[asg70]

This might be the silver lining of Coronavirus:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... -pollution

What would happen if people really tried to limit CO2 emissions? Telecommuted? EVs instead of gas cars maybe? Didn't just fly around the planet recklessly the way Plant does? Well, here we have it. I hope the lock-downs last long enough that enough data can be gathered to extrapolate some useful projections for what can be gained through lifestyle change.

[rockdoc123]

how about they had no oil and gas? How about they had to somehow depend on a renewable system that can't possibly supply their energy demands at this point in time? Silver lining? I think not.
I keep shaking my head at the number of people here who somehow think you can just shut down all the oil and gas production and turn a switch...magically we are running on renewable energy, likely helped by massive amounts of pixy dust.
You really need to understand that the US oil and gas system shutting down is not good for you as a US citizen, it is extremely bad.

[asg70]

You really need to understand that the US oil and gas system shutting down is not good for you as a US citizen, it is extremely bad.

Not good for your livelihood, you mean.

BTW, your propaganda sounds familiar.

[Outcast_Searcher]

how about they had no oil and gas? How about they had to somehow depend on a renewable system that can't possibly supply their energy demands at this point in time? Silver lining? I think not.
I keep shaking my head at the number of people here who somehow think you can just shut down all the oil and gas production and turn a switch...magically we are running on renewable energy, likely helped by massive amounts of pixy dust.
You really need to understand that the US oil and gas system shutting down is not good for you as a US citizen, it is extremely bad.

To be fair, I don't think he said that overall it's a good thing for the US. He said that there could be a silver lining out of it re having the world (re the folks who will actually look at data and not cry "conspiracy" or "fake news" if it's not what they'd hoped) see how much difference a fair amount of power down can do.

Now, after that, whether we actually DO anything productive with it is a whole different question. I'm not optimistic on that front. EV's will take over as they become economically superior AND not a significant inconvenience -- not when they'll help save the planet, IMO.

[rockdoc123]

Not good for your livelihood, you mean.

no, you moron, not good for anybody. I am retired, my last board position expired a couple of years ago, I own virtually no oil and gas company shares and only and only some of the distribution network shares...basically my livelihood has F^^K all to do with the oil and gas industry.
But ask yourself this...can you do without heat, water, transportation? Do you live on an acreage where you just cut wood for heat and have a system where you can convert all the wind and water into power? I highly doubt it as almost nobody does. You need oil and gas...if you have an electric car how do you think all of that material was manufactured without oil and gas? Are your tires magically not made of petroleum products? Do you wear cottom clothes you spun yourself from a hand loom or did you buy them from a store where it took a ton of hydrocarbons to produce?
The bottom line is if suddenly the US stopped producing oil and gas entirely then the US economy would suffer. That would especially be the case if the US quit producing and Saudi Arabia and its friends shut-in production to drive the price of oil up. You are smug right now about your low gasoline price....how about $5/gallon?

You need to do a bit of learning with regards to economics I'm afraid. You go on and on about stock market disasters etc but it is very clear you haven't a clue about how all of these bits of business fit together in the greater scheme of things.

[jedrider]

The skies in the bay area of San Francisco have been gorgeous everyday since the shutdown. I'm loving it, but I know it can't last.

If I had a choice, I would choose 1/8 the population and clear skies.

[Cog]

The silver lining that some seek here is the death of billions. Which is exactly what shutting down oil/gas production would achieve. They couch it in different terms but that is their desired outcome.

[bochen777]

The silver lining that some seek here is the death of billions. Which is exactly what shutting down oil/gas production would achieve. They couch it in different terms but that is their desired outcome.

Sure, Mr... We Lie, We Steal, We Kill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYf5h0w ... u.be&t=303

[Cog]

The Chinese have a lot of experience with the whole ditch and bullet to the back of the head gig. Wouldn't want to offend the Maoist.

[asg70]

I am retired, my last board position expired a couple of years ago

Yet the industry has been good for you. You're hardly objective.

ask yourself this...can you do without heat, water, transportation?

Last I checked, the powerdown I am talking about in the OP isn't saying there's no oil use. It's power DOWN, not power OFF. Yet you just move to an extreme case of using no fossil fuels at all in order to paint a portrait of helpless dependency.

if suddenly the US stopped producing oil and gas entirely

Which has nothing to do with the OP. What I see here is someone who is just triggered and looking for a whipping-boy.

[Ibon]

I am retired, my last board position expired a couple of years ago

Yet the industry has been good for you. You're hardly objective.

ask yourself this...can you do without heat, water, transportation?

Last I checked, the powerdown I am talking about in the OP isn't saying there's no oil use. It's power DOWN, not power OFF. Yet you just move to an extreme case of using no fossil fuels at all in order to paint a portrait of helpless dependency.

if suddenly the US stopped producing oil and gas entirely

Which has nothing to do with the OP. What I see here is someone who is just triggered and looking for a whipping-boy.

I always said consequences are the catalyst of cultural transition toward real sustainability. This Covid19 is a temporary example and what may be long lasting remains to be seen.

You cant put the cart before the horse. The horse are the physical consequences and the cart follows. Attempts to but the cart in front you know well ASG70 in your hopelessly depressing experiences with transition town movement.

You cant have a measured reasonable conversation with others on this topic before they are honed by consequences.

I have been beating this message into the ground for 20 years here and it is still just as valid.

[asg70]

Change can be scary until you get a taste of it and realize, gee, it wasn't so bad after all.

Retirees who made their entire careers off of mid 20th century attitudes are hardly the sages we should be listening to in determining what kind of change is feasible.

[Ibon]

Change can be scary until you get a taste of it and realize, gee, it wasn't so bad after all.

Retirees who made their entire careers off of mid 20th century attitudes are hardly the sages we should be listening to in determining what kind of change is feasible.

The other message I have been drumming here for years is our obsolescence and how the emerging generation will be the ones who will be the heavy lifters moving through consequences. They will also not be burdened by some of the baggage we all carry.

I can't agree more with your post.

[EnergyUnlimited]

The change will come for sure but it won't be voluntary one.
We need following conditions to be met, to initiate any significant change:

1. Pressing environmental factors.
These will be divided into 2 categories:
- Permanent ones which are slowly growing but become formidable as time pass, eg climate change, resource depletion, devastation of environment.
- Violent and disruptive ones but relatively short term. These will include diseases like COVID and such diseases may mutate and come back and back and back in new and new waves.
Natural selection may hone strains which mutate fast enough and with a sufficiently long incubation periods during which transmission occurs to make all this testing and contact tracing meaningless approach.
Think about airborne AIDS type of disease, not necessarily that lethal but infective by aerosols in latent period.
Also - pestilence - we are all busy with COVID but few are noticing that huge plague of locust is now haunting Africa and parts of Asia.

People will surrender certain life styles only once they have realized that usual problem solving approach based on science and technology have utterly failed.

2. Intellectual decay and degradation of education system
This can be observed essentially everywhere is the First World and America is a good example of that.
Lowering standards of education in direction of restricting/abandoning teaching most of STEM as too difficult and replacing is with lessons about many genders, gay rights and female equality.
Students with such curriculums are going to be far too stupid to contribute to maintenance of ailing civilization in any meaningful way so it will be idling into ruin.

3. Replacement structure building races (mainly white and yellow) with more unruly "brown people".
This policy is already going on across the West and is quite successful.
For sure white race can be disbanded and replaced without making a peep. Even if yellow race survived in coherent form, it is going to be mainly in Asia (China).
Converting West into mindless, unruly mobs unable to maintain their life support structures should certainly benefit environment in longer term.
You don't even need to get rid of all whiteys in their entirety. It is enough to make most of them stupid by gender studies and eliminate from a gene pool as time pass.
Those more resilient to such approach who can see growing hopelessness around will abandon usual structure/society building activities and join organized crime and fanatic religious groups. It should really help to destroy existing energy consuming advanced social order.

4. Replacing Christianity and other monotheist religions with more environmentally friendly paganism
Major factor which have allowed white race to be so destructive was embracement of monotheist religion which specifies that man is the master of Earth and God gave Earth to him.
Abandoning of this sort of beliefs is a prerequisite for any successful powerdown etc.

[asg70]

So sad to unhide someone like EnergyUnlimited only to see more evidence that he is only capable of interpreting the world solely around his brand of bigoted politics.

Look, there is no single reason for why we're screwed. Environmentally speaking, pound for pound, it's more of a right-wing problem than a left-wing although the narcissism and hedonism and misplaced priorities of the anything-goes generation doesn't help matters, but the young tend to at least be more cognizant of the problem (think the Greta worship) even if they aren't doing much on the ground to combat it. I just don't think it fits neatly into a left/right box. Human beings in general are pleasure seekers. Powerdown is ANATHEMA to that regardless of your political ideology. Asceticism simply doesn't sell.

The kind of thinking that is most damaging is the sentiment expressed in the "pursuit of happiness" clause of the Constitution. It's tragedy of the commons. Nobody wants to take responsibility for their part of the collective commons. They feel a sense of entitlement to consume on the commons and shy away from the idea that by doing so it robs others or future generations. Either this is fueled by surplus mentality, ignorant of ecology, or a selfish musical-chairs hoarding impulse, there is very little support for holding back. Everyone just gets what they can while they can.

[Ibon]

Human beings in general are pleasure seekers. Powerdown is ANATHEMA to that regardless of your political ideology. Asceticism simply doesn't sell.
.

I agree with your comments about the young generation being more cognizant and I would add that they are maturing into adulthood with less wealth so this is putting a bit of backbone into their early cognizance. As they mature into those years of societal influence we will see how well they do. I do believe they will surprise us contrary to what many of the cynical old baby boomers on this site believe.

I also agree that this is much more than a political left/right issue.

Now to touch on this point of humans being pleasure seekers. I will go on a bit of a ramble since I am sitting in an empty eco resort and I have already spent 4 hours today in my greenhouse and working in our gardens.

Historically in our evolution pleasure was kind of like sugar, it was not abundant in early cultures. There was very little boredom also. Life was toil interspersed with leisure in small dosis. Pleasure was focused and concentrated during rituals and celebrations that came at the end of extended periods of constraints and hard work.

Sugar was rare in our environment in the past and we evolved pleasure sensors on our tongue and nose that created an endorphin rush when we found a stash of honey. That has fucked us up as modern humans because sugar is now abundant but our pleasure response to it is still stuck in the Pleistocene. That is why modern humans cannot manage sugar very well.

Seeking pleasure is maybe something similar. We seek it because historically it was not abundant. Now with decades of opulence it has caused an immense amount of indolence and cultural degradation because we can indulge in pleasure the way we indulge in sugar. Out of balance compared to our historical evolution.

Ascetism does sell though when folks are culturally exposed once again to the role it plays in balance with pleasure. Same with hard work. Same with serving others. When you focus on others and service and giving then when your spirit and soul is nourished by this the desire to seek pleasure is less intense. Spiritual inner fulfillment and inner peace reduces the need to seek pleasure externally.

There are innate aspects in our biology and very strong cultural ones regarding this.

We do not have mentors and spiritual leaders and an education system that teaches the rewards of a more ascetic lifestyle. That can teach the balance between service and seeking pleasure.

We have become a decadent culture. We do not know how to handle opulence well. We evolved with constraints and during the harvest when we danced and howled to the moon in pagan celebrations those dances were trance like and our pleasure was soulful and 100%

Today pleasure seeking has none of that deep celebratory intensity. Pleasure seeking today is pretty mediocre and related to passive entertainment. Even our pleasure seeking has become decadent!!!... That is how decadent we are actually. haha. LOL.

For me it is much more cultural than biological though.

The values that are missing in today's society is the teaching of service to others, civic duty, virtue, communion with nature, developing a reverence toward our mother earth and toward our fellow man. Instead it is all about focused on maximizing ones pleasure.

Another reason why the obsessive focus on seeking pleasure is because it reveals a spiritual void. When you give and serve to others or when you make a deep communion with the natural world then your avarice toward seeking pleasure subsides. Again and worth repeating, spiritual fulfillment reduces the need to seek pleasure because you cultivate inner peace instead of focusing on external pleasure points.

Todays religions are dead. Have been totally corrupted. Those that follow religions today play lip service to the deeper aspects of prayer and inner spiritual peace. It is mostly tribal like what George Carlin once mentioned in one of his stand up comedy skits about religion. Here it is in a 52 second summary. It should give you all a chuckle!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9c7TxKf-Ls

Materialism has replaced a sense of reverence and religiosity. The worlds religions have become hollowed out institutions offering nothing.

Modern human culture suffers from a deep spiritual void.

More science and rational thought will not cure this.

I personally have found a sense of the sacred in wilderness and nature. That has been my antidote to the cultural malaise. I don't know how collectively though our society will once again turn toward the rewards of reverence and service and giving and move away from the shallow pleasure seeking entertainment we occupy so much of our time with.

What will it take to turn ourselves inward to exercise those long atrophied spiritual muscles?

God help us!

P.S. I am an atheist.

[JuanP]

Ibon "Ascetism does sell though when folks are culturally exposed once again to the role it plays in balance with pleasure. Same with hard work. Same with serving others. When you focus on others and service and giving then when your spirit and soul is nourished by this the desire to seek pleasure is less intense. Spiritual inner fulfillment and inner peace reduces the need to seek pleasure externally"

Well said! I couldn't help but notice that you left out or forgot sex when making your observations about our evolution. I think sex probably gave most people significant amounts of pleasure.

I think millennials in the USA are more community oriented as a consequence of their lack of wealth and opportunities. I definitely see this at the farm with the volunteers. I have also noticed that they tend to be less traditional where their belief systems are concerned; they believe in all kinds of stuff. I am not sure that they will do better than us, though, because too many of them seem to be quite disconnected from reality and always plugged into their "smart" phones. I do hope you are correct about that, though. I mostly feel sad for them because they haven't been dealt a fair hand, IMO. They were raised with extremely unrealistic expectations, and they seem to be having a lot of problems adapting to reality. I have also noticed that many of them have mental health issues.

I was a believer, lost my faith as a child, became an atheist, and am now an agnostic. I don't believe in gods, but I know that this is something I believe, not know. I can't prove they don't exist or that they do, and I don't concern myself with the matter at all. I would consider time spent thinking about that as time wasted, so I stay out of it. I'd rather sit and watch my bird feeders or plant seeds. My life is based on nature.

[asg70]

You had me up to citing George Carlin. There is a strong nihilist streak in today's society that is in love with Carlin and others of his ilk. I find that if all you do is highlight the problems with society you lead people to an abyss of hopelessness and dread. This is what I see missing in most flavors of activism. It spends all of its time fighting against things and very little time trying to build anything new or instilling a new form of the sacred. This is why some of the loudest culture-critics were also highly self-destructive figures. They sort of couldn't move beyond the anger stage of their grief and so it consumed them in the end. I also think the internet rewards conflict (twitter in particular) and so there's really no motivation to move beyond anger. You see it here, for sure, even with posters who have had many years to process things and should be farther along the continuum.

[Ibon]

You had me up to citing George Carlin. There is a strong nihilist streak in today's society that is in love with Carlin and others of his ilk.

I get that also. Carlin was relevant in his humor during the deconstruction stage of our cultural decline when his biting wit was equally piercing to both conservatives and liberal progressives. He was of my generation and I saw him as a prophet.

But as you say he is perhaps dated as the message going forward has to focus on construction of a new narrative rather than any further deconstruction.

[Ibon]

I couldn't help but notice that you left out or forgot sex when making your observations about our evolution. I think sex probably gave most people significant amounts of pleasure.

Sexual energy is pleasure and when in balance with more ascetic spiritual pursuits can be a source of great pleasure especially when both participants celebrate it with mutual respect. I am not puritanical and believe that as you mature into your sexuality it is a stage of your life that should be celebrated with others. It is only when it can be expressed that it then finds its proper place in the complexity of the human experience. Repress it and it ends up finding release in perversions.