A Drop of Rain

Orlov wrote a nice article, The Five Stages of Collapse about what he sees as the general tendency of collapsing societies, based on what he saw when the USSR failed. Orlov is delightfully witty in a dark sort of way.

I think he may be making a slight mistake though in thinking that the US collapse is going to look like the USSR collapse, which is what he wrote about mainly, the countries are very different in terms of the cultures, politics, social systems.

But what is not different is the fundamental requirement of our system for raw materials and resources, and the serious lunacy of believing in debt fueled and funded ‘growth’, which was supposed to replace growth based on resource exploitation, ie, manufacturing . Sadly trying to restore debt fueled growth is the method Obama is trying to keep floating, like the Bush group before him (oh, if the banks would just lend again everything would be ok…).

When growth stops in a system based on Capital and debt, ie, a system requiring growth to survive, that system will not have a neat elegant wind-down, that much you can be absolutely certain about. But I think one major difference is found in the respective histories of the US and Russia.

Russia has always been fond of oligarchs, with basically unlimited power, whether czars, Putin, Stalin, or Lenin.

The US has at least some checks and balances, and people have a certain expectation that they won’t get totally screwed by the system. Not to idealize our political process in any way, but we do have a system that, although damaged severely by corporatism, can be altered, and we have political documents, which if we follow them, are actually all the tools we need. But the people need to be really pissed off before this happens, and ready to support a party that is willing to cut off corporatism and its perks.

Just a quick note, keeping in mind that we live in an allegedly globalized world, which will allegedly prove more efficient etc. That’s all nonsense of course, globalization is all about corporations moving responsibilities and liabilities (such as environmental concerns, labor costs, and so on) to where they can generate the highest short term rates of return while generating the greatest possible social disruption and global destruction in the process.

So it strikes me, what is the first thing to go when this system starts to crack due to rising resource costs and peaked production levels of key resources, like oil? Airlines, of course. So it’s not surprising to see, after a disastrous last year, that World’s airlines in fight for survival (with 9 billion US dollars in losses this past year).

Faced with their biggest crisis in history, airlines from throughout the world gathered in Kuala Lumpur to take stock and swap survival strategies.

“Numbers can tell powerful stories,” International Air Transport Association director-general Giovanni Bisignani told his audience of 500 airline representatives at their annual summit.

Airlines are expected to collectively lose US$9 billion (NZ$14b) this year as falling demand, lower yields, broken consumer confidence and the swine flu pandemic threaten to wipe out US$80b in revenue.

Those losses will come on top of last year’s US$10.4b deficit thanks to the double hit from record high fuel prices and the collapse of the world economy.

“The ground shifted and our industry was shaken,” Mr Bisignani says.

Airlines are in survival mode and in desperate need of help to see them through the crisis and allow them to emerge with a business model that delivers a financially sustainable future.

Yep. Can you say: (re)nationalized airlines? In fact, can you say: the only countries that will have any chance of controlling the bumpy downhill slide are going to be the ones where the state controls resource allocation and pricing? Watch the ‘free market’, one of the greatest pieces of nonsense ever generated as a concept in human history, start to show more and more how pathetically unable it is to actually do anything other than serve as an excuse to funnel more money to the hands of those who control it.

This one is depressing, mainly because the Kogi people, like other native peoples I’ve heard or read, realize the problem is not at all complicated: we have violated the fundamental conditions for life continuing on the planet earth. Well, it’s also depressing because this was done in around 1990, when the early warning signs were becoming very clear to these people, who had watched the natural world for centuries, millenia probably. Now of course everything is worse, and growing increasingly bad by the month almost now.

Watch this if you don’t watch anything else. (Google Video Page)

What I really have to agree with is them calling us ‘little brother’. We are so completely arrogantly twisted in our views that we think our own ways, which are destroying the planet incredibly quickly, have anything to teach of value.

More film at nationalgeographic.com :: Keepers of the World (long flash video)

Personally, I’m getting tired of hearing people who are unwilling to engage in fundamental changes in our modern way of life talk about solutions etc when it’s those very ways of life that are the problem (you know, hybrids, wind power, high tech solar voltaic… all just ways to consume and destroy a little bit more before it all fails completely).

I’ll add a few of the better quotes from the first video, but I wanted to get this one posted first.

Any self-respecting doomer has to keep up with the latest from Jay Hanson, one of the first to connect the dots of peak oil and peak population.

Call him a doomer, he doesn’t care.

Check out the interview page (direct stream)

There’s a good interview with Dr. Dennis Meadows, co-author of the original Limits to Growth. It’s long, about an hour, and if you don’t understand the core concepts behind sustainability and population overshoot, you definitely want to give this a listen.

I had to take a break from writing for a bit. Things are really moving fast, if you’re really interested, the best sites I know of are on the link bar to your right. For the economy, theautomaticearth.blogspot.com is doing a really solid job day in and day out. Nice work Ilargi and stoneleigh.

There’s not a lot of point at this time in repeating what others are doing well, although I have to admit, sometimes I come across an article that really makes me think. I mean, all this money floating around, it’s really not real. It never is physical at all. In fact, when I think back on what the best religious and philosophical systems have always said, this whole idea of money actually having meaning is pure delusion, in a very real sense, not as an abstraction, it simply doesn’t even exist today as anything at all substantial beyond some bits moving around computers, as that article correctly notes.

The entire way of moving money around is just a way to distribute power, to grab hold of a thing that some believe to be real, but which could be turned off literally with a few switches. Try it. Just turn off all the key banks’ systems, and suddenly those webs of credit, debt, etc, all vanish. They have no substance, and exist only as relationships, faith more than anything else.

Personally, I prefer more physical states of reality, at least when it comes to our day to day existence. I’m also a big fan of real free markets, you know, the ones where big corporations don’t control every phase of distribution and consumption. Sometimes when I hear these ‘free market’ psychopaths babble on about the ‘free market’, meaning for example the GM, Ford, Toyota, Hyundai, and so on, corporations manipulating trade, consumer minds, politicians, and so on, as an example of a free market. What a joke.
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Richard Heinberg recently wrote a short piece for The Ecologist (and believe me, all you head-in-the-sand denialists are about to wake up to a harsh dose of reality, so you might want to start paying attention to the people who are right, and who have been right all along) discussing the speed of systems collapse as of now.

Keep in mind, we’re sailing here on a very big ship, with a lot of inertia, so changes happen in a sort of surreal slow-motion time frame that requires something of a coherent overview to understand, although everyone of course immediately understands things like $100 fill-ups on their excessively large SUVs and trucks.

Heinberg’s point below, however, is worth some serious thought. I guarantee you I’m going to look at his suggestion very seriously, and I recommend you all do too.

As the Great Unraveling proceeds, there may in fact be only one occupation worthy of our attention: that of identifying the qualities that make our species worth saving, and then celebrating and exemplifying those qualities. If we concentrate on doing that, perhaps we win no matter what. Outwardly, it will probably look a lot like what many of us are already doing: working to save a species, an ecosystem, a human community; to make a village sustainable, or to halt a new coal power plant.

Taking in traumatic information and transmuting it into life-affirming action may turn out to be the most advanced and meaningful spiritual practice of our time.
How Do You Like the Collapse So Far?, 05 Jun 2008

(Stan Kahn lives in Cambodia, and will be contributing articles now and then)

There are several reasons cited for the recent worldwide spike in food costs which has seen the per ton price of rice nearly triple, with other grains amongst nearly all foodstuffs also seeing steep rises. However, one cause, which I consider the most important, is not mentioned very often, and especially not in the main stream media.

A combination of factors has brought world rice stocks down to a 30 year low. On the demand side the primary reason has to be laid to rising population.

We can not possibly continue to add people indefinitely to a finite world without repercussions. The idea that we and our consumption can grow indefinitely and unrestrainedly never did make an iota of sense: Now that we are bumping up against the limits of the world’s capacities only the most ludicrously out of touch does not see the great danger humanity faces.

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Last week James Howard Kunstler had a pretty insightful blog posting, highlighting the fast rising belief in the United States that Big Oil is responsible for the gasoline price rises:

A friend asked me how come the public apparently grasps the reality of climate change but can’t seem to wrap its collective brain around the unfolding oil crisis.

I’m not convinced that the public does grasp climate change. It’s perceived, perhaps, as a background story to daily life, which goes on regardless. Are you even sure Hollywood didn’t invent it — and maybe some boob at Time Magazine is selling it as though it were really happening?

Few have anything to gain by espousing denial of climate change. It’s hard for most people to tell if they have been affected by it. It doesn’t quite seem real. Those who actually make gestures in the face of it –- screwing in compact fluorescent lightbulbs, buying Prius cars — end up appearing ridiculous, like an old granny telling you to fetch your raincoat and rubbers because a force five hurricane is organizing iself offshore, beyond the horizon.

The public appears aggressively clueless about the peak oil story. They do not accept any threats to the motoring regime. The news media is surely not helping sort things out. I saw a remarkable display of ignorance on CNN last week when the new resident idiot-maniac Glenn Beck hosted Teamster Union boss James Hoffa and they agreed that the oil companies were to blame for high fuel prices. To put it as plainly as possible, Beck doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, and it’s disgraceful that CNN gives free reign to this moron to misinform the public. It’s perhaps equally amazing that Hoffa doesn’t know we have entered a permanent global oil crisis based on demand having outrun supply. These two idiots think that if Exxon-Mobil built a new refinery down in Louisiana, everything would be fine, diesel fuel would go back down to 99 cents a gallon, and it would be Christmas every morning.
Kunstler, April 28, 2008

The misconception that private oil companies are behind the recent gasoline price spikes is important to look at more closely. I’ve been finding this mistaken view too when I talk to people who have not actually looked into the questions of gas prices as they relate to Peak Oil. Essentially, what we’re seeing is how complete the domination of the corporate media is when it comes to how people come to understand complex issues.
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Well, 30 years too late, and at least 10 years after Colin Cambell started warning the world about the coming peak oil issue, the news is finally hitting the true mainstream media. In this case, the Washington Post, the voice of the Washington DC establishment.

The issue is not simply a concern that we will have to pay outrageous prices for a gallon of gas. If that were the worst of it, the situation would be difficult but manageable. The reality, however, goes deeper and is much more troubling. There are multiple problems affecting the world that are having a decidedly negative net effect: a global rise in demand for crude oil, the plateau in the production of crude oil (which may indicate the peak has already been reached) and continued global population growth. Together, these three factors are serving to shove the world into a crisis that has ominous possibilities.

When there isn’t enough oil to satisfy global demand, the price obviously rises. Perhaps less obvious, however, is the effect this price increase has on the world’s ability to produce food. Every stage of the food production cycle is affected by petroleum and a rise in the price of a barrel of oil has compounding effects: It costs more to run the farm machinery, more to buy the fertilizer, more to take it to market and more for processing. In the United States, this results in raised eyebrows at the grocery store. In parts of the world where upwards of 75 percent of a family’s income goes to buying food, it results in social unrest and riots.
Daniel L. Davis, Editorial, May 5, 2008

That’s about as direct as you can put it. The era of not only unlimited growth, but growth at all, of any sort, is fast ending.
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