Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Kurt Cobb It isn’t often that the world’s working stiffs get a chance to fleece rich investors. But that’s essentially what has happened as a result of the vast overinvestment in natural gas drilling in the United States. Strangely, the long-term result may be a plunge in supply and a huge spike in price.
Just a few days ago, the National Snow and Ice Data Center, based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, announced that ‘Greenland’s surface melting in 2012 was intense, far in excess of any earlier year in the satellite record since 1979.’ Our future is melting before our very eyes… When significant parts of the corporate media are openly embracing and indeed pushing climate ‘scepticism’, is there any meaningful justification for this in the climate science? No. Geochemist James Lawrence Powell recently conducted an exhaustive study of the peer-reviewed literature on climate science. Going back over 20 years, his search yielded 13,950 scientific papers. Of these, only 24 ‘clearly rejected global warming or endorsed a cause other than carbon dioxide emissions for the observed warming of 0.8 degrees since the beginning of the industrial era.’
The old-fashioned school districts that provided me with a convenient example in last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report represent a mode of politics that nobody, but nobody, talks about in today’s America. Across the whole landscape of our contemporary political life, with remarkably few exceptions, when people talk about the relationship between the political sphere and the rest of life, the political sphere they have in mind consists of existing, centralized governmental systems.
“Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment,” French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once said. Substitute “forecasts” for the word “statistics,” and you’ll have a good understanding of the public reaction to the recently released BP Energy Outlook 2030.
When William Butler Yeats put the phrase I’ve used as the title for this week’s post into the powerful and prescient verses of “The Second Coming,” he had deeper issues in mind than the crisis of power in a declining American empire. Still, the image is anything but irrelevant here; the political evolution of the United States over the last century has concentrated so many of the responsibilities of government in Washington DC that the entire American system is beginning to crack under the strain.
We live in a vast mechanized economy, where machines do 90-99% of the mechanical work needed to create and deliver products and services, even food. These machines are paid in energy, and have no notion of human currency. This article explores the idea of metabolic (energy backed) currency, how it might come about, and what we can learn from the technology industry.
Once money becomes primary value rather than a marker of value, it’s almost automatic that money will further dissociate our values and alter our perceptions. We don’t see the hungry person, we see the poor person—and the response is very different.
The return to an older American concept of government as the guarantor of the national commons, the theme of last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report, is to my mind one of the crucial steps that might just succeed in making a viable future for the post-imperial United States. A viable future, mind you, does not mean one in which any signficant number of Americans retain any significant fraction of the material abundance we currently get from the “wealth pump” of our global empire. The delusion that we can still live like citizens of an imperial power when the empire has gone away will be enormously popular, not least among those who currently insist they want nothing to do with the imperial system that guarantees their prosperity, but it’s still a delusion.
The American Dream is a meme forged in the aftermath of World War II that embedded the promise of prosperity, success and upwards mobility into the country’s cultural lexicon. It seems this Dream is coming to an end, leading many to wonder what comes next. This essay articulates a more realistic vision of how the world works as well as how rites of passage can lead people towards a worldview that will serve them well in years to come.
For general audiences and experts alike, this is an engaging, accessible reader that takes an affirmative social change approach to localization.
It is hard to imagine a more unlikely vehicle for advancing energy literacy than a finely crafted large format picture book. Energy, after all, is invisible. We see its effects, but never the thing itself. And yet, Energy: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth succeeds and succeeds profoundly.
The hard work of rebuilding a post-imperial America, as I suggested in last week’s post, is going to require the recovery or reinvention of many of the things this nation chucked into the dumpster with whoops of glee as it took off running in pursuit of its imperial ambitions. The basic skills of democratic process are among the things on that list; so, as I suggested last month, are the even more basic skills of learning and thinking that undergird the practice of democracy.
