Most of us are familiar with the Politically Correct (PC) World View. William Deresiewicz describes the view, which he calls the “religion of success,” as follows:
There is a right way to think and a right way to talk, and also a right set of things to think and talk about. Secularism is taken for granted. Environmentalism is a sacred cause. Issues of identity—principally the holy trinity of race, gender, and sexuality—occupy the center of concern.
There are other beliefs that go with this religion of success:
- Wind and solar will save us.
- Electric cars will make transportation possible indefinitely.
- Our world leaders are all powerful.
- Science has all of the answers.
To me, this story is pretty much equivalent to the article, “Earth Is Flat and Infinite, According to Paid Experts,” by Chris Hume in Funny Times. While the story is popular, it is just plain silly.
In this post, I explain why many popular understandings are just plain wrong. I cover many controversial topics, including environmentalism, peer-reviewed literature, climate change models, and religion. I expect that the analysis will surprise almost everyone.
Myth 1: If there is a problem with the lack of any resource, including oil, it will manifest itself with high prices.
As we reach limits of oil or any finite resource, the problem we encounter is an allocation problem.
Figure 1. Two views of future economic growth. Created by author.
As long as the quantity of resources we can extract from the ground keeps rising faster than population, there is no problem with limits. The tiny wedge that each person might get from these growing resources represents more of that resource, on average. Citizens can reasonably expect that future pension promises will be paid from the growing resources. They can also expect that, in the future, the shares of stock and the bonds that they own can be redeemed for actual goods and services.
If the quantity of resources starts to shrink, the problem we have is almost a “musical chairs” type of problem.
Figure 2. Circle of chairs arranged for game of musical chairs. Source
In each round of a musical chairs game, one chair is removed from the circle. The players in the game must walk around the outside of the circle. When the music stops, all of the players scramble for the remaining chairs. Someone gets left out.
The players in today’s economic system include
- High paid (or elite) workers
- Low paid (or non-elite) workers
- Businesses
- Governments
- Owners of assets (such as stocks, bonds, land, buildings) who want to sell them and exchange them for today’s goods and services
If there is a shortage of a resource, the standard belief is that prices will rise and either more of the resource will be found, or substitution will take place. Substitution only works in some cases: it is hard to think of a substitute for fresh water. It is often possible to substitute one energy product for another. Overall, however, there is no substitute for energy. If we want to heat a substance to produce a chemical reaction, we need energy. If we want to move an object from place to place, we need energy. If we want to desalinate water to produce more fresh water, this also takes energy.
The world economy is a self-organized networked system. The networked system includes businesses, governments, and workers, plus many types of energy, including human energy. Workers play a double role because they are also consumers. The way goods and services are allocated is determined by “market forces.” In fact, the way these market forces act is determined by the laws of physics. These market forces determine which of the players will get squeezed out if there is not enough to go around.
Non-elite workers play a pivotal role in this system because their number is so large. These people are the chief customers for goods, such as homes, food, clothing, and transportation services. They also play a major role in paying taxes, and in receiving government services.
History says that if there are not enough resources to go around, we can expect increasing wage and wealth disparity. This happens because increased use of technology and more specialization are workarounds for many kinds of problems. As an economy increasingly relies on technology, the owners and managers of the technology start receiving higher wages, leaving less for the workers without special skills. The owners and managers also tend to receive income from other sources, such as interest, dividends, capital gains, and rents.
When there are not enough resources to go around, the temptation is to use technology to replace workers, because this reduces costs. Of course, a robot does not need to buy food or a car. Such an approach tends to push commodity prices down, rather than up. This happens because fewer workers are employed; in total they can afford fewer goods. A similar downward push on commodity prices occurs if wages of non-elite workers stagnate or fall.
If wages of non-elite workers are lower, governments find themselves in increasing difficulty because they cannot collect enough taxes for all of the services that they are asked to provide. History shows that governments often collapse in such situations. Major defaults on debt are another likely outcome (Figure 3). Pension holders are another category of recipients who are likely to be “left out” when the game of musical chairs stops.
Figure 3 – Created by Author.
The laws of physics strongly suggest that if we are reaching limits of this type, the economy will collapse. We know that this happened to many early economies. More recently, we have witnessed partial collapses, such as the Depression of the 1930s. The Depression occurred when the price of food dropped because mechanization eliminated a significant share of human hand-labor. While this change reduced the price of food, it also had an adverse impact on the buying-power of those whose jobs were eliminated.
The collapse of the Soviet Union is another example of a partial collapse. This collapse occurred as a follow-on to the low oil prices of the 1980s. The Soviet Union was an oil exporter that was affected by low oil prices. It could continue to produce for a while, but eventually (1991) financial problems caught up with it, and the central government collapsed.
Figure 4. Oil consumption, production, and inflation-adjusted price, all from BP Statistical Review of World Energy, 2015.
Low prices are often a sign of lack of affordability. Today’s oil, coal, and natural gas prices tend to be too low for today’s producers. Low energy prices are deceptive because their initial impact on the economy seems to be favorable. The catch is that after a time, the shortfall in funds for reinvestment catches up, and production collapses. The resulting collapse of the economy may look like a financial collapse or a governmental collapse.
Oil prices have been low since late 2014. We do not know how long low prices can continue before collapse. The length of time since oil prices have collapsed is now three years; we should be concerned.
Myth 2. (Related to Myth 1) If we wait long enough, renewables will become affordable.
The fact that wage disparity grows as we approach limits means that prices can’t be expected to rise as we approach limits. Instead, prices tend to fall as an increasing number of would-be buyers are frozen out of the market. If in fact energy prices could rise much higher, there would be huge amounts of oil, coal and gas that could be extracted.
Figure 5. IEA Figure 1.4 from its World Energy Outlook 2015, showing how much oil can be produced at various price levels, according to IEA models.
There seems to be a maximum affordable price for any commodity. This maximum affordable price depends to a significant extent on the wages of non-elite workers. If the wages of non-elite workers fall (for example, because of mechanization or globalization), the maximum affordable price may even fall.
Myth 3. (Related to Myths 1 and 2) A glut of oil indicates that oil limits are far away.
A glut of oil means that too many people around the world are being “frozen out” of buying goods and services that depend on oil, because of low wages or a lack of job. It is a physics problem, related to ice being formed when the temperature is too cold. We know that this kind of thing regularly happens in collapses and partial collapses. During the Depression of the 1930s, food was being destroyed for lack of buyers. It is not an indication that limits are far away; it is an indication that limits are close at hand. The system can no longer balance itself correctly.
Myth 4: Wind and solar can save us.
The amount of energy (other than direct food intake) that humans require is vastly higher than most people suppose. Other animals and plants can live on the food that they eat or the energy that they produce using sunlight and water. Humans deviated from this simple pattern long ago–over 1 million years ago.
Unfortunately, our bodies are now adapted to the use of supplemental energy in addition to food. The use of fire allowed humans to develop differently than other primates. Using fire to cook some of our food helped in many ways. It freed up time that would otherwise be spent chewing, providing time that could be used for tool making and other crafts. It allowed teeth, jaws and digestive systems to be smaller. The reduced energy needed for maintaining the digestive system allowed the brain to become bigger. It allowed humans to live in parts of the world where they are not physically adapted to living.
In fact, back at the time of hunter-gatherers, humans already seemed to need three times as much energy total as a correspondingly sized primate, if we count burned biomass in addition to direct food energy.
Figure 6 – Created by author.
“Watts per Capita” is a measure of the rate at which energy is consumed. Even back in hunter-gatherer days, humans behaved differently than similar-sized primates would be expected to behave. Without considering supplemental energy, an animal-like human is like an always-on 100-watt bulb. With the use of supplemental energy from burned biomass and other sources, even in hunter-gatherer times, the energy used was equivalent to that of an always-on 300-watt bulb.
How does the amount of energy produced by today’s wind turbines and solar panels compare to the energy used by hunter-gatherers? Let’s compare today’s wind and solar output to the 200 watts of supplemental energy needed to maintain our human existence back in hunter-gatherer times (difference between 300 watts per capita and 100 watts per capita). This assumes that if we were to go back to hunting and gathering, we could somehow collect food for everyone, to cover the first 100 watts per capita. All we would need to do is provide enough supplemental energy for cooking, heating, and other very basic needs, so we would not have to deforest the land.
Conveniently, BP gives the production of wind and solar in “terawatt hours.” If we take today’s world population of 7.5 billion, and multiply it by 24 hours a day, 365.25 days per year, and 200 watts, we come to needed energy of 13,149 terawatt hours per year. In 2016, the output of wind was 959.5 terawatt hours; the output of solar was 333.1 terawatt hours, or a total of 1,293 terawatt hours. Comparing the actual provided energy (1,293 tWh) to the required energy of 13,149 tWh, today’s wind and solar would provide only 9.8% of the supplemental energy needed to maintain a hunter-gatherer level of existence for today’s population.
Of course, this is without considering how we would continue to create wind and solar electricity as hunter-gatherers, and how we would distribute such electricity. Needless to say, we would be nowhere near reproducing an agricultural level of existence for any large number of people, using only wind and solar. Even adding water power, the amount comes to only 40.4% of the added energy required for existence as hunter gatherers for today’s population.
Many people believe that wind and solar are ramping up rapidly. Starting from a base of zero, the annual percentage increases do appear to be large. But relative to the end point required to maintain any reasonable level of population, we are very far away. A recent lecture by Energy Professor Vaclav Smil is titled, “The Energy Revolution? More Like a Crawl.”
Myth 5. Evaluation methods such as “Energy Returned on Energy Invested” (EROI) and “Life Cycle Analyses (LCA)” indicate that wind and solar should be acceptable solutions.
These approaches are concerned about how the energy used in creating a given device compares to the output of the device. The problem with these analyses is that, while we can measure “energy out” fairly well, we have a hard time determining total “energy in.” A large share of energy use comes from indirect sources, such as roads that are shared by many different users.
A particular problem occurs with intermittent resources, such as wind and solar. The EROI analyses available for wind and solar are based on analyses of these devices as stand-alone units (perhaps powering a desalination plant, on an intermittent basis). On this basis, they appear to be reasonably good choices as transition devices away from fossil fuels.
EROI analyses don’t handle the situation well when there is a need to add expensive infrastructure to compensate for the intermittency of wind and solar. This situation tends to happen when electricity is added to the grid in more than small quantities. One workaround for intermittency is adding batteries; another is overbuilding the intermittent devices, and using only the portion of intermittent electricity that comes at the time of day and time of year when it is needed. Another approach involves paying fossil fuel providers for maintaining extra capacity (needed both for rapid ramping and for the times of year when intermittent resources are inadequate).
Any of these workarounds is expensive and becomes more expensive, the larger the percentage of intermittent electricity that is added. Euan Mearns recently estimated that for a particular offshore wind farm, the cost would be six times as high, if battery backup sufficient to even out wind fluctuations in a single month were added. If the goal were to even out longer term fluctuations, the cost would no doubt be higher. It is difficult to model what workarounds would be needed for a truly 100% renewable system. The cost would no doubt be astronomical.
When an analysis such as EROI is prepared, there is a tendency to leave out any cost that varies with the application, because such a cost is difficult to estimate. My background is in actuarial work. In such a setting, the emphasis is always on completeness because after the fact, it will become very clear if the analyst left out any important insurance-related cost. In EROI and similar analyses, there is much less of a tieback to the real world, so an omission may never be noticed. In theory, EROIs are for multiple purposes, including ones where intermittency is not a problem. The EROI modeler is not expected to consider all cases.
Another way of viewing the issue is as a “quality” issue. EROI theory generally treats all types of energy as equivalent (including coal, oil, natural gas, intermittent electricity, and grid-quality electricity). From this perspective, there is no need to correct for differences in types of energy output. Thus, it makes perfect sense to publish EROI and LCA analyses that seem to indicate that wind and solar are great solutions, without any explanation regarding the likely high real-world cost associated with using them on the electric grid.
Myth 6. Peer reviewed articles give correct findings.
The real story is that peer reviewed articles need to be reviewed carefully by those who use them. There is a very significant chance that errors may have crept in. This can happen because of misinterpretation of prior peer reviewed articles, or because prior peer reviewed articles were based on “thinking of the day,” which was not quite correct, given what has been learned since the article was written. Or, as indicated by the example in Myth 5, the results of peer reviewed articles may be confusing to those who read them, in part because they are not written for any particular audience.
The way university research is divided up, researchers usually have a high level of specialized knowledge about one particular subject area. The real world situation with the world economy, as I mentioned in my discussion of Myth 1, is that the economy is a self-organized networked system. Everything affects everything else. The researcher, with his narrow background, doesn’t understand these interconnections. For example, energy researchers don’t generally understand economic feedback loops, so they tend to leave them out. Peer reviewers, who are looking for errors within the paper itself, are likely to miss important feedback loops as well.
To make matters worse, the publication process tends to favor results that suggest that there is no energy problem ahead. This bias can come through the peer review process. One author explained to me that he left out a certain point from a paper because he expected that some of his peer reviewers would come from the Green Community; he didn’t want to say anything that might offend such a reviewer.
This bias can also come directly from the publisher of academic books and articles. The publisher is in the business of selling books and journal articles; it does not want to upset potential buyers of its products. One publisher made it clear to me that its organization did not want any mention of problems that seem to be without a solution. The reader should be left with the impression that while there may be issues ahead, solutions are likely to be found.
In my opinion, any published research needs to be looked at very carefully. It is very difficult for an author to move much beyond the general level of understanding of his audience and of likely reviewers. There are financial incentives for authors to produce PC reports, and for publishers to publish them. In many cases, articles from blogs may be better resources than academic articles because blog authors are under less pressure to write PC reports.
Myth 7. Climate models give a good estimate of what we can expect in the future.
There is no doubt that climate is changing. But is all of the hysteria about climate change really the correct story?
Our economy, and in fact the Earth and all of its ecosystems, are self-organized networked systems. We are reaching limits in many areas at once, including energy, fresh water, the number of fish that can be extracted each year from oceans, and metal ore extraction. Physical limits are likely to lead to financial problems, as indicated in Figure 3. The climate change modelers have chosen to leave all of these issues out of their models, instead assuming that the economy can continue to grow as usual until 2100. Leaving out these other issues clearly can be expected to overstate the impact of climate change.
The International Energy Agency is very influential with respect to which energy issues are considered. Between 1998 and 2000, it did a major flip-flop in the importance of energy limits. The IEA’s 1998 World Energy Outlook devotes many pages to discussing the possibility of inadequate oil supplies in the future. In fact, near the beginning, the report says,
Our analysis of the current evidence suggests that world oil production from conventional sources could peak during the period 2010 to 2020.
The same report also mentions Climate Change considerations, but devotes many fewer pages to these concerns. The Kyoto Conference had taken place in 1997, and the topic was becoming more widely discussed.
In 1999, the IEA did not publish World Energy Outlook. When the IEA published the World Energy Outlook for 2000, the report suddenly focused only on Climate Change, with no mention of Peak Oil. The USGS World Petroleum Assessment 2000 had recently been published. It could be used to justify at least somewhat higher future oil production.
I will be the first to admit that the “Peak Oil” story is not really right. It is a halfway story, based on a partial understanding of the role physics plays in energy limits. Oil supply does not “run out.” Peak Oilers also did not understand that physics governs how markets work–whether prices rise or fall, or oscillate. If there is not enough to go around, some of the would-be buyers will be frozen out. But Climate Change, as our sole problem, or even as our major problem, is not the right story, either. It is another halfway story.
One point that both Peak Oilers and the IEA missed is that the world economy doesn’t really have the ability to cut back on the use of fossil fuels significantly, without the world economy collapsing. Thus, the IEA’s recommendations regarding moving away from fossil fuels cannot work. (Shifting energy use among countries is fairly easy, however, making individual country CO2 reductions appear more beneficial than they really are.) The IEA would be better off talking about non-fuel changes that might reduce CO2, such as eating vegetarian food, eliminating flooded rice paddies, and having smaller families. Of course, these are not really issues that the International Energy Association is concerned about.
The unfortunate truth is that on any difficult, interdisciplinary subject, we really don’t have a way of making a leap from lack of knowledge of a subject, to full knowledge of a subject, without a number of separate, partially wrong, steps. The IPCC climate studies and EROI analyses both fall in this category, as do Peak Oil reports.
The progress I have made on figuring out the energy limits story would not have been possible without the work of many other people, including those doing work on studying Peak Oil and those studying EROI. I have also received a lot of “tips” from readers of OurFiniteWorld.com regarding additional topics I should investigate. Even with all of this help, I am sure that my version of the truth is not quite right. We all keep learning as we go along.
There may indeed be details of this particular climate model that are not correct, although this is out of my area of expertise. For example, the historical temperatures used by researchers seem to need a lot of adjustment to be usable. Some people argue that the historical record has been adjusted to make the historical record fit the particular model used.
There is also the issue of truing up the indications to where we are now. I mentioned the problem earlier of EROI indications not having any real world tie; climate model indications are not quite as bad, but they also seem not to be well tied to what is actually happening.
Myth 8. We don’t need religion; our leaders are all knowing and all powerful.
We are fighting a battle against the laws of physics. Expecting our leaders to win in the battle against the laws of physics is expecting a huge amount. Some of the actions of our leaders seem extraordinarily stupid. For example, if falling interest rates have postponed peak oil, then proposing to raise interest rates, when we have not fixed the underlying oil depletion problem, seems very ill-advised.
Everything I have seen indicates that there is a literal Higher Power governing our world economy. It is the Laws of Physics that govern the world economy. The Laws of Physics affect the world economy in many ways. The economy is a dissipative structure. Energy inputs allow the economy to remain in an “out of equilibrium state” (that is, in a growing state), for a very long period.
Eventually the ability of any economy to grow must come to an end. The problem is that it requires increasing amounts of energy to fight the growing “entropy” (higher energy cost of extraction, need for growing debt, and rising pollution levels) of the system. The economy must come to an end, just as the lives of individual plants and animals (which are also dissipative structures) must come to an end.
People throughout the ages have been in awe of how this system that provides growth works. We get energy from the sun. This solar energy helps grow our food. It allows the physical growth of humans. It allows the growth of ecosystems and of economies. Humans, ecosystems, and economies seem permanent, but eventually they all must collapse. In physics terms, they are all dissipative structures.
Humans have been in awe of the self-organizing property permitted by flows of energy for as long as humans have had the ability to think abstract thoughts. These flows allow a newly created whole to be greater than the sum of their parts. For example, babies start from a small beginning and mature into adults. Musical notes go together to form recognizable melodies. Physical movements go together to form dances. Awe for this phenomenon seems to be one of the origins of religion.
Another reason for religions is a need for hierarchical structure within an economy. We know that animal groups very often have “pecking orders.” Adding a god provides a convenient way of adding a “top level” to the pecking order. Of course, if leaders can convince members of the group that they are all knowing and that science can provide all of the answers, then the top level provided by religion is not needed.
A third reason for religions is to help align the thoughts of members in a particular way. Most of us are aware of the power of magnetized materials.
Figure 7. Source.
To some extent, the same power exists when the belief systems of groups of people can be aligned in the same direction. For example, teachers find it much easier to teach large groups of students, if parents have emphasized the importance of school and the need for respect for teachers. A military leader can attack another country, if soldiers follow orders. A group of generally uncivilized people can learn the benefit of working with others, if proper instruction is given.
What has been astounding to me, as I have looked into the situation, is that the scientific evidence seems to point in the direction of a literal Higher Power governing our Universe. It is not clear whether this higher power is the Laws of Physics, or whether it is some outside “God” that created the Laws of Physics.
In the past, many researchers assumed that the Universe was a closed energy system, irreversibly headed toward a cold, dark end. Recent research indicates that the Universe is ever-expanding, and in fact, seems to be expanding at an accelerating rate. While individual dissipative structures are constantly encountering more and more entropy, the universe as a whole is perhaps expanding rapidly enough to “outrun” growing entropy. Thus, it can behave as an always-open system. This always-open energy system allows many types of objects to self-organize and grow, at least for a time. These objects behave as dissipative structures, each having a beginning and an end.
We really don’t know whether the Universe had a beginning. Some research suggests that it did not. Others believe it began with a Big Bang.
Within the Universe, the earth seems extremely unusual. In fact, it is not clear that there is any other planet that has exactly the right conditions for complex life. A recent American Scientist article discusses this issue. The book Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe points out the huge number of coincidences that were necessary for complex life to form and flourish.
Within the Earth, and perhaps within the Universe as a whole, human economies are the most energy-dense form of structure found.
Figure 8. Image similar to ones shown in Eric Chaisson’s 2001 book, Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature.
Thus, in some sense, we humans and our economies may, in some sense, represent the current upper bound on development in the Universe.
We humans live on Earth. It is easy for us to think that our primary purpose in life is to care for and protect the Earth. Unfortunately, with our need for supplemental energy, this is not possible. Even at an early date, our need for resources exceeded what was sustainable. Joshua (in Joshua 17:14-18 relating to the period around 1400 BCE) instructs the tribes of Joseph to clear the trees from the hill country to have enough land for his tribe. This practice was clearly unsustainable; it would lead to erosion of the soil on hilltops. Even at that early date, high population and the need for resources to provide for this high population was conflicting with earth’s sustainability.
If our God is either the Laws of Physics, or some force giving rise to the Laws of Physics, then our God is really the God of the Universe. The limitations of the current Earth are no problem. God (or the Laws of Physics) could create a new Earth, or 1 million new Earths, if He chose to. Thus, from God’s point of view, it is not clear that there is any point to today’s environmentalism. There is a need not to poison ourselves, but “saving the earth” for other species after humans, or for a new set of humans who somehow will use much less energy, doesn’t make much sense. Humans can’t use much less energy; even if we could, our energy use would always be on an upward slope, headed to precisely where we are now.
There are many things that we can’t know for certain. Does this God want/expect us to worship him? Does this God plan an afterlife for some or all of the humans on Earth today? Obviously, if God (or the Laws of Physics) could create the Earth, God could also create other structures as well–possibly a “Heaven.” It is not clear to me that any one of today’s religions has a monopoly on insights regarding what is expected. A person might argue that we need not worry about religion at all, except for the fellowship it provides and the insights it offers regarding how early people coped with their difficulties.
Myth 9. The texts of religious groups around the world are literally true.
The texts of religious groups are true in the same sense that peer reviewed scientific literature is true. They represent, more or less, the best thinking of the day on a particular subject. This certainly does not mean that they are literally true.
We need to read religious texts in the context that they were written. In the earliest days, religious texts represented stories that people passed down from one generation to the next. These stories represented insights that these early people had gained. No one at that time was too concerned about authorship. If a story says, “God said,” it could also mean, “We think that this is something that God might have said.”
Literary styles were very different, back in an era before people pretended to have scientific knowledge. People created stories illustrating some aspect of a particular phenomenon. These stories were not supposed to fully describe what happened. This is why Genesis features two different creation stories.
The Bible makes liberal use of hyperbole and exaggeration. It is hard for people who are not familiar with the original language to understand how stories were intended to be interpreted. Is the concept of Hell added, primarily to provide a contrast to Heaven? In the Old Testament, the number of words in the ancient Hebrew language is much smaller than in today’s languages. This, by itself, makes direct translation difficult.
The earliest religious stories explained how God was perceived at that time. As people became more settled, their views changed. People were getting more “civilized.” Population densities were rising. The best beliefs in an early period may not have had relevance for a later period. This is why most religions have had reformers. Sometimes new writings are added. At other times, the way the writings are interpreted changes. This is why there seems to be a bizarre progression of stories from the Old Testament to the New Testament; new stories needed to be added to supplement and replace old ways of thinking.
Some of the things that early people discovered have not been understood by environmentalists. Genesis 1:28 says,
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
The early people had figured out that humans were indeed different from other animals and plants. Their use of supplemental energy gave them power over other creatures. Their numbers could (and indeed, did) increase. Early authors were documenting how the world really worked. We later humans have been too blind to see the real situation. It is more pleasant for us to think that somehow we are just like other animals, except perhaps smarter and more in control. With our greater knowledge, we could somehow have avoided an increase in our numbers, if we had only planned better. The laws of physics say this cannot happen; our higher energy use dictates who will win the battle for resources.
The early religious stories were not too different from Peak Oil and Climate Change. They were sort of right. They gave partial insight. They were the best the authors could do at the time.
The ancient religious documents could not tell the whole story at once. New groups would gradually add more insights to the developing story, providing a better understanding of what was truly important for people living in a later period.
Conclusion
In practice, people need a religion or a religion-substitute. People need a basic set of beliefs with which to order their lives.
Our leaders today have proposed the Religion of Success, with its belief in Science, and the power of today’s leaders, as the new religion. This religion has appeal, because it denies the limits we are up against. Life will continue, as if we lived on a flat earth with unlimited resources. This story is pleasant, but unfortunately not true.
Donald Trump, with his version of conservatism, presents another religion. This religion seems to be focused on justifying the allocation of wealth away from the poor, toward the rich, through tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. This is part of the process of “freezing out” the poor people of the world, when there are not enough resources to go around.
It is hard for me to support Trumpism, even though I recognize that in the animal world, the expected outcome when there are not enough resources to go around is “survival of the best-adapted.” If our concern is leaving energy resources in the ground for future generations, transferring buying power from the poor to the rich is a way of collapsing the economy quickly, while considerable resources remain in the ground. The fact that wealthy people are favored ensures that at least some people will survive.
China and Japan both have what are close to state religions, created by their leaders. School children learn stories regarding what is important, based on what state leaders tell them. In Japan, school children visit religious sites, and learn the proper religious observances. They also learn rules about what is expected of them–always be polite; respect those in charge; don’t eat food on the street; never leave any food wrappers on the ground. In many ways, these religions are probably not too different from today’s Religion of Success.
I personally am not in favor of religions that originate from political groups. I would prefer the “old fashioned” religions based on ancient documents from one or another of the world’s religions. We are clearly facing a difficult time ahead. Perhaps early people had insights regarding how to deal with troubled times. Admittedly, we don’t know for certain that heaven can be in our future. But when things look bleak, it is helpful to see the possibility of a reasonable outcome.
Furthermore, religious groups offer the possibility of finding a group of like-minded individuals to make friends with. We need all of the support we can get as we go through troubled times.
If anything that causes people to reflect on the nature of reality and their assumptions about it is a religion, then what word are we going to use to talk about people who believe in and worship a transcendent god described in ancient texts?
Political correctness a religion? Hardly. It is pure reaction. Isn’t it a bit odd that the people who are accused of enforcing political correctness never utter the phrase?
Religion is strange. It has a purpose on its own, but it also can be (and often is) an auxiliary to a political regime. The political regime is likely to manipulate the religion and its teaching for its own purposes. If church and state operate together, the church can be set up to help with political needs (providing jobs to “extra” children in a family who cannot inherit the family farm, for example. Also, jobs involving building and maintaining the church. If church workers take vows of poverty, and cannot marry, funds for these purposes go much farther.) In fact, a political regime may get rid of organized religion, and try to impose its own new teachings regarding what is important.
Political correctness is not all that different from the religions we have had in the past. Governments need a way of guiding people’s thinking. Having some element of truth to what is being said is helpful.
There is no obvious way to know if there is a god, or what precisely this god might want from humans. So a political regime can tell its subjects whatever it chooses.
There is a need for some sort of way of determining what is right and wrong, and some view of how to treat other people. We can get this from some set of religious teaching, or from a political regime, or both, with some overlap.
I think the Abrahamic religions are the only ones who believe in a God who cares about humans. (Perhaps only a subset of Abrahamic religions.) Some people can believe this; other people think this is silly. You can’t get a god who cares about humans from Political Correctness.
The idea of heaven also does not come from Political Correctness.
I called you servants now call you friends.
The meeting of all sentient beings of good will is the kingdom of God.
If the people are encouraged to pray and fast, the have less time for consuming resources and can relax and replenish the exhausted energy of their bodies. Moreover, the depleted water reservoirs, forests, animals etc. have time to accumulate. The worship of God is in fact the time when the resources can accumulate and are not hunted/depleted so fast.
Having a day without work (Sunday, Saturday or whatever day) has the same function: replenishing energy and resources.
It also ensures that servants and slaves are given time off to be with their families. Rich people can always take time off. It is poor people who find themselves pressed to work all of the time.
A lot pf people have been socialized in developed countries to substitute time for money. I remember reading one story with a woman with a stomach ulcer preferring to work on the floor her office than to take time off to see a doctor. She worked in finance.
I also remember reading about someone who was so busy at her job trying to be productive (do the work of multiple workers) as a nurse that she urinated on herself.
There are plenty of stories on the other end of the work ethic spectrum. No one seems to get the work/life balance right. I suppose it’s because many working people are glorified slaves. I suppose that political correctness might be a manifestation of guilt from the elite, since many of them don’t work, and those who do work very hard at tasks most people find meaningless. The elite’s golden age is long behind them and they are producing fewer brilliant politicians, artists, and technical marvels in the past.
Political correctness, which is really a desire for revenge for past grievances in practice, may also, as a post on Youtube about a clip the movie AIRPLANE(1980) brought to light, might be an indication that social conditions are deteriorating, along with BAU.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0j2dVuhr6s&lc=z134wb5arwinyx1ql04cfl3rnsj3zxawfq00k.1423920939954827
” it took 70 years just for folks to earn that right to play like that…by 2001, folks BACKWARDS in disrespecting others in reality and then it became WAYYYY too racist,violent and shitty and so the “right” to play like that was gone. You had to be there anyway, it was a better time all the way around. If anyone was born after 1985 you will never, ever, ever understand the entire atmosphere of the 1980s. People MOSTLY respected one another for who they were and that just isn’t happening today. Just look at the YOU TUBE comments across the board. It did not even have anything to do with “political correctness”, it simply had to do with treating others the way YOU want to be treated. Too many freaks who want to stir up the shit pot against others. SO we ALL may as well enjoy it on film (and leave it at that) because those days will NOT be back at all. Count on it. The country should not have gone out of their way to reverse the way things were. No no one can be trusted any more. Can’t say as I blame any one, either. The climate was a better climate in those days for every one and not so damned stupid as it is today. People have taken things way too far now and that’s that.”
I understand that the major religions of the world all seem to have a belief in them that is similar to the Golden Rule. The idea is basically to treat others as you would like others to treat you. This would involve the respect that you talk about in your comment.
This Golden Rule works pretty well, as long as resources per capita are flat, or expanding somewhat. When there is not enough to go around, there is much more of a conflict: basically the musical chairs problem I talked about. How do you deal with others, when you are the one being marginalized?
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a big increase in the amount of cheap energy available. The customs of the past (including treating blacks and women as second class citizens) no longer seemed to make sense. There was a sudden shift away from segregated schools, and of job listings sorted by sex. Tax benefits were added for single “heads of households” (basically mothers). Also the tax code was changed in way that sometimes made the taxes of a married couple higher than that of two single people living alone. All of these things were disruptive to the ways of the past. Divorce became much more common in the US, and many fewer people got married, especially among the poorer and less educated.
Not all of this worked out as planned. Adding women to the workforce tended to hold down the wages of men. Marriage rates fell, first among blacks, and later among others. Without adequate family structure, a lot of children struggled. Adding globalization after about 2000 made things worse. People who could find jobs would feel a need to work overly long hours to keep them.
Now we are dealing with falling energy per capita, and too many at the bottom being squeezed out. It is hard to blame these people for being resentful of how society is treating them. I can understand why treating others as you would want them to treat you would go by the wayside.
It is impossible to go backward, but in some ways, we would be better off if at least some of the customs of the past were available. Marriage and stable families would definitely have benefits, for example.
….. The climate was a better climate in those days for every one and not so damned stupid as it is today. People have taken things way too far now and that’s that.
Amen to all that. Great post!
Shouldn’t this “cliffhanger” spammer cunt be put to rest , for a little bit ?
As long as he exhausts fast eddy everything’s ok.
Cliffhanger adds nothing of substance to the discussions in the comments section. He will post 100s of links a week to news articles we already know about. He claims to be almost middle-aged, if not already middle-aged but he acts like a teenager on here.
Fast Eddy plays a vital role of keeping the Politically Correct Green Energy advocates from overrunning the comments section. What role does Cliffhanger do besides point out the obvious and regurgitating the “Trump sucks” shtick?
I can never forgive Fast Eddy manipulating Tverberg to kick out Reverse Engeneer, the best commenter ever on this blog!
It wasn’t quite that way. RE pretty much left on his own.
RE explained how he was put in a srew stick on OFW, in some of his comments of his blog, as I asked him about it. A long time ago though, so I can’t find them now. While it was FE that belonged to that screw stick. So RE had no choice but to leave.
People have their own ideas. I thought the problem was that I wasn’t encouraging people to go set up renewable homesteads, or something like that.
Well… he did have a choice…. he could have stuck around and endured my logic and fact bombardments…. and been made to look like a crazy coot…
Or he could bow out gracefully and gone back under his rock….
Logic and facts know no pity or remorse…
All is as it should be.
I guess I won’t be getting a call from RE to appear on his radio show?
https://www.askideas.com/media/37/Funny-Laughing-Gif-Picture.gif
RE was filled with koombaya and illogical thought…. and Fast Eddy sent him back to where he belongs… DelusiSTAN…
I hear he’s out there in the bush living the dream….
And if you think he was the best contributors on FW —- then you belong in DelusiSTAN as well…
Be careful of your fingers when you type your response….
https://68.media.tumblr.com/ec345b6ce4a284d6ee1b063b4a3309df/tumblr_ohf6oyt6Ri1ufzk7po1_500.gif
About when did Reverse Engeneer, post comments?
Looks like a fake collar on that dog, more of a cat person now.
https://typeset-beta.imgix.net/2016/10/5/lvdead26f-6afa088c-ab10-4062-9505-5fd7fc70330e.jpg?w=700&h=394&fit=crop&crop=faces&auto=format&fm=jpg&q=70
https://www.romper.com/p/is-king-ezekiels-tiger-real-on-the-walking-dead-shiva-will-play-important-role-21441
nice doggie! down boy!
obviously needs some love and affection.
RE was a great commenter and it was very unfortunate what happened with FE harassing him relentlessly and then RE getting blamed for his reaction.
As a side not though, I think Cliffhanger adds a lot to this site with links to articles and comments. I don’t see the problem.
Exactly!
Fast Eddy does that to all DelusiSTANIs…. someone has to
In fact I invented Fast Eddy specifically to carry out these hits….
FE presents “an inconvenient truth” to many who do not want to hear it. Funny, but did everyone here complaining about FE also complain when the government of the U.K. Decided to FORCE all schoolchildren to read the BS book by Al Gore in the classroom?
You social fascists are such hypocrites. You revel in suppressing thought that does not agree with you. You revel in fascist training of the young in your ideology when you think your version of things should be force fed.
++++++++++++++++++++++
I am amazed…. that those who pride themselves on independent thought — who no matter what set of facts are presented (and Tim and dropped some bombshells on here) have not the slightest shred of doubt about this one issue …
I started out assuming __ ___ was likely to be real — because I was bombarded with so much bullsh it about it that it just became second nature to assume it was real…
And I did not look into this issue at all because why would I? We are NOT going stop burning coal and oil — we are NOT going stop driving IC vehicles ….
So I did not care if the tale was real or fake…
But then … a crack of doubt opened…. and I started to think about this issue —- not because it mattered… because it does not – we will Burn More Coal….
But because I refuse to be indoctrinated — I refuse to be run around with a ring through my nose…
I am in the pursuit of truth. Where there is doubt there is smoke… where there is smoke there is fire.
And unlike others who refuse to acknowledge this — I embrace it — because I have thrown off another tentacle of the matrix… and that puts me one step closer to the truth…
But more importantly — it makes me wonder — what other ideas do I accept that might also be wrong.
And the journey continues.
For many here — the journey has apparently ended.
I’ve nothing against RE. Personally I like him. And I read his blog. I enjoy his takedowns of Guy McPherson, who he calls “Guy McStinkson”. But he is asking for trouble when he brings his vision of the good life after collapse to OFW.
RE knows this well and he has documented his run ins with unabashed doomers including Guy, Gail, and of course FE. And we can see clearly from the below that Eddy left his teethmarks in RE’s rear end.
Good summary of information. So no unorthodox good life talk about things in the future. This heretical thought must driven away, just learning here myself, think I got it…
In a way, it is good to have diverse thought. How else can I explain what I think it the right way, if someone doesn’t ask a question based on “wrong thinking?” So driving away diverse thinking is not really helpful.
At the same time, it can get to be “over the top.” There is a limit to the number of black, overweight, undressed women I can put up with.
Correct — just as we do not permit talk of a future that involves fairies milk honey and virgins…
It’s why I don’t bleat on about how I could have been a centre in the NBA if I was 7 feet tall…
Imagine if I looked like Brad Pitt…. I could….
The reasons people become Kollapsniks (followers of Collapse Dynamics) vary quite a bit. I came to collapse from the economic end, looking for the reasons behind the collapse of the investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman brothers in 2008.
My early investigation led me to deduce it was primarily energy related, which led me to the Peak Oil forum. That forum had it’s heyday slightly before I arrived on the scene in around 2006, although it was still a highly active forum with 100s of posts a day going up in 2008 when I got there. The preponderance of collapse discussion at this time revolved around economics and energy, and climate was only tangentially discussed occassionally.
human-extinctionDuring this period also, you were considered a fairly serious doomer if you suggested we would need to drop back to a 1750s style of living in order to deal with the lack of FFs and that a fairly significant number of people would have to die since the planet is in overshoot WRT Homo Saps without the extra energy input from fossil fuels. You were REALLY serious as a Doomer if you suggested the best we could do is Stone Age technology living as Hunter-Gatherers. There were a few people suggesting Extinction might be in the cards, but none of them suggested it would happen on an extremely short timeline, on the order of 20 years from present day or even less. Even those who did suggest it were a relatively small number in the commentariat.
In the intervening years though, deterioration in the climate with more and bigger disasters each year and steadily rising concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere has brought a new and rising number of Kollapsniks into the community, the Klimate Kollapsnik.
The KK is barely concerned with economics at all, what worries her or him are all the dieing fishes as the ocean acidifies, along with dying phytoplankton who we will suffocate without their production of oxygen. All of this gets blamed on the Great Evil occupying the Planet, Homo Sap. VERMIN IN NEED OF EXTERMINATION! Homo Sap is responsible for all our ongoing and escalating problems due to burning FFs and turning the planet into an industrial sewer. As a result, folks holding these views are becoming increasingly more prevalent across the collapse blogosphere, increasingly more nihilistic about possible outcomes and increasingly more misanthropic in their attitude toward their fellow Homo Saps. A fairly common meme now amongst this crowd is that Homo Saps DESERVE to DIE, and the SOONER THE BETTER!
Identifying where this meme began is fairly EZ if you have been following collapse dynamics on the blogosphere these last 8 years, it began on Guy McPherson’s Nature Bats Last website. Guy was one of the first people to call for not just Human Extinction, but NEAR TERM Human Extinction, with his timeline constantly getting shorter on this, now to the point of calling it for 2020 according to some of his readers, although last I checked it was 2030. Either way, that is a remarkably short timeline to 7.2B DEAD PEOPLE!
I participated on NBL for a couple of years in the commentariat, generally making the case that Extinction is an inevitability but that such a short timeline is highly unlikely and in the meantime you need to figure out how to survive a changing climate, because for whatever the underlying reasons are for this, it’s definitely changing. However, my attitude of trying to find solutions to a very nasty problem here was not well received in the NBL commentariat because it was deemed to be infused with too much HOPIUM. Having ANY hope whatsoever that ANY Homo Saps can survive coming changes was considered DELUSIONAL. Dr. McStinksion, the Great Guru of Death himself has proclaimed that it is HOPELESS. We’re ALL GONNA DIE.
The effect of this leadership position by Guy drew in to the NBL commentariat a lot of serious nihilists and misanthropes, mainly from long time environmental activists who have experienced failure after failure for the last 40 years in terms of trying to get anything about BAU changed in any real significant way. Their conclusion now is that the BEST outcome that can occur is for Homo Sap to DIE as soon as possible, in order to perhaps save a few beloved trees and other animals.
There is a kind of confirmation bias ongoing here amongst these folks, Dr. McStinksion included. Since they WANT Homo Sap to die, they cherry pick every piece fo data they can dig up to demonstrate it will happen. AND SOON! No evidence to the contrary is tolerated, no argument that we can transition off FFs is acceptable. If you have the temerity to make such an argument on NBL you are brigaded in the commentariat as the Extinction Hound Dogs are let loose and ridicule you as hopelessly deluded.
… I also cross post and regularly talk on the Collapse Cafe with Gail Tverberg who runs the Our Finite World blog. I don’t drop in the commentariat there too often, but after her last article I did so because I take issue with her cockamamie anthropological arguments that Homo Saps must have Fire because we have small jaws and need to cook our food. Mostly we had a fairly genial discussion about our conflicting opinions on this topic, but again OFW has a very prolific poster Fast Eddy, who is yet another nihilist/misanthrope. You can’t make a positive comment on OFW these days without FE dropping in to accuse you of holding a passport to DelusiSTAN. The commentariat of OFW USED to be fairly balanced with people proposing different ideas and possible solutions, but they seem to have mostly disappeared as the overwhelming meme now in that comentariat is that Homo Sap is doomed and no solution will work. Although she is more cagey about it than Dr. McStinksion, you can tell Gail herself holds out no hope. She is convinced Homo Saps must have fire to survive, convinced we will be unable to extract the expensive FFs left due to economic reasons and then will proceed to burn down all forests on earth in the insatiable Quest for Fire. So this attitude attracts the nihilists and misanthropes into the commentariat, and then they come to dominate because they depress the hell out of everyone else and then people holding opposing opinions stop reading and/or contributing.
Perhaps the problem is solved.
It does get to be overdone, I will agree.
My autistic son had a problem in high school with responding whenever a teacher would ask any kind of question. A guidance counselor suggested that three responses per one-hour class was all that he could comment. Given those guidelines, things went much more smoothly.
Nice response. Bless you.
How Vulnerable Are Societies to Collapse? – Discover Magazine
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2017/09/28/how-vulnerable-collapse/#.Wc5uNI9Szix
Here’s why millions of Americans feel left behind by the economic recovery -Business Insider
http://www.businessinsider.com/inequality-near-historic-highs-wages-stagnant
Nuclear Power Is ‘On Its Back,’ Former CIA Director Says – Forbes
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2017/09/27/nuclear-power-is-on-its-back-former-cia-director-says/#2acb0aa96b24
Solar power alone won’t solve energy or climate needs – PHYS.ORG
https://phys.org/news/2017-09-solar-power-wont-energy-climate.html
WEF warns of ‘vast numbers of jobs’ being disrupted by automation and robots – NBC NEWS
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/27/wef-warns-of-vast-numbers-of-jobs-being-disrupted-by-automation-and-robots.html
Only thing disrupting is the lack of demand from the non-elites.
With automation and an entire political party solely for the top 5%, it’s as if the overall plan is to have a future society of super duper wealthy people, their automated machines and whoever can survive in the bottom 95% living in cars, working 6-12 part time jobs 90-120 hours a week, cleaning themselves with washcloths in public bathrooms.
If we don’t get collapse in the next 10 years, there’ll be heads on sticks well by then.
Hi, here you can find translation in Russion of this excellent article (not sure if you need it at all, bit if you need – here you are!)
https://aftershock.news/?q=node/567751
Thanks from Russia!
Alex.
You are welcome. Thanks to you as well. I have seen my articles translated into a number of different languages, but I don’t remember Russian before.
Meanwhile in Norway: A lot of people has lost their job in the oil industry but the the unemployment rate is declining. Riddle me this!
This recent OECD report says a few related things:
http://www.oecd.org/eco/outlook/economic-forecast-summary-norway-oecd-economic-outlook-june-2017.pdf
“Despite low oil prices, growth has remained positive thanks to accommodative monetary and fiscal policies.” – This seems to mean government policies supporting low interest rates and more debt.
The report also says:
Economic activity continues to strengthen
So, according to this report, unemployment rate has been relatively high for Norway. The falling level of the Krone makes it more feasible to export Norwegian goods.
There is a chart in the report showing housing prices rising year after year, and the household debt ratio rising as well. It is mostly a debt bubble that is keeping things going, I expect.
A Fragile Civilization
When something breaks, how fast can you fix it? Can you make it as good as new?
When civilizations are in decline they are unable to fix things and make them as good as new.
The recent hurricanes will be a good test to see if we are in decline. If we rebuild quickly to a level comparable to where we were before, and do it without bankrupting the country, then maybe we are doing okay. If we can’t recover to were we used to be then we are in decline. Has anyone noticed that the Twin towers were replaced by a smaller single tower? I hear there are neighborhoods in New Orleans that have never been rebuilt after hurricane Katrina. Has Haiti recovered from their earthquake? How long will it take Puerto Rico to recover?
A crisis like a hurricane or an earthquake is a great way to stress test a country.
You are probably right. An earlier comment I made was that given the difficulties of Puerto Rico, I expected quite a few people to move to the United States, rather than rebuild.
I see that Richard Heinberg has an article out. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/09/27/disaster-puerto-rico-chance-build-back-sustainably-and-resilience
He tells Puerto Rico to “repudiate debt.” Don’t use aid money to pay off creditors. I would have to agree with that.
He also says,
“Build a different energy system. Patching up the old PREPA electricity generating and distribution system would be a waste of money. That system is both corrupt and unsustainable. Instead, invest reconstruction funds in distributed local renewables and low-power infrastructure.” – I don’t think this will get anywhere. Distributed local renewables would as likely as not mean burning down forests, as far as I can see. Low-power infrastructure must mean six-volt or 12-volt electricity systems. This article talks about 12-volt home power system for homes. https://www.motherearthnews.com/green-homes/12v-dc-home-power-zmaz84ndzraw These are similar to power arrangements on boats. This is a more skeptical article. https://www.homepower.com/articles/solar-electricity/design-installation/ask-experts-12-volt-power
He also says,
“Rethink transportation. The island’s current highway-automobile dominance needs to give way to increased use of bicycles, and to the provision of streetcars and light rail. An interim program of ride- and car-sharing could help with the transition.” – I don’t see this going very far. Maybe more bicycles, but streetcars need functioning electricity, and even light rail is expensive to build.
Heinberg also talks about increasing local food production using Permaculture.
I suppose we could say that these storms, besides giving a chance to stress test the country, will give a chance to see whether these supposedly sustainable practices will make any sense to those who theoretically could use them. Who will pay for them? How will all of the supply lines stay in place?
Global Wealth Report by Allianz
https://www.allianz.com/v_1506497732000/media/press/document/AGWR_17-Report_EN.pdf
“Debt is growing much faster again
Global household liabilities increased by 5.5% in 2016, the highest rate of growth since 2007. That means that debt also rose faster than nominal economic output for the first time since 2009, and the global debt ratio increased by almost 1 percentage point to 64.6%.”
This seems to be a report of household debt, and household wealth, all in Euros. So currency level changes will presumably be included, relative to Euros.
It isn’t the way I am used to looking at things. For example, Japan’s (household) debt ratio is low, but of course its household debt doesn’t include the debt of businesses or governments.
Yes, that is right: if the households are less indebted, the debt can be on the side of the government and state, which is the case of Japan and its ageing population.
Scary stuff… and keep in mind … Venezuela … has not collapsed…
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-28/what-100-buys-you-venezuela
And the good news is that this will one day get better.
hahahahaha … ya right
Here Is will bump up my comment on trenzjender, which was briefly held up by the zenzor. 😉
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/09/26/why-political-correctness-fails-why-what-we-know-for-sure-is-wrong/comment-page-4/#comment-147206
It’s as much a tribute to the book by George P Hansen that I have read. Commenters are entitled to think what they will of trensjender, of course, but it’s probably as old as humanity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsVLIiI8Vfo
I’m of the opinion that progress often comes from expanding our binary opposites (ouch!), leading to crossover and new genres, such as jazz-fusion was in the 1970s. Films and novels that mix genres often become wildly influential.
Taco Bell Employee Accused Of Stealing And Eating $25,000 Of Tacos
http://medianit.com/stealing-tacos/
Now that’s supersizing!
$60 WTI by the end of 2017.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/28/oil-could-soon-overtake-its-2017-highs-strategist-says.html
happy days are here again!
off on a tangent, an interesting fact:
experts (even “strategists”) are often wrong.
more than that, experts often disagree with each other!
what’s up with that?
Your Hope is as Hollow as Fear…
US oil drillers won’t generate ‘meaningful’ returns unless oil stays above $50 a barrel, says Moody’s – NBC NEWS
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/28/oil-and-gas-drillers-better-hope-oil-stays-above-50-says-moodys.html
WTI $51.57
not predicting it will stay above 50.
but that’s reality for today.
There is much here to comment on here…but I’ll have to gather my thoughts to write them properly with a peppy, sober, if more than mildly caffeinated brain of early Saturday morning.
If you ever read it, there will be a surprise for you Gail, as I will post a picture of my newly decorated beater-car-for-non-elite-worker covered in stickers explaining Peak Oil and Economics featuring some graphs and images from Our Finite World.!
Your darn Leonardo sticks made it dead front center of the hood Gail !!!
Stay tuned !
It’s True, The Government Paid the NFL to Stand For the National Anthem
https://lawnewz.com/high-profile/heres-what-should-really-outrage-you-about-the-nfl-the-national-anthem/
And right wingers are furious because players are protesting their tax payer funded US government mind conditioning scheme. LOL You just can’t get any dumber than that..
Little Jimmie loves Tom Brady. And Tom Brady loves his country and little Jimmie does too. Little Jimmie enlisted and goes to Iraq and gets blown in half by an IED. But at least he got to see his favorite team ‘The Patriots’ win the Super Bowl…
An then there is this utter MORE on…
In May 2002, eight months after the September 11 attacks and after completing the fifteen remaining games of the 2001 season which followed the attacks (at a salary of $512,000 per year),[8] Tillman turned down a contract offer of $3.6 million over three years from the Cardinals to enlist in the U.S. Army.[9]
Tillman and his brother Kevin enlisted on May 31, 2002. Kevin gave up the chance of a career in professional baseball as he had already signed to play for the Cleveland Indians. In September 2002, they completed basic training together.[10][11] The two brothers completed the Ranger Indoctrination Program in late 2002 and were assigned to the 2nd Ranger Battalion in Fort Lewis, Washington. Tillman resided in University Place with his wife before being deployed to Iraq.
After participating in the initial invasion of Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, in September 2003, they entered Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia, and graduated on November 28, 2003.[12]
Tillman was subsequently redeployed to Afghanistan, and based at FOB Salerno.[13] On April 22, 2004, he was initially reported to have been killed by enemy combatants. An Afghan Militia Force allied soldier was also killed in the action. Tillman’s platoon leader First Lieutenant David Uthlaut and his radio telephone operator (RTO), 19-year-old Jade Lane, were wounded in the incident.
The Army initially claimed that Tillman and his unit were attacked in an apparent ambush on a road outside of the village of Sperah about 25 miles (40 km) southwest of Khost, near the Pakistan border. It wasn’t until after his burial that investigations by the Department of Defense and U.S. Congress were launched, eventually ruling his death as friendly fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Tillman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Tillman#/media/File:Corporal_Patrick_Tillman.jpg
If my son died after traveling to the other side of the world to defend his country, it would at least be comforting knowing the wasn’t killed by unfriendly fire.
Not clear how one defends one’s country — from Afghanistan….
We have had similar controversy here in the UK over players wearing (or not) the poppy at football matches. Even young Prince William had the nerve to stick his oar in:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/15643295
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/37832115
The “Real IRA” terrorists threatened one Northern Irish player with unpleasant consequences for him and his family if he ever wore the poppy. He never has, and who can blame him? This insistence on political gestures in a public space, otherwise you might be regarded as a traitor, is disgraceful. It’s Orwellian – this in England, the country of George Orwell! In North Korea, there are consequences, sometimes death, if you don’t applaud the “Great Leader” enthusiastically enough. How far down that route do we in the West want to go?
“In North Korea, there are consequences, sometimes death, if you don’t applaud the “Great Leader” enthusiastically enough.”
In the West people don’t have to be threatened, the trends du jour is obeyed without questions because we’re free to do what we want.
Be careful – you could be sent to prison for revealing official state secrets. 🙁
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2017/oct/01/catalan-independence-referendum-spain-catalonia-vote-live
FC Barcelona has announced their La Liga clash with Las Palmas will be played behind closed doors. In a statement, the Catalan club said: “FC Barcelona condemn the events which have taken place in many parts of Catalonia today in order to prevent its citizens exercising their democratic rights to free expression. “Given the exceptional nature of events, the board of directors have decided that the FC Barcelona first team game against Las Palmas will be played behind closed doors following the Professional Football League’s refusal to postpone the game.” Earlier today, Las Palmas announced a Spanish flag had been sewn on to their kit for the game to show support for “the unity of Spain”.
— so, more sportsmen wearing political symbols – is this becoming one of the trends of disorder?
Poll: 84% Americans support NFL players’ right to protest -Yahoo News
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/poll-84-people-support-nfl-players-right-protest-164811638.html
“The climate change modelers have chosen to leave all of these issues out of their models”
LOL! Do people who estimate the future needs of orange juice and gasoline make similar guesses at something far outside of their specialty, like composting perhaps? Is it the job of a specialist or someone putting a model together to speculate that the economy will collapse next year and therefore all orange farms are to shutdown production this spring permanently? Climate change model accuracy is mostly meaningless as we know the overall direction is fatal and nearby. The CO2 is rising two orders of magnitude greater than the Permian extinction. Our fate is already sealed, regardless of the financial system.
Estimates about CO2 decreasing are also a waste of time for two reasons: global dimming and the lag effect. The industrial activity across the globe could cease and CO2 could keep rising in the atmosphere for 10 years or longer. We really have no idea as global CO2 has continued its unabated, exponential rise regardless of stagnating economic activity. How do you explain this relationship that appears in total contrast to the picture you’re trying to paint? It’s rising like growth never slowed or stopped.
Your attempt to shift the blame for our current situation to someone else is amusing to me. Physics are the laws of our world, they are not “god” anymore than fire is. Go to a different planet and the laws change. Are there now multiple gods? What does that make the sun or gaea or a black hole for that matter? Our evidence that there exists no life in the universe is like a blind man with a box over his head saying because he can’t see other humans they surely are figments of his imagination. We are an ignorant and arrogant species but here in America we are ethnocentric too.
I don’t believe that our mission here was to protect the Earth as it can take care of itself and it’s currently in the process of exterminating us. Your pointing out of a bible passage that demonstrated unsustainability clearly shows, without any doubt, the the Bible was written by primitive man and not an all knowing deity. God, or what you understand of it, does not want to be worshipped or bowed down to anymore than you do, because we are all a small part of god, including plants and animals. Your connection to all religions having universal truth rings true. You are on the right path but you haven’t yet seen the light. The only higher consciousness we have access to here is our own.
If you read my post, I talk about the Bible being written by primitive man and not an unknown deity. I don’t think you have read or understood my post.
I read your post but skimmed the religion part. In general when things turn to religion I start to get pictures of Zeus in my head and I just sort of ignore everything after that. No offense to you but I’ve had enough of that hogwash for several lifetimes.
I feel EXACTLY the same when an article attributes pretty much any negative klimactic phenomenon (without a shred of evidence) to man made Geebllle weeeming…
That stuff really drives me nuts!!!
Also if you realize that cavemen wrote the Bible then you should have zero problems discrediting their made up god as well. It seems to me there’s a disconnect there.
god is fake — but ggggwwww is real.
WMD is?
Putin is?
I am confused – how do you work out what is real and what is not?
My rule of thumb is that if the MSM bleats on about it endlessly — it is ALWAYS fake
That is a simplistic rule of thumb, FE – you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The MSM is full of excellent and accurate information. What it does tend to do is sensationalise to attract attention and distort reality by providing information without context, by exclusionary detailing or by focusing disproportionately on one aspect of a story, often for political motives.
MSM stories also almost universally (and I would suggest unwittingly) rest on the faulty assumption that human brilliance will ensure the indefinite continuance of BAU. I think we can forgive the MSM this, as most of humanity holds the same assumption.
It amused me that the one MSM article you have been continually posting to back up your position on ggggwwww has led to The Mail on Sunday being upbraided by the Independent Press Standards Commission for deviously manipulating Dr. Bates’ testimony:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4891046/IPSO-adjudication-upheld-against-MoS-climatesciencearticle.html
If you “realize” that cavemen wrote the Bible, it probably means you’re clued up on gibberish, or at the very least that your classical education has been woefully neglected.
Tradition has it that the Bible was written by around 40 distinct individuals, none of whom spent much time living in caves. These writers were civilized and literate men, quite capable of scribbling down words on parchment and following a complex narrative. Even those of them who dictated the words to others were among the Jeffrey Archers of their times.
What you have written it total f789ing bullsh it…
How wonderful it must be to have the MSM do all your thinking for you.
I suppose you also believe that Saddam had WMD – that Putin is the devil — and that 911 was not a false flag?
Or is it that the MSM lies about those issues — but is telling you the truth re ___ ____
You’re wasting your time with wrong assumptions.
I guess the truth doesn’t hurt…. It doesn’t even leave a scratch….
How does it work — the MSM is always lying except with regard to gooblel wermmming?
Or do you believe the other lies too?
I win. Always.
Clueless as ever. Always.
U.S. Has Gone a Record 142 Months Without a Major Hurricane Strike
https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/record-142-months-without-major-hurricane-may-be-coming-end
Waaaazzzz up wit dat?
“Physics are the laws of our world, they are not “god” anymore than fire is. Go to a different planet and the laws change.”
The laws of physics are universal – in this universe.
“you haven’t yet seen the light”
But you have? We’re talking about the unknowable here. That’s how the human race advances: musing about what is. It’s the basis of science and philosophy. When we buy a house, we learn all about it from the estate agent. However, we are born into this world, this universe, without an estate agent to give us all the facts. No wonder philosopher Kierkegaard complained, “I want to speak to the manager!”
Gnostics imagine that the world is illusion. It’s could be the case that we on Earth are the only beings in the universe, and the space is just a show put on for our benefit. Then again, it might not be. But we can’t prove it yet either way. So people are entitled to muse.
Evolution means that life self-designs in reaction to the environment. But perhaps some intelligence designed life so that it self-designs. We just don’t know. So a little humility is in order, o enlightened one, when Gail gives her views on such matters – as she is entitled to.
Gravity is not the same. That’s just one huge difference. We could go on and on but it’s pointless. 9.81 meters per second doesn’t work on Jupiter, for example. So yes, physics changes and formulas we use on earth would be invalid.
I don’t do humility. Seeing the light doesn’t mean I’m saved or I’ve seen god per se. Our higher consciousness essentially is god. It’s plugged in. Anyone can experience it, I am in no way special in that regard. When you do see a higher vibrational being you will get it. They’re so bright they’re often mistaken for angels. Astral project and see for yourself. Most never get past vibrating as it leaves one feeling they’ve had a heart attack or in a terrible state of fear.
“Gravity is not the same.”
I repeat: the laws of physics are universal – in this universe. Jupiter is subject to gravity as is Earth, but this is related to the mass of the planet. Are you subject to different laws of physics because you’re 5 foot and I’m 6 foot? No. Don’t be silly.
When lucid dreaming recently, I saw a young blond lady but with green skin, hovering above me. She had wings and bent forward and shook my hand. Seemed real to me. Guess Mr Greer’s would be a better site for that sort of thing.
The laws of physics are universal – in this universe.
That’s an unprovable assertion based on an unverifiable assumption.
We can’t observe beyond the edge of the observable universe and we can’t measure very many physical phenomena in distant places such as beyond the edge of our own galaxy.
The idea that the laws of physics are the same everywhere is no more than a convenient hypothesis.
“The idea that the laws of physics are the same everywhere is no more than a convenient hypothesis.”
And a very logical one. Give me a good reason why they should suddenly warp beyond the edge of the observable universe? Perhaps we should just give up on logic and deny everything.
Give me a good reason why we should make dogmatic assertions about things we can’t possibly have any knowledge about?
As you yourself said, “We’re talking about the unknowable here. That’s how the human race advances: musing about what is. It’s the basis of science and philosophy.”
Fine, let’s muse about” what is”, by all means. But what is the point of musing about “what is forever beyond our event horizon” and therefore totally unknowable?
The assumption that the laws of physics are the same in all times and all places rests on a deeper assumption that the Universe was created by a designer or generated as a single entity by some process not involving a designer but that established this one set of fundamental laws to rule it all.
However, an equally logical idea is that just as what we perceive as “the laws of biology” depend on “the laws of chemistry” and “the laws of physics”, so what we perceive as the laws of physics are partially determined by something more fundamental that varies from time to time and place to place, is impervious to our senses and measurement instruments and yet exerts an influence on the physical world via the weakening or strengthening of fundamental forces across vast regions of time and space.
Some people have suggested that the laws of physics break down at the singularity inside each black hole, or that they were different at the moment of the Big Bang, or that they have evolved over time—whatever that’s supposed to mean. I’ve heard it suggested that the speed of light is changing over time or that as the Universe expands, the decreasing gravitational pull between its constituents on the inter-galactic scale is driving progressive changes in the various universal constants. It’s all speculation, much of it groundless, but no more groundless than the assumption that the laws are universal in the grandest sense.
Granted, these laws can and do evolve, but remember this all started from Tango’s suggestion that our close neighbour Jupiter was subject (now) to a different sort of physics than currently Earth is. No! I do know one rule of the universe, though – Tim has to have the last word, as long as he breathes. 🙁
The Next Hot Millennial Trend: Never-Ending Labor in Dystopian Warehouses -VICE
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59dy75/the-next-hot-millennial-trend-never-ending-labor-in-dystopian-warehouses
I think that 8000 Watts per person in industrialised world is exaggerated, by about 100%. Maybe the most energy intensive countries in the Middle East reach 8000W, but average is much less.
According to my calculation, current world average is about 2000 W per person.
Putting the Permian Basin in Perspective: WTGS Presentation -Scientist Art Berman
http://www.artberman.com/putting-permian-basin-perspective-wtgs-presentation/
L.A. controller says city should open emergency homeless campgrounds and shelters -LA TIMES
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-controller-homeless-camps-20170927-story.html
Pingback: Mindre för pengarna | Förändringens tid
Interesting & Mindprovoking ideas!
The Stock Market Is Seriously Overvalued Based On This Benchmark
“As the price of oil fell from over $100 a barrel in 2014 to $43 in 2016, ExxonMobil slashed its capital expenditures in half from $33 billion to $16 billion. By severely cutting its capital expenditures, future oil production at ExxonMobil has only one way to go… and that’s down.”
https://srsroccoreport.com/the-stock-market-is-seriously-overvalued-based-on-this-benchmark/#comment-49622
I also see that it talks about the deteriorating condition of Exxon Mobil.
Yes!. Ole T-Rex Drillerson left them in god awful shape! They went from being one of the most profitable companies in the world. To one of the most unprofitable In less than a decade. …
The entire global oil industry got caught with the Hubbert Fista-Curve back in 2006..And have been seeing stars ever since…….
Upcoming ‘Oil Shortages’ will Collapse the World Economy & Governments.
R.I.P. 7.5 Billion
When will this take place, just a ballpark estimate will work? It may even be a bigger number if it’s down the road a bit, who knows.
At the earliest sometime next year. Says: HSBC & CITI
This world will burn!
I agree!
not til next year at the earliest!
let’s party like it’s 1999, er, 2017.
BAU tonight, baby!
You know what — I actually look forward to this …. because it will be the only way to shut up these fools who moan and wail about Gibble Gobble imminently roasting us….
We’ve burned almost all the fossil fuels we will EVER burn — and we are not roasting.
You’d think that would calm the MORE ons…. you’d think they’d look at that and think hmmm… we are not roasting … therefore we are not likely to ever roast….
But nope. They keep banging on the pots …. because the MSM told them to
Sea ice news…
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2017/09/23/20170928_gore.jpg
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-28/inconvenient-record-arctic-sea-ice-growth-september
This topic generally has a good following.
Yea only 21k Peer Reviewed Papers Published since 2012.
Says Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge…= FAIL
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-28/inconvenient-record-arctic-sea-ice-growth-september
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2017/09/23/20170928_gore3.jpg
Ice melts… water freeze…. ice melts … water freezes…. the never-ending cycle… never ends….
It’s like when we bought this shack on the ocean — when other buyers were scared off by ‘gerbil in the bu tthole’ — we asked the farmers who had been there for generations about what was happening …
And they said — well… sometimes the ocean is bigger and it erodes a bit of the beach front — and then the ocean is smaller and the beach front rebuilds… hasn’t changed much overall in the 50 years we been here….
These discussions were had when I actually believe the MSM hype about this nonsense…..
The upside of knowing? A nice discount on the property….
Oh and btw — the insurance company had no issue with insuring this property – and charged no premium…
Go figure!
Excuse me, but who farms on the beach? What crops do they grow?
40% increase? Joel, how about comparing recent years ice VOLUME (forget extent) compared to 2000-2010, 1990-1999, 1980-1989. It keeps tracking LOWER. You can’t just look at variations from year to year like you’re in two year data barrel with blinders on and can’t see anything else, you need to compare different decade averages. You know, over time…
https://robertscribbler.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/piomas-minimum-arctic-ice-volume.png
Joel, take a gander at that graph. It plots Arctic Ice Volume DATA over time. Notice a trend?
So the arctic ice volume is trending to zero. And the Russians just launched what will become that largest nuclear powered ice breaker. Those Russkis, living right there on the arctic sea, must be some real,dumb sonofabitches….NOT!
Anybody that thinks the Arctic ice volume isn’t trending to zero is an idiot.
“Stupid spell check…correction “Anybody that thinks the Arctic ice volume is trending to zero is an idiot.”
Russia is building a new icebreaker to exploit opportunities made possible by melting ice.
“The massive vessel, named Sibir (Siberia), was developed as part of a huge push by the Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation to open up crucial shipping lanes in the icy Northern Sea Route, where climate change and commercial competition have attracted international attention.
Rising temperatures in the Arctic are gradually thawing natural oil and gas reserves estimated to be worth up to 35 trillion dollars and nuclear icebreakers such as the Sibir are capable of creating shipping routes in otherwise unpassable icy waters.”
http://www.newsweek.com/russia-deploys-worlds-largest-and-most-powerful-nuclear-icebreaker-ship-bring-670621
Really laughable Mike. You pass off an article by Newsweek, which mentions the obligatory PC correct “climate change” words. And your comment appears in the paper about PC! First, Newsweek is no source of anything I would take face value…second, the PC required mention of “climate change” is unscientific. And then, why do so many global warming expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctica end up stuck in “unexpected heavy ice”. Geez, one of them had to be rescued by either Chinese or Russian icebreakers. Russian scientists have warned of the upcoming ice age. The ice bound Arctic is why they are building these icebreakers.
The way comments are sorted this site, the “first” comment is the latest comment. Thus, the first comment keeps changing. This makes it maddening to keep up with all of the comments, but a person doesn’t have to keep plowing through pages and pages of comments to get to ones that haven’t been read. This sorting is what the commenters on this blog seem to prefer.
‘building a new icebreaker to exploit opportunities made possible by melting ice’
Why do you need an icebreaker when there is no ice…. duh….
When I traveled through the arctic …. in the summer about 8 years ago — the ship had a hardened hull… it was NOT an icebreaker…
No hurricanes for 9 years…
And…. https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-new-record-maximum
Inconvenient facts for those who are told what to think….
Notice how when those inconvenient facts run up against indoctrination how these people react — they actually get quite angry
https://www.sott.net/image/s21/420853/full/C3yv_TOUMAALsob.jpg
The Klimate is always changing
Ocean levels are always changing.
Ice volumes are always changing.
Since the beginning of time
None of this is going to kill you.
Running out of fresh water will… so worry about that.
Well … don’t worry about that either – because there is f789 all that anyone can do about it.
Feel free to stop driving a car… shopping in stores … using electricity etc… if you want to make a meaningful statement
Otherwise… close the hole
Oh my, it is a cartoon, I will follow up tomorrow on this. Watching a film documentary now have to change the disc.
J. H. Wyoming
Thanks for the graph on volume, had been watching that as well as fast extent variations a couples years back.
My post was intended to elicit a response, poor judgement on my part, also I didn’t read the ZH article and only gave a link to where the cartoon came from. Lots of sensational headlines and click-bait stuff there.
Will use sea level to explain why I am not very concerned.
https://climate.nasa.gov/system/charts/12_15_seaLevel_left.gif
Source: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/
SATELLITE DATA: 1993-PRESENT 3.4 millimeters per year margin: ±0.4
Joel’s estimated remaining life span probably less than 20yrs or 68mm sea level rise, not a lot, selfish outlook I know.
Do feel bad for the animals that have to deal with it though.
http://www.defenders.org/sites/default/files/magazine-winter-2015-polar-bears-joan-cambray.jpg
Source: http://www.defenders.org/magazine/winter-2015/life-after-ice
Now as a Sci-Fi fan, the movie Waterworld depicts some serious sea level rise.
Waterworld is a 1995 American post-apocalyptic science fiction action film
The setting of the film is in the distant future.
The polar ice caps have completely melted, and the sea level has risen over 7,600 m (25,000 feet), covering nearly all of the land.
The most expensive film ever made at the time, Waterworld was released to mixed reviews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterworld
Why didn’t you use this image – it tugs at the heart strings so much more powerfully
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/03/03/article-1254862-0887E183000005DC-283_634x398.jpg
https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-new-record-maximum
Massive Arctic Ice Gain Over The Past Five Years
Arctic sea ice extent is up 40% from this date five years ago.
https://realcli mate science.com/2017/09/40-sea-ice-ice-gain-over-the-past-five-years/
HOLY SHI T – the ICE IS MELTING!!! WE ARE GOING TO DROWN!!! (note the date)
https://www.sott.net/image/s21/420853/full/C3yv_TOUMAALsob.jpg
I liked mom teaching the kid to swim better, good news clip.
There wasn’t a lot of ice at the North Pole in 1959, when the USS Skate surfaced there.
This is a charming old Boeing newsreel confirming what is old news to some of us—but no doubt it’s new to J.H. Wyoming—the fact that back in the 1950s the ice at the pole wasn’t very thick. The 1:10~1:17 mark shows the conning tower breaking through the ice.
https://youtu.be/iv9NxOrKDow
And here’s the USS Hartford doing the same thing in 2016.
https://youtu.be/9990wY1DEhk
A question for J.H.* Why was the ice at the North Pole thicker in 2016 when the Hartford rose than it was in 1959 when the Skate rose?
This reminds me of a Greek joke. Sorry if it’s a bit “lost in translation”.
A man picks up a hitchhiker on a busy highway. Along the way the car hits an animal. Driver gets out an shoots it.
A little bit later, the driver again hits an animal on the road. He gets out and puts animal out of its misery.
Some time later the driver is involved in big crash. Hitchhiker is flung through the windshield onto the bitumen, being disemboweled in the process.
Noticing the driver is walking towards him with his gun, he quickly packs the remains of his entrails into his abdomen exclaiming. “It’s just as well nothing happened to us!”
Pingback: Why political correctness fails – Why what we know ‘for sure’ is wrong - Ecologise
https://i.redd.it/l4d7ibxfqnoz.jpg
Hear, hear!
I warned Hugh that too much hanky panky with the staff would get him in the end.
And now I’m warning soft goth wife that getting old and dying are hereditary.
7 Female CEOs Who Inspire Us All To Be Cogs In The Capitalist Machine
http://www.clickhole.com/article/7-female-ceos-who-inspire-us-all-be-cogs-capitalis-1242
Political correctness can be appropriate or inappropriate, depending whether it serves a survivable civilization or not. You can’t have stability (on which nuclear management depends, among other threatening forces) on the backs of disgruntled groups.
NUCLEAR THREAT:
There are hundreds or thousands (depending what you count) of nuclear danger sites that are like Fukushimas in waiting. FE has made this point and it’s well taken.
– needs sophisticated governance for indefinite management of all such sites, requiring:
– relative global stability
– a very high level of redundancy
– a very high level of regional buy-in and education
– major attention on regional land use planning
GOVERNANCE AND PSYCHOLOGY:
You can’t have reliable governance without addressing what’s in people’s minds.
GENDER:
Women being a global category, as is land, makes the categories alike in some ways, and perhaps inseparable. Attention to gender might be a way to get beyond race. Gender appears to be a more structural (word) issue than race (a construction of civilization), in that it subsumes race and is not as artificial or arbitrary.
MAINTAINING CIVILIZATION:
– The likely global formula for housing is backyard tiny houses, since they can supply income to existing home owners while housing masses of new and increasing low-income people (well educated or not) .
– The likely formula for food is ubiquitous gardening–backyard, workplace, schools, near-urban greenhouses, as well as industrial farms–all focused on making soil.
– The jury is out as to whether civilization can be made complementary to nature.
– Reliance on nature alone for any future way of life does not seem feasible.
NOTES:
– Other people are much better at scholarship and the pedagogy than I– mine is a lay person’s view, using commonsense, although it requires (aesthetic) intuition to reach that commonsense level.
– The FE challenge expanded: Currently, I see an urgent need to study and practice life ways of indigenous peoples, especially hunter gatherers. A part of doing this might require ubiquitous application of the FE challenge (making it a means of status) within our management of civilization, however and for whatever durations that “work.”
– Lots of issues are beyond common sense, and require the kinds of expertise that can be found on FW, in academies, in religion, in business and industry, but it could help to have a small number of commonsense guideposts that remain stable amid the inevitable sorting out of hyper complexity.
– I look at only the simplest skeletal issues of relationships and synthesis, but even though the system is self organizing, it doesn’t self organize in isolation of such heuristic (best guess) initiatives by humans.
Where I live (older neighborhood adjacent to a university campus), the trend is to finish off basements and rent them out as apartments. Or for a group of students to rent a home, trying to as many people into the home as the zoning laws will allow (or more). Or for an organization that does drug rehab to buy the homes and use them as temporary housing for several clients at a time. I believe this cost is paid by health insurance.
I don’t see backyard homes. They use too much energy to build and maintain. I see apartments and homes being used by non-related groups of people. In some cases, there may be separate apartments. In others, each person (or two people) may rent a bedroom, and the group may share and kitchen living room (if zoning laws will permit this). Zoning laws try to limit this, as much as they can.
I like the sound of these. Facebook is donating $20 million toward housing for two historically underserved communities that border its world HQ in Menlo Park. And that made me think of backyard housing as a preferred alternative to building on visible open space–which is the prevailing practice and expectations. But your ideas cover a lot more bases.
I passed on these wonderful suggestions to a concerned citizen neighboring the FB HQ. Adding the following:
Anyway, I appreciated getting her (your) POV, although I still think backyard tiny houses (where they can be afforded) can be completely private the way some people might prefer. But she brings up so many great affordable options too, some requiring no additional building. And all of them require work and planning. Looked at that way, every single home or apartment building can yield housing of one sort or another from among the above “options.” That could come under a housing plan led by a city-wide agency. It could provide thousands of local “construction” jobs. And Facebook housing money would be more than sufficient to act as seed money for the program. It requires innovation, creativity, thinking outside the box. City councils are not good at that. A land trust that wasn’t too hidebound and stiff could help. Anything. A start must be made. Two or three people meeting to discuss this would be a good start.
I really don’t think we need much in the way of additional housing. People double up in what we have. This is the way we reduce use of materials of all kinds.
Where we will need additional housing is places like Puerto Rico, or where people are trying to do farming and previous homes have been torn down. People will need to build what they can afford. I don’t think that they will look like today’s “tiny houses.” Maybe like old fashioned sod houses.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Sod_house_1901.gif
Very nice image. It’s about the simplest and best insulated “building” one could devise. The IC version requires waterproofed cardboard boxes (using IC substances) fireproof-filled–sand can work, but rammed cellulose is lighter and insulates better. Using that method, one could build a tiny basic shell of a structure for $150. Which is all that a poor person can afford for a home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sod_house
Sanitation is a problem too.
https://www.planetizen.com/news/2017/09/95044-sanitation-without-sewers
Sanitary use of waste seems more important than building standards. If a building collapses, the injury is confined to a single residence. But if waste is badly handled it can lead to disease affecting thousands. So cities should have minimal involvement in slum building “codes” and lots of involvement in sludge. It requires universal education and basic oversight of sludge management. This should fall under planning, and every single neighborhood, rich, middle class or indigent must have a plan.
If every poor community was obliged to have a sort of comprehensive plan, toilets would need to be part of it. City governments generally don’t have the staff or the time to make such plans–they can’t even manage it within the mainstream. So the informal or NGO community might have a role here. If you fail to plan you plan to fail.
Sewer-free toilets need to be connected to compost operations, which every slum community should have. A bucket and sawdust toilet should be affordable for each residence. And the government or some large-enough agency could buy the sludge for a modest stipend. But as long as there is a little land put aside for composting, it’s not clear why households couldn’t make their own compost for use to grow a small amount of food, separately or as a group.
There’s a second part to this, which is held up in moderation.
No business, no boozing, no casual sex: when Togo turned off the internet
When young people started mobilising online against Togo’s president, the state switched off the internet. In the week that followed, people talked more, worked harder and had less sex – all of which proved bad news for the government
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/sep/21/no-business-no-boozing-no-casual-sex-when-togo-turned-off-the-internet
this experiment was one week what happen when this become permanent ever
Very interesting article. I am sure different parts of the world would be different. I expect that in the United States have a lot more business on the Internet. An outage for a week or more would be a real problem.
great article gail
I’m not sure if Trump is aware Puerto Ricans are US Citizens
-Hillary Clinton
Does not really matter. It’s a preview of what’s coming for all of us, on live TV. From the coverage it is obvious that there is absolutely no preparation, no coordination between various government agencies. No plans whatsoever. The contempt that americans have for government gives them the government they want and deserve.
As a minor example, there should have been dozens of cruise ships lined up to evacuate those people.
Capitalism does not care if some people starve as long as those who pay have their margaritas on the sun deck
And so on.
Not exactly, every society-country differs in its capacity, preparedness, and professionalism towards disaster relief. Although, I’d agree this is a warning sign especially for immediate circle of US colonies and N America proper.
Yeah, I meant to say for all of us here in the US… True, surely other parts of the world are better prepared but it won’t matter in the end
And I’m not sure most Americans are even aware Puerto Ricans are American citizens…
Just sayin’
“Puerto Ricans are American citizens”.
So why aren’t they allowed to vote in US presidential elections?
You have to live in a state to vote for electors for the presidential election. Puerto Ricans don’t live in a state.
The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) does not apply in the same way in Puerto Rico. http://www.benegroup.net/assets/files/Impact-of-the-ACA-in-U.S.-Territories-10-31-16-(1).pdf
Average wages are a whole lot lower than in the US. https://www.bls.gov/regions/new-york-new-jersey/news-release/countyemploymentandwages_puertorico.htm
Puerto Rico is territory of the United States, not a state. These people may be US citizens, but they cannot vote for President. If there is not enough to go around, I expect payments to Puerto Rico will be on the short list of things to cut.
That Republican who was shot. Just Said in Congress. First “I Need To Thank God”…He totally ignored the Doctors who helped! LOL
No surprise there
To be fair he did thank the Doctors afterwards. But why do the Doctors always have to play second fiddle to an imaginary being?
What is the difference between God and a doctor? God does’nt think he is a doctor.
God made the doctors, specially trained RNA that spent years in the nucleolus (school) before being assigned to a malignant techno-cell. I think God is interested in only one thing, getting from point A to point B (entropy) in the shortest time possible. Cells couldn’t work on the fossil fuels adequately to get God from point A to point B with their microscopic tools (enzymes), but the upscale humans sure can. That’s why, when the resource gradients are gone, the conduits (dissipative structures) will be discarded.
The Doctors are of course among the dissipative structures that will be discarded.
Right-Wingers’ Paranoia About the ‘Deep State’ Is Probably Quite Different Than What You Might Imagine
http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/right-wing-deep-state-hypocrisy?akid=16131.2689436.0-qhpV&rd=1&src=newsletter1083079&t=22
Saudi reverse on women drivers propelled by economics – Financial Times
https://www.ft.com/content/c532fb60-a2b1-11e7-b797-b61809486fe2
I can’t wait till the Prince’s new Vision 2030 plan is finished.
So I can take my wife and Kids to visit their new Saudi Entertainment Hub!! ….FAIL
Yep, it was never much about human rights, the plan is simply to send women into office work and tax them. Now, the problem is they assume such work will be there for them from announced and planned IPO of Aramco as they leveraged the money into some other schemes. However, both these plans might fall immediately as house of cards, or sort of muddle through for few years.. we don’t know..the timing and sequencing..
Interesting points! I can understand that reasoning.
Sounds a lot like the point made in other parts of the world, “Would-be retirees can work longer.” Yes, but if the retirees take the jobs, others won’t have them. Adding retirees to the workforce may drive down wages for everyone, because number of workers exceeds the needed supply. Same may hold for women.
the plan is simply to send women into office work and tax them.
Enough with the lunatic conspiracy theories. This is not Info Wars or the comment section of any ZeroHedge Article.
Sounds like the driving is just a part of that larger plan. So almost BAU until at least 2030 that’s good, long live the Prince.
Hope this doesn’t look like a wall of text, clipped some parts of the article link shown below.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/why-did-saudi-allow-women-to-drive-its-scared-of-a-post-oil-world/articleshow/60870284.cms
Saudi Arabia is one of the most conservative Muslim countries. Now it has realised it cannot live in its cocoon when its oil-dependent economy is under threat.
Letting women drive is part of several similar changes that have been taking place lately. Saudi Arabia is turning its Red Sea coastline into a global tourism destination as part of a plan to make tourism an alternative source of revenue. The tourist area will be “semi-autonomous” and governed by “independent laws and a regulatory framework developed and managed by a private committee,” which indicates foreigners will be allowed to drink and women could wear bikinis, things without which it cannot dream of drawing rich luxury tourists.
Allowing women to drive will save Saudi Arabia the remittances that expat drivers send back to their home countries. It will give them more access to economy. Saudi women, most of whom are well-educated, can do jobs which are now offered to expats. It will also drive spending as women who are free to move can contribute to more consumer expenditure. Additionally, the step will also attract more foreign investors by boosting global image of Saudi, now known as a repressive regime.
Saudi Arabia’s fear of a post-oil world is pushing it out, forcing it to open up. Lifting the ban on female drivers is part of its change-or-perish strategy.
I can’t wait to visit a Saudi Entertainment Hub! Sarc
For some reason I thought of the film, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen a 2011 British romantic comedy-drama. Good luck with your travel plans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_Fishing_in_the_Yemen
Having visited Yemen a few years ago – I thought I’d download that movie to have a look…. I lasted about a minute… it’s the usual rubbish out of Hollywood
Will they be selling Saudi 10 Inch Beheader blades at the gift shops?
I wonder how tourists will get to Saudi Arabia without oil.
Post oil transportation options:
By land
https://drwyjmricaxm7.cloudfront.net/repository/Camel-caravan-in-the-Sahara-Desert–Morocco-Tours–On-The-Go-Tours-284571454413212_crop_683_341.jpg
By Sea
https://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/e7a732f1f7b64eeeac7786485950d1356842293d/c=0-0-2977-2236&r=x393&c=520×390/local/-/media/USATODAY/USATODAY/2012/10/01/star-flyer-01.jpg
https://www.usatoday.com/story/cruiselog/2015/05/27/star-clippers-cruise-ship/28006991/
Rustic! I have actually run across some options like these on the Internet, when investigating options for vacations.
http://www.traveller.com.au/sailing-the-aegean-sea-ghqzhu
If the decline is little by little, the people will manage. Some people will fall off from the ladder, which is unavoidable. But there are ‘core’ nodes of society which will be maintained.
I think that feudalism, or techno-feudalism, will take place. It is inevitable.
Also, glad that Gail took some points from people who talked about technology. Existing computing power is enough to maintain order for quite a long time.
Electricity is pretty much a requirement for technology such as computing power. Keeping it will be a challenge. Part of the problem is simply making repairs after storms, earthquakes and volcanos.
Political correctness starts with religion. While there are all kinds of knee-jerk bibliolatry among large segments of the U.S. population, only a minuscule percentage knows anything at all about the actual history of the Bible. Few have even heard of scholars like Ziony Zevits who explained the myth of the Garden of Eden, or Ann Killebrew who showed that the “Exodus” was not a case of Israelites leaving Egypt, but of Egyptians leaving Canaan. Nor do most know even of the first Jewish War (described by Josephus) which severed the Jesus movement from Judaism and created Christianity, nor about pseudoepigraphy through which most books of the New Testament were compilations under false names, nor the “charter myth” of the Acts of the Apostles, a pious lie invented out of whole cloth, nor about Marcion, the author of the first New Testament (around A.D. 144) composed of an early (gentilized) version of Luke and ten letters of Paul, or the four centuries it took to establish something resembling a “canon.” (See The First New Testament: Marcion’s Scriptural Canon by Jason D. BeDuhn. Also Dennis E. Smith and Joseph B. Tyson, Acts and Christian Beginnings: The Acts Seminar Report, plus Bernard Brandon Scott’s The Real Paul: Recovering His Radical Challenge.)
One of the bases of religion, purposely overlooked in today’s anti-religious academic discussions, is the matter of the paranormal. (And yes, Virginia, there really is a paranormal undergirding to nature.) The “scientific” bunch likes to dismiss it as the ravings and delusions of idiots, etc., and refuses to consider any part of it. Because they might lose their government funding and/or the approval of their equally cowardly colleagues. But in spite of their denials, there are in fact such things as hauntings, as premonitions, as telepathy, and so forth. Of course, most of such phenomena are misinterpreted not only by the ignorant, but by people who should be analyzing such things.
There are, for instance, strange things which happen in history. Strangest of all are those that seem to be driven by the mass unconscious of a species, submitting all its individuals to the will of the group soul, things similar to the “murmuration” of birds, fish and other types. (A related phenomenon may be seen in the often-noted common behavior and telepathic connection between identical human twins.) What with the movement of North Korea toward building a thermonuclear-tipped ICBM, we may be slouching toward a point where the group unconscious of homo sapiens may suddenly reduce mankind to the earth’s carrying capacity.
The best explanation of this cosmic undergirding is given by biologist-philosopher Rupert Sheldrake with his theory of ultra-dimensional morphic fields. These are tantamount to what human beings in part experience as memory. (A good introduction is his The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Memory of Nature.) But evidence for the paranormal can be seen almost everywhere and throughout the history of mankind and animals. Another researcher who contributed much to the persistent, “disembodied” quality of memory is U. of Virginia’s Professor of Psychiatry Dr. Ian Stevenson’s Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect, a summary of his massive, two-volume opus, Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects, among many other works. And, of course, the history of man’s religions is replete with references and addresses to a transcendent and intelligent reality or realities underlying human existence.
To cut to the chase: life on earth follows the path of evolutionary epistemology, which incorporates knowledge and learning in the morphology and behavior of living beings. Life is matter which learns. Although the atheist types like to claim that everything (e.g., the Big Bang, cosmogonic inflation, the supernova which produced the elements composing us, the early moon bouncing off the early earth, then circling it, the unexpected emergence of primitive life, the Cambrian explosion, the dinosaur-extinguishing comet of 65 million years ago, etc., etc.) is just all happenstance, the “cybernetic” nature of intensifying, incarnate knowledge argues against that thesis. Bizarre paranormal occurrences such as poltergeist phenomena, “ghostly” appearances experienced by many, especially women and young children, all reinforce Sheldrake’s view. Never mind the universal reports of those who have had Near-Death Experiences in which individuals suddenly recall their entire lives — that is, recognize themselves as consisting essentially of memory.
All of these things, and far more, indicate that there is an underlying Mind which predetermines cosmic teleology. Knowledge is our nature, our essence and our destiny. Unless, of course, we nihilistically choose to regress lazily to the primitive state whence we arose, as we seem to want to do. It would do us well to remember that when a species refuses to grow and adapt to new ecological circumstances, it goes extinct. And if we do not adapt, this planet will be finished as far as intelligent life is concerned.
I am afraid that there is a great deal of truth in what you are saying. The many religions as practiced today do not line up well at all with what evidence we seem to be amassing over the years of how the system seems to really work.
I would agree that knowledge is very important to the whole system. It is one way energy is “dissipated.”
I have a sister, Lois Tverberg, who is involved with some of the research that is going on. Her first book, Listening to the Language the Bible, was a book on the range of meanings that some ancient Hebrew words have, making translation difficult. Her later books relate more to background information regarding how people living in the time of Jesus would have understood the words Jesus is quoted as saying. Her later books are written in a “chatty” way intended to make them appealing to study groups attended by middle-aged ladies. (This was not her choice, but the way the book religious book market works.)
I am sure that the extent to which churches incorporate newer research into what they teach depends very much on the church. I know that the Bible Study material that the ELCA Lutheran Church sells definitely includes some of this research. In general, I expect that there is little of this research incorporated by churches (especially churches that believe the Bible is “literally true”).
So “Tverberg” is your maiden, not married name. I’m a libertarian at heart, but I told my wife if she wanted the ring, she had to take my name. Probably Chauvinistic of me, I know. I do do most of the cooking and dish washing, so I suppose it was a trade off. Anyways, sorry to drift off topic.
I got married 40 years ago. I never changed my name at that time.
There were several things that influenced me:
1. My mother had mentioned earlier that quite often professional women didn’t change their last names. (She has a masters’s degree herself.) She had no problem with the idea.
2. One of the supervisory women in the office where I worked had changed last names three times in about a year’s time (Married Name 1) (Maiden Name) (Married Name 2) I could see that this made a mess inside the office.
3. I already had a master’s degree and had completed the actuarial exams. My degrees were all in my maiden name.
4. The best man in our wedding (my husband’s best friend) and his wife had different last names.
5. My husband was a college professor who didn’t care one way or the other.
So I never changed my last name. After I started writing a blog, I was glad I had not changed my last name. Having a distinctive last name was helpful.
I do understand the mess it creates for Professional Women. My wife is a physician. We were married while she was in her residency, and she kept her maiden name until the residency ended and we moved back to our home state (so as not to confuse the patients). I can’t really articulate a good reason why a woman should change her name other than tradition. I have a friend from law school who kept her maiden name because the family was prominent in local politics and she knew she would one day run for judge (actually she did, and takes office next month).
And you are right, Tverberg is distinctive.
Madame Fast never changed her name either… primarily because were both just too lazy to bother with the paperwork….
And what is the point anyway
Theedrich: Knowledge is our nature, our essence and our destiny.
Exactly. Religion and science are the two best examples because both offer answers. One offers all the answers.
Theedrich: Unless, nihilistically choose to regress lazily to the primitive state
Nihilism has nothing to do with going to primitive state. Nihilism, most likely, would had slow it down. Also, it’s a small percentage of the population to make any significant difference.
Theedrich: Remember that when a species refuses to grow and adapt to new ecological circumstances, it goes extinct. And if we do not adapt, this planet will be finished as far as intelligent life is concerned.
Correct. And intelligence is what will lead humanity, and probably all the other species into extinction much sooner than otherwise, because it never accounts for the externalities or otherwise it will cease to exist. Science is a great example.
”Intelligence is a lethal mutation.” — Ernest Mayr, grand old man of American biology.
“The human brain remains a piece of stone-age machinery, however you look at it, and no amount of culture can make it otherwise. Genetically speaking we are a finished product, not a prototype. What you see is what you get—there will be no bright utopian future.”— Reg Morrison. The Spirit in the Gene, page 247. https://regmorrison.edublogs.org/author/regmorrison/
Quick Note:
Gail, I am sorry to say, your website layout is not easy to navigate. I went through several pages and still couldn’t find my posts.
I though you should know.
Anyway, I still your fan, and of the people that post here for whatever it’s worth.
Thanks for the Interesting post. Just one comment. In myth 4: Where you are using the unit “Watts per hour” you should just use “watts”. “Watts per hour” would indicate that the wattage is increasing every hour, or that the energy consumption is increasing quadratically.
It is probably a typo, should be watts per capita.
You are right. Watts per hour should be watts per capita. I fixed it.
Understanding the Concept of Carrying Capacity and its Relevance to Urban and Regional
Planning – Journal of Environmental Studies (Taiwo,and Oluwasola, 2017)
http://www.avensonline.org/wp-content/uploads/JES-2471-4879-03-0017.pdf
From the Conclusion:
Secondly, mass enlightenment towards the dire implication of carrying capacity should be provided to the people through the medium of all national agencies and media houses such as radio, television and print media. And finally, organization of seminars
and conferences in the domain of all professionals should key into carrying capacity awareness, among others.
Never Going To Happen!
Another thing that won’t happen,
“For example, while prizes like national awards are being given to willing compliance with environmental planning standards, defaulters should be sent to jail without option of fines.
Simple Really!
We Burned Our Oil Living Like No Tomw. So Now There Isn’t One….
Against this backdrop, the power producers have struggled to get sufficient supplies as they compete with overseas buyers for lower-quality coal that was once considered too poor to export. Miners in Australia can command higher prices for coal known as high ash in China, South Korea and India.
“The high ash market has developed in North Asia over a number of years and that has caused complications for some power stations,” said Robin Griffin, a research director at Wood Mackenzie Ltd. in Brisbane. “It means that miners can actually sell a much lower quality product into the export market.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-27/now-one-of-the-world-s-energy-powerhouses-has-a-coal-squeeze
Running low on the quality stuff…
And this low-grade shite would produce less energy … meaning more has to be burned … meaning electricity prices ain’t going nowhere but up
Very interesting article. The coal shortages in Australia are partly because the coal can be sold for more in the export market to China. Now Australia seems to have a shortage of both coal and natural gas.
The story reminds me of the recent story we saw about India having a shortage of (imported) coal. I am wondering if the problem was that they couldn’t pay the cost of imported coal, with China bidding up the price. If Australia wants to keep it for itself, that makes an additional problem.
People think the coal story is uninteresting. It really may be very important.
IEA, KSA, HSBC, CITI, Warns of Massive Oil Shortages Coming Soon! Peak Oil Vindication Loading….3….2…..1
Most people will not be overly concerned by these predictions…
They expect that prices will go up before shortages hit…. and investment will charge into new exploration and a great many new finds…
Boy oh boy are they in for a surprise.
In a 2016 report, the IEA estimated that the industry would need to bring online an additional 21 mb/d of new supply by 2025 just to keep current production flat, after factoring in depletion rates from existing projects plus higher demand levels. At the time of that writing, however, the industry only had about 5 mb/d of new supply in the pipeline, implying a gap of about 16 mb/d, a gap that showed little sign of being bridged.
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/IEA-Price-Spike-Coming-in-2020.html
Not a problem. Elon will fix it. Just a few billion in subsidies and voila.
Ah been hearin bout that peak oil bull sh it for 50 years now…. stop your worryin cliff… ‘they’ ain’t gonna let us run out of oil… ‘they’ will pump more when the time comes…. ya know there’s a lot of oil down there still – we is the new Saudi Arabia – ain’t ya herd?
This Often Results in Fast & Unexpected Collapse (Tainter 1988)
Should the Chinese-Asian profound slowdown materialize as predicted in those graphs presented here recently, so by ~Q1-Q2 2018 the situation might be ripe for another 2014-15 style “triangle of doom” wedge in which demand “suddenly” evaporates, resulting in both energy and utilities crashing as well again.
So, in summary this particular scenario predicts from now few months of bouncy plateau or smallish fake slump and possibly attempt at rebound, however around ~Q1 2018 obvious weakness sets in (no orders no demand), then another serious affordability-demand crash. Should they be able or not to pick it up again afterwards via some massive stimulus is another matter, not discussed here for a moment. Still, the visible (admitted) shortage issue will be due only in next rounds starting ~late 2018 / early 2019 to mid 2020s..
—
But as you say there are evidently more people (in overall depletion camp) expecting shortages first, followed by price spike and then maybe another affordability ceiling and reset.
—
Who will be correct in the end, what type of can kicking strategies might interfere next.., usual set of questions about unknown sequencing of events.
One does wonder if the financial gimmicks stop working before the oil supply gives out….
I suspect that even the men fighting for our lives do not know the answer to that….
The situation is … in flux….
It is interesting that they don’t talk about probability of bankruptcy for major companies in the oil industry. (I suppose that they have their “Peak Oil” blinders on.)
I noticed that there is some company called macroaxis that estimates “probability of bankruptcy” in the next two years. This might better be called probability of financial distress.
https://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/EXXO34F.SA–Probability-Of-Bankruptcy
For Exxon Mobil, it says
“Exxon Mobil Probability Of Bankruptcy = Normalized Z-Score = 41%”
For Chesapeake Energy, we have
https://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/CHK–Probability-Of-Bankruptcy
“Chesapeake Energy Probability Of Bankruptcy =Normalized Z-Score = 54 %”
For ConocoPhilips we have
https://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/COP–Probability-Of-Bankruptcy
ConocoPhillips
Probability Of Bankruptcy = Normalized Z-Score = 5 %
For Chevron we have
https://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/CVX–Probability-Of-Bankruptcy
Chevron Probability Of Bankruptcy = Normalized Z-Score = 12 %
Does bankruptcy even really matter anymore ie. deficit / debt / corruption don’t seem to be an issue. Just keep the pumps running and some assets change hands. Or just change the rules of the game and make it up as you go. Too hard to make sense of all this stuff.
I cannot imagine the CBs allowing a major producer like Exxon to go bankrupt…. that would bring down BAU…
I suspect that the CBs have identified the TBTF producers — and are shoveling cash into their gaping maws right this moment…
There are no rules anymore — the house is in flames — whatever it takes…
Digital Painting, 2133×2133 px (2017)
https://i.redd.it/68ihrkl8ofoz.jpg
Hi Gail,
Thanks for another interesting and very philosophical article.
On the rarity of complex life, there are also recent findings that point to the much larger number of exo-planets (those that have right conditions for life) out there that we are able to detect now with the Kepler telescope. Thus the Fermi paradox etc. In any case, we will never know everything about how the universe works and your discussion on religion I feel is irrelevant – no offence. We know enough now to know what is coming, and this is the reality for our generation and the next one or two.
I will be on the lookout for articles about exo-planets.
This is an article from 2016. https://www.space.com/17738-exoplanets.html
The article starts by talking about the search to find planets that are habitable. This article says,
“Astronomers announced in August 2016 that they may have found such a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. The newfound world, known as Proxima b, is about 1.3 times more massive than Earth, which suggests that the exoplanet is a rocky world, researchers said. The planet is also in the star’s habitable zone, just 4.7 million miles (7.5 million kilometers) from its host star. It completes one orbit every 11.2 Earth-days. As a result, it’s likely that the exoplanet is tidally locked, meaning it always shows the same face to its host star, just as the moon shows only one face (the near side) to Earth.”
It seems to me that the inhabitants of this planet will either be fried or frozen, with the planet locked in such an orbit. There is really a very long list of criteria that planets need to meet, to be habitable. It seems like this example suggests that they will need to do more searching, if they expect to truly find a habitable planet.
Reblogged this on Desgringueler and commented:
Bravo Gail:
Glad you like it!