to floss.
Speak for yourself.
Or days or weeks or months or years or decades.
I’m waiting for a stock market crash so large you see Bankers and CEO’S hanging from tree’s!
Keep waiting. Collapse will occur on the same day the stock market reaches new highs.
Also when the amount of oil in storage reaches new highs, and oil prices reach new lows. There will be gluts of coal and natural gas as well.
Seriously, we need to stop being so negative around here. Maybe the flying cars could run on methane fuel?
http://bigthink.com/design-for-good/this-is-how-you-turn-cow-fart-gas-into-energy
Couldn’t the flying cars have a wind generator thingy attached to generate electricity for the car? What do you call those things? I forget. Then it wouldn’t even need any gas or stuff to make it go. You know, just one of those thingys.
Move over Musk!
Uber claims it will having flying cars in Texas and Dubai by 2020!
http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Uber-claims-it-will-having-flying-cars-in-Texas-11098358.php
I’m very excited about Uber’s flying cars, which will make our dangerous streets safer for women and minorities but I’m also very, very concerned about the lack of inclusiveness and toxic masculinity inside Uber’s offices. They need to hire more women and minorities instead of oppressing them. They need to stop being energy bigots and embrace the sun, and wind, and the earth as energy sources for their operations. If they do that, then their flying cars will be something I can get behind 100%!
-Progressively Yours
Fighting Fossil Fuel Oppression since 2009!
You need to read more of Our Finite World. I suggest some of my posts on wind and solar. Read down the lists of recent/popular posts at the side. Unfortunately, wind and solar won’t save us either.
Too many Übermenschs and not enough Überfraus—that’s a refreshing way of looking at humanity’s problems.
Do you think that Uber should hire transgenders to get a better balance in the office?
I would be all for transgenders being hired to test drive the flying cars.
Just wait until the first flying car crash. How pleased will you be when a car fall on top of you?
Our theory of economics is so completely lacking that it is possible for people to make claims like this. As far as most people know, we simply pay each others wages. More debt allows us to pay more wages to each other. Growth somehow happens by magic. Energy products have nothing to do with it. Growing use of complexity is completely benign. It will eventually allow us to live on Mars, if Earth is too hot/polluted.
The species which destroyed the only planet to which it is adapted will move, in the blink of an eye, to another planet, never so far visited by humans, and to which it is not adapted, where it will establish a flourishing civilisation along the lines of the one which destroyed the original ecosystem.
Quite obvious when one thinks about it.
‘Uber claims it will having flying cars in Texas” – can flying pigs be far off?
It gets more absurd by the minute…
You gotta wonder what the honchos at Ford, GM, BMW, Toyota etc make of all this ….
The pathetic thing in all this is that they are having to roll out EV models to take advantage of the hype — and because to not do so could impact share prices — even though they would know these are total bullshit.
They must sit there and just shake their heads in dismay
Just think of all of the jobs for people designing these silly cars. It is not like we are “running out” of oil. The problem is very different. The problem is system collapse, and that affects electricity as much as oil. It also affects our ability to keep our roads repaired.
One of my sisters emailed this morning saying that their attempted drive down US Highway 1 in California has run into a lot of washed out areas, because of all of the rain. The highway seems to be closed south of Big Sur. http://www.latimes.com/travel/deals/la-tr-highway-1-road-closures-20170223-story.html Fixing roads with problems will not be possible, if we lose our industrial economy.
It doesn’t seem possible to go on without some kind of industrial system. Someone said re your later post on Japan, that there is a point where government takes over (from the market?) to avoid collapse? Temporarily.
I talked about the government being the one that takes on more debt, when citizens wouldn’t add more. Japan seems to have huge public works projects, whose purpose is almost entirely to give people jobs. This article talks about “needless dams and roads to nowhere.” http://bigthink.com/Global-Pedestrian/needless-dams-and-roads-to-nowhere-in-japan
I wonder how real all this is. The Japanese are traditionally brilliant designers, and I’ve seen their tiny sleeping berths (forget the location) since 40 or more years back. Hard to believe they couldn’t offer the same amount of work seeing that everyone had their own tiny home of tiny car or whatever.
Meanwhile the MSM is banging the drum about green shoots… the pretty vapid talking heads have their cheerleader outfits on — and are reading off the robotic screen…with a direct feed from the Ministry of Truth
So we have to rely on ZH for proper analysis…
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-25/about-caterpillars-tremendous-earnings-growth-there-just-one-thing
ZH is in the job.
I’m starting an etf that shorts anything Musk. I’ll call it SMSK.
Not a good bet in fantasy world. Go to Disneyland ride the Carousel of Progress take a few OxyContins and enjoy the ride.
i think most delusional people are environmentalist who want save the planet
environmentalist tell us reduce co2 by not using car and plane yet there goes though plane for climate conference and using computer which also contribute to co2
for me the biggest environmentalist was Genghis khan who killed some 40 million people
so the forest can regrow and population can be stabilized
++++++++++++++
If only we could have had a few hundred more Genghis-types throughout history we could have pushed off collapse another generation or so….
I guess he had his own version of Khan Academy.
An oldie but a goodie…it’s funny coz it’s true 🙂
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/ff/96/2e/ff962e7a797cd8d8144ec7e0b4f34ef2.jpg
+++++++++++++
Kalahari Bushmen rounded up and put on a “reserve” just like the Native American Indians:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-24821867 They are to be a “tourist attraction” now.
Apparently a new Diamond mine sits in the heart of the Kalahari Bushmen’s native land and that is likely the reason for their relocation. It is interesting to read their side of the story about how awful modern life is for them.
Sad!
Thanks for posting this.
It was inevitable. That is civilization.
After reading your post on declining gasoline consumption, Harry, I did a Google search on EV’s, but as you can see from below that would only account for a small part of declining demand. One other possibility is ICE cars sold in 2016 getting better mileage? Or the economy is slowing down? But I thought the FED were planning to raise rates this year due to the economy heating up. Well, anyway reduced gasoline consumption is an interesting development.
http://www.nanalyze.com/2017/03/electric-cars-usa/
In November of 2016, there were 540,000 cars on the road in the USA. This sounds like a lot, but it’s only .22% of all cars on the road in the USA. If we look at yearly production numbers, it still paints a miniscule picture. In 2016, there were around 17.5 million cars produced of which only 134,000 were electric (about .77%). So who is selling all these electric cars?
Bergen, when you throw in the dismal high street retail situation and the struggling restaurant industry, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that consumers are tapped out.
Re the restaurant industry (which I’m sure is all Amazon’s fault, too, lol):
https://www.thestreet.com/story/14089680/1/the-u-s-restaurant-industry-has-completely-collapsed.html
I remember a Wolfstreet article on this subject not too long ago.
I don’t disagree with the notion consumers are tapped out, Harry. Just as an example of how costs have risen; our water bill use to be 36 very 2 months and was recently changed to 105 every month. People complained but it made no difference. Our local municipality allowed the water district to become privatized and shareholders always want more. On another front we changed the HVAC system to reduce utility bills and PG&E eliminated our special rate that was less in Summer, so we pay about the same as we did before but of course paid 10K for the Quad mini-split system. On healthcare we would be paying 1200 ea. a month for the Ins. we have but only pay 230 a month on California Care (Obamacare) but when the R’s repeal and replace with nothing we’ll have to got to catastrophic health ins. which pays nothing unless you have cancer and are willing to go bankrupt on the part you do owe. So on all fronts people are being squeezed to a great extent by a system intended to make a small % of people very wealthy. Not sure if this is just a US problem but it’s certainly getting worse. Guess they won’t be happy until everybody is a slave during the day and living cars on side streets at night. For now our family is alright but a lot of people are living on a razor financial edge.
At one point, we had simple systems, installed with low cost oil. Now we have complex systems, and need to install them with high cost oil. So the cost are higher.
Saving water does no good. It is a dollar amount that must be spread over the customer base. Others will save water as well. The rates per gallon of water will go up, so that the total amount is collected.
What your witnessing is entropy in the system. It can only increase with time. Right now your ok but your surplus has been eviscerated to offset others deficits. Like the pension system has been eviscerated to prop up shale. Dissapative systems consume all surpluses in order to stay alive as they collapse. Obamacare is a prime example. Why so surprised and serious?
Anecdotally….
We had a new neighbour move in a few months ago … he was building a swimming pool when we dropped in to welcome him….
He was joking saying that the only way he could convince his kids to make the long (a whole 20km!) ride out to visit was to build the pool.
As he put it – with the price of petrol so high they are watching every km they drive.
People are struggling…. they are driving as little as possible because the choice is between food – and going somewhere that is not absolutely necessary.
We cannot be far from the end of days.
I spotted that China seems to be refining like crazy for export. I wonder who’s buying?
https://financialtribune.com/articles/energy/63007/china-exports-record-diesel-volumes
All of this buying crude, then refining it and reexporting it makes it hard to determine what China’s true oil “demand” is. I see they are exporting both gasoline and diesel.
Does cheaper labor give them a price advantage in doing a lot of refining?
I imagine cheaper labor gives a price advantage. Lesser pollution controls helps as well.
“Lackluster gasoline demand is once again raising concerns that the oil market won’t be able to escape the doldrums.
“Demand for U.S. gasoline has recovered since January, but remained below 2016 levels throughout much of this year. Now, analysts are worried weak consumption will cause gasoline stockpiles to keep building and eventually result in weaker crude oil demand and pricing…
“”As gas prices drop, that creates an undertow for the entire crude oil market,” said Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at Oil Price Information Service…
“In a troubling sign, the nation’s gasoline station operators have reported at industry conferences that their sales are down 1.5 to 2 percent this year, according to Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates.
“”When you hear retailers telling you that their demand is down you’ve got to be a believer,” he told CNBC.”
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/24/the-oil-market-has-one-big-problem-people-arent-buying-enough-gas.html
There must be a reason that “people aren’t buying enough gas”. Probably that no longer have jobs and do not need the gas anymore. The article should be titled: “Diminishing Returns Leads To Job Loss And Deflationary Collapse.”
And why try to beat a dead horse?
I was looking at the IEA’s forecast of oil demand. Their forecast of the increase in oil demand for the year is 1.3 million barrels per day, which is down from their previous forecast. One statement in the report struck me as strange:
After rereading the statement above, I think what it is trying to tell us is that the second quarter is normally a higher period for refining oil than the first quarter. We can deduce that the second quarter would normally be 2.35 mbd per day higher than the first quarter; the IEA is forecasting that the demand will be higher yet than this: 3.5 mbd higher than in the first quarter of 2017 (and 1Q 16).
My guess is that the IEA is being optimistic. An increase in demand from “Atlantic Basin” suppliers would seem to me to service US and European summer vacation drivers. Will they be driving all that much? The Middle East uses oil (in part) to run its air conditioning. Also natural gas to run power plants. It is hard to see those uses will ramp up, with revenues not being a good shape.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3162563/The-dying-giant-species-grave-world-s-male-white-rhino-certain-never-mate-lives-guard-protect-poachers.html
What can you say…we killed off these critters for phony aphrodisiac and bundles of cash.
I am far more troubled by this situation — and we are all complicit:
http://worldanimalnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/WAN-Pigs-At-Factory-Farm-Image.jpg
https://nothymetowastedotorg.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/20130523-172641.jpg
https://s3.amazonaws.com/user-media.venngage.com/546af0f78d7f1497cfef6415e8ca7ee1.jpg
We so deserve what’s coming to us (although a bit in our defense, any other species that would have developed like us would probably have done the same…it just turns out that it’s our species to whom it happened to….and we proceeded to wreak havoc on the whole biosphere)…
Yes – this outcome was inevitable.
How Tesla will go Bankrupt —- not gradually….
http://wolfstreet.com/2017/04/24/4-short-sellers-explain-why-they-target-tesla-but-dont-try-this-at-home/
The question is how long can this silliness go on. Does Tesla’s price fall at the same time that there are huge collapses in other stocks, and in bond prices?
“The question is how long can this silliness go on” – I don’t know. You would think that a person investing in company stock would do some research. I know very little about how the stock market works. But, even I know that Tesla makes zero business sense. I also know that the valuations of stocks do not correlate with earnings. How stock prices keep going up is beyond me.
Given that Tesla gets headlines just about every day — I assume that someone somewhere has decided this company is necessary – and TBTF ….
I assume that they will have access to unlimited cash – either given to them outright as subsidies – or as ZIRP loans…. allowing them to see off any shorts by simply buying back stock…
I am doubtful that Tesla will fail in advance of the collapse of BAU.
Wall Street and our central bank are in for a rude awakening very soon! The idea that the US economy is on stable footing and about to experience a surge in growth is ridiculous. Hence, the consensus that the Fed can normalize interest rates and its balance sheet is nothing short of a bad joke…and it’s on them.
For starters, the government’s fiscal deficit for the month of March came in at $176.2 billion, which means the deficit 6 months into fiscal 2017 is $526.9 billion and running 15% over last year.
If not for the calendar timing of receipts and payments, our government’s deficit would be a year-to-date $564.0 billion or 23% above last year. In addition, there was an 18% decline in corporate income tax collection. We all know there was no corporate tax reform passed.
So the credible conclusion must be reached that corporations are not growing there profits…they are actually shrinking.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-24/fed-about-drop-moab-wall-street
18% decline in corporate tax collection ….
You won’t find that piece of info in the MSM… I just tried a google search of that… and nadda…
Obviously that single data point would wreck the narrative if it were broadcast….. so it will not appear on CNBs … Bloomberg… FT… etc….
How the CBs are holding this together is beyond me…. bravo
I find the threat of a government shutdown worrying, with all of these negative things going on. How do any group of people agree on anything that is supposed to provide somewhat adequate funding, given the headwinds we are up against?
This article gives a good overview of the situation for anyone, like me, who is not at all up on the US debt ceiling issue:
“…one reason the federal debt grows is because we take on new debt to keep paying interest on old debt. So if Congress ever refuses to raise the debt ceiling, what it’s really doing is refusing to honor America’s debt obligations.
“This would be calamitous.
“U.S. debt is considered the safest asset in the global financial market. Countless other assets and investments around the globe are all keyed off it. Countries stockpile U.S. treasuries in order to maintain currency reserves, because the overwhelming majority of international financial transactions are done in American dollars. All of this hinges on people’s trust that the U.S. government will abide by its promises. Take that away, and you’re yanking the cornerstone out of the entire global financial system.
“Moreover, if the debt ceiling isn’t raised, all government day-to-day spending would have to immediately fall until it was even with day-to-day revenues. Sucking that much spending out of the economy at once would induce an immediate national recession.”
http://theweek.com/articles/693862/trumps-looming-economic-armageddon
In the last government shutdown, we lost the government websites with data very early on. I worry that the result could be a lot worse than that, if the shutdown drags on, and receipts start falling. How can disbursements be cut back enough to match the falling receipts? Quite a bit of payments are for things like Social Security and Medicare which have been agreed upon, and will rise with an aging population. It becomes impossible to keep outgo level (or worse yet, make it fall to match declining revenue).
I think this blog post is one of your very best. Thanks.
Just one question: is the system you describe the only possible one? I do not mean to be cute, but is it possible to design a different system that would serve more of the people than the one you described, and would be less prone to serious problems?
For example, why not have a system with no debt, no interest rates, and no banks?
Wouldn’t that solve a lot of our problems? It would be simpler and three harmful elements would be gone. Debt, interest, and banks, favor the wealthy non-producers in our society. They have plenty of money and will do just fine without debt, interest, and banks.
They have lived far too long off the swear of someone else’s brow.
I think you have to have debt to “pull the economy forward.” Any time you build something that might be used in the future, or you agree to divide labor in a way that is more efficient, there is a need to “pay” the person who makes the goods that might be used in the future, or who gives of his labor in shared production of some goods or services. Any certificate that acts like money is, in fact, debt. A group of people is always building goods that might be used in the future. They need more certificates for future goods and services, to pay workers.
The old fashioned way of handling debt was that it all came from the king or other leader. Some of this debt was owed to the king by way of the king’s ability to tax his subjects. With this approach, there could be debt, without a real need for banks. There also wouldn’t be insurance companies and pension funds holding the debt. You would work until you died. The advantage of this approach is that the king could forgive debt of a particular group (say farmers) if he chose. When banks, insurance companies, and pensions plans are involved, it is impossible to do this.
Whenever time-shifting is involved (debt will be paid back later), there is a chance of default. Somehow, a fee to offset this chance of default is needed. There are likely other transactional costs involved as well. Whether this fee is called “interest” or a service charge, the effect is the same. Somehow, there needs to be payment for this services.
Of course, adding debt and interest on debt tends to concentrate wealth, with those who are already benefitting the most. This is an important reason for the debt forgiveness–to try to get proper order back in place again.
Fast Eddy. Electrics, just like ICE cars run on oil. When was the last review you saw for a Great Off Road EV? Last I checked most roads are oil based. That doesn’t even count how much oil is used putting up wind turbines and generating/distributing electricity. You and I agree, but for once you understated your position.
EVs would not exist without government subsidies…
With one exception — golf carts.
Now that’s a great off road vehicle. I stand corrected.
Debt forgiveness sounds good on paper until you really start following the paper trail. We are all in some or many ways on the receiving end of that debt. Hand in hand with forgiveness of debt will be the unwillingness of the loaners to extend more debt. How many layers of debt are involved in my making this post?
My electric bill and my internet bill to name two and that just got this electron packet to my property line, which is not really fully my property line until the mortgage is paid off. (don’t even get me started on property taxes).
As long as money is created at the same time debt is created then this whole system must reset back to zero on both sides. Those holding real assets free and clear will have to defend themselves from the mass of humanity that will have nothing at that point.
Its the three days without water and the three weeks without food that will be most critical. Like the adage ‘when seconds count, the cops will be there in minutes’, most communities have three days of food in the system. Tough times lie ahead.
Debt forgiveness is not the problem. Debt is the problem. We have no need for debt. Our system was designed to include debt because those who have money want a risk-free income. Taking their money and investing it in startups is very risky. Not only would the wealthy have to commit their money to the venture, but they would have to manage it or hire someone to do it for them–which would be expensive and risky as well. So, the wealthy realized centuries ago that lending money to those who did not have it was a better way to go. They would lend it only to people who had the ability to repay it, and who had assets that could be taken if they failed to repay. In this way the wealthy could increase their wealth no matter the outcome of the investment. What is more, the wealthy realized that they could use the law to force the borrowers to give up their assets. It has been a sweet way of life for the wealthy.
But if we never create debt, if we never permit the wealthy to lend money at interest and if we never allow them to attach the assets of the borrower, we will have many more startups and the economy will have more jobs–better paying jobs.
The debt-model economy that we suffer under has become, in the minds of most people, a law of the universe. Most of us think of it as a natural law like gravity. But it is like gravity in only one respect–it is pulling us down.
People who blindly defend the current economic system are doing themselves, and the world, a great disservice, perhaps a fatal disservice.
Unfortunately, debt cannot be avoided. All currency is debt. Debt is the promise for future goods and services that we use to pay for current goods and services. Debt implies that future energy supplies will continue, as they have in the past.
The only alternative to debt would be an economy based solely on barter. It would be an ever-declining economy, because the goods made in the past keep deteriorating with age, and thus keep declining. We would not be able to “pay” anyone for making new goods, because that would be “debt”: the promise of new goods or services.
Now you have moved the goal posts. Debt of the kind in which banks or individuals loan money to others in exchange for repayment at interest subject to seizing collateral in the event of default is what I am talking about and is what our economy runs on.
To define debt as the depletion of resources is a different discussion. Resources will diminish and we must deal with it as a society, not as individuals.
You have told me that “all currency is debt” before, but you fail to explain what that means. If it is debt, then who is the debtor? If it is debt then how is it repaid–do you return the currency? How do you know who to repay? Does your “currency debt” incur interest? Who gets the interest? Who sets the rate? When is the debt incurred? When I get a paycheck? Obscure terminology is the refuge of those whose arguments cannot otherwise be defended.
Spell it out, or give it up.
Debt involves promises. In the case of government promises, these are promises that the certificates you hold will be useful in exchange for goods and services in the future. Debt doesn’t necessarily carry interest. In fact, we saw recently in Europe and Japan that interest rates can be negative. In such a situation, governments want to ban cash, because a 0% rate is a “better deal” than a negative interest rate.
Governments that issue currency are the debtors. The situation is no different than if they provided you with “gift cards.”
I don’t think I defined debt as the depletion of resources. Debt provides a promise of future goods and services. Since energy is involved in making goods and services, debt is a promise that energy will continue to be available, in the right quantity, at the right price, in order to make goods and services in the future. There are a lot of people who think that this promise is one that cannot be kept. But it doesn’t keep governments from continuing to issue more and more debt, in the hope that the new promises will somehow fix our existing problems. One of our current problems is the fact that energy prices (oil, natural gas, coal) are too low for most providers. The hope is that the additional debt will somehow work its way back to wages, and those wages will bring up “demand” for goods made using energy products. By doing this, energy prices will be raised, to closer to the level the producers require.
There is of course debt involved in the purchasing property. This debt generally requires the payment of interest. The thing that is in question is whether the property will, in fact, be good for its current purpose, and thus retain its value. For example, if the property is in a strip mall, and a large number of stores are closing, there is a very significant chance the property will not be worth what a person has paid for it. If a city can no longer provide water and sewer connections for a property (because of energy related problems) or electricity supplies (also because of energy problems), the property will likely not be worth much.
A wealthy person could start a business with his own money and build things that will be used in the future. As he produces these things, there will come a time when they will be sold and the business, and its owner, will get money. There was no debt. There was no need for banks. There was no need for interest. So, why wouldn’t this system work?
I suppose you might say that not everyone is rich, and I might say that you are correct in the current way of doing things, but we don’t have to do things the current way. The new system, which I call democrato-capitalism gives everyone enough money to act as if they are rich and can start their own business. Problem solved. You’re welcome.
I’m excited. I think that we are getting somewhere. What do you think?
Any certificate that acts like money is not debt, it is money. There is no need for debt. But our current system depends on debt because it is good for the wealthy who have money and they want to get more by leveraging their money. Bad system. It should be stopped before it destroys our civilization.
The “money” the wealthy person has is government debt. It only lasts as long as the financial system lasts, or as long as the government stays in operation. For example, if the US governments could not reach an agreement on funding (the question coming up this week), and shut down without a way of recovering, it could be a permanent shut down. Eventually, all payments would stop.
If banks stop operation, the “rich” person would have no way of paying the workers in his business. His business would fail.
You may not think of money as debt, but it is. It is like “store credit” that a store issues to you, when you return an item. Or like a “gift card” that you buy to give as a gift. Whoever issues the store credit, or the gift card, has a liability on its balance sheet for that amount.
You may think that debt requires “time shifting.” Some debt has a date attached to it, but other debt does not.
But this thread began with my assertion that banks, interest, debt are not needed. If money was made available to those who need it without having to borrow it from a bank then no debt would be created. You mentioned that the king could forgive debt and I thought you were finally seeing the light, but the idea of banks, interest, and debt is apparently burned into your brain.
If the “rich” person had money to pay his employees then he would not have to go to the bank. I did this myself. I started a retail business and financed it entirely with my personal capital plus the cash that came into the business via sales. I operated the business for years and never borrowed a cent from anyone. There was no debt.
I said at the outset that a system in which all persons had enough money that they were rich is possible and therefore no debt would be needed. Such a system is easy to create and operate. The source of all spending would be the issuer of fiat currency. The purpose of this system would be to put money into the pockets of the citizens, not to put money into the pockets of the bankers. “Time shifting” can easily be done without debt. You think that the two are connected because you can’t see the forest for the trees.
Governments have no debt. The idea that government money is debt is part of the scheme, and it is a nefarious scheme, that permits bankers to get rich. They literally have a license to print money. Government money, fiat money, is nothing more than a data point in cyberspace. All of the shenanigans that we undergo today in our economic system are a scam to let some profit from the labors of the many.
My god, the debt limit law is just another part of the scam.
Lincoln’s greenbacks were issued without incurring debt. You can look it up, and they were kept in circulation for nearly a century. But the banks, through their control of Congress finally put an end to it. So a debt-free currency has already been produced by the US government, and it worked exactly as I have been saying.
If the rich guy will not have the money to pay his workers then he is a business in name only. If his business was a real business then the business itself would take in more than enough income to pay its bills.
Money is not like “store credit” it is simply a way for us to conduct commerce. “store credit” in my store went into the customer’s pocket through cash or through crediting his credit card. I kept no “store credit” records. Why would I? They would be a pain in the ass. It was much easier to simply refund the customer’s money in the same form that he gave it to me.
Your point that money will evaporate if the US government goes out of business is simply silly.
But, it seems that your basic point is that our banking system, which works against the common good, is an essential part of our economy. You are wrong, and no matter how many times you insist that “currency is debt” you will still be wrong.
Dear Hestel;
If you are writing a novel, you can create a universe where currency is not debt, and in fact there is no debt at all. You can have unicorns too. Ms. Tverberg does not write fiction as far as I can tell. People who start what might sound like a reasonable argument with “is it possible to design a different system” bore me silly.
Look around, and look at what IS. What really is happening on this planet in this universe is the only things that really matter to the people here on this planet.
“If people didn’t eat meat, there would be no need for factory meat production.”
Another example of a statement that is a completely meaningless foray into fiction. If you look around, you will notice that people do eat meat. It doesn’t matter what the result might be if they did not.
People have lost the ability to tell fiction from reality. It leads to worshipers of the great Elon in the sky, people that think debt can be eliminated from our economy, people who think Fukushima is an ELE, who think Trump will make Merca great again, permaculture can feed everyone, etc. etc.
Try, Just Try to Keep it Real,
Pintada
A dollar is money only at the exact point in time when it is used to physically buy goods and services made with real resources. If the resources are not currently available to create the goods and services then money is debt. It is resources owed to someone. If a point comes where there are no longer sufficient resources to fulfill all the demands that money produces, then debts become very large. The system becomes unstable at some point and people loose faith in the money and the financial system collapses as the divide between the amount of debt (money with insufficient resource to buy) becomes too great.
I just don’t see how printing enough money for everyone to be rich will work unless no attempt is made to buy anything with the money. If everyone was instantly rich with dollars, that would create a massive shortage in real resources. So, all that money you printed and gave away is really debt your holding because it has to wait until the resources are available to make the stuff you want to buy. Debt becomes money only at the point of sale when the transaction takes place. Otherwise it is just a promise.
A loan is different type of debt than monetary debt. With a loan the resources are there and the goods are available to buy but you have no money. In the above scenario the money was there but there were not goods to buy. A loan is different. The money to buy the goods is created literally out of thin air to instantly “buy” these types of goods.
Then you pay back the loan with interest so it becomes a personal debt. Loans work when resources are abundant and the economy is growing to allow loans to be paid back with interest without undue stress. We are leaving the era of abundance behind now as resources become more scarce and expensive to extract.
As wages continue to stagnate and decline and monetary debts grow larger (due to diminishing returns of real resources) and personal debts grow larger (due to buying things that either have no value or are no longer useful) the financial system will grow increasingly unstable to the point of collapse. It will be 2008 all over again with inter-bank trust is lost.
You are describing the current system. I began this thread by describing a new system in which debt, banks, and interest are things of the past.
Trying to bring about such a transition would just collapse the current system. We’re stuck with it.
Who would throw out the old system? The 62 who owns half the world?
Attempting to change our financial system is like redoing the foundation of a house. We would have to tear the house down first. Or, start from a new system from scratch while somehow maintaining the legacy financial system. The bottom line is that It is just too resource intensive. The problem is not so much the lack of money as it is the lack of resources.
As to supplying everyone with enough money to be rich, you have leaped to a conclusion. This thread has gotten long and has more than one conversation going on. In the economy I describe, each citizen would have enough money to satisfy his basic needs. It would be deposited in his bank accounts by the federal government. In addition he would have access to substantial funds that could be used at the natural time to be spent for worthwhile, non-inflationary purposes such as going to college, buying or building a home, renting an apartment, starting a family, starting a business, putting aside savings for retirement, etc. If any person has a good idea for a business then he can develop a business plan and the money would be supplied at no interest. In order to get the funds, his business would have to pay good wages and bonuses to the employees and would have to pay dividends to the stockholders.
in my system the money supply is infinite. It floats in cyberspace and the government can activate it as needed. Money that is in excess will be deactivated.
To Henry Gibbs:
Such a system would be peter rabbit simple to implement. All we would have to do is give each citizen a bank account if they do not already have one, and then deposit money in it each month. Nothing to it. The need to borrow money would disappear and so the banks would become simply service organizations that operate the payments system as checks and credit card charges are processed.
During the Lincoln administration debt-free money was issued and nobody noticed.
it’s Eddy’s wall for headbanging time I think
i shall recruit you into my hole digging circle hestal
It’s a brilliant money making scheme, where 100 men are given shovels,and unlimited sackfuls of money, and is required to stand in a circle
Each man starts digging a hole in front of himself, and sells the dirt to the man on his left for as much cash as can be negotiated. (remember there is no limit to available money)
Each digger buys dirt from the man on his right, again–the price is negotiable.
Digging goes on, each buying and selling dirt, each man making a fortune. What could possibly go wrong?
Then folks start getting tired—they need food/energy to sustain the strength to dig.
But there’s the catch, if anyone stops digging, they drop out of the circle and lose all the money they made. So they desperately keep digging, determined to keep their money. They get so desperate they start to eat money. That doesn’t work, no calorific value you see.
Suddenly one man collapses, then another, then another….until after a day or two of digging every man is dead through overwork.
All the money they earned had no value to them, because their digging circle had no energy input.
No money has value unless it is constantly supported by energy
Hestal, what your describing in physics is called a “perpetuall-motion machine”. The biggest problem with your idea is that In your system money is infinite while resources are finite.
I am going outside for a few moments… to scream at the trees….
There – I am back – I feel better…
Now where were we?
Greg says: “The biggest problem with your idea is that In your system money is infinite while resources are finite.”
Exactly Greg! The concept is so simple yet plenty here think that all the CBs have to do is to print more cash to stave off collapse. Again the laws of physics will always (eventually, and very soon at that) prevail on the rules of our Financial System, which is virtual and just a human construct…unless we live in a virtual world like in the movie The Matrix, CBs are helpless in the long run to deal with the predicament we find ourselves in…now if only CBs could print convential oil and other resources, that would be a different story (but even then we would be stuck since the biosphere would collapse even faster than it is now)….PREDICAMENT = NO SOLUTION
So the price of something tangible is infinite / definite? What is that? $2.49?
Demand depends on someone having the funds to “buy” either the goods themselves, or (in the case of commodities), goods made with the commodities. It is easier to print the money than it is to get it back to potential buyers of goods.
Hestal, the global economy is a complex adaptive system – nothing Peter Rabbit simple about changing it, much as I like the metaphor. Humans only have control over niches within it; as a totality it is self-organising. Gail’s self-driving car analogy is apt. We are just passengers.
You’re going to make up money on a computer screen and put in peoples accounts instead of make up money on a computer screen and let the FED lend it out at interest. People with ideas like that usually end up tied to a post and then there is a fire. Those dudes with the white shirts and neck ties don’t put up with that kind of stuff.
The problem is not just debt that is unsustainable, it is civilization. All civilizations are unsustainable. Eliminating debt does not make civilization sustainable.
Debt is related to growth of human population and human consumption of finite resources. Replacing capitalism with some social democratic version of capitalism-which has been tried, by the way- ” democrato-capitalism “–is common throughout Europe–will not reign in growth of human activity. Voters will always vote for more stuff, and if they don’t have a way to pay for it immediately–debt, like Greece did– will not save civilization.
Debt is essential to civilization. Debt is a byproduct of civilization. Civilizations are built upon a surplus of food and other necessities. Debt arose when a bartering system could no longer work because of the time differences between what it took for different kinds goods to be made. A sword, for example, one could imagine, took more time and more resources to make than a dead dead turkey. Debt arose as a way for a person who specialized in making swords could get food or another surplus good when they did not have enough swords or anything else tangible to exchange for food or another surplus good–in the expectation that the lender of food or another surplus good will get something equal in value to what was seemingly given away, plus interest to compensate the lender of food or another surplus good for their trouble…the closest thing to what I mean by “their trouble” is “opportunity cost”.A lender of food or another surplus good could readily trade his surplus with another person with surplus goods, but that would limit his customer base and the kinds of goods he could acquire. The lender of food or another surplus good would not be able to get a sword because the person making the sword may not have swords available immediately to exchange for a surplus good.
Getting rid of debt means getting rid of specialization and large surpluses.
Getting rid of debt means no money because money has no inherent use other to say: “This person deserves X.” . Money is debt.
Without surpluses there is no specialization. Without specialization, debt is nearly non-existent.
Getting rid of debt means getting rid of civilization.
This is a lifestyle that has little use for debt.
http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/19byh3t2v6t0gjpg/ku-xlarge.jpg
It’s possible that there is a tiny amount of debt* exists in this lifestyle because people always want more.
Men, in particular are motivated to acquire more in order to be attractive to women.
There is no way to restrain human ambition.
*and because people are born indebted to their parents and social group/family.
I agree.
To add a little to your point about intergenerational indebtedness, our parents took care of us as children. We take care of our children, in the hope/expectation that they will take care of us late in life. Now, however, the government has taken over the role of handling the intergenerational indebtedness. People don’t stop to think, “If I don’t have children, and my neighbors don’t have children, there will be no one to support me in my old age.” They assume that the government can continue in that role. People in government have talked to their actuaries enough to realize that the ratio of young workers to retired population is very important. It is these people in government who are interested in allowing immigrants in, so that there is some way of funding government programs for the elderly. Of course, if the immigrants are mostly unemployed, or working at very low wages, this doesn’t work.
rather like stopping to ask directions on an Irish country road:
Ah well sorr—if I was you, I wouldn’t start from here.
meaning that while things may be inconvenient–we are stuck with the system we have
. we are locked into mutual interdependent debt because it supports the economic system we created for ourselves.
we cannot simply disengage and go somewhere else
Those who could have possibly changed the system would have lost the most.
Those who survive our collapse will be those who can obtain sufficient life sustaining essentials—especially clean water and food—on a continuous basis, both during and after collapse. Those who store large quantities of these essentials and those who attempt to produce
food, either individually or in communities, will be easy targets for the vast majority who have neither the foresight to store nor the skills to produce. No matter how remote or secluded your sanctuary, somebody will know about it; and they will come to call when they become desperate; and they will be well armed and devoid of compassion. You can prepare for a last stand, but you cannot prepare for post-collapse survival.
I’ve thought about this a lot. Very remote – no one within 20 miles could work. Too much effort and risk for someone to head out there. But lately, I think right in plain sight is the best. Create a very small room between two rooms in a high rise. Store rem’s and water. Hole up and if you hear someone, into the room you go. Kind of like a safe room, but so small it can’t really be detected.
That scenario doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. For starters you want to avoid being in a City especially any large City where you have societal breakdown as well as a breakdown in law and order. Building a hideout room within two rooms requires lots of money. You can’t do that if you are a renter. If you live in a high rise with at least two rooms, chances are you spent a lot of money on that apartment or condo, which probably means you are wealthy.
If so it’s better to invest in a bugout place outside the City or buy a place in another Country where you have at least a buffer zone between the haves and have nots. You can create something similar in a bugout retreat that’s far away from a metropolitan area where chaos and violence have a much higher chance of taking place.
I sure as hell would not want to be hold up in some high rise if and when the SHTF.
One word: COMMUNITY.
You don’t have it so you are doomed.
I agree, without community you are doomed to failure.
And still under the assumption it is instant apocalypse. What if collapse is local and personal. You lose your job and the welfare state is gone – then YOU have collapsed!
No drama, just sad.
Low energy consumption = job loss. Perhaps financial collapse for everyone, but could be job loss for you first.
they used to be called priest holes
Make sure to bring some pens and paper and keep a diary….
Isn’t a priest hole the thing you find on a pre adolescent boy?
we do not wish to know that
Do the priests take questions from the back benchers during mass? If so perhaps I will drop by and ask for clarification on Sunday….
i get the impression you would be more at home in a black mass
I agree, easy targets.
My grandmother came from a remote valley in the Pyrenees, from a village -Zazpe – which has since been abandoned: ample water and wood, a very hard life though – historically hunted bears, wolves, foxes, deer and wild boar to supplement an inadequate diet. Snowed in for months at a time in winter.
All those food sources,have gone now, of course. They were never really safe as far as I can tell: armies and bandits had no trouble raiding the valley, and in the 1790’s a plague of some kind took between 25 % and 60% of the population of each tiny village.
The Arabs raided for slaves before the Reconquest drove them back, and the Church took slaves from there, too, donated by pious landowners. No doubt the Romans also did, as they had mines there, and a small town, on a pre-Roman base, just excavated.
Average historical population was 350 people, rising at most to 1,300 in the 18th century – just before the plague actually, so the two are no doubt connected.
The current population is about 300, mostly rather elderly, and most of the villages are ruined having been abandoned from the 1950’s as life in Spanish towns got better after the Civil War.
On the other hand they survived, -due no doubt to a high birth rate and determination – only for life to be drained away in the 20th century. I would, sentimentally, like to settle there, but there is no really strong, young, community capable of surviving disasters and I can’t see how one could establish one.
Maybe this century the forests will burn up with climate change, and the streams run dry, who knows…..
Temples….
While waiting over an hour to charge your car… you get to catch up with other followers of the religion … hey Bob how are things — they are great Susan — we are so happy to be saving the planet — yes I know what you mean — our entire family feels so blessed to own this Tesla – it’s like a gift from god — yes it is — let us bow our heads and give thanks to ELON.
This is really going to hit the coffers of the Sunday religions…
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-24/tesla-doubles-its-superchargers-with-massive-solar-stations
It makes one wonder…. if we are witnessing a Jesus or Mohammed moment here…
Surely there must have been a void that both of these fellows filled — that created the tipping points that resulted in new religions….
Reblogged this on Por mis finanzas and commented:
La Economía es como un circo
After 51 consecutive months, the dead CAT spell is finally over.
On Monday, traditionally just ahead of earnings, Caterpillar reported that in March its world retail sales rose 1% Y/Y, the first increase since November 2012. The reason: Asia/Pacific, also known as China, which saw a 46% surge in total machine sales, up from 39% last month, and the best Asian performance going all the way back to April 2011.
Aside from China, however, the drought remained as every other region posted a decline in annual sales, led by Latin America (down 25%), North America (down 13%) and EAME (down 3%).
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-24/streak-over-caterpillar-posts-first-positive-retail-sales-after-51-months-declines
It’s all about China…. moar ghost cities please.
China has bet the farm on hi-tech – their supercomputers are 4+ times faster than in the US, Keiser Report
I know from personal experience that they have good tech as I bought a License Plate camera several years ago, and its performance is astounding. Goodness knows what their best stuff is like.
The US is about to be relegated to also ran, which means the risk of the old “kick the chessboard” trick is high.
The graduate campus at the university here, is bursting with foreign graduates – all of them Chinese.
One hardly sees other nationalities.
All being trained up in high tech and bio-sciences, in which the university is a global leader with superb facilities.
3,000 housing units have just been completed to house the Asian students and their families.
We also import talent into housing complexes.
This all seems so dismal. CAT has been declining every month since 2012 so if sales rose 1% compared to last March sales that is kind of pathetic. Overall they must be way way down from what they were before the 2012 contraction began. They would need double digit sales increases every month for years to catch up. Or am I missing something?
‘CAT shares surged over 6% in early trading on the strong results’
Strong results? Wow, i guess any sign of life sends the price soaring these days.
Is it just me … or does this sound like the dialogue was written by Tesla PR people?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-12/tesla-dominates-u-s-luxury-sedan-sales
Then we have this total piece of bullshit that suggests Tesla’s only rebate is the $7500 that all EV purchasers receive… https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-24/the-electric-car-revolution-tesla-began-faces-its-biggest-test
Not true https://www.quora.com/How-much-government-subsidies-did-Tesla-Motors-receive-by-2015
Tesla must spend billions on PR to get this horseshit published – either that or the Elders have deemed them a key source of Hopium and are told the Ministry of Truth to have their outlets prime the pump…
How hard would it be to create a new powerful religion if you owned the MSM? Not very hard at all…
Tesla IS a new religion.
And like all religions – it is illogical — filled with contradictions — supported by zero facts — and has blind devotion from its followers. And ultimately it is not ‘good’ (in this case good as in green) in that it destroys the environment
The last thing you want to do is get into an argument with a Tesla owner over any of this … you will get the same result as you would trying to debate the existence of god with a theist.
Initially, the e-Golf will be available only in British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. Thanks to a provincial bribe of $14,000, it will be a screamin’ deal in Ontario; British Columbia residents can expect $5,000, while those in Quebec see an $8,500 incentive. With the aforementioned list of $35,995, you can be pretty sure Volkswagen is taking a scorching bubble bath on each one.
Yes, this is a silly and unsustainable economic scenario, but if you’re on the right side of the equation (and the idea of an electric Golf spins your wind turbines), this is an opportunity almost too good to be true. In Ontario, the 2017 e-Golf will cost less than the base Golf TSI with automatic transmission. And it’s an exceptional vehicle, both in the way it drives and what it delivers – comfort, functionality, near maintenance-free motoring, cheap running costs and, of course, a big wavy green flag.
http://driving.ca/volkswagen/golf/reviews/road-test/first-drive-2017-volkswagen-e-golf
You can have all the subsidies in the world…. but at the end of the day you will also be buying a ICE vehicle as well … because EVs have no reliable range…. and people actually do require a car that will get them further than just the Mall…
So that needs to be factored into the cost of the EV.
Of course people buying EVs are DelusiSTANIS — and they would disagree with me.
Now if they would just take the bus…..
Fast Eddy. Electrics, just like ICE cars run on oil. When was the last review you saw for a Great Off Road EV? Last I checked most roads are oil based. That doesn’t even count how much oil is used putting up wind turbines and generating/distributing electricity. You and I agree, but for once you understated your position.
Wind turbines and EV’s are obviously good.
Rational analysis, bad.
Lots of people here need re-education in a camp for those with psychological and anti-social disorders.
Fairly soon, this sort of negative talk will be classified as economic and ecological terrorism.
That day can’t come soon enough, as such people stand in the way of progress and the Bright Mars Future, our only hope.
Psi is the only future, and not many qualify.
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html
AI religion?
mmh?
Saludos
el mar
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html#1
http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Edge1.png
He placed himself only on the right position. Only a little bit off on the x axis.
I see the post is from January 2015. Clearly, we must be on the straight up portion by now, if we believe the author!
It is surprising how many people believe that my website is OurInfiniteWorld.com. I got an email just this morning, talking about how much advertising revenue I could generate, on Our Infinite World. The name seemed to fit well with the group’s objective.
http://cdn.images.express.co.uk/img/dynamic/78/590x/Kim-Jong-Un-attack-Trump-US-world-war-740550.jpg
straight up portion! yes we can!
If it buys you a nicer house, I say go for it! 😉
A nicer house probably means more to clean. Our current house is walking distance to the university where my husband teaches. It has some advantages. People might think I was a bit crazy, also.
I’ve never understood the obsession with large houses….
Eddy
Buy this book by G B Shaw
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intelligent-Womans-Guide-Socialism-Capitalism/dp/1847493335
covers all that stuff about housing and 000s of other things… I have a s/h copy—one of the best books on humankind there is—you can open it anywhere and be engrossed for hours
i’d advise anyone to read it who is interested in social interactions
Damn… no audio version.
audios no good
my copy is full of post-it stickers
I agree with Kenny Starfighter–you deserve a nicer house, Gail! Maybe you can give us a happy ending or two.😄
FE says: “I’ve never understood the obsession with large houses….”
FE I have a condo in an area full of these large mansions (all built in the last 15 years)….They make me want to puke…Can’t stand this “Nouveau-Riche-Keeping-up-with-The-Joneses” houses….and BTW having spoken with a few real estate agents in the area, a lot of these “mansions” are devoid of anything inside…Tables and chairs in main dining room are PVC…they spent all their cash on the house (and posh cars) with nothing left over to decorate the damn house…
That seems to be par for the course — quantity over quality…. My preference is small but of high quality — and as Gail points out —- less to clean….
That is important to … Madame Fast….. 🙂
And we all want Madame Fast to be happy.
Ok ok, but then get a Tesla instead! The world economy kind of depends on it. (You probably shouldn’t drive it though, with the reliability issues and horrible charge time)
But if not for you, do it for your country!
And don’t worry about us. We’ll… we’ll just find another place to hang. [sobs]
Do it to support Elon….