Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Fellow Americans, this evening I have a special message for you. It’s an unprecedented and surprising message, but ultimately it will resonate with your common sense, good will, and patriotic spirit. It turns out that the recessionary cloud we’re under does have an extremely valuable silver lining. I know; it sounds like something only a politician would say, but wait. I think you’ll be surprised to hear my explanation.
Vigilante, klan, family and private justice, all are the path to barbarism today just as surely as they were when Aeschylus wrote the Oresteia. I will stand on the side of civilization for as long as I am able. The only alternative I see is what philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “a war of all against all.”
My title is ambitious and ambiguous: revolution and resistance (which tend to be associated with left politics), revelation and redemption (typically associated with right-wing religion), all framed by a warning about ecological collapse. My goal is to connect these concepts to support an argument for a radical political theology — let me add to the ambiguity here — that can help us claim our power at the moment when we are more powerless than ever, and identify the sources of hope when there is no hope.
So far, we are on course for full-force collision. The fundamental problems with our monetary and financial systems have not been addressed, but only papered over. The latest excerpt from Richard Heinberg’s new book ‘The End of Growth’.
Lost in the furor over the debt crisis last week came the news that the U.S. economy expanded at an annual rate of only 0.4 percent in the first quarter and 1.3 percent in the second. As these numbers were well below what economists were expecting, the revelation that the US was not coming out of the “great recession” was quite a shock for those who have not been paying attention.
The new book GWR: The Global Warming Reader leaves a reader wondering why, given the evidence, there’s not a robust movement to replace the causes of the warming. But the situation is unlike any other that’s arisen, and our historical models of resistance or mobilization may mislead us. Many of these differences are painfully apparent to those trying to build a movement; in the aggregate they are daunting and suggest the need for some additional tactics, including a kind of initiation.
If it didn’t have such explosive consequences, you’d have to laugh at the comedy of errors unfolding in the U.S. political arena. Politicians are proposing farcical “solutions” to the debt crisis in a competition to see who is better at pandering to the electorate. Are citizens really supposed to believe that raising taxes or cutting expenditures will provide meaningful relief on ballooning bank-inherited interest payments — payments so stratospheric that the human mind lacks a conceptual reference point for them? Each and every government service could be cut and it still wouldn’t help pay off the debt. The problem can’t be solved by reining in an overgrown government bureaucracy because much of it was created by an unregulated, overgrown banking system.
There is a way in which The Tea Party’s uncompromising stance does make sense. Perhaps they are willing to crash the economy not just or only out of ignorance of basic economics—or basic economics as, importantly, it is articulated by liberal academic economists and Wall Street analysts alike. Perhaps they see this crisis as an opportunity to make their stand against a system that cannot continue along its current path. The path to a sustainable future, they seem to suggest, will involve some changes to our expectations about what we deserve and what we can expect.
Most people hardly noticed, but the recent Spanish elections have been troubled by a series of demonstrations. A relatively high number of demonstrators have gathered in major Spanish cities during the months of May and June, demanding radical but curiously unspecific changes in Spanish politics. There have been similar protests in Portugal and in Greece, all of them about the austerity measures taken in those countries in response to the debt crisis. Of course, the French far left has seen in these protests the premises of the revolution it has been waiting for throughout the last fifty years, but what strikes me most about those protests is their pointlessness and their conservative nature. In that, they may well be representative of the political climate of the early decades of energy descent.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-Japan
Republicans have created a political crisis by refusing to raise the nation’s debt ceiling unless they achieve their priorities of dramatically reducing government spending—primarily on social programs.
A larger context is the fact that the U.S. is still reeling from an epic credit crunch. …
The even bigger, and most important, context is that we are entering a new historic era. … Economic growth—fueled during past decades by cheap energy and raw materials, but also made possible by a stable climate—is coming to an end.
Thirty days on from its decision to release reserve oil stocks, the IEA announced Thursday that it will take no further action for the moment. This, along with positive news from the latest European emergency summit, and signs from Washington that the US may avoid its looming self-inflicted default, saw oil prices strengthen to more than $118/barrel.
