OVERSHOOT track info
January 3, 2010
1. The Good Times are Killing Me by Modest Mouse
2. Frank Rotering interviewed by KMO on the C-Realm Podcast
3. Paul Kingsnorth interviewed by Alex Smith on Radio Ecoshock
4. Albert Bates interviewed by KMO on the C-Realm Podcast
5. Frank Rotering C-Realm Podcast
6. Matthew Stein interviewed by Jason Bradford on the Reality Report
7. Matthew Stein Reality Report
8. Frank Rotering C-Realm Podcast
9. Paul Kingsnorth Radio Ecoshock
11. James Howard Kunstler interviewed by KMO on the C-Realm Podcast
12. Good Morning Beautiful by the Deftones
13. Richard Heinberg interviewed by Jason Bradford on the Reality Report
14. Charlie Hall interviewed by Janaia Donaldson on Peak Moment TV
17. Jay Hanson interviewed by Jason Bradford on the Reality Report
19. Richard Heinberg lecture available here
21. Bill Wilson interviewed by Janaia Donaldson on Peak Moment TV
22. Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime by Beck
23. Jim Kunstler interviewed by KMO on the C-Realm Podcast
24. Old Future by John Gorka
25. Colin Duncan interviewed by C.S. Soong on Against the Grain
26. Colin Duncan ATG
27. Paul Kingsnorth Radio Ecoshock
28. Hole in the Earth by the Deftones
29. Colin Duncan ATG
30. Richard Heinberg lecture
31. Rick Munroe interviewed by Kathleen Petty on CBC Radio
33. Colin Duncan ATG
34. Dmitry Orlov in a presentation to the Long Now Foundation
35. Dmitry Orlov Long Now Foundation
36. David Blume interviewed by KMO on the C-Realm Podcast
37. Adam Schick of Linnea Farm interviewed on Deconstructing Dinner
39. Nothing (But Flowers) by Talking Heads
40. KMO of the C-Realm Podcast reading a quote by Tim Bennett
41. Charles Eisenstein interviewed by KMO on the C-Realm Podcast
42. Dmitry Orlov interviewed by Alex Smith on Radio Ecoshock
43. Charles Eisenstein C-Realm
44. Sally Erickson interviewed by KMO on the C-Realm Podcast
45. James Howard Kunstler C-Realm
46. Frank Aragona of the Agroinnovations Podcast
Who Then Will Lead Us?
December 23, 2009
by Dan Allen
The Land of Make Believe
Our leaders have failed us. Our leaders are failing us. Our leaders will continue to fail us. As the farce of the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit recedes, the failure of our leadership stands naked before us — again. But only ever-so-briefly, before ducking back behind the glossy ad-campaign facade of empty promises and false hope. Other failures will follow. This is certain. “That’s OK!” we scream. “Just keep telling us what we want to hear! Tell us everything’s gonna be OK!” For we still live in The Land of Make Believe. …But ever more tenuously now, as the cracks in the veneer of normalcy widen ominously. We have a make-believe economy using fairy-dust money to manufacture an imaginary recovery. We’re fighting two wars with an imaginary national credit card. We have a national energy policy based entirely on imaginary technology and imaginary resources. We have a climate policy which will likely require wholesale migration to an imaginary planet. Enough already. It is time – past time – to ask ourselves the necessary questions: Who will step forward to restore sanity to our lives? Who will provide us the real leadership necessary to extricate ourselves from the delusional madhouse our culture has become? If our leaders will not lead us to a livable future, then who will?
Copenhagen Shmopenhagen
December 18, 2009
Don’t worry! Climate Change will reduce greenhouse gas emissions! Rising sea levels will inundate cities along coastlines which will result in the partial collapse of industrial civilization and those doomsday “business as usual” forecasts will never happen! Think food. Think soil. Think compost. As of now, we are dependent on industrial civilization for absolutely everything. So get ready.
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.
Did you get a CD? Now SHARE it. Or reproduce it.
November 25, 2009
Here is a list of some of the speakers, artists and links for more info on them. (In the works, and may not get around to it for a while.)
Check out the links on the right hand side of the page for more info. Leave a comment and perhaps an email address and maybe a discussion may begin online and/or off.
TV and Hollywood are a waste of highly valuable time. Learn to value time over money and walk out of a shitty movie (like 2012–which was composed of a few scattered CGI sequences buffered by vast quantities of filler. Of garbage. Of total waste).
Compost Humanure. (Humanure Handbook link over there –>)
Entropy gets no respect
August 27, 2009
The difference is that every part of the plateau has the same energy potential due to gravity, while every part of the slope does not have the same potential, and the boulder rolling down the slope can cash in some of the difference in potential to keep itself moving. The greater the difference in potential, the greater the payoff in terms of energy released. Notice, though, what happens when the boulder on the slope finally lurches to a stop at the bottom of the valley below: it stops, and another push won’t get it going again. It still has a lot of potential energy in that position – it has, in theory, 4500 miles to fall until it reaches the center of the earth – but there’s nowhere it can go to release any of that energy. Without a difference in potential, how much energy you’ve got is a meaningless statistic. (This is, incidentally, why the quest for zero point energy is an exercise in absurdity; by definition, zero point energy is at the lowest possible potential state, and therefore cannot be made to do any work at all.)
The same rule applies to every energy resource: there has to be a difference in potential that allows energy to be released, and the bigger the difference, the bigger the benefit. With petroleum, the difference is in chemical energy. Those long chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms have a lot of energy to release when they come apart and combine with highly reactive oxygen instead; the short chains that form natural gas have less, and the carbon in coal has less still, though it’s still a lot by the standards of other energy sources. All the extraordinary things our species has done with fossil fuels over the last three hundred years are functions, in effect, of the difference in chemical potential energy between a barrel of oil and a cloud of smoke.
Why are these reflections as welcome in the collective conversation of our time as a slug in a fresh green salad? Because they point up the profoundly shortsighted nature of the decisions that made the world in which all of us now live. The immense potential energy locked up in fossil fuels was put there by millions of years of photosynthesis. It’s as though, to return to our metaphor, living things down through the ages rolled boulders uphill and perched them high above the valley floor. After a half billion years or so, our species came along, and figured out how to roll those boulders downhill. As long as there are still plenty of boulders in place, we can continue using them, but when the rate at which we want to send boulders rolling downhill outstrips the boulder supply, it’s a waste of breath to insist that we can get the same results by bouncing pebbles across the valley floor.
The problem here is that very few people want to deal with that reality. The great majority will make themselves believe in zero point energy and evil space lizards and any other absurdity you care to name, rather than gulp and take a deep breath and admit that the prosperity we’ve enjoyed for the last three centuries was bought at our grandchildren’s expense. I sometimes suspect that one of the reasons so many people like to imagine an apocalyptic end to the industrial age is that sudden extinction is easier to contemplate than the experience of slowly waking up to the full extent of our own collective stupidity.
http://www.energybulletin.net/49964
Observed and Projected Temperature Rise
By the end of the century, mid-continental temperatures will rise between 2.5 and 13 degrees, on average, depending to a large extent on what happens in Copenhagen at the climate negotiations.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that was adopted many years ago said that the member nations should make every effort to “avoid serious or irreversible damage.” Solomon says we recently passed that point. Because of the long time that greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere, even if we halted all emissions immediately, the planet will continue to warm for at least another 600 years.
In the past 20 years, most of Tennessee has moved at least one agricultural zone to the southward, and some parts have moved as many as 3 zones. That means we can plant earlier and harvest later, which I suppose is a good thing. It also means that we are now ideal habitat for armadillos, fire ants and scorpions, all of which are pushing our possums up into Ohio.
Of course it is much worse for the trees, which can’t just uproot and move north. In earlier years we have seen blights claim white oaks and dogwoods. This year we are losing more hickories from the weather fluctuations that make droughts, extreme rainfalls, late frosts and early thaws more frequent.
In Boulder, David Yarrow, biochar pioneer, small farmer and permaculture trainer in New York and New England, unveiled a vision of a community-centered biochar lifestyle that obtains fertility, fuel and food in an ecologically responsible cycle between humans and the living natural world. The three economic drivers for biochar development are farm products (including fertilizer, fuels and power); climate services; and carbon-negative community. That third driver is the greening of the human habitat to deliver carbon-negative housing and workplaces — the whole built environment.
The First Die-off
August 17, 2009
A Civilisational Tipping Point
August 12, 2009
Although the need to cut carbon emissions has been evident for some time, not one country has succeeded in becoming carbon-neutral. Thus far this has proved too difficult politically for even the most technologically advanced societies. Could rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere prove to be as unmanageable for our early twenty-first century civilization as rising salt levels in the soil were for the Sumerians in 4000 BC?
http://permaculture.org.au/2009/08/13/a-civilisational-tipping-point/
The risk is that these accumulating problems and their consequences will overwhelm more and more governments, leading to widespread state failure and eventually the failure of civilization. The countries that top the list of failing states are not particularly surprising. They include, for example, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Chad, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Haiti. And the list grows longer each year, raising a disturbing question: How many failing states will it take before civilization itself fails? No one knows the answer, but it is a question we must ask.
We are in a race between tipping points in nature and our political systems. Can we phase out coal-fired power plants before the melting of the Greenland ice sheet becomes irreversible? Can we gather the political will to halt deforestation in the Amazon before its growing vulnerability to fire takes it to the point of no return? Can we help countries stabilize population before they become failing states?
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.
