Doomer Hope

People naturally associate "doomers" as straight up haters who don't want to see anything good happen. I disagree. Doomers, such as myself, don't want to see bad things happen but get their doomer attitude from being completely honest about the perilous situation that lies ahead. They do have hope but tend not to look at things with doe-eyed optimism when they know a giant pain tsunami is on the way.

Need an example. Check out James H. Kunstler's weekly blog today for a true Defcon 1 Doomer's call for hope:

Perhaps it's time to redefine "hope" in the greater social sense of the word. To me, hope is not synonymous with "wishes fulfilled." In fact, hope should not be about wishing at all. Hope should be based on confidence that the individual or group is reliably competent enough to meet the challenges that circumstances present. Hope is justified when people demonstrate to themselves that they can behave ably and bravely. Hope is not really possible in the face of patent untruthfulness. It is derived from a clear-eyed and courageous view of what is really going on. I don't think that defines any of the behavior in the United States these days. We've become a self-jiving nation intent on playing shell games, running Ponzi schemes, and working Polish blanket tricks on ourselves.

Doomers don't wish there to be money trees that solve all our problems. They don't fetish over technological wunder-projekts that will defy physics. Doomer Hope means having the power to let go of fantasy and make hard-nosed decisions on what needs to get done to get through the challenges that are coming.

Don't mistake this for some populist homage to hard working pipefitters who want their kids to grow up to be yuppie marketing managers so they don't have to break their backs molding pipe all day. Doomer Hope is letting go, getting back to work and enjoying the small gains achieved with much sacrifice as it has been through human existence before cheap energy.

A Real Blockbuster

Michael Ruppert brings a real Halloween horror film when Collapse comes out November 6th. It should be shown in every PTA meeting, corporation, church get-together, football game, everywhere. Cuz we need everyone to get this thing right.

Too Big To Fail

Are populations to big to fail? Ethiopia needs a massive food bailout to keep their people from starving to death. In a world wrought with global climate problems caused by massive use of hydrocarbons and overpopulation is it in the world's best interest to use more hydrocarbons to transport food in from distant countries to feed a population size larger than what it's land can sustain? Do the Federal Reserve Food Banks get to come in and control what people do with their new found lease on life or will another massive bailout be needed after only a few months?

Famine is a word that has been long vacant from Western cultures and so have been famine free for many years, a situation that I'm sure third world countries would like to reach as well. But if a country's population cannot feed itself from its own land base, does the world owe that country the food supplies to maintain its overpopulated state?

Discuss at the dinner table while trying to ignore the irony.

The Horror, The Horror

Yes, that's a bird who was found dead and decayed with a stomach filled with plastics. Even if you say you want to save the environment anytime you use plastic you roll the dice on unintentionally killing animals locally or a thousand miles away. Climate Progress has the rest.

Plastic we use floats with the ocean currents so plastics that enter the ocean off L.A. end up in Hawaii and in a giant "garbage island" in the Pacific. Vice TV had a great 12 part series which will make you cry all the milk out of your cereal.

Cuz I Like Scary Quotes

The UK Guadian has a nice little post that combines two of my favor things: government ineptitude and peak oil.

Here's a nice lil' scary snippet:

"There is a train crash about to happen from an energy point of view. But politicians everywhere seem to have entirely missed the scale of the problem," said the report's author, Simon Taylor

Yup, I'd say that's a pretty accurate assessment. Unless the govt's are working on a non-nuclear weapon based Deus Ex Machina that will save us all. Doubt that.

But that's not all folks!

The IEA expects production from existing oilfields to fall by 50% between now and 2020 and warned the world needs to find an additional 64m barrels a day of capacity by 2030 – equivalent to six times current Saudi Arabian production.

Yes, in about 10 years we'll be at 50% of our current oil capacity. Proceed to clean the crap out of your pants.

We'll Leave That There

Daily Show does probably the best non-intentional report demonstrating Neil Postman's theory on the entertainmentinzation (yes, that's a word) of the news industry. We'll leave it there? Starts at the 1:45 mark and it goes to you pee your pants with laughter.

There is so much to cover here I can't take it but I would say a news anchor questioning if she can "check the facts" has got to be as hilarious as it is soul-flattening.

ASPO No Chance

Colin Campbell, founder of ASPO, gives Obama a free pass on the peak oil issue.

Question: What about the notion of making America energy independent?

Campbell: It can’t be done voluntarily. To make America energy-independent is not something I think any government can achieve. But within 50 years that’s what nature will deliver. Countries will have to be energy independent. They have no alternative. Some may get there quicker than others, but it’s not something some government will say, well this is our plan of action. It will delivered to them by the force of nature. So America will indeed be energy independent and probably quite soon if these imports dry out. What that means and how they react to such a situation is another day’s work.

Happy Monday, America!

Disney and Global Warming

What a scary interpretation via Disney Co of what global warming would be! You could say the the government's attempt to solve the problem has been an "utter failure" of it's own.

Vermin of the Ocean

Fishermen in the NE are complaining of the return of the dogfish, the "vermin of the sea", as the reason their fishing stock is declining. The same dogfish are under federal protection. What is a culture of empire to do? Do you let the fishermen deplete the fish stock or do you let the burgeoning dogfish population devour the few cod and mackerel that are remaining due to the overfishing in the first place? If we had just learned to live within our place in the world we wouldn't have to consider any animal "vermin". Every species would have it's place and we wouldn't have fishing unions or government bureaucracies waging stupid battles that neither really knows how to solve.

Obama, the New Gorbachev?

Earlier today I alluded to Dmitry Orlov who has a running racket on the USA/USSR collapse comparison. Though he reaction to Obama's big win is a bit unsettling.

Gorbachev certainly deserves credit for making sure that the USSR disintegrated with a whimper and not a bang. May Barak Obama be just as successful in completing the dissolution of the USA, quietly and without any undue bloodshed. Moving forward, I wish him a long and happy unemployment.

The Everlasting Population Problem

It's good to see some people trying to work together to fix this nuisance of a climate problem. Something that needs to be considered is what "constants" we assume will continue as normal all the way to 2050. Growth of course is paramount but if you think of the cuts in comparison to population growth the real nature of the cuts is astounding.

Each American would emit 3 tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2050, down from 24 in 1990, if President Barack Obama achieves his goal of an 80 percent cut in national emissions from 1990 and the population rises to 400 million by 2050.

This is quite a reversal in sustainability. Dmitry Orlov loves to point out that the world can sustain 300 million people who earn $1/year or 300,000 who make $100,000/year. Think about the lifestyle that we will live if we have 400 million living at 80% of the carbon footprint of people in 1990! Think back to 1990. The population was a shade under 250 million. Cars, lot smaller and fewer, non-existent personal portable technology. (The Gameboy just came out in 1989). Think to 2009 terms where nearly everyone has a car, cellphones, ipods, computers, fancy audio/visual setups, etc.

I can think of two things: either we are going to inherit alien technology from Area 51 to make all these things run on farts or really all the world leaders know we are going to be at carbon footprint level of A.D. 200 due to a combo of peak oil/peak soil/peak water/peak fish/climate change.

Shingle Thievery

What would drive a human to steal roofing shingles? How about peak oil and/or global warming.

Investigators believe some thieves are part of an organized operation, stockpiling the materials in anticipation of hurricanes, tornadoes and other roof-ripping storms that would heighten the demand for their stolen wares. Other thefts may be isolated incidents from people looking to sell the shingles to roofers for a quick buck. Also, the soaring price of shingles, which are petroleum-based products, has driven the demand for cheaper, black-market roofing material.

Is it too early to start the insanity?

Climate Crock

DeSmogBlog has another great video from Peter Sinclair's series "Climate Denial Crock of the Week", this week we get to watch one come to life. To be able to watch a statement be chopped up, taken out of context and then blabbered all over the airwaves is something to behold. If news centers actually had people to fact check, like Peter Sinclair does, the world we be a much safer, saner place.

Also, DeSmogBlog's proprietor, James Hoggan, gets a shout out from climate-awesome blogger Climate Progress for his new book Climate Cover-Up. If you feel like crying yourself to sleep at night or need motivation to keep writing your congressman everyday than this book which covers the climate denier atrocities is right up your alley.

Real Humans, Real Hunt

Humans were built to do many things but maybe our greatest asset was endurance. Check out this "persistence hunt" from possibly the last remaining tribe to do so.

Note all the respect he pays to the animal and the personal sacrifice in energy he commits to taking down his prey. The hunter takes down a kudu (big antelope) with little more than a spear, a water bottle and some tracking knowledge. A minuscule carbon footprint compared to Western hunters and their disposable shells, scout cameras, and ATV's.

A Jumble That's for Sure

Douthat tries to make sense of something in his GOP screed today. I would say this editorial is a fairly good description of the bankrupcty of ideas that comprise the Republican way of thinking. Not once in the entire piece is there any allusion to anything that would remotely appear to be a GOP suggestion on how to fix the problems associated with the income gap.

Douthat offers us typical GOP gripes: taxes ("soaking the wealthy with higher tax rates and cutting taxes for everybody else "), big government ("one way that a Democrat majority can plausibly bring down inequality: Just let government keep growing.") and competition (" Democrats, the heroic efforts of some liberals notwithstanding, remain the party of the education bureaucracy, resistant to all but the most incremental efforts to bring choice and competition to our public schools.")

Same old, stuff right? Yup.

Douthat does touch on an interesting point:

this is because the Democrats have become as much the party of the rich as the
Republicans,

This is where it takes skill for a humble reader to read between the lines. There is no two-party system. It's one big party that just yells about different things but always does the same thing. See lobbyists for example.

Douthat also touches on immigration, taxation reform, education policy and it's all good. But aruging about these symptoms is like being trapped in an avalanche and arguing if the snow is runny or fluffy. You're already in waaaaay to deep and it won't be a clean way of solving how to get out. Not when one party won't even talk about a solution. This whole system is busted, top to bottom. It needs to be completely thrown out and rebuilt.

Douthat reaches his conclusion on the following note:

That combination could eventually create the more egalitarian America that Democrats have long promised to deliver. The question is whether Americans will thank them for it.

Will they? As the income gap increases to widen and more people fall into the crappier half of that equation with the every continuing rece-depression, more people are going to need a helping hand. How else will their kids eat? It's like when you walk into a nice government facility or get a tax break and you say to yourself "ah, this is nice". I think people will like it just fine.

What Does it Really Mean

Star Wars as were it written by environmentalists. The parody is funny but its implications for actual action are a bit more unsettling than the humor lets on.

Hallelujah

Friedman laid it all out yesterday in his End of We editorial:

The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.

Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.

There was a great doc that came out a couple years ago called Why We Fight. The closing line came from Karen Kwiatkowski and I think it applies here.

I think we fight because basically not enough people are standing up saying, "I'm not doing this anymore."

I, for one, am not.