The Human Ecology of Collapse, Part One: Failure is the Only Option
December 10, 2009
Part One: Failure is the Only Option
…A great many people aware of the limits to fossil fuels, for example, have assumed that the question that needs answering is how to sustain a modern industrial society on alternative energy.
Ask that, though, and you’re back in the Waste Land, because any answer you give to that question is wrong. The question that has to be asked is whether a modern industrial society can exist at all without vast and rising inputs of essentially free energy, of the sort only available on this planet from fossil fuels, and the answer is no. Once that’s grasped, other useful questions come to mind – for example, how much of the useful legacy of the last three centuries can be saved, and how – but until you get past the wrong question, you’re stuck chasing the mirage of a replacement for oil that didn’t take a hundred million years or so to come into being.
…Beneath all the yelling, though, are a set of brutal facts nobody is willing to address. Whether or not the current round of climate instability is entirely the product of anthropogenic CO2 emissions is actually not that important, because it’s even more stupid to dump greenhouse gases into a naturally unstable climate system than it would be to dump them into a stable one. Over the long run, the only level of carbon pollution that is actually sustainable is zero net emissions, and getting there any time soon would require something not far from the dismantling of industrial society and its replacement with something much less affluent. Now of course we would have to do this anyway, since the world’s fossil fuel supplies are depleting fast enough that production limits will begin to bite hard in the years and decades ahead, but this simply sharpens the point at issue.
JHK’s blog: Hunky Dory
August 3, 2009
Here, in the dog days of summer, it seems to me that the situation in the USA is so fundamentally bad, so unpromising, so booby-trapped for failure, that I wonder if there has ever been a society so badly deluded as ours. We’re prisoners of our wishes, living in a strange dream-time, oblivious to the forces gathering at the margins of our vision, lost in a wilderness of our own making.
Dmitry Orlov clearing it all up:
June 17, 2009
…The idea of perpetuating the status quo through alternative means is all-pervasive, because so many people in positions of power and authority wish to preserve their positions. And so just about every proposal we see involves avoiding collapse instead of focusing on what comes after it. A prime example is the push to develop alternative energy. Many of these alternatives turn out to be fossil fuel amplifiers rather than self-sufficient resources: they require fossil fuel energy as an essential input. Also, many of them require an intact industrial base, which runs on fossil fuels. There is a pervasive idea that these alternatives haven’t been developed before for nefarious reasons: malfeasance on the part of the greedy oil companies and so on. The truth of the matter is that these alternatives are not as potent, physically or economically, as fossil fuels. And here is the real point worth pondering: If we can no longer afford the oil or the natural gas, what makes us think that we can afford the less potent and more expensive alternatives? And here is a follow-up question: If we can’t afford to make the necessary investments to get at the remaining oil and natural gas, what makes us think that we will find the money to develop the less cost-effective alternatives?
“In Transition” preview
June 12, 2009
JHK’s weekly blog: “Clusterfuck Nation”
June 8, 2009
Lagging Recognition
Through the tangle of green shoots and sprouting mustard seeds, a certain nervous view persists that the arc of events is taking us to places unimaginable. The collapse of General Motors and Chrysler signifies more than the collapse of US car manufacturing. It spells the end of the motoring era in America per se and the puerile fantasy of personal liberation that allowed it to become such a curse to us.
Of course, many Nobel prize-winning economists would argue that it has only been a blessing for us, but that only shows how the newspapers are committing suicide-by-irrelevance. And if other societies, such as China’s late-entry industrial start-up, want to adopt a similar fantasy, they will only find themselves all the sooner in history’s garage with a tailpipe in their mouths.
“The peak oil crisis: watching a mega-crisis”
June 5, 2009
To summarize our situation: If and when the U.S. and world economy rebounds significantly, the increased demand for oil will quickly lead to higher prices which in turn is likely to choke off the rebound; if the U.S. and world economy continues to contract, demand for oil and oil prices will fall for a while, but the economy will be approaching depression levels; if the massive deficit-financed bailouts lead to lack of interest in U.S. government securities and a weaker dollar, interest rates will soar and choke off economic growth; if the U.S. and other governments seriously clamp down on carbon emissions to control global warming, higher energy prices are likely. Our economy and future stand at a crossroad.
…None of this bodes well for a return to life as we knew it only a few years ago.
With the need for the public to take swift action, Homer-Dixon admits he’s alarmed by the amount of public apathy especially amongst the youth. “I don’t understand why young people aren’t out there in the thousands on the streets saying, ‘This is our future.’
“I think part of the problem is that a lot of the public doesn’t understand how serious this is,” he continued. “And the real problem? There’s a certain lack of mobilization, there’s a lot of apathy, especially among young people. They’re not getting engaged, they’re not organized into a politically mobilized force.”
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Features/2009/05/29/9620211-ca.html
“The fifth problem: peak capital”
June 2, 2009
The industrial capital stock grows to a level that requires an enormous input of resources. In the very process of that growth it depletes a large fraction of the resource reserves available. As resource prices rise and mines are depleted, more and more capital must be used for obtaining resources, leaving less to be invested for future growth. Finally investment cannot keep up with depreciation, and the industrial base collapses, taking with it the service and agricultural systems, which have become dependent on industrial inputs.
When do we expect peak capital to occur? According to the “standard run” of the LTG report, it may arrive during the first two decades of the century. It may very well be that much of what we are seeing now is a symptom of peak capital approaching: airports, roads, bridges, dikes, dams, and about everything that goes under the name of “infrastructure” are decaying everywhere in the world. The whole economic system is becoming unable to maintain the level of complexity that it had reached just a few decades ago.
JHKunstler’s weekly blog
June 1, 2009
Shattered and Shuttered
…The humanity visible on the downtown streets of Watertown looked like extras who wandered away from the latest Road Warrior location shoot — semi-hominid creatures with strange loping gaits, arresting hair-dos, and enough tattoos to qualify them for harpoon duty on Herman Melville’s Pequod. You passed by groups of them on the streets and wanted to make sure the car’s doors were locked….
…Burger King was doing some kind of promotion in its Watertown huts and the marquee in their several parking lots proclaimed — I swear to God — “Ask us about our Angry Burger.” WTF? Is the rage of lumpen America so repressed now that it can only be expressed in menu items that turn people into hulking four-hundred-pound monsters?
http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/06/shattered-and-shuttered.html
“155: Ethical Capitalism for the Earbud Generation”
May 27, 2009
C-Realm Podcast Episode 155
After finishing up the interview with James Howard Kunstler recorded at the Kunstler Kave, KMO welcomes Duncan Crary, the talent behind the talent on the Kunstlercast, to the C-Realm to talk about pod casting, appropriate technology, the relationship between the old and the new media, finding the sweet spot between opinionated reporting and delusions of objectivity, and creating a niche for “ethical capitalists” in the new economy.
http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/2009-05-27T12_23_12-07_00
