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

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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I was talking to some friends, the kind who are reasonably smart, well educated, but, sadly all too prone to repeat as fact what is in fact a myth. In this case, the myth that Peak commodity production was predicted in the 1970s (in books like The Limits to Growth [LTG]), and never happened. The Oil Drum had a nice article that analyzes how this myth came to be:

The success of the smear campaign against the LTG ideas shows the power of propaganda and of urban legends in shaping the public perception of the world, exploiting our innate tendency of rejecting bad news. Because of these tendencies, the world has chosen to ignore the warning of impending collapse that came from the LTG study. In so doing, we have lost more than 30 years. Now, there are signs that we may be starting to heed the warning, but it may be too late and we may still be doing too little. Cassandra’s curse may still be upon us.

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Read a review of Reinventing Collapse by Dmitri Orlov. His stuff is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but only in terms of tone, in terms of reality, it’s pretty much what he sees.

Also check out Dmitri Orlov’s comparison between the former Soviet Union (USSR), and the United States of America (USA) in terms of the structural similarities and differences between pre-collapse USSR and USA.

If you want a quick summary, the USA is in serious trouble if collapse happens, we have invested too much in the wrong areas, given too much power to the corrupt state/business entity, and have grown too lazy ourselves, as well as simply having put our money, time, and energy into the wrong places for too long.

Think James Kunstler’s The Long Emergency, for example.

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