Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Bank Transfer Day is gaining some serious steam. Although it’s not technically affiliated with Occupy, it’s being embraced by the movement and is the first specific call to action since the Occupy protests began.
The idea of the “energy trap” is that an increasing number of Americans are caught between the cost of gasoline and a systemic inability to stop driving their cars. In the last 60 years America has become a “motorized society” in which most of our citizens have become totally dependent on daily travel by car for their existence. Take away our cars and most of us would be hard pressed to reorganize our lives to provide for the essentials of life – earn an income, and provide food, shelter, and education for ourselves and our families.
A group of distinguished energy experts representing academia, industry, think tanks, and non-profit organizations will meet Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 10:30 am in front of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to call for “Truth in Energy”regarding the possibility of a near-term oil crisis and long-term oil shortages. Following the news conference, the group will deliver a letter to DOE Secretary Steven Chu calling for urgent action to address this potentially critical threat to America’s economy and national security. The Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas USA (ASPO-USA, www.aspousa.org) organized the news conference.
Robert Anton Wilson pointed out some years ago that people who say “you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution” are usually part of the problem. The habit of thinking in binaries–that is, in hard oppositions between antithetical concepts–has deep roots in the human mind, but it leads to certain predictable difficulties, among them a particular kind of vulnerability to the sorcery practiced by the advertising and marketing industries. If we’re to see past the haze of arbitrary binaries to a less polarized future, a glance at other ways of thinking is probably worth our while.
-Fertiliser cost warning
-The Food Crisis Strikes Again
-Occupy the Food System!
-Women Farmers Feed the World
As concerned citizens, and representatives of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas USA (ASPO-USA), we the undersigned believe that the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Energy Information Administration (EIA) have failed to critically examine one of the most serious threats to our economy, national security, and environment—the prospect of an impending decline in world oil supply.
DOE and EIA have also failed to examine factors that may constrain future domestic natural gas supply, despite the current exuberance regarding shale gas. In our view, these shortcomings to recognize and address supply limits for oil and gas are a major danger to America’s economy and national security.
I am thinking of creating my own derivative, called a political default swap. This is how it works. We each choose a country and bet against the length of survival of its government as it tries to introduce enough austerity measures to keep the markets happy. It works like a sort of insurance policy, where the riskier the country, in this case the less able its politicians are to bear down on its people and extort their work to pay bankers’ debts, the higher the cost of betting on it.
Let us try to apply this same approach to a truly complex system: the economies of US and Europe, in the state in which we currently find them: raging government deficits, staggering levels of bad debt, continuous government bailouts and infusions of free money by central banks, record levels of poverty and long-term unemployment and underemployment, and a lack of any meaningful economic growth. Specifically, let us try to characterize the effect of the continuous monetary infusions, bailouts, and stimulus spending. The economics profession has failed to do this and so amateurs are forced to step into the breach.
Statements from petroleum geologists and analysts supporting ASPO-USA’s call for “Truth in Energy”regarding the possibility of a near-term oil crisis and long-term oil shortages:
Robert L. Hirsch (co-author of “The Hirsch Report”), Tom Whipple (former CIA analyst), Lt. Col. Daniel Davis (U.S. Army), Art Berman and Jeffrey J. Brown (petroleum geologists), as well as Jim Baldauf and Jan Lars Mueller of ASPO-USA.
As they first formed, the assemblies were invigorating and uplifting. We were creating a new community, I was told. We were making new friends. We were hearing from new people. We were enjoying an environment where dissent was the norm. But as days passed, and then weeks, it got too familiar. And it wasn’t obvious to folks what more they could do.
To grow, the occupations need to very explicitly conceive themselves in ways that address immediate needs, are aimed at viable and worthy long term goals, and develop modes of participation that cause normal folks, enduring normal harsh conditions, to feel that giving their time makes good sense because it can eventually lead to a new social system with vastly better outcomes than those presently endured. Occupations that began in response to economic insanity need, as well, to broaden and adopt a more encompassing focus taking into account not only the economy, but also, and equally, matters of race, gender, age, ability, ecology, and war and peace.
Do more with less. It’s a popular refrain these days, and one that libraries are all too familiar with. Re-tooling the ways that they share information and resources while simultaneously juggling financial issues, the challenges before libraries are significant. But with the support of their communities, libraries are moving into the future.
There is a close link between growing debt and growing GDP. GDP growth is a gross measure; it does not take into account the amount of debt required to finance this growth. The increasing level of debt since 1945 has enabled economic growth to be higher than it otherwise would be, and has allowed the US to buy goods and services from abroad that we could not otherwise afford. If high oil prices cause economic contraction, as I believe is the case, we may see the situation reverse itself. Instead of rising debt leading to growing GDP and growing imports, we may instead see shrinking debt leading to declining GDP and declining imports.
