Peak Oil is You

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Page added on April 25, 2017

Heinberg: Juggling Live Hand Grenades

Here are a few useful recent contributions to the global sustainability conversation, with relevant comments interspersed. Toward the end of this essay I offer some general thoughts about converging challenges to the civilizational system.

“Oil Extraction, Economic Growth, and Oil Price Dynamics,” by Aude Illig and Ian Schiller. BioPhysical Economics and Resource Quality, March 2017, 2:1.

Once upon a time it was assumed that as world oil supplies were depleted and burned, prices would simply march upward until they either crashed the economy or incentivized both substitute fuels and changes to systems that use petroleum (mainly transportation). With a little hindsight—that is, in view of the past decade of extreme oil price volatility—it’s obvious that that assumption was simplistic and useless for planning purposes. Illig’s and Schiller’s paper is an effort to find a more realistic and rigorously supported (i.e., with lots of data and equations) explanation for the behavior of oil prices and the economy as the oil resource further depletes.

The authors find, in short, that before oil production begins to decline, high prices incentivize new production without affecting demand too much, while low prices incentivize rising demand without reducing production too much. The economy grows. It’s a self-balancing, self-regulating system that’s familiar territory to every trained economist.

However, because oil is a key factor of economic production, a depleting non-renewable resource, and is hard to replace, conventional economic theory does a lousy job describing the declining phase of extraction. It turns out that once depletion has proceeded to the point where extraction rates start to decline, the relationship between oil prices and the economy shifts significantly. Now high prices kill demand without doing much to incentivize new production that’s actually profitable), while low prices kill production without doing much to increase demand. The system becomes self-destabilizing, the economy stagnates or contracts, the oil industry invests less in future production capacity, and oil production rates begin to fall faster and faster.

The authors conclude:

Our analysis and empirical evidence are consistent with oil being a fundamental quantity in economic production. Our analysis indicates that once the contraction period for oil extraction begins, price dynamics will accelerate the decline in extraction rates: extraction rates decline because of a decrease in profitability of the extraction business. . . . We believe that the contraction period in oil extraction has begun and that policy makers should be making contingency plans.

As I was reading this paper, the following thoughts crossed my mind. Perhaps the real deficiency of the peak oil “movement” was not its inability to forecast the exact timing of the peak (at least one prominent contributor to the discussion, petroleum geologist Jean Laherrère, made in 2002 what could turn out to have been an astonishingly accurate estimate for the global conventional oil peak in 2010, and global unconventional oil peak in 2015). Rather, its shortcoming was twofold: 1) it didn’t appreciate the complexity of the likely (and, as noted above, poorly understood) price-economy dynamics that would accompany the peak, and 2) it lacked capacity to significantly influence policy makers. Of course, the purpose of the peak oil movement’s efforts was not to score points with forecasting precision but to change the trajectory of society so that the inevitable peak in world oil production, whenever it occurred, would not result in economic collapse. The Hirsch Report of 2005 showed that that change of trajectory would need to start at least a decade before the peak in order to achieve the goal of averting collapse. As it turned out, the peak oil movement did provide society with a decade of warning, but there was no trajectory change on the part of policy makers. Instead, many pundits clouded the issue by spending that crucial decade deriding the peak oil argument because of insufficient predictive accuracy on the part of some of its proponents. And now? See this article:

“Saudi Aramco Chief Warns of Looming Oil Shortage,” by Anjli Raval and Ed Crooks, Financial Times, April 14, 2017.

The message itself should be no surprise. Everyone who’s been paying attention to the oil industry knows that investments in future production capacity have fallen dramatically in the past three years as prices have languished. It’s important to have some longer-term historical perspective, though: today’s price of $50 per barrel is actually a high price for the fuel in the post-WWII era, even taking inflation into account. The industry’s problem isn’t really that prices are too low; it’s that the costs of finding and producing the remaining oil are too high. In any case, with prices not high enough to generate profits, the industry has no choice but to cut back on investments, and that means production will soon start to lag. Again, anyone who’s paying attention knows this.

What’s remarkable is hearing the head of Saudi Arabia’s state energy company convey the news. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Amin Nasser, chief executive of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producing company, said on Friday that 20 [million] barrels a day in future production capacity was required to meet demand growth and offset natural field declines in the coming years. “That is a lot of production capacity, and the investments we now see coming back—which are mostly smaller and shorter term—are not going to be enough to get us there,” he said at the Columbia University Energy Summit in New York. Mr. Nasser said that the oil market was getting closer to rebalancing supply and demand, but the short-term market still points to a surplus as U.S. drilling rig levels rise and growth in shale output returns. Even so, he said it was not enough to meet supplies required in the coming years, which were “falling behind substantially.” About $1 [trillion] in oil and gas investments had been deferred and cancelled since the oil downturn began in 2014.

Mr. Nasser went on to point out that conventional oil discoveries have more than halved during the past four years.

The Saudis have never promoted the notion of peak oil. Their mantra has always been, “supplies are sufficient.” Now their tune has changed—though Mr. Nasser’s statement does not mention peak oil by name. No doubt he would argue that resources are plentiful; the problem lies with prices and investment levels. Yes, of course. Never mention depletion; that would give away the game.

“How Does Energy Resource Depletion Affect Prosperity? Mathematics of a Minimum Energy Return on Investment (EROI),” by Adam R. Brandt. BioPhysical Economics and Resource Quality, (2017) 2:2.

Adam Brandt’s latest paper follows on work by Charlie Hall and others, inquiring whether there is a minimum energy return on investment (EROI) required in order for industrial societies to function. Unfortunately EROI calculations tend to be slippery because they depend upon system boundaries. Draw a close boundary around an energy production system and you are likely to arrive at a higher EROI calculation; draw a wide boundary, and the EROI ratio will be lower. That’s why some EROI calculations for solar PV are in the range of 20:1 while others are closer to 2:1. That’s a very wide divergence, with enormous practical implications.

In his paper, Brandt largely avoids the boundary question and therefore doesn’t attempt to come up with a hard number for a minimum societal EROI. What he does is to validate the general notion of minimum EROI; he also notes that society’s overall EROI has been falling during the last decade. Brandt likewise offers support for the notion of an EROI “cliff”: that is, if EROI is greater than 10:1, the practical impact of an incremental rise or decline in the ratio is relatively small; however, if EROI is below 10:1, each increment becomes much more significant. This also supports Ugo Bardi’s idea of the “Seneca cliff,” according to which societal decline following a peak in energy production, consumption, and EROI may be far quicker than the build-up to the peak.

“Burden of Proof: A Comprehensive Review of the Feasibility of 100% Renewable-Electricity Systems,” by B.P. Heard, B.W. Brook, T.M.L. Wigley, and C.J.A. Bradshaw. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Volume 76, September 2017, Pages 1122–1133.

This study largely underscores what David Fridley and I wrote in our recent book Our Renewable Future. None of the plans reviewed here (including those by Mark Jacobson and co-authors) passes muster. Clearly, it is possible to reduce fossil fuels while partly replacing them with wind and solar, using current fossil generation capacity as a fallback (this is already happening in many countries). But getting to 100 percent renewables will be very difficult and expensive. It will ultimately require a dramatic reduction in energy usage, and a redesign of entire systems (food, transport, buildings, and manufacturing), as we detail in our book.

“Social Instability Lies Ahead, Researcher Says,” by Peter Turchin. January 4, 2017, Phys.org.

Over a decade ago, ecologist Peter Turchin began developing a science he calls cliodynamics, which treats history using empirical methods including statistical analysis and modeling. He has applied the same methods to his home country, the United States, and arrives at startling conclusions.

My research showed that about 40 seemingly disparate (but, according to cliodynamics, related) social indicators experienced turning points during the 1970s. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of political turmoil. My model indicated that social instability and political violence would peak in the 2020s.

Turchin sees the recent U.S. presidential election as confirming his forecast: “We seem to be well on track for the 2020s instability peak. . . . If anything, the negative trends seem to be accelerating.” He regards Donald Trump as more of a symptom, rather than a driver, of these trends.

The author’s model tracks factors including “growing income and wealth inequality, stagnating and even declining well-being of most Americans, growing political fragmentation and governmental dysfunction.” Often social scientists focus on just one of these issues; but in Turchin’s view, “these developments are all interconnected. Our society is a system in which different parts affect each other, often in unexpected ways.”

One issue he gives special weight is what he calls “elite overproduction,” where a society generates more elites than can practically participate in shaping policy. The result is increasing competition among the elites that wastes resources needlessly and drives overall social decline and disintegration. He sees plenty of historical antecedents where elite overproduction drove waves of political violence. In today’s America there are far more millionaires than was the case only a couple of decades ago, and rich people tend to be more politically active than poor ones. This causes increasing political polarization (millionaires funding extreme candidates), erodes cooperation, and results in a political class that is incapable of solving real problems.

I think Turchin’s method of identifying and tracking social variables, using history as a guide, is relevant and useful. And it certainly offers a sober warning about where America is headed during the next few years. However, I would argue that in the current instance his method actually misses several layers of threat. Historical societies were not subject to the same extraordinary boom-bust cycle driven by the use of fossil fuels as our civilization saw during the past century. Nor did they experience such rapid population growth as we’ve experienced in recent decades (Syria and Egypt saw 4 percent per annum growth in the years after 1960), nor were they subject to global anthropogenic climate change. Thus the case for near-term societal and ecosystem collapse is actually stronger than the one he makes.

Some Concluding Thoughts

Maintaining a civilization is always a delicate balancing act that is sooner or later destined to fail. Some combination of population pressure, resource depletion, economic inequality, pollution, and climate change has undermined every complex society since the beginnings of recorded history roughly seven thousand years ago. Urban centers managed to flourish for a while by importing resources from their peripheries, exporting wastes and disorder beyond their borders, and using social stratification to generate temporary surpluses of wealth. But these processes are all subject to the law of diminishing returns: eventually, every boom turns to bust. In some respects the cycles of civilizational advance and decline mirror the adaptive cycle in ecological systems, where the crash of one cycle clears the way for the start of a new one. Maybe civilization will have yet another chance, and possibly the next iteration will be better, built on mutual aid and balance with nature. We should be planting the seeds now.

Yet while modern civilization is subject to cyclical constraints, in our case the boom has been fueled to an unprecedented extreme by a one-time-only energy subsidy from tens of millions of years’ worth of bio-energy transformed into fossil fuels by agonizingly slow geological processes. One way or another, our locomotive of industrial progress is destined to run off the rails, and because we’ve chugged to such perilous heights of population size and consumption rates, we have a long way to fall—much further than any previous civilization.

Perhaps a few million people globally know enough of history, anthropology, environmental science, and ecological economics to have arrived at general understandings and expectations along these lines. For those who are paying attention, only the specific details of the inevitable processes of societal simplification and economic/population shrinkage remain unknown.

There’s a small cottage industry of websites and commenters keeping track of signs of imminent collapse and hypothesizing various possible future collapse trajectories. Efforts to this end may have practical usefulness for those who hope to escape the worst of the mayhem in the process—which is likely to be prolonged and uneven—and perhaps even improve lives by building community resilience. However, many collapsitarians are quite admittedly just indulging a morbid fascination with history’s greatest train wreck. In many of my writings I try my best to avoid morbid fascination and focus on practical usefulness. But every so often it’s helpful to step back and take it all in. It’s quite a show.

Post Carbon Institute

15 Comments on "Heinberg: Juggling Live Hand Grenades"

Apneaman on Tue, 25th Apr 2017 3:06 pm

Heinberg, you forgot the great dieoff currently underway. I guess in some ways you could file it under depletion since the humans use and rely on those species and the ecosystem services they provide. More than most are aware of.

Extinction risk for many species vastly underestimated, study suggests

https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-04/cu-erf042517.php

World Penguin Day: Species facing extinction as fishing fleets harvest their prey for livestock feed

‘The decline of species is reaching a critical point and we cannot ignore the role of unsustainable livestock production’

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/world-penguin-day-extinction-fishing-fleets-prey-harvest-livestock-feed-emperor-african-penguin-a7700846.html

Emergency declaration warns of coral extinction

http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0003657655

The rate of dying is faster than anything we know of from the fossil record, so what do the humans do? Look the other way, count barrels and celebrity watch, which are all part of their evolutionary make up. This will go on until it can’t.

penury on Tue, 25th Apr 2017 3:46 pm

I presume the race is on, not taking bets on whether we run out of species first or resources. In the long run it does not make much difference, humans are going away.

Apneaman on Tue, 25th Apr 2017 6:03 pm

Ooooo this is a goodun. It clearly demonstrates that TPTB will continue to remain silent and action-less about AGW and a biosphere spiraling out of our habitual range. The MSM is their bullhorn and the only thing coming out of it is BULLSHIT.

Broadcast Media’s Deafening Silence as Hundreds of Thousands March in Defense of Science

“Unfortunately, despite widespread internet and print coverage, broadcast media barely mentioned the historic event.”

“Around the world and in the United States, science budgets are under threat, politically motivated individuals attempt to delete factual information related to public health and safety from science websites, individual scientists are subject to politically motivated attacks by quacks and climate change deniers in the hallowed halls of the U.S. Congress, and the person elected president is willfully scientifically illiterate while openly expressing opinions and pursuing policies that are hostile to fact-based science.”

https://robertscribbler.com/2017/04/25/broadcast-medias-deafening-silence-as-hundreds-of-thousands-march-in-defense-of-science/

What else would you expect in the last stage?

makati1 on Tue, 25th Apr 2017 6:03 pm

Long article, but it is a good summary of the situation. Humans are ‘going away’ and taking most of the life of the planet with them. Timeline is the only question. From my 70+ years, I see the speed picking up and the cliff fast approaching. I am prepping, but also watching the show. It is “interesting times” to live in.

Apneaman on Tue, 25th Apr 2017 7:07 pm

Woe to North Carolina….again they get hit with AGW jacked Rain Bombs and you can throw consequences of sea level rise in there too.

Worst flooding since Hurricane Matthew swamps N. Carolina

https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2017/04/25/north-carolina-raleigh-flooding/100889390/

Record rainfall in Charleston area Monday was made worse by flood tides

“”We shattered the daily record. We at least doubled it up,” said meteorologist Carl Barnes of the National Weather Service’s Charleston office in North Charleston.

Barnes wasn’t able to give a definitive total with rain still falling Monday evening. More than three inches of rain had fallen in downtown Charleston, besting the previous total of 1.12 inches.

At the Weather Service office, nearly two inches had fallen. The previous record was .81 inches.”

http://www.postandcourier.com/news/record-rainfall-in-charleston-area-monday-was-made-worse-by/article_4127fe64-292c-11e7-a8f2-0bc714cf0f73.html

Record-breaking rain brings dangerous flooding to Triangle; rivers rising

“Sewage spills

Floodwaters inundated sewage pipes and pump stations throughout the Triangle. The city of Durham reported two sewage spills, of an estimated 15,750 gallons on Infinity Road and 9,000 gallons on Sparger Road, both into unnamed tributaries of the Eno River.

Smithfield reported a sewage spill at its pump station on U.S. 70 Business East. Crews set up a bypass pump and hauled 22 loads of waste water to another site, but the town still released 20,000 gallons of untreated waste water into Polecat Branch, which flows into the Neuse River.

Franklin County reported two spills in Youngsville and Franklinton, totaling 39,000 gallons.”

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/weather/article146593689.html

3 different severe weather stories and no mention of how on a warming planet there is more evaporation, which loads the atmosphere with more moisture that will eventually fall somewhere as a big fucking rain bomb. Monster AGW jacked Rain Bombs been falling for a few years now and what is the response? Shhhhhhh….if we stay real quiet maybe the monster will go away. Tell yourself.

Apneaman on Tue, 25th Apr 2017 7:17 pm

Hauntingly Freakish Siberian Wildfires Now Flicker to Life in April

“This past winter has been ridiculously warm for large sections of Siberia. From the Yamal Peninsula to Lake Baikal to the thinning ice of the Arctic Ocean and back down to the Sea of Okhotsk, temperatures have ranged from 4 to nearly 7 degrees Celsius above normal throughout the entire first quarter of 2017.”

“2017 marks the 4th consecutive year of excessive winter warmth for this section of our world.”

“By Sunday, the fires sparking closer to Lake Baikal further east had also grown their own series of tell-tale smoke plumes. One particular blaze in central Siberia appeared to have produced a 2.5 x 6 mile long burn scar in just one day (about 10,000 acres).”

https://robertscribbler.com/2017/04/24/hauntingly-freakish-siberian-wildfires-now-flicker-to-life-in-april/

Apneaman on Tue, 25th Apr 2017 7:26 pm

As climate warms, the oceans are becoming more toxic, new research shows

“These events can sicken or kill people who consume toxin-contaminated shellfish and can damage marine ecosystems by killing fish and other marine life,” said researcher Christopher Gobler.

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2017/04/25/As-climate-warms-the-oceans-are-becoming-more-toxic-new-research-shows/1091493129106/

Apneaman on Tue, 25th Apr 2017 8:12 pm

“Species, ecosystems, glaciers, sea ice and humans themselves continue to absorb and pay for this human experiment of industrialization gone horribly awry. Many are paying with their very existence…Thanks to ACD, Earth has lost approximately half of all its coral reefs in just the last three decades. A quarter of all marine species depend on reefs. Reefs provide the sole source of protein for more than one billion people, and they are now vanishing before our eyes.”-Dahr Jamail

http://bit.ly/2pjthKt

Apneaman on Tue, 25th Apr 2017 8:22 pm

Highly informative video for anyone interested in some recent scientific findings.

5 Year Study: Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost (SWIPA)

“Major finding. What happens In the Arctic does not Stay in the Arctic.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsiMRxzeNbs

Apneaman on Tue, 25th Apr 2017 10:25 pm

Not with a Bang, or a Whimper. A Tink.
By Tom Lewis | April 24, 2017 | Apocalypse When?

“The sea level at Coral Gables has risen four inches since 1992, and is rising now at a rate of an inch a year. The world’s glaciers are melting, and the oceans are expanding, as the average temperature inches ever higher. In South Florida, seawater is lapping up onto inland streets and properties, in the absence of any storm, with increasing frequency. Salt water is intruding into the aquifers that provide the area’s drinking water. Sea level is expected to rise three more feet by 2060. (South Florida is also in Hurricane Alley, at risk from stronger and more frequent hurricanes, also because of climate change, but that is another story.)

Pretty soon now, Mayor Jim Cason reckons, we will hear the tink. The first mast will strike the first bridge, announcing that there is no more access to the open sea for sailing boats from Coral Gables’s canals. Property values inland from the bridges will tank. The willingness of buyers to buy, lenders to lend, and insurers to insure will all be severely constrained. Loss of revenue will cripple the city, making it ever less desirable as a place to live or even visit.

But here’s what’s so important about this, and what Mayor Cason understands about it; what the mast hitting the bridge will do is pop the bubble of denial that allows people to function as if the climate isn’t changing, the sea isn’t rising, the storm isn’t coming, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Business as usual persists. The band on the deck of the Titanic keeps playing. We appreciate the people who keep telling us that everything is alright, we resent those who see doom coming, as if they were bringing on the doom, not warning us to get out of the way.”

http://www.dailyimpact.net/2017/04/24/not-with-a-bang-or-a-whimper-a-tink/

Cloggie on Wed, 26th Apr 2017 3:35 am

Well, well, well, a first mea culpa of sorts.

Perhaps the real deficiency of the peak oil “movement” was not its inability to forecast the exact timing of the peak… Rather, its shortcoming was twofold: 1) it didn’t appreciate the complexity of the likely (and, as noted above, poorly understood) price-economy dynamics that would accompany the peak, and 2) it lacked capacity to significantly influence policy makers.

Wrong, completely wrong. What the peak oil dreamers overlooked completely, with their stubborn focus on conventional oil, was the potential of what Michael Klare dubbed the “Third Carbon Age”, that is enormous amounts of fossil fuel, that formerly could not be exploited, but with new technology can be exploited.

But the peak oil dreamers hate technology, so technology doesn’t exist.

Sorry for posting this link yet again, but it makes a clear point, devastating for the peak fossil = soon crowd:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2593032/Coal-fuel-UK-centuries-Vast-deposits-totalling-23trillion-tonnes-North-Sea.html

Conclusion: the entire earth’s crust is filled to the hilt with carbon dregs that can be exploited, for instance by burning coal underground, without having to mine it.

Should we do this for centuries to come? Of course not. We already have sufficient low energy prices with wind and solar, resulting in alt-energy being the largest chunk of new installed energy generating capacity, under hard capitalist = Darwinian circumstances, that is without subsidies. And it will win the battle in Europe first, because Europe has hardly any fossil fuel reserves.

In other words: alt-energy already won and will become even more price competitive with every passing year.

Conclusion: there is no energy problem. This hole idea of energy doom, caused by depletion is off the agenda for good. Problem solved. Please close down you Post Carbon Institute, Richard, you are making a fool of your self. Why don’t you open a, let’s say Post Steam Engine Institute. Or Post Black & White Television Institute. Or a Post Bakelite Telephone Institute. The possibilities are endless.

[part 1]

Cloggie on Wed, 26th Apr 2017 3:36 am

Wow, Richard is feeling a little guilty about pushing so many folks into doomerism. We have many here in our own ranks, but we are not going to mention any names here.lol

Having said that, doom will NOT come from fossil fuel depletion, but it will come from a totally different direction, unexpected for most: the unfolding disaster in the West as a result of “modern values” and mass migration, as well as the rapid rise of new geopolitical formations, China and Islam.

Europe dominated the world between 1492-1945. After that the two new kosher-ruled kids on the block USA and USSR arrived on the scene and (intentionally, forget Nuremberg) destroyed Europe.

Meanwhile the USSR is dead now and the very fact that the Trump presidency seems to have stranded only 3 months after it began, will have made it abundantly clear to the conservative part of European America (libtard Heinberg is definitely not part of them) that their last hope of political representation in Washington has vanished. And they will draw their conclusions, namely that kosher-run Washington-America is not their country (in fact it hasn’t been for a century). These scenes in Berkeley are only the beginning in a violent process of the coming dismemberment of the United States:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8GVtXfATtI

And it won’t be different in Europe with the coming clash between the European autochtones and the third world invaders.

That is the real doom that is coming, not this silly obsolete fossil fuel depletion story.

The modern US-led West is something that needs to be completely destroyed and replaced by a new “green-right” culture circle that is post-Christian, post-Humanistic, post Human Rights, post-communist and post-feminist.

Think neo-Roman. This might not be your world, Richard.

[part 2]

Davy on Wed, 26th Apr 2017 5:42 am

Peak oil theory has evolved so discrediting its early evolution and dismissing what it is saying now is emotional agenda. We are all evolving including the techno optimist that have been spectacularly wrong on some accounts. Technology was supposed to power us through to a new age then why all the debt and unfunded liabilities. Why are renewables at such a low penetration rate with huge subsidies and many years? This is not a clear success story but techno optimist claim it is. They use projections of the future 20 years down the road as a today realized but today it is still fantasy.

The “third carbon age” is a fake on many accounts. An age denotes a longish period. Maybe we should call it the carbon retirement period. It is more a period of change that technology has allowed because of economics. There is nothing revolutionary about the technology. What allowed it to transform the oil sector was economics of the post 08 new normal of repressed cost of money and monetary easing that is little more than “policy” created liquidity. This liquidity is not natural productive liquidity. This new age is not so optimistic and powerful it is deceptive and exploitive.

Those who acknowledge peak oil and who have studied it deeply for years realize it is about systems and dynamics as well as an oil complex and its production. There are clear dysfunctions going on in the oil sector and the global economy because of the oil problem. Oil is a curse for some economies. The traditional view of oil found by early peak oil theory is lacking. This does not mean the ideas that have evolved are not dangerously relevant. Society is spending more to find and produce oil. This is an increased cost at a time where society is facing increased cost on a broad range of issues. It is not so much that fossil fuels could not be exploited but now are because of technology. It is now more the economic incentive that allowed existing technology to access what was once uneconomic. Now the problem is in a global economy where normal price discovery has been repressed and yield seeking bubbles are present we have economic activity that is in many cases is malinvestment. Oil is clearly one of these areas.

The conclusion should be we have an energy problem along with multiple other problems. They are converging and positively reinforcing. Technology and complexity are part of the problem. Behavioral issues of corruption and manipulation in an exploitation of markets and resources are a further problem. We are now in an uncanny time of a new normal that was a bifurcated recession. This recession has intensified at some levels. We have wealth transfer and economic abandonment but also bubbly markets and development. We have had extend and pretend policies that have failed to realize bad debt and have allowed bad debt activity to flourish. Oil is part of this. Some technology has only been allowed because of disregard for the real rate of return of its application. We are by no means without an energy problem considering all the other problems we have. We are now likely in predicament of which technology and energy are so interconnected with that they will not power us through to a new age techno optimist crow about. This false advertising is just more of a failed social narrative of progress and development as our answer. It is failing us and more of the same is likely to make it worse. It is not that technology is hated it is more that technology is not a savior to our problems but part of it. Technology should be used wisely. Blind techno agendas need to be called into question. How is that hate? I call that wisdom.

twocats on Wed, 26th Apr 2017 9:41 am

good articles Ap.

you’ve gotta have the cognitive dissonance filter up to 11 Clogs in order not to see or feel it.

You Don't Want to Know Me on Wed, 26th Apr 2017 10:15 am

“replaced by a new “green-right” culture circle that is post-Christian, post-Humanistic, post Human Rights, post-communist and post-feminist.”

Funniest thing I’ve seen in a long fucking time.

Utopian much Cloggie?

Heinberg: Juggling Live Hand Grenades

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