It is becoming increasingly apparent that the train has left the station for the demise of Industrial civilization. Rather than being a set of chilling thought experiments or doomer fantasies, the Long Descent now underway will be an exciting time of innovation, action movie, and zombie technologies morphing into a new way of life.

Out of the Fog of Collapse there are a few voices of clarity that stand out due to their pragmatic, realistic, yet hopeful suggestions for a way to proceed. Some apply dark humour, some provide dry dusty data, and some provide integration of the data sets with the right harmonic of solutions to the oncoming transition times. Many of these voices can be heard here:

http://energybulletin.net

John Michael Greer is one of these chaps. I've been following his blog out on the Energy Bulletin for a few years, and just finished his book The Long Descent where he pulls together the problem and offers some possible solutions. He writes beautifully, is well versed in the Peak Oil data sets, and hails back to a time we are all familiar with, offering anew many of the solutions which might have made this a more leisurely journey if we had persisted in them back in the 70's.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/

Appropriate technology, gardens, compost, bikes, and working with Nature instead of beating her to death. I want to build this world, and sweep up the current capitalist manifestation into the compost pile. From this seat, there are about 3 years left to continue to have access to relatively cheap fuel, which we can use to get some foundations in place for a lower tech, lower energy future. After that, the wheels look to come off this game, in not so slow motion, just like Saint Donella told us in Limits to Growth.

All the latest energy reports from DOD, , universities , and even the venerable Lloyd's seem to be circling the 2012-2015 time frame when the planet starts losing the ability to meet the demand for oil, DOD and others expecting a 10% shortfall. And then it is just down the slope of 4% depletion rate per year from there on out ad infinitum. Not a show stopper, not an immediate collapse, hell in 20 years we will still be producing as much oil as we were in 1970, but with China and India joining the fray of the last minutes of Industry, the depletion curve might move a bit quicker than expected.

In 1990 , two countries lost 10% of their oil imports - Cuba and N. Korea - when the Soviet Union collapsed. One country, Cuba, weathered it because they had local communities with a small garden ethic, and were willing to roll back to less energy intensive technologies. The other country, followed a path of the aristocracy protecting themselves, allowed 1 million of the 'small' people to starve to death. It seems to matter which choice you make.

Anyway, same old story. Look busy, Santa's coming.

Peace Love and composting toilets,

Thom

Throw Out My Wallet

--more sparring with email friends--

"Besides, what do the liberals know about jobs? Jobs are created by business. You guys hate business. As soon as any business gets profitable you want to stomp it to death with taxes and anti-trust investigations! In order to create jobs you have to accept the notion of profitable businesses. You people think profit is evil."

==========================

Oh, for chrisakes..... jobs? from profitable business? When business sniffs profit by having jobs done in Mexico (1980's), China (1990's) and India (2000) they never hesitate to LOSE jobs here in the USA in favor of higher PROFITS by exploiting third world labor and calling it opportunity.

Profit, as the sole guiding principle and arbiter of business decision making, is one of the greater evils of capitalism. Evil being described as something against the common Good, such as mountain top removal, or dead zones from chemical fertilizers in our oceans, or marketing SUV's, or clear cutting boreal forests, or slash and burn clearing for raising beef or bio-fuels, or over-fishing to collapse the North Atlantic Cod populations, etc etc ... all being justified, by business, as the righteous pursuit of profits.

Profit is the fuel that drives the great engine of capitalism to seek continuous growth in a limited system, certainly an evil against plain common sense - expecting a limited, closed, material system to provide endless growth.

Profit, beyond the reasonable measure of recompense for effort, is the distorted lens, the fun house mirror in which we are all expected to view the world, and ourselves. Action without profit, in this mirror, is useless. Activity, effort, art, craftsmanship, music, compassion, altruism, simple kindness; any human endeavour seems now to be judged on the altar of profit, and if not tied to some remuneration of profit, is deemed foolish, trivial and useless.

Profit is the rapacious voice that says ALL and NOW, and considers nothing beyond its immediate satisfaction. No consciousness of connectedness, of ecology, of sustainability, no concern for a future, no looking out to seven generations, or even to our brothers, but NOW! and ALL! Cut ALL those trees, take ALL those fish, and do it NOW, this quarter, and the devil take the future.

Profit is, in many cases, the value derived from exploitation. The exploitation of labor, exploitation of free nature, exploitation of human weakness. Profit courses like a drug through the hearts of women and men, destroying lives, minds and ultimately destroying the natural foundations on which we all, all of The Creation, rely. Larger doses are required, requiring more theft, and leaving, as all drug addictions will, a dissatisfaction, a soul sickness, even in the midst of high profits and high times.

Business has become the sacred calf at which we worship, our temples and cathedrals now built in months to the gods of insurance, and consultancy, and finance. And oh! how we worship, sacrificing all; our breath, our sweat, our minds, and all the precious moments of our precious lives to feed the sacred calf of economic growth and higher profits. Business claims to provide the life we desire, to provide the products, the services, the "progress" that we all yearn for, all in exchange for just some small profit, some small payment for marginalizing, co-opting, and removing the resiliency and skill that existed in the world, before profit drove us all to become enslaved to an economic system driven by and grounded in this idea of profit which ultimately benefits only a few.

Businesses, large corporate enterprises, will not create jobs here, what are we thinking? We have been watching them take the jobs of our fathers and hand them gift wrapped to the Mexicans, Indians and Chinese for the last 40 years! And this was done, not for any other reason than to create Profit for a few million elites. They pacified us with low low prices, the consumer sheep that we are. We sold our economy for twenty dollar coffee makers and low priced hair dryers from Wal Mart.

So, yes, there are a number of valid reasons from this seat to consider Profit an evil that we could better avoid, a drug that once imbibed, becomes the monkey that eats the world, and leaves us in the end with nothing but copper pennies and abstract shit.

Capitalism is killing us,

Thom

Better to have the crime, the suicidal lovers,
or the incest between two brothers,
as between two mirrors
falling in love and loving their reflections,
better to venture and eat the poisoned bread,
better adultery on beds of ashes,
the ferocious passions,
and delirium, its venomous ivy,
and the sodomite who carries for his buttonhole carnation a gobbet of spit,
better be killed by stoning in the public square than tread the mill that grinds out into nothing the substance of our life,
changes eternity into hollow hours,
minutes into penitentiaries,
and time into some copper pennies
and abstract shit.

-- Ocatvio Paz

-- from Sun Stone

-- response to an email list --

I don't disagree with your statement that 'Growth works.' It certainly does what it intends; creates jobs, increases output of the shiny things (and useful things as well) , and ameliorates age old problems of survival. Life grows, that is what it does. It has an arc: seed, seedling, shoot, plant, fruit, compost. Provided that the nutrients are there, and the water, this arc will play out in any garden. My contention is that we are at the cusp of the fruit/compost period for this civilization. Growth, as Saint Donella Meadows has shown us, has Limits. We are now hitting many of those limits in this unique moment of time in the planets history.

Growth as an economic strategy is fine when the resources are abundant. It works well when there is new lands to settle, new resources to discover, virgin forests to exploit, ores and oil to be had with a high EROEI etc.

It has worked quite well over the last 200 years, no doubt about that. I will set aside the intended consequences of income disparity, oppression, and environmental destruction for now and try to stick to the economics of it.

The question we face today is that Growth is no longer possible, so why are we continuing to focus on that as a viable economic paradigm? It is quite clear that Growth, in your terms, is impossible for most of the worlds people. In fact, growth now is a cancer, eating into our natural capital. Earth Overshoot Day is now....September 25 http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/earth_overshoot_day/ . How do you promise Growth to the Chinese and Indians and Brazilians in the face of that reality?

As much as we all want to keep our comfortable life, the fact is that the only demonstrably sustainable lifestyle is , sorry ... hunter/gatherer. And as we well know with 7 billion humans, huge megalopilis enclaves, and already exploited natural resources, this is no longer an option for most of the planet. Defining Sustainability is like nailing jelly to a tree ... or like rubbing a rabbits foot. It is hard to get it right, but makes us feel good by saying the word. Like you, I have not yet found an economics designed around sustainability. And actually, I don't expect to find one that will provide the same level of comfort as the current growth model.

Subsistence living, scraping out your food and materials from your own plot of land, is portrayed as a horrible thing by you, and yet, hasn't it always been thus for most of the humans? And is it such a horror? Is it horrible to dig the soil, plant the seeds, harvest the fruit, manage the productivity of the soil, preserve your food, make necessary items from your own materials? Hard work, yes, but a horrible life? I dont agree with that. My own experience in just dipping my toe into gardening and soil building has shown it to be a 'spiritual experience' if I may use the term (mutters some pedantic reference to James and Varieties of ...here...)

It is quite a difficult problem in the macro sense. Capitalism, growth, this current economy with all its wonders ....I would love this to continue!! (with many mods to the capitalism and social justice part) But the hard fact is...it can not. There is simply not enough stuff here. For me, I take a good programmers approach: divide and conquer. I take one aspect of the problem about sustainability such as : It is not sustainable to fly lettuce from Chile to Calfornia, and I grow my own lettuce. I take the next problem : It is not sustainable to clear cut trees to make packaging that gets throw in a landfill after ONE use. I reduce buying packaged goods, I buy in bulk, and the packages I do use, I save and use as sheet mulch, eventually returning them to the soil here. The ultimate goal would be that I no longer purchase any packaged goods, but this seems like a Herculean task here in this current economy.

Localization of human needs seems the most likely candidate for sustainability. Small communities providing the light manufacturing, food production, and specialties for the local population. The down side of this is that the large corporations that have taken over all aspects human production, will need to go away. And that sir, is the political problem, not that people are afraid of hard work. The rivers of money that pollute our politics will always be spent on preserving the status quo of Growth and corporate hegemony over the basics of life. Until we agree that sweat is revolutionary, that individual effort and skill are the weapons of the revolution, the status quo will prevail. Gandhi, India, spinning wheels, and British cotton being the poster child on this idea.

No easy answers, and certainly no macro answers from this seat. I just see the data, see the storm clouds out there, and realize that I can only walk my own talk, and hope it does not get too sporty on the social scene. Because, as Mr. Lallo points out, humans are violent, and hungry humans are randomly violent. I do expect that social unrest, meaning people killing each other for food, may be in our future. No, Rodney, unfortunately we can't all get along.

But we get along better on a full stomach which is why returning to an agrarian state of mind in the physical world, while maintaining a high level of mental endeavour in the virtual seems to me to be the proper course. 1860 with laptops. I hope the society decides to preserve our connectivity, preserve our computing prowess and ability to manufacture these systems and maintain these networks, and allow the sprawl and freeways to revert to small roads and smaller houses, with gardens surrounding each, and community power being generated from each rooftop. And then I woke up.

Peace, freeBSD , and Compost,

Thom

Micro-Skills

Finally have a day off and thought to drop in for a moment and share an interesting article on Transition Towns. http://www.bohemian.com/bohemian/06.17.09/feature-0924.html

TV and air conditioners. Think of the energy requirements! If we shut them all off tomorrow, we could probably shut down a thousand coal fired power plants. And would we be that much worse off? Humans have existed for something like a million years without air conditioning until the last 50 or so. But now we think we can't live without it. And what would we do without American Idol and Dancing with the Stars? Would our lives would be so much poorer? Of course, that would mean on History Channel and no Discovery Channel too. Hmmmmmm..

And now technology steps in again with blogs, and IM, facebook and twitter-to build communities again. But these things all require more technology, more production, more energy. Our Ford would be very proud of us!

- my friend Bob from an email list

5 years after my bodhi moment relating to peak oil and climate change, the premises are further strengthened by the data and well...by just looking out my window. And although I am not deeply involved in the Transition movement as yet, this appears to be the emergence of the one realistic solution to the hmmmm, not looming, but now ongoing dilemma - Localization of all requirements.

Growing food is the entry point to Transition - well said in the article. And what is being discussed here, the air conditioning, the TV, the computers, the sheer waste of energy on comfort and entertainment with its unintended consequence of isolation and community shredding, will not be possible in the near future. Like globalization, it will just move into the strange period of history of our petroleum feeding frenzy. Localizing, community interactions, neighbors relying on neighbors, is poised to make a big comeback in the coming decade as we will either stand together, or fall alone.

So, I guess this is just another friendly reminder that we have about 5 years to get to a comfortable low energy zone for ourselves before the duct tape stimulus efforts fail and the wheels finally come off this capitalist nightmare. I won't bore you with the details of IEA, US Defense Dept, PostCarbon Institute data, but 2013-2015 looks to be when that oil starts getting might pricey. If you consider what $147/bl oil did to the economy last year, well ... $300 should be just grand.

Exponential growth cannot continue forever if the tokens are of a material nature. You soon require more tokens than there are atoms in the universe. Too bad for us, that realization only comes at the last few iterations. Economies based on perpetual growth will hit limits, as we are seeing right now. My future retirement scenarios, based on perpetual growth of a resource dependent system may be misguided as our economies use 1000 barrels a second of oil to function. I don't need computer models, or neural networks to calculate this...nothing more than simple artihmetic paints the likely outcome.

Corn in the fields.... micro farming (or as we would say in Los Ankgeleeees, micro-growing) . That's an entry point. Micro milling, micro-brewing, micro-metalsmithing, micro-lumbermills, micro-canneries....and working our ass off most days to get the harvest in, same as it ever was before up from the ground came the bubbling crude. I have rows of corn coming up in my yard, mulched by squash, with pole beans climbing up the cornstalks. The '3 sisters' which provided the sustenance for the indigenous peoples here for 10,000 years are a wonderful example of the perma-culture ethic. Everything doing more than one job, the squash mulching the corn, the beans fixing nitrogen for the corn, the corn acting as the trellis for the bean. What the hell I do with the corn come havest, I have no idea, but life is for learning. 5 years.

It doesn't have to be this way. That was the counter culture meme we all gave up on. This time, the nascent counter culture is about skill, about recovering some recently lost knowledge that allowed humans to live. About eschewing the baubles of industrial output which serve to enrich a few, and returning to the planting-growing-harvesting rhythms of the thousands of years of human civilization. Forget Ford, it is time for Dionysus and Demeter.

Rely on Nature, the carnival shell game is over.

Thom

P.S.

We have had cloud cover here in June for 3 weeks solid now, night time temperatures very very cool, and my native born Cali friend confirmed the weirdness of it all, for I sure don't remember this in 30 years. Used to be a regular Nov-March rainy season, and clear blue skies from April to October, with a rare shower in mid summer. This is what climate change looks like I suppose, step by step, incremental weather changes, barely worth mentioning in polite conversation.

5 Years

Coffee Power

It is inspiring and fits in perfectly with my transition efforts. One of the experiments this year is making oil from the soy now growing in my yard (which was once a space buried under a concrete driveway). Granted, the amount of soy beans from the current planting will most likely provide me with a few meager quarts, but the benefits of soil nitrogen fixing and education are the important aspects of this at the moment. Coffee grounds! I've been composting them for years, but to be able to squeeze some liquid fuel AND still get the composting benefit is a new one for me. Will try this.

Although I live in the "failed state" of Sunny Southern California (LMAO), we still need a little heat in the winter. Standard fuel oil burning heaters will burn bio-diesel with no modifications. Replacing the natural gas heater with one of these, and a small bio-diesel processor provides another step on the road of unplugging from this collapsing large scale fragile system.

A few items of note that have shown up in the last few weeks for me:

This lecture is well worth the hour it takes to view it. Cal Tech chem professor Dr. Nate Lewis does the math on future energy, population and climate change out to 2050.

Ahhhhhh...The laws of nature, from which there is no escape.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/lectures/feb08.cfm

Even the IEA thinks this current economic stimulus revival is a Head Fake:

A shortage of oil could trigger another global recession around 2013 – says the IEA. By 2010 the price will reach new highs.

The IEA in Paris is warning of a new, much more severe global economic crisis around 2013. The reason is that investments in oil from new projects are being cancelled by large oil companies. If demand starts increasing in 2010, the oil price could explode, fire up inflation and put global growth at risk.

"We are concerned, that oil companies are reducing their investment levels. When demand returns a supply shortage could appear. We are even predicting that this shortage could occur in 2013." Said Nobuo Tanaka, head of the IEA in an interview with Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

http://energybulletin.net/node/48582

AND one for my friend Robert Baron Bob. The Transition Towns idea is spreading rapidly and is a decent framework for self-organizing. Here is a story on the group in Boulder.

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2009/apr/10/transition-movement-boulder-sustainable-lives/

Plan C

I'm about halfway through PLAN C by Pat Murphy ISBN: 978-0-86571-607-0 which is inline with the sustainable town idea.

Plan A being business as usual which provides us with a 6 degree Centigrade global rise in temp by 2100. Game Over.

Plan B being techno solutions which allow us to be such warm fuzzy "Greens" and still have this ridiculous lifestyle.

Plan C which is based on curtailing fossil fuels and localizing our economy.

Plan D which is Die Off (interestingly the highest outcome of the scenario runs done by Limits to Growth models)

I find myself at Plan C.5 - somewhere between knowing that localization and curtailment, self reliance and small scale systems will be the path to provide a reasonably survivable future for my cute little grand-daughter, and realizing that humans are mostly too stupid to live and that G20 Plan A agreements are probably dooming us to a Permian extinction in the short term.

In parting, extrapolate Google. They create a hugely successful information processing infrastructure by utlizing small commodity PC's networked together. I am installing a similar system at work using the Apache Hadoop project. It works running on old PC's that were doomed for the child crawling electronic dumps in East Asia.

Take food, energy and transportation, localize them, use the already manufactured things (and coffee grounds) , and they scale up to a vibrant new economy based on recognizing Limits and reducing inequity. The fact that the robber baron corporatocracy will drown in a bathtub by doing this is a plus.

Note to self: Save the planet, stop buying corporate products.

Peace love and espresso powered heating,

Thom

Rollback

I'm a programmer.  I like computers, I like the mental space that writing software creates in me, and I like the benefits of ubiquitous computing and large databases.  In writing applications that talk to these databases you quickly master the concept of the Transaction.   A Transaction is a set of updates, inserts, deletes that must all succeed.  If they do succeed, you can then Commit the transaction and the new data is allowed to exist.   If they do not succeed, you can salvage the integrity of the data in the data tables by performing a Rollback.  Rollback restores the system to it's previous state and assures the integrity of the overall system.  

This serves as a simple metaphor for me as I continue on my way in an attempt to build a Future.  It seems quite apparent to me that this Transaction of the last 30 years, this economic growth spurt which looks like nothing less than a money grab by a small segment of society inspired and abetted by the Reagan/Thatcher/Friedman schools of conceptual thinking,  has failed.   A number of tables are now corrupt: the economic table, the energy table, the climate table, the social equality and justice table.   

In the database world, this realization would require a Rollback, but instead I read that the G20 is executing a Commit !!  They are committing to business as usual, attempting to stimulate the economies to new growth, new plunder while fleecing the taxpaying masses of money to reward the very people who created this untenable transaction, which oftentimes is themselves.  

Unfortunately,  this Commit is doomed to achieve exactly what a Commit of corrupted data would achieve in any software system.  The system will demostrate bugs, report bad data, and in worst cases, crash.   The geological realities of energy make this path a fools party, and I expect it to create a Head Fake - the economy appearing to recover in preparation for a much sharper decline.   The physics of available oil seems to indicate that this is what will transpire over the next 5-10 years: 

http://energybulletin.net/node/48530

Rollback.   It is time to Rollback the current transaction and return to the practices and lifestyles (the datasets)  that worked so well for tens of thousands of years.  Time for us to wake up to this ridiculous manner of living, one that was only possible in the last 100 years thanks to the oil bonus, and begin now to restore our lives, restore our communities, and restore our natural surroundings from the horrific damage created by the ethos of unbridled capitalist economics.  

A Rollback looks like localization.   It looks like self reliance.  It looks like dynamic Freedom, like Attitude in the face of aristocratic arrogance, like dancing.   It looks like baked pies,  suburban gardens, community interactions, re-use of the already manufactured things,  reducing the store bought, and learning how to actually DO something.   

If  I want destructive capitalism to disappear, it seems quite easy.  Stop buying their stuff.  Stop giving them my money, and rely more on my skill and knowledge, and abundant Nature, to provide the life I want.  Rely more on my neighbors than the corporations, rely more on myself than on my government, and rely entirely on the natural laws from which there is no escape.  

Rollback, and retain some integrity of Life.  Rollback, and make more time for dancing, and less time for slavery to the greed of the elites.  Rollback, and discover your Freedom.