Throw the Cradle Out With the Bathwater

via Climate Progress.

Is it coincidental that the very place the started our civilization on agriculture and all it's problems will be the first to fade? Turkish dams are now choking the Tigris and Euphrates and the famous Mesopotamian marshes out of all the water. And with a dusty cough, I die.

Bubba Gump Shrimp is in Trouble

Seafood is in massive decline. Here's a clean, simple version of that story. Favorite graph of the day:


If you want to see it in documentary form, here ya go.

This Fire Is Outta Control

Will the Blue Dogs cut off our nose to spite our collective faces?

Intervention Fail

Shmuel (how cool is that name) Rosner at Slate declares "the end of interventionism". An empire must have influence to be considered an "empire". The declining influence of the U.S. and the West is something we have to get used to. I even look forward to it. It's a lot of work being the boss of everyone.

Americans often search for explanations by looking inward to apportion
blame—by pointing a finger at Bush or Obama, expressing an urgent need to prioritize the economy, or rehashing the vices of liberalism and the sins of conservatism. While all these factors no doubt contribute to the current mood, looking inward is not enough—indeed, it's just another sign of Western narcissism. The end of interventionalism is not just a sign of the mellowing of the West; it is also an indication that the enemy is getting stronger—and smarter.

Put a Cap and Trade in that Ass

Climate Progress and Krugman team up (well, CP just backs up what the Krug-sangwich blogs) again to drop major logical bombs on the dunderheads who don't get the cap and trade law. They basically say what I would say if I took appealing econonmics classes instead of attending Econ 103 only to guarantee I had a nap before my afternoon workout.

Readers Digest:

Any time you have a market, there’s some opportunity for speculation. Even if the good being traded isn’t storable, there may be a futures market, so you
can bet on the future price. If the good is storable, the spot price may be moved by the futures market, since high futures prices may provide an incentive for stockpiling.

For example, the fact that wheat is traded means that there’s also a wheat futures market; and because wheat can be stored, futures prices affect spot prices.

So, should fear of speculation lead us to ban trading in wheat? Nobody would say that. Yes, sometimes speculators will get it wrong — but the advantages of having a wheat market vastly overshadow the possible harm that may sometimes come from speculation.

Now substitute “emission permits” for wheat. It’s exactly the same story. Why should you address it any differently? Yet as Joe Romm tells us, Sen. Byron Dorgan — who I
suspect kind of favors allowing the market in wheat to operate — warns against cap and trade because it would offer too many opportunities to the “Wall Street crowd.” And that same line is, unfortunately, being echoed by a number of progressives.

F-22: For Whom The Bell Tolls

Senate killed the F-22 yesterday. The pricey boondoggle built in the image of a former age now frees up billions of dollars. Some of that money is already saved for the next boondoggle which gets it start in 2010. I'm happy that we're savin the dollars but as I personally not enthused about the F-35's prospects related to our government spending in the future.

Though I do like the way Robert Gates thinks:

to design and buy—as we have the last 60 years—only the most technologically advanced versions of weapons to keep up with or stay ahead of another superpower adversary, especially one that imploded nearly a generation ago. … We must break the old habit of adding layer upon layer of cost,complexity, and delay to systems that are so expensive and so elaborate that only a small number can be built, and that are then usable only in a narrow range of low-probability scenarios.

Meet the New Boss

When I was 10-ish I remember the big panic about the whole in the ozone and how all are faces would be melted off if we didn't fix it. And then we did it there was much rejoicing. Until now, where it seems our previous fix is actually proving to be a big problem.

The phrase "to err is human" would be my answer for anyone thinking humanity is fit to rule the Earth.

Global Warming, Yes Please

I can probably say that everyone has heard "Yeah, but it's July and it's 70 out!" as proof there is no such thing as climate change. Greenfyre has got a good post about why that statement is just a half-thought turd that leaked out of someone's mouth.

Anti-Guerrilla Groups

All they wanted was beauty. Poor Evanstoners had their "guerilla garden" mowed down by people who hate making the most of the resources around them. It was wildflowers but it was better than looking at a gaping whole in the ground.

Franken in 2012

It's good to bring humor to a situation. Even serious situations where having some perspective is a good thing. But humor shouldn't be all that you bring when thoughtfulness is called for. I believe our congressmen are no longer capable of bringing seriousness to legistlative process. They like to talk big on entertainment and sports issues but when it comes to anything of note they go an waste an opportunity to be a leader by crapping all over themselves. The one guy you'd expect to be more funny than wisened is actually the only one to be both.

Again, this is a reason why politicians should never serve more than two terms. They run on votes instead of on what's best.

"I Get Upset to See Things Individually Wrapped in Plastic"

If you've said this or a close approximation you would probably enjoy this new film.

Working my best to be Zero Impact Man.

The Most Dangerous Game

It's gonna be a hard fall. Americans really have no idea what's coming. Most are totally clueless as if there is no possible doubt things will get better. Some think it's bad but there'll be some technological revolution to save us. But there won't be. When you are is this deluded, the collapse is gonna hurt big time.

Thanks to Yglesias

I Broke My Capslock Key...

...trying to shout as loud in text as I could. The WaPo (hopefully going the way of WaMu) published a climate op-ed by VP-candidate/mother/governor failure, Sara Palin. I could go blue in the face but I'll just link you to Climate Progress who speaks about it like he's ran a blog on the issue for some time.

Go Rural, Young Man!

Your young, unemployed and bored with staring at episodes of "The Office" on your phone? Learn to farm. The ruiners of the Earth will soon leave the world to the Millennials and instead of trying to play their game it's time to get a different skill set.

It's not like you have a choice.

Kunstler Time

James Howard Kunstler is often branded as one the "doomers" of peak oil. I tend to think of him more as a realist. He makes two points this week that I'd like to highlight:

It brings back the question, which has loomed dimly at the margins of America's collective consciousness, as to whether we can get through the long emergency ahead without going through a wringer of domestic political convulsion. At this rate, sooner or later, anything identified with wealth could become a target for the wrath of the unemployed and foreclosed. The first rock that flies through an East Hampton window, or the first firebomb tossed into the lobby of Goldman Sachs Manhattan headquarters could ignite a chain of events that shoves all economic policy out of the political arena and quickly divides everyone at the center of power into armies out for blood.

I'm not to sure how this would play out. American is more terror alert and most city scrapers have major deterrents to these kind of acts. On top of that, with all that has gone on already in the country, from stolen elections, failed federal agencies, and stimulus outrage, why has it not happened already? My opinion is that we are too docile, in love with our gadgets and whiz bang movie openings. I think it will take a food and/or gas shortage to make this a reality. When you can't go anywhere or can't feed yourself, people will get a bit desperate.

Also, just a message to all the young dudes (and women):

It would mean different ways-of-life for a lot of people -- for instance, young adults who had expected lifetime employment as corporate executives but who, instead, find themselves ten years from now working at farming. We have an awful lot to get real about.

Yes, get real about it. We need more farmers and this is not negotiable.

Now You Have It

Ever get tired of trying to remember the report that contradicts a climate deniers "claims" that global warming is a hoax? Well, there's a handy-dandy youtube channel that has simple, easy to to watch videos that debunk all the deniers false claims.

Thanks to Greefyre

En Fuego

Krugman has really been hitting the environmental bong pretty hard lately and it's good to see. The climate bill (and really anything related to the environment) needs to be front page news more so, say, then a dead pedophile.

Put it this way: if the consensus of the economic experts is grim, the consensus of the climate experts is utterly terrifying. At this point, the central forecast of leading climate models — not the worst-case scenario but the most likely outcome — is utter catastrophe, a rise in temperatures that will totally disrupt life as we know it, if we continue along our present path. How to head off that catastrophe should be the dominant policy issue of our time.

Totally Bummers

Mental illness isn't a symptom you normally talk about when discussing the effects of dehydration but it seems to fit right in when you look at the big picture.

Subterfuge

Wow, another stimulus? No joke. The economy is already on shaky legs and when the Peak Oil bomb really hits we are gonna be even worse off. Krugman is right today. Obama and his supposedly "transparent" administration must level with the American people:

What Mr. Obama needs to do is level with the American people. He needs to admit that he may not have done enough on the first try. He needs to remind the country that he’s trying to steer the country through a severe economic storm, and that some course adjustments — including, quite possibly, another round of stimulus, may be necessary.

This is all fine and dandy for political posturing for 2012 but that's not honesty for the real challenges that will be arriving shortly. We need to be honest about Peak Oil and Climate Change if we ever stand a chance of passing through it peacefully.

The Ruskie Way

My favorite Ruskie posted a vid of his USSR vs. U.S. collapse talk on his blog. Hope you like it!

Leather and Scales Will Tear You Apart

Man definitely feels it has nature under it's thumb. I mean every once in a while things get out of hand big time but never that often.

It is important to note that animals are never safe and should be revered. Even in Spain.

I'd Say That's About Accurate

Let's see how Waxman-Markey goes.

Say It Ain't So, G.I. JOE

The Hollywood ad wizards keep coming up with new ways to ruin my childhood. The latest travesty is the new G.I. JOE turd that will be unleashed on the public in August. Gone are all the unique to character uniforms which are replaced with a single, all-black, super suit for all members of the force. (Why not just make a movie of Snake Eyes clones?)

Slate took us down memory lane (does Shipwreck not sound a bit like Jack Nicholson) of the old JOE series from 1985 in all it's "0% casualty rate" glory. It's important to take a look at the a bit deeper. Beyond the instant negative reaction the censors would have to massive slaughter in a kids cartoon, you can look at the reason that no one dies in context of the story we tell ourselves.

No one wanted to be a member of Cobra, not even Destro for as a Joe you always had the ability for crafty escapes and were always in the right place at the right time. You always won as a JOE, never died, in fact, didn't even kill anyone but emerged as the savior of your nation. Everything will be alright. Good will always triumph. The stories of our culture are built into everything we do and that is something we always need to be conscious of.

Slim Pickens

T. Boone Pickens announced his canceling of the his plans for the world's largest wind farm today. He's main reason, that it was too hard to get the power from the farm to the distribution system, underlines just one of the major problems with "green power". Add distribution to the problem list of: poor efficiency, lack of capital, and lack of political will and the U.S. is setting itself up for a massive fail in the "green energy" department

What Could You Do With Four More Years?

Yglesias posted a graph (and I love graphs) of the average female life expectancy in Russian over the last 50 years. It does look like, except for a small aberration in the years directly following the USSR's collapse, that the women in Russian actually live about two more years than they do now.

But I'm more interested in that little "aberration" of a drop in life expectancy of 4yrs during the USSR's fall. Russia never fully collapsed into an anarchic state like say, Somalia, but it did see a collapse of their economy and severe disorganization in it's public services. Now, it did all this at a time when there was no worldwide energy scarcity or no massive droughts/flood-based famines caused by global warming. Russia could very easily import any needed oil or food it couldn't produce for themselves. (USSR collapse expert Dmitry Orlov covers that import conversion on his blog.)

To me it leaves a frightening realization that even in scenario where oil and agribusiness are on life support somewhat functioning there's a good chance you'll see a decline in life expectancy. If you add in massive energy shortages and uncertain crop production you can end up with a pretty major decline.

I Tells the Tell

There are generally considered to be four possible outcomes to a future of decreasing energy availability. Probably the least preferred of the four is the "Mad Max" collapse theory where gangs of ruthless killers terrorize the barren countryside looking for the last drops of oil. But it's not all bad.

I've been reading Daniel Quinn's Ishmael and in the book the protagonist is asked to to describe civilization's "origin story". Nearly all "primitive" cultures have an story of their origin which tells how their tribe came into existence and why their world has the characteristics it does. In the book, the lead cannot describe ours, the origin story of today's industrialized civilization. Then I caught a bit of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and ran into this classic scene where Max hears the origin story of the kids.

These kids, the remnants of a plane the crashed fleeing the destroyed cities of Australia, formed an origin story. The story is presented orally in front of a mural of cave paintings depicting their arrival to the lush oasis in the middle of vast apocalyptic desert. Now, I could go on a tangent about the kids' desire to return to "Tomorrow-morrow Land" and it's "hi-scrapers" and how Mr. Max wants to everyone to stay put and be, no joke, "thankful" that they have found this little Eden instead of scratching out a hen shit existence in the cesspool of Bartertown in all it's methane powered glory, but I'm going to stick to the hope presented by this little passage.

Perhaps, if all Al Gore's wonderful toys fail to get built and if (hopefully not) the Transition Town movement cannot establish enough resilience-y into our communities than one can only wish that a few of us can eek out a life built in balance with the natural world and have a beautiful origin stories filled with appreciation of how they got where they are and what resources they have left.

It's Like Peak Oil

Peak Blood. What will Ethan Hawke not do?

Mississippi Burning

That's All You Had to Say..........scariest environment imaginable. Probably my favorite blog for climate change, Climate Progress continues the necessary theme that these politicians who vote NO to climate change bills deserve to be rememberd in infamy till as long as there are humans.

Growing Power

A one-man wrecking crew of Urban Farming, Will Allen of Growing Power in Milwaukee, WI, gets some good pub in the NYT Magazine. If there is going to be hope for cities, some of what he's doing is going to be needed big time.

Do You Have a Flag?

Starting easy to ween us back into the news cycle.

Eddie Izzard asks the true question of empire: Do you have a flag?

Also, he riffs a bit on Technopoly.

Arguably the Driest Season of the Year

I'll be in the U.P. the next couple days. Yes, taking time off just 2 days(!) into the blog, G. W. style.

Listen to Arj Barker describe some of the activities for this weekend.

The Way We Love Now Won't Be How We Love in 10 Years

There's been a lot of hullaballoo about "A Vindication of Love" by Cristina Nehring. Enough so that even conservative "chosen one" Ross Douthat defers to it in the wake/continuing wake of GOP politicians jumping into the adultery pool. This panging for love is continued by over-educated, apparently undersexed, and recently divorced Atlantic Monthly piece by Sandra Tsing Loh.

There are so many angles to take on this essay that it could make your head explode so I'm going to take the angle of marriage as it relates to energy and to an extent what it maybe in 1o years as we head down the backside of the oil bonanza.

Loh writes of a world of middle-agers longing for love in their marriage but living lives that have become submerged by the drudgery of kids, work, and all the other facts of existence they've hoisted on themselves. She casts off the idea of marriage as "work" as if should be anything but. You and your lover should be mad, hot rabbits for each other from first kiss to last breath.

A big boo-hoo.

As Clint Eastwood said in Unforgiven, "Deserves got nothing to do with it". Yes, it'd be great if everyone who finds a serious relationship would feel on day 10,000 of that pairing as they did on Day 10. That's not how it goes even in the best of times.

But through all of Loh's marital bellyaching her complaints do reveal much of the rotteness that's created by cheap energy. For her friend who's husband has complained she's gained a few LBS maybe we need to look at food intake and level of work. If each of us had to hack out some sort of physical labor each day (and that is not only "chain-gang" type stuff but also washing clothes by hand) instead of using oil/electirc coal powered machines then I'm sure we'd all be a bit more slim. Add that to a high-carb, corn influence diet and vio-la: fat people.

Another of her associates mates is bookmarking porn sites. Not that there's nothing wrong about naked women but the ability to transmit data rapidly from all points across the globe is more than our brains were developed to deal with. Is the 36-24-36 chick, legs akimbo, better than my wife? No, but she's different and right there on the screen. No contest way in favor of alienation to one's spouse.

And for Loh herself who's traveling husband is gone 20 weeks a year (and to her Samantha-esque friend who's late night snacks take the redeye to the bedroom) wouldn't it be save to say that both situations would be different with out airline travel. If he was home more often they prob could be a bit steamier. Would the SITC chick be as free if everyone in town knew her sexual proclivities? I doubt it.

Loh tosses out the fact that attraction is on a 4yr timer, long enough to raise a baby to an age where it can fend for itself. Back then we also only lived to 30yrs on average and had no sedentary home. If anything it's a case to go back to a rough, yet sustainable hunter-gatherer society versus a latte'd-up, instant industrial society we have now.

This is not to say that nobody can benefit from the stories shared but if you are relating to what is being ready you're already suffering from the poisonous society we lived in and are medicated by the countless media options that constantly declare hot, passionate love forever. Falling in loves the easy part, making it last is hard. That's why nobody does the sequel to the "guy gets girl" called "guy and girl learn to deal with each other".

That's Where The Bailout Went

I'd never thought I would be part of a bank that failed but alas, WaMu did, and I was quickly shuffled under the giant condor wing of Chase Bank. Today, they converted me from the spectre of my "WaMu" account to a full-on Chase account.

They were polite and courteous to the point of actually showing me how online banking works (redundant) but what was creepier was that when I told him I didn't know my account info for my various monthly pay-outs the friendly banker produced a dog-eared paged binder full of a corporate greatest hits of pay-to addresses.

Beside the discomfort of a banker knowing what corporate hegemons (proper use of word?) that my wallet bows to each month is it disturbing for a seemingly "helpful" corporate collusion to get each other paid? I think setting up payments to other corporations is a little different than Mickey D's palling up with Pixar to shill plastic figurines in the happy meals.

Yes We Can is Needed NOW

Friedman speaks it right in the NYT today. Yes, we need the climate bill passed in all it's imperfect glory. But what concerns me more is where is the eerily quiet Obama on all this. As Friedman point out:

I also hope we will hear more from President Obama. Something feels very
calculating in how he has approached this bill, as if he doesn’t quite want to
get his hands dirty, as if he is ready to twist arms in private, but not so much
that if the bill goes down he will get tarnished. That is no way to fight this
war.

It's like he's already positioning for 2012 and thought it'd good to have him back again (probably) his next term will be worse than this one if he doesn't get the ball moving now.

And just to further my point that the Legislative Branch is worthless, Yglesias' point on the issue:

The Senators in question aren’t going to care that coal state House members already did this. They need to do it personally so they can claim credit. So you need to go back to a cleaner bill, then basically let the coal state Democrats
do what Rick Boucher (D-WV) already did all over again. That way they can say that they changed the bill, and saved Appalachia from the depredations of the environmentalists, which sounds a lot better than just giving Boucher the credit.

And, yes, that’s stupid. But I’m quite confident that’s how congress works.

King of Waste of Time

Unless you want to be picked for the 2nd OJ trial you know the Michael Jackson died last week. I guess it's a positve(?) human trait that we gloss over all the bad (would pedophile be real bad?) stuff one did in one's life. Well, this graph would sum up the hypocrisy of death.

Humans are the Problem (Not the Deer)

Illinois is complaining there are too many deer. The biggest complaint is that they eat someone's pretty flowers ("Tulips -- they absolutely love those things"). So unfortunate but deer have had to come a long way to get here.

Deer were nearly extinct(!) in the early 1900's:

Although hunters and agricultural development all but eliminated Illinois'white-tailed deer in the early 1900s, efforts to restock the herds in the 1930s were wildly successful, according to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

That's when our population was only 80 million. Who's to say what would happen now with a population around 300 million.

But of course if they did just as we'd please there'd be no problems.

The deer might be more welcome if they craved less-desirable plants, such as garlic mustard, an invasive weed that crowds out the native species, Jones
said."Deer don't eat it, unfortunately," he said. "If they did, it would be a
godsend."

Let's get Monsanto on that!