Recently there’s been a slight bending of the overtly rationalist worldviews of some our more prominent doomer bloggers. I’m not sure what triggered this subtle change, though I could take a guess, but I’ll refrain until we can see which ones actually are able to return to something resembling reality.

First we had Dmitri Orlov, who really nailed a lot of these issues, and along the way reminded me of just how well educated Europeans of his age really were, even if they moved here as teenagers.

Our species’ hypertrophied linguistic abilities have allowed us to create entire systems composed of elements that we either cannot directly observe or cannot observe at all: mathematics, physics, ideologies, theologies, economies, democracies, technocracies and the like, which manipulate abstractions-symbols and relationships between symbols-rather than the concrete, messy, non-atomistic entities that have specific spacial and temporal extents and that constitute reality for all species. There is a continuum between products of pure thought, such as chess or mathematics, sciences which produce theories that can be tested by repeatable direct experiment, such as physics and chemistry, and the rest-political science, economics, sociology and the like-which are a hodgepodge of iffy assumptions and similarly iffy statistical techniques. Perfectly formal systems of thought, such as logic and mathematics, seem the most rigorous, and have served as the guiding light for all other forms of thinking. But there’s a problem.

The problem is that formal systems don’t work. They have internal consistency, to be sure, and they can do all sorts of amusing tricks, but they don’t map onto reality in a way that isn’t essentially an act of violence. When mapped onto real life, formal systems of thought self-destruct, destroy nature, or, most commonly, both. Wherever we look, we see systems that we have contrived run against limits of their own making: burning fossil fuels causes global warming, plastics decay and produce endocrine disruptors, industrial agriculture depletes aquifers and destroys topsoil, and so on. We are already sitting on a mountain of guaranteed negative outcomes-political, environmental, ecological, economic-and every day those of us who still have a job go to work to pile that mountain a little bit higher.
The Great Unreasoning

This was a really good meta view of just what’s wrong with the so-called ‘critical’ methods being used by our largely untrained intellectuals masquerading as bloggers.

So this posting was really welcome.

Next along comes Joe Bageant with a great series of articles, stuff that finally is making sense, and almost, don’t take this wrong Joe, but it almost sounds like he’s achieving that rarest of all things, wisdom.
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The Energy Bulletin linked to this Noam Chomsky comment on the right in the USA.

“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering here at home.”
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“Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error,” Chomsky said.

Their attitudes “are understandable,” he said. “For over 30 years, real incomes have stagnated or declined. This is in large part the consequence of the decision in the 1970s to financialize the economy.”
The Progressive – Chomsky Warns of Risk of Fascism in America

I also found an interesating site, religiondispatches.org, for a more interesting view of modern religious questions. Their article on Sarah Palin suggests that maybe there’s not quite as much to worry about from the far right as Chomsky thinks, but he’s also right to point to the problem.

Here’s a reasonably coherent overview of the actual production situation globally, with a nice historical overview as well.

The supply of the world’s most essential energy source is going off a cliff. Not in the distant future,but in a year and a half. Production of all liquid fuels, including oil, will drop within 20 years to half what it is today. And the difference needs to be made up with “unidentified projects,” which one of the world’s leading petroleum geologists says is just a “euphemism for rank shortage,” and the world’s foremost oil industry banker says is “faith based.”
www.countercurrents.org – The Imminent Crash Of Oil Supply: Be Afraid

And there were more reasonably good overviews published this past week.

America is mired in recession. Europe is in turmoil. Banks are reducing lending. Families are selling their extra vehicles. All of these factors would tend to push the price of oil down. Yet, the opposite has happened. The price of crude-oil futures jumped more than 70 percent over the past year, and as of mid-April sat near $86 per barrel.
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No country has spent more money on oil exploration and production than the U.S. Nor has any country drilled as many holes looking for oil. Yet, despite record dollars spent and unlimited access to the best, most advanced technology available, America’s oil production is in relentless decline. It is a decline that has continued for 40 years—despite discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico, the Bakken Formation, the Rocky Mountains, and Alaska.

These are uncontroversial facts grounded in geology.

Here are some more. On March 25 the U.S. Department of Energy revealed that “a chance exists” that the world could experience a decline of liquid fuels production between 2011 and 2015 “if the investment is not there.”
An Uncomfortable Fact About Oil

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This is a nice historical review of just how California was placed into the financial predicament it’s in now, at least partially.

The decimation of the California economy was a long-term project. It began in earnest in 1978 with the passage of the infamous Proposition 13 (the People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation). Like the current Proposition 16 (a proposal that protects private utilities while pretending to uphold the right vote), Prop 13 was perhaps the first use of the most brilliant means of circumventing democracy ever devised.

Embodied in the state constitution that appropriately numbered ballot proposition not only set a limit on property taxes at one percent of value but it also made it virtually impossible for the state to raise sales or income taxes by requiring a two-thirds vote in both legislative houses. Since property taxes were the primary source of funding for education, Prop 13 was the poison pill that sickened and eventually killed the future of education in the state once known as golden.

By crippling the state’s revenue raising mechanism it was only a matter of time before economic events would bring California to its knees.
Who Killed California

And so it goes… not that facts will ever alter profoundly ideological right-wing viewpoints, but it’s useful to have them at hand in case you have to actually try to talk to one of them.

Well, I was skeptical, but here is the The Joint Operating Environment 2010 (pdf – explicit discussion starts page 26 of the report, section ‘Energy’) report from the US Joint Forces Command.

The guardian had this story, but I didn’t want to mention it until I found the actual source pdf, linked to now above.

“By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day,” says the report, which has a foreword by a senior commander, General James N Mattis.

It adds: “While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India.”
US military warns oil output may dip causing massive shortages by 2015

And that’s about the size of that. Next we’ll be seeing the Republican party start to talk about global warming and the dangers it poses, after, of course, the next study comes out from the US military warning about that as well.