The United States of Fear

SUBHEAD: Mark Karlin interviews Tom Engelhardt on his book "The United States of Fear".  

By Mark Karlin on 15 December 2011 for Truth-Out.org - 

  (http://www.truth-out.org/how-have-we-become-united-states-fear/1323880893)  

Image above: Detail of “East Border! Protecting the homeland against Bolshevism!”, a German propaganda poster for border management against Communism in 1919. From (http://www.markmaxwell.co/2010/09/03/why-does-it-look-like-that/).
 
Tom Engelhardt's "The United Sates of Fear" is yours with a minimum one-time donation of $25, or a monthly commitment of $10 or more to Truthout. If you're a fan of TomDispatch, this book weaves together Engelhardt's trenchant and incisive thoughts about America's declining empire - and how it impacts all aspects of our society.

Mark Karlin: Your last chapter in so many ways embodies what you have covered in TomDispatch, and what is at the core of our crisis of democracy today: imperial decline. When did our American empire begin to implode?

Tom Engelhardt: Well, I have no doubt that, economically speaking, we've been losing traction for quite a while on that downhill slope, but a crucial "moment" was certainly Washington's decision to follow what I call "the Soviet path." After all, in those last years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, the far weaker of the two superpowers, threw money into its military while its deficits rose and its infrastructure crumbled - and of course it got mired in a terrible war, a "bleeding wound," in Afghanistan. It all sounds eerily familiar, no? Washington's decision, in its moment of Cold War triumph, to follow essentially the same path and the Bush administration's wild belief that it could drive U.S. military power unilaterally into the heart of the Greater Middle East and establish a Pax Americana there (the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were only supposed to be the beginning of the process) had a similar effect. Now, of course, we have soaring deficits, rotting infrastructure and unending war in Afghanistan (and elsewhere). It could give you the chills.

MK: How is the instigation of a state of national fear tied into the effort to maintain empire?

TE: I think that the real thing it's tied into is an effort over this last decade to turn what I call the "national security complex" into America's growth industry. Fear - of terrorism and nothing else - has been the "drug" that has powered the national security state to heights and a size it never reached when it had a genuine superpower enemy with a nuclear arsenal. Today, the intelligence bureaucracy dwarfs what existed in the Cold War era; the Pentagon budget is so much larger and so on. Give credit where it's due: it's been quite a feat based on remarkably little when you think about it.

MK: If 9/11 hadn't been carried out by al-Qaeda, would it had to have been invented to justify the measures that have been carried out to attempt to maintain America's military footprint around the world, at such great expense to our society?

TE: It's a good question that is, of course, impossible to answer. What-if history is fascinating, but always remains what-if. It's easy to forget, for instance, that in the period before 9/11 the Bush administration had essentially rejected Clinton administration and other warnings about terror and al-Qaeda because they considered China the future enemy to grow the Pentagon and the rest of the national security state upon. Without 9/11, many things might have been different. For one thing, to offer an example, on September 10, 2001 the Bush administration polling was lousy. It was already a remarkably unpopular administration in the political doldrums. Had it wanted to do something like set up a Department of Homeland Security, it probably would have gotten all snarled up in Congress and not succeeded. The Patriot Act, never. Etc. etc....

MK: Isn't the concept of an ongoing "terrorist threat" fulfilling the need of an ongoing enemy that we lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union?

TE: Yes, it's played that role. Or put another way, at most a few thousand scattered terrorists and a couple of ragtag minority insurgencies (in Afghanistan and Iraq) with poor arms and limited funds have, miraculously enough, fulfilled the role of an actual superpower! That speaks to the deceptive power of the 9/11 attacks which managed to look apocalyptic - hence the nuclear term "Ground Zero" that was almost immediately applied to the spot in New York City where the towers came down - without being so. Americans dealt with the 9/11 moment as if a major power had hit us with a nuclear weapon and so declared "war" on what? Those who wanted to deal with the event, which was terrible but not exactly civilization-threatening, as a criminal act were laughed out of the room and all the rest followed.

MK: Clearly, you believe that President Obama has not only failed to restore many of our civil liberties taken away under the Bush/Cheney administration, but, in fact, has gone further than the neocons? What happened to his constitutional scholar principles?

TE: Increasingly, I don't speculate much on the motives of the players in our national drama, in part because I think we humans are all like the unreliable narrators of modern fiction, not to be trusted when we claim to know why we do things. We're mysteries - perhaps to ourselves above all. It is clear, however, that the Obama administration, like those before it, hasn't exactly been eager to give up the prerogatives of an imperial presidency, much expanded under the Bush administration and in some cases has been at work expanding them further. This has been the direction the presidency has taken in our lifetime - ever expanding power - whatever the constitutional bona fides of the occupants of the Oval Office.

MK: Obama promised government transparency during his 2008 campaign, but you would argue the maintenance of a shadow government that operates in secrecy is necessary to operate the military-industrial complex. Why is this so and why is Obama going along with it?

TE: I would argue that our ever expanding national security state has, like a mother ship leaving Earth, simply lifted itself out of our world and, surrounded in secrecy (which helps the process along), has entered a space above us all where its denizens need be accountable for nothing and, unlike the rest of us, are assured of never being subjected to the legal system for whatever acts they take - with a single exception: whistleblowing. If you or I break into a house and commit acts of violence, we'll undoubtedly be arrested and brought before a court of law. But if the national security state breaks into another country and does the same, if it kidnaps, tortures, assassinates, those who do it will not be prosecuted. It's essentially a guaranteed. Obama's "sunshine" policies were simply swallowed whole and disappeared almost without a trace into the new national security state.

MK: All of the rollbacks of our constitutional rights taken by the executive branch and government and Congress are being done in the name of fighting terrorism. How serious a threat is terrorism and what are the alternatives for dealing with it?

TE: Since 9/11, even if you include the attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the guy who ran his plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, terrorism has ranked above shark attacks but below just about anything else that has the ability to harm Americans here in the US. As a comparison, my crude calculations show maybe 25 domestic terror victims, including in the incidents above, whereas some 30-odd thousand Americans a year die on our roads in traffic accidents. Yet terror is the only thing where the government promises us something close to 100% safety. Generally, terror attacks can be tragic, but they are relatively minor dangers for Americans, even if they have been used to engorge our national-security-homeland-security state.

MK: Getting back to the issue of America and empire. Isn't it ironic that the US was founded as a nation in a war against the reigning empire of its time: British military rule that spanned the world?

TE: I don't know how strange it is. Militant republics seem quite capable of becoming empires from Rome to France, no? It is true, however, that the anti-imperial tradition that began with the American revolution here has historically acted as at least some kind of brake on imperial thinking, however modestly. Americans at least didn't like to think of themselves as imperial. It was part of the national self-image - until, at least, the George W. Bush years and when such thinking took hold among right-wing pundits, it was - or should have been - a sign that something was coming unglued.

MK: You discuss drones and advanced military technology in your book and TomDispatch. No technology is exclusive for long. Isn't the American reliance on current superior technological warfare bound to boomerang against us in the end?

TE: "Perfect weapons," the atomic bomb included, never fulfill the promises made for them, but by the time that's obvious, they've embedded themselves in our world. Something in the range of 40-50 nations now either have drones, are at work designing them, or are planning to buy them. The (un)friendly skies are going to be filled with them and when the first Iranian or Russian or Chinese drones start to take out their version of bad guys, we're not going to be so happy. When the first "suicide drones" hit we're going to be even less happy. What we've done in these years is to create a rationale for overriding national sovereignty and assassinating whomever we care to wherever we care to. Think of it as the globalization of death and, in the end, it will indeed by an ugly precedent for the planet.

MK: Although we are currently in a state of perpetual war, most Americans don't think of us being at war. Why is this so and compare it to the national consciousness of World War II, for example, when everyone was suffused with contributing to the war effort?

TE: After the U.S. Army nearly collapsed in Vietnam - a draft or citizens army, that is - the high command and other interested parties in essence said "never again." They created the All-Volunteer Army in part to detach the military (and so the wars it fought) from and insulate it from, our society, from citizen pressure. In that they succeeded. Americans, as I (and others) at TomDispatch have regularly pointed out, are now remarkably detached and insulated from the wars fought in our name and, increasingly, even those wars are fought with an eerie detachment, at least the drone part of them. In essence 1% of Americans who run things send 1% of Americans (those in the armed services) out to fight their wars and the other 98% are left out of things. It's not exactly the definition of a democratic republic, is it?

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The Fourth Wall

SUBHEAD: Hollywood has forgotten how to do the one thing that made the American movie industry great - to tell a story.

 By James Kunstler on 19 December 2011 for Kunstler.com - 
  (http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/12/the-fourth-wall.html)

 
Image above: Equipment used in time-lapse sequence in the filming of "Hugo". From (http://www.dragonframe.com/blog/2011/12/passion-for-hugo).

This week, with a nod to the onrushing holiday, and various freight trains of dread barreling down the track at us, I want to take a break from the usual concerns and talk about something else: why Hollywood exemplifies our worst collective blunder of the historical moment: our techno-narcissism.

I went to the cineplex at the mall late yesterday afternoon - also a break, after a month of moving and shlepping to another house - to see the new Martin Scorcese movie, Hugo. The story told is a sort of frame for an homage to one of the pioneers or movie-making, Georges Méliès, a French "illusionist" (magician) who made over 500 films at the turn of the 20th century, most of them now lost. He was an innovator, also, of what we now call FX, special effects, employing stop-motion, puppetry, and many optical tricks borrowed from his stage magic act in order to portray wild, dream-like fantasies on the screen. His best-known surviving movie is the Jules Verne-inspired A Trip To the Moon, in which several Edwardian Age explorers make the journey in a giant artillery shell fired from a colossal cannon. The movies of Méliès possess great child-like charm, consistent with a new art-form in its infancy: exuberant, surprising, and often self-consciously silly.

Scorcese conveys Méliès's story through the frame of another story about a boy, the orphaned son of a watchmaker, who lives in the attic of one of the great Parisian train stations in the 1920s. Hugo goes about his daily business winding the great clocks of the station, pinching croissants and bottles of milk from vendors, and evading the sadistic Station Inspector (Sacha Baron-Cohen, a.k.a. Borat). Hugo's doings also come to involve the owner of a toy shop in the station, who turns out to be the movie-maker Méliès (Ben Kingsley), now completely disillusioned and forgotten. The boy, of course, becomes the agent of Méliès's resurrection to glory and public honor for his pioneering work.

Scorcese, a leading film historian in his own right, chose to tell this story using the latest movie technology of our day: 3-D and CGI, computer-generated imagery, to wow a contemporary audience. Here, things get dodgy. It turns out that there is a curious relationship between movie technology and the art of cinema story-telling, and it can be expressed in terms of diminishing returns. The more clever we get at applying computer magic to the movies, the worse our story-telling abilities. It has gotten to the point where Hollywood is just about incapable now of telling a story because so many technological tricks are cluttering up the screen that the nuances of human behavior are sacrificed to them.

In the case of Hugo, Scorcese's use of 3-D violates one of the cardinal rules of staged dramatic action in its insistence on dragging the viewer through what is called "the fourth wall" in a relentless attempt to induce the illusions of speed and vertigo. The fourth wall refers to an old convention of the proscenium stage, in which the audience is presumed to be viewing the action through an open wall of a sort of magic box. This boundary between "real life" and the life depicted on stage, or on-screen in our time, allows another convention to happen: the willing suspension of disbelief, so that we become emotionally involved in the action beyond the wall. The fourth wall was respected through the glory days of Hollywood and all of the movie classics that Scorcese has paid homage to over the years. Breaking it has impoverished movie-making, a result that was obvious in James Cameron's ponderous hit, Avatar, which reduced human emotion to a level below the average cartoon of the 1930s while it piled on the dazzling computer-generated images. In Hugo, Scorcese's camera, or "camera" in the case of all the whopping 3-D CGI shoves the audience through the fourth wall and into the magic box in order to stimulate (or simulate) a sense of wonder about the proceedings inside it. But it only has the effect of wearing you down psychologically, and making you constantly aware of being manipulated.

One of the ironies of Hugo is that a major sub-plot in the story involves a mechanical automaton - sort of an early robot, animated like a clock with gears and escapements - which Hugo's dead father had been working on before his tragic death in a fire. Automatons were popular devices in the magicians' parlors of the early industrial age. They were wondrous machines for their time, but they really couldn't do much more than deal out a few cards or wave their arms about. The automaton in the movie doesn't really do much, either, but the story of Hugo hinges on the emotional attachments that the automaton inspires in him and the other characters. And it does illustrate, inadvertently I believe, one of the crucial primary relations of the human project to technology in our time: that the virtual is just not an adequate substitute for the authentic. This will be a hard lesson for us to learn.

Hugo worships at the altar of his father's broken automaton, just as the American public at all levels worships at the alter of technology, and it is sure to disappoint us. So great are the comforts and conveniences of our time that we are terrified by the prospect of losing them and, as the hyper-complexities around us unravel, we Americans are willing to believe any preposterous story that promises to keep the cars moving and the lights on. I call this state of affairs technological narcissism. The leading current expression of it can be seen in the incessant propaganda from politicians and the corporations telling the nation that we have "hundreds of years worth of oil and gas" available in North America and that we can easily become "energy independent" if we only drill-drill-drill. The public will at first be disappointed by these lies, and then they will become murderously enraged. Just watch. How it unfolds will be a story really worth telling generations from now.

For the moment, though, Hollywood has forgotten how to do the one thing that made the American movie industry great: to tell a story. Another irony of the day is that the biggest critical hit of the holiday release season is a silent movie, The Artist, made in France by director Michel Hazanavicius, another homage to Hollywood history, made by outsiders and going back to the basics - just as American life will have to go back to the basics when reality drags us kicking and screaming out of the box we've crawled into..

Internet Censorship Delayed

SUBHEAD: The "Stop Online Piracy Act" controlling internet content delayed in Congress.  

By Zack Carter on 17 December 2011 for Huntington Post -   
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/16/sopa-vote-delayed_n_1154347.html)

Image above: Illustration for article on constitutionality oc SOPA. From (http://thepoliticalelite.com/harvard-law-professor-sopa-is-unconstitutional/2584).

After two days of debate, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) abruptly halted a key hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act, postponing a Committee vote on the bill until 2012. The move marks a win for hordes of internet activists who oppose the bill, but gives lawmakers another opportunity to juice deep-pocketed corporations for campaign contributions.

"This is a huge victory for everyone who uses the Internet -- and proof that millions of people speaking out can still make a difference in a Congress usually run by corporate lobbyists," said Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit and Demand Progress, an organization that has staunchly opposed the bills for months.

SOPA is being aggressively pushed by Hollywood movie studios, major record labels and luxury goods providers as an effort to crackdown on internet piracy of their products. But the tools envisioned are so extreme that tech experts warn the legislation threatens the very functionality of the Internet. The ACLU and other free-speech groups emphasize that by authorizing the federal government and corporations to shut down entire websites without a trial for posting just a single piece of copyright-infringing content, the bill would sharply curb the exercise of free speech online.

Delay has been the dominant strategy for SOPA opponents in Washington for some time. The deeper into 2012 the vote on the bill is pushed back, the more likely the legislation is to die in an election year.

"It is good news," said Sherwin Sie, deputy legal director Public Knowledge, a non-profit group opposing the bill. "The last thing you want is to get something like this rushed through at the last minute while people are trying to do something else. That's been the message of SOPA opponents throughout. What's the big rush?"

It's a legislative strategy that members of Congress are all too willing to accept. With huge corporations on both sides of the bill, lawmakers will be able to request another round of campaign contributions, no matter what the legislation's ultimate fate may be.

"The most troubling dynamic in Congress is the way the agenda itself becomes a tool for fundraising," notes Harvard University Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig. "Dramatic fights over billion-dollar industries are exactly what legislators want going into an election year, because it flushes money into their pot. "

And SOPA is precisely one of those issues. Smith did not need to delay the vote in order to round up additional support to ensure passage. The House Judiciary Committee has close ties to Hollywood and is strongly supportive of the bill. Smith wrote the legislation, and over the past two days, the committee shot down amendments to weaken or moderate provisions of the legislation by wide margins.

"Congress benefits from keeping us all in suspense," noted Gabriela Schneider, spokesperson for the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to government transparency."Those special interests who have a stake in it are ... contributing directly to campaigns, and this gives them more time to do it."
See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Internet Censorship Ahead 11/16/11 .

Kauai 2012 Power Down

SUBHEAD: Here on Kauai we are going to unplug everything we can. Just Say YES to the Power of LESS! By Jonathan Jay on 17 December 2011 for Island Breath - (http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2011/12/kauai-2012-power-down.html) Image above: Power Down promotional poster by Jonathan Jay. WHO: You, Your Ohana, Your Friends, and Neighbors WHAT: Unplug Everything You Can - Power Down Your House: Just Say YES to the Power of LESS! WHERE: It starts in Your home - And thatʻs where it STOPS - Turn everything Off :) WHY: To begin thinking about our energy "demand" in a new way - by REDUCING Demand WHEN: Second Sundays: January 8, February 12, March 11, 20112 CONTACT: Jonathan Jay email: jjkauai@gmail.com website: http://p2pkauai.org Image above: Power Down promotional poster by Jonathan Jay. POWER DOWN is about using less, and discovering what that less-powered life feels like. Turn off as much as you can, and together as an island community, we will see how low we can go. You may discover on the Fist Power Down, Sunday January 8th, you canʻt turn everything off - thatʻs OK turn off as much as you can. We are working with the engineers at KIUC to find out just how power we collectively save on that day. Later when people like you send in your Power Down Stories to the p2pKauai.org website, and we study the data, we can retool and upgrade our efforts for the Second Power Down on Sunday February 12th. Together we can, and together we will joyfully Power Down Kaua`i, and discover the Power of Less! Video above: A P2P film by Joel Guy. From (http://vimeo.com/33830574) .

Dmitry Orlov on Europe

SUBHEAD: An interview with Orlov on the Post Peak Oil prospects of collapse in Europe and the world. By Tancrede Bastie on 15 December 2011 for Energy Bulliten - (http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-12-16/conversation-dmitry-orlov-about-europe) in original French (http://www.orbite.info/traductions/dmitry_orlov/un_entretien_avec_dmitry_orlov.html) Image above: A photo self-portrait of Dmitry Orlov on an undisclosed tropical beach. From original article. I came upon Dmitry Orlov's writings (http://cluborlov.blogspot.com)—as with most good things on the Internet—by letting chance and curiosity guide me from link to link. It was one of those moments of clarity when a large number of confusing questions find their answer along with their correct formulation. For example, the existence of fundamental similarities between the Soviet Union and the United States was for me a vague intuition, but I was unable to draw up a detailed list as Dmitry has done. One must have lived in two crumbling empires in order to be able to do that.

I must say that my enthusiasm was not shared by those around me, with whom I have shared my translations. It's only natural: who wants to hear how our world of material comfort, opportunity and unstoppable individual progress is about to collapse under the weight of its own expansion? Certainly not the post-war generation weaned on the exuberant growth of the postwar boom (1945-1973), well established in their lives of average consumers since the 1980s, and willing to enjoy a hedonistic age while remaining convinced that despite the economic tragedies ravaging society around them, their young children will benefit from more or less the same well-padded, industrialized lifestyle. The generation of their grandchildren is more receptive to the notion of economic decline—though to varying degrees, depending on the decrease of their purchasing power and how lethally bored they feel at work (if they can find any) .

It would be wrong to shoot the messenger who brings bad news. If you read Dmitry carefully, scrupulously separating the factual bad news, which are beyond his control, from his views on what can be done to survive and live in a post-industrial world, you will find evidence of strong optimism. I hope that in this he is right.

Whatever our views on peak oil and its consequences—or our distaste for scary prophecies—we can find in Dmitry Orlov fresh ideas on how to conduct our lives in a degraded economic and political environment, reasons to seek fruitful relations with people you might not normally cherry-pick, or the most effective approach to the frustrating political and media chatter and the honeyed whisper of commercial propaganda (shrug, turn around and go on with your life).

Tancrede Bastie: What difference do you see between American and European close future?

Dmitry Orlov: European countries are historical entities that still hold vestiges of allegiances beyond the monetized, corporate realm, while the United States was started as a corporate entity, based on a revolution that was essentially a tax revolt and thus has no fall-back. The European population is less transient than in America, with a stronger sense of regional belonging and are more likely to be acquainted with their neighbors and to be able to find a common language and to find solutions to common problems.

Probably the largest difference, and the one most promising for fruitful discussion, is in the area of local politics. European political life may be damaged by money politics and free market liberalism, but unlike in the United States, it does not seem completely brain-dead. At least I hope that it isn't completely dead; the warm air coming out of Brussels is often indistinguishable from the vapor vented by Washington, but better things might happen on the local level. In Europe there is something of a political spectrum left, dissent is not entirely futile, and revolt is not entirely suicidal. In all, the European political landscape may offer many more possibilities for relocalization, for demonitization of human relationships, for devolution to more local institutions and support systems, than the United States.

TB: Will American collapse delay European collapse or accelerate it?

DO: There are many uncertainties to how events might unfold, but Europe is at least twice as able to weather the next, predicted oil shock as the United States. Once petroleum demand in the US collapses following a hard crash, Europe will for a time, perhaps for as long as a decade, have the petroleum resources it needs, before resource depletion catches up with demand.

The relative proximity to Eurasia's large natural gas reserves should also prove to be a major safeguard against disruption, in spite of toxic pipeline politics. The predicted sudden demise of the US dollar will no doubt be economically disruptive, but in the slightly longer term the collapse of the dollar system will stop the hemorrhaging of the world's savings into American risky debt and unaffordable consumption. This should boost the fortunes of Eurozone countries and also give some breathing space to the world's poorer countries.

TB: How does Europe compare to the United States and the former Soviet Union, collapse-wise?

DO: Europe is ahead of the United States in all the key Collapse Gap categories, such as housing, transportation, food, medicine, education and security. In all these areas, there is at least some system of public support and some elements of local resilience. How the subjective experience of collapse will compare to what happened in the Soviet Union is something we will all have to think about after the fact. One major difference is that the collapse of the USSR was followed by a wave of corrupt and even criminal privatization and economic liberalization, which was like having an earthquake followed by arson, whereas I do not see any horrible new economic system on the horizon that is ready to be imposed on Europe the moment it stumbles. On the other hand, the remnants of socialism that were so helpful after the Soviet collapse are far more eroded in Europe thanks to the recent wave of failed experiments of market liberalization.

TB: How does peak oil interact with peak gas and peak coal? Should we care about other peaks?

DO: The various fossil fuels are not interchangeable. Oil provides the vast majority of transport fuels, without which commerce in developed economies comes to a standstill. Coal is important for providing for the base electric load in many countries (not France, which relies on nuclear). Natural gas (methane) provides ammonia fertilizer for industrial agriculture, and also provides thermal energy for domestic heating, cooking and numerous manufacturing processes.

All of these supplies are past their peaks in most countries, and are either past or approaching their peaks globally.

About a quarter of all the oil is still being produced from a handful of super-giant oil fields which were discovered several decades ago. The productive lives of these fields have been extended by techniques such as in-fill drilling and water injection. These techniques allow the resource to be depleted more fully and more quickly, resulting in a much steeper decline: the oil turns to water, slowly at first, then all at once. The super-giant Cantarell field in the Gulf of Mexico is a good example of such rapid depletion, and Mexico does not have many years left as an oil exporter. Saudi Arabia, the world's second-largest oil producer after Russia, is very secretive about its fields, but it is telltale that they have curtailed oil field development and are investing in solar technology.

Although there is currently an attempt to represent as a break-through the new (in reality, not so new) hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling techniques for producing natural gas from geological formations, such as shale, that were previously considered insufficiently porous, this is, in reality, a financial play. The effort is too expensive in terms of both technical requirements and environmental damage to pay for itself, unless the price of natural gas rises to the point where it starts to cause economic damage, which suppresses demand.

Coal was previously thought to be very abundant, with hundreds of years of supply left at current levels. However, these estimates have been reassessed in recent years, and it would appear that the world's largest coal producer, China, is quite close to its peak. Since it is coal that has directly fueled the recent bout of Chinese economic growth, this implies that Chinese economic growth is at an end, with severe economic, social and political dislocations to follow. The US relies on coal for close to half of its electricity generation, and is likewise unable to increase the use of this resource. Most of the energy-dense anthracite has been depleted in the US, and what is being produced now, through environmentally destructive techniques such as mountaintop removal, is much lower grades of coal. The coal is slowly turning to dirt. At a certain point in time coal will cease to provide an energy gain: digging it up, crushing it and transporting it to a power plant will become a net waste of energy.

It is essential to appreciate the fact that it is oil, and the transport fuels produced from it, that enables all other types of economic activity. Without diesel for locomotives, coal cannot be transported to power plants, the electric grid goes down, and all economic activity stops. It is also essential to understand that even minor shortfalls in the availability of transport fuels have severe economic knock-on effects. These effects are exacerbated by the fact that it is economic growth, not economic décroissance [Fr., "de-growth"] (which seems inevitable, given the factors described above) that forms the basis of all economic and industrial planning. Modern industrial economies, at the financial, political and technological level, are not designed for shrinkage, or even for steady state. Thus, a minor oil crisis (such as the recent steady increase in the price of oil punctuated by severe price spikes) results in a sociopolitical calamity.

Lastly, it bears mentioning that fossil fuels are really only useful in the context of an industrial economy that can make use of them. An industrial economy that is in an advanced state of decay and collapse can neither produce nor make use of the vast quantities of fossil fuels that are currently burned up daily. There is no known method of scaling industry down to boutique size, to serve just the needs of the elite, or to provide life support to social, financial and political institutions that co-evolved with industry in absence of industry. It also bears pointing out that fossil fuel use was very tightly correlated with human population size on the way up, and is likely to remain so on the way down. Thus, it may not be necessary to look too far past the peak in global oil production to see major disruption of global industry, which will make other fossil fuels irrelevant.

TB: How is post-collapse Russia doing ? Ready for its second peak ?

DO: Russia remains the world's largest oil producer. Although it has been unable to grow its conventional oil production, it has recently claimed that it can double its oil endowment by drilling offshore in the melting Arctic. Russia is and remains Europe's second largest energy asset. In spite of toxic pipeline politics (which have recently been remedied somewhat by the construction of the Nordstream gas pipeline across the Baltic) it has historically been the single most reliable European energy supplier, and shows every intention of remaining so into the future.

TB: Is there hope for a safe, harmless European decline, or is any industrial society just bound to collapse at once when fuel runs out?

DO: The severity of collapse will depend on how quickly societies can scale down their energy use, curtail their reliance on industry, grow their own food, go back to manual methods of production for fulfilling their immediate needs, and so forth. It is to be expected that large cities and industrial centers will depopulate the fastest. On the other hand, remote, land-locked, rural areas will not have the local resources to reboot into a post-industrial mode. But there is hope for small-to-middling towns that are surrounded by arable land and have access to a waterway. To see what will be survivable, one needs to look at ancient and medieval settlement patterns, ignoring places that became overdeveloped during the industrial era. Those are the places to move to, to ride out the coming events.

TB: I remember my grandmother telling me about the German occupation, when urban and suburban dwellers flocked into country towns every Sunday with empty cases, eager too find some food to buy from the local farmers, hopping back in a train the same day. Is there any advantage in living in a city, in a post-collapse era, rather than in the countryside?

DO: Surviving in the countryside requires a different mindset, and different set of skills than surviving in a town or a city. Certainly, most of our contemporaries, who spend their days manipulating symbols, and expect to be fed for doing so, would not survive when left to their own devices in the countryside. On the other hand, even those living in the countryside are currently missing much of the know-how they once had for surviving without industrial supplies, and lack the resources to reconstitute it in a crisis. There could be some fruitful collaboration between them, given sufficient focus and preparation.

TB: Can we grow sufficient food with low technology, low energy methods, out of highly exhausted, highly polluted farmland ? It seems we might end up in a worse farming situation than our ancestors just two or three generations ago.

DO: That is certainly true. Add global warming, which is already causing severe soil erosion due to torrential rains and floods, droughts and heat waves in other areas. It is likely that agriculture as it has existed for the past ten thousand years will become ineffective in many areas. However, there are other techniques for growing food, which involve setting up stable ecosystems consisting of many species of plants and animals, including humans, living together synergistically.

What will of necessity be left behind is the current system, where fertilizers and pesticides are spread out on tilled dirt (rather than living soil) to kill everything but one organism (a cash crop) which is then mechanically harvested, processed, ingested, excreted, and flushed into the ocean. This system is already encountering a hard limit in the availability of phosphate fertilizer. But it is possible to create closed cycle systems, where nutrients stay on the land and are allowed to build up over time. The key to post-industrial human survival, it turns out, is in making proper use of human excrement and urine.

TB: If cities or big towns survive collapse, what will be their core activities? What do we need cities for?

DO: The size of towns and cities is proportional to the surplus that the countryside is able to produce. This surplus has become gigantic during the period of industrial development, where one or two percent of the population is able to feed the rest. In a post-industrial world, where two-thirds of the population is directly involved in growing or gathering food, there will be many fewer people who will be able to live on agricultural surplus.

The activities that are typically centralized are those that have to do with long-range transportation (sail ports) and manufacturing (mills and manufactures powered by waterwheels). Some centers of learning may also remain, although much of contemporary higher education, which involves training young people for occupations which will no longer exist, is sure to fall by the wayside.

TB: Some Americans view peak oil and collapse as another investment opportunity. You already wrote on the fallacies of the faith in money. That leaves a more useful question: what can people do of their savings during or preferably before collapse? What can you buy that is truly useful? I assume the answer vary greatly according to how much money you still have.

DO: This is a very important question. While there is still time, money should be converted to commodity items that will remain useful even after the industrial base disappears. These commodities can be stockpiled in containers and are sure to lose their value more slowly than any paper asset. One example is hand implements for performing manual labor, to provide essential services that are currently performed by mechanized labor. Another is materials that will be needed to bring back essential post-industrial services such as sail-based transportation: materials such as synthetic fibre rope and sail cloth need to be stockpiled beforehand to ease the transition.

TB: You don't mention arable land or housing. Do you think some kind of real property may turn out a valuable post-collapse asset, assuming you can afford them without drowning into debt, or is it too much financial and fiscal liability in our pre-collapse era to be of any use?

DO: The laws and customs that govern real property are not helpful or conducive to the right kind of change. As the age of mechanized agriculture comes to an end, we should expect there to be large tracts of fallow land. It won't matter too much who owns them, on paper, since the owner is unlikely to be able to make productive use of large fields without mechanized labor. Other patterns of occupying the landscape will have to emerge, of necessity, such as small plots tended by families, for subsistence.

Absentee landlords (those who hold title to land without actually physically residing on it but using it as a financial asset) are likely to be simply run off once the financial and mechanical amplifiers of their feeble physical energies are no longer available to them. I expect several decades more of fruitless efforts to grow cash crops on increasingly depleted land using increasingly unaffordable and unreliable mechanical and chemical farming techniques. These efforts will increasingly lead to failure due to climate disruption, causing food prices to spike and robbing the population of their savings in a downward spiral.

The new patterns of subsisting off the land will take time to emerge, but this process can be accelerated by people who pool resources, buy up, lease, or simply occupy small tracts of land, and practice permaculture techniques. Community gardens, guerilla gardening efforts, planting wild edibles using seed balls, seasonal camps for growing and gathering food, and other humble and low-key arrangements can pave the way towards something bigger, allowing some groups of people to avoid the most dismal scenario.

TB: How can people make preparations for collapse or decline without losing connections with their current social environment, friends, relatives, jobs or customers, and everything around them that still function as usual. That is a question about sanity as much as practicality.

DO: This is perhaps the most difficult question. The level of alienation in developed industrial societies, in Europe, North America and elsewhere, is quite staggering. People are only able to form lasting friendships in school, and are unable to become close with people thereafter with the possible exception of romantic involvements, which are often fleeting. By a certain age people become set in their ways, develop manners specific to their class, and their interactions with others become scripted and limited to socially sanctioned, commercial modes.

A far-reaching, fundamental transition, such as the one we are discussing, is impossible without the ability to improvise, to be flexible—in effect, to be able to abandon who you have been and to change who you are in favor of what the moment demands. Paradoxically, it is usually the young and the old, who have nothing to lose, who do the best, and it is the successful, productive people between 30 and 60 who do the worst. It takes a certain detachment from all that is abstract and impersonal, and a personal approach to everyone around you, to navigate the new landscape.

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The TV-Hat is waiting for you

SUBHEAD: In search of the perfect balance of form and function; today's contender is the TV-Hat. [Publisher's note: Last night watching the Colbert Report I was amused by a skit mocking what I assumed was a made-up product - The TV-Hat! But the satire seemed to elaborate to be wasted on something without a basis in reality. To check this possibility I googled "TV Hat" and immediately found the "TV Hat Official Site" at (https://www.buytvhatnow.com). On the site was a promo video for the hat that was the source for the Colbert clip (see below). Further research revealed the following gadget review by Francis Cardino, an early adopter who discovered the TV Hat at the January 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Nevada. Luckily, there is still time to buy TV Hats as Xmas stocking stuffers for the ones you love most - just $29.95 each] By Francis Cardino on 8 January 2011 for Gear Diary - (http://www.geardiary.com/2011/01/08/in-search-of-the-perfect-balance-of-form-and-function-todays-contender-is-the-tv-hat/) Image above: Francis Cardino wearing TV-Hat in his Los Vegas hotel room. Reason enough to be blinded. From original article.

We have seen a wide range of new and improved gadgets this week at CES. Some impressed us while others left us cold. And there were a few that made us laugh. This review is about one of those items.

Yes, the TV Hat looks… well… It looks interesting. We drew straws to see who would write the review and Francis drew the short one. (Shhhh don’t tell him but they were all short.)

Oh, and make sure to check out the end of the review since there are tons of extra shots to enjoy.

So…. Here’s Francis…

Ok, so day 1 my first time here at CES. And as you all can imagine it is a serious amount of information to take in. We trolled the floor today meeting with vendors and catching a glimpse of this years new products that will all hopefully see the store shelves soon. I have only been writing for GearDiary for about a year now but I am pleased to say that this is the pinnacle of my short lived career in tech reviews and news. Today I was introduced to such a product that makes it all worth it. With thousands of new tech related products I am pleased to give my first on site CES review of the TV Hat.

The TV Hat is probably what caught my eye the most during my running through Gadget Gauntlet and being the fantastic editors that they are made proper arrangements to get me a review sample. So without further ado, here is my hands on experience of the personal theater known as the TV Hat.

Upon initial un-bagging and inspection it’s clear that this hat can be worn and enjoyed by anyone. Just because it’s stamped with the coveted “As Seen On TV” logo doesn’t mean that you’re not in for a treat. The quality one size fits all hat has an extended brim and front face hood that keeps extra light from leaking in and ruining your theatrical production. When not in use the hood has a patented snap which makes for easy and convenient for travel without taking up valuable space in your carry-on or backpack. The extended brim is great for all occasions, with the hood snapped up it does a fine job of keeping the sun out of your eyes and also prevents other from invading the personal space in front of you.

The business side of the hat (underneath) has a fully adjustable plastic magnifying glass and clear plastic pouch that holds your video playing device (mobile phone or iPod). The screen magnifier is fully movable and runs on a click lock rail system. It easily adjusts to anyone wearing the hat while providing maximum viewing pleasure by increasing the virtual screen size of your mobile device. The plastic magnifier was covered in protective plastic but was still scratched upon first removal. This is no doubt an added feature of the hat to make it look more broken in and not so new. I was also worried that with the added weight of the mobile movie device that the hat would cause a large amount of neck strain and stress, but surprisingly the hat is built well enough that after a whole 5 minutes of wearing I felt no added fatigue or discomfort.

With all the great new products here at CES I truly believe I found a diamond in the rough. Whether you’re at home on the porch or in Las Vegas trying to escape from the daily grind this hat puts you in your own personal movie theater. Powered by your mobile device This little gem will set you back about $30 and can be found at AsSeenOnTVHat.com. It’s only been one day here for me but I think I may have found the winner for gadget of CES 2011 award. Be sure to check out the site for more info.

The TV Hat blocks out sound and light, turning and ordinary experience into an extraordinary theater experience. You will be engrossed in your favorite TV show or YouTube movie in no time. Try it, and you won’t put TV Hat down.

Summary

What I like:

• No batteries required
• One size fits all
• Full theater experience from a mobile device
• packs up neatly for travel and storage

What needs improvement:

• Comes in black color only (now available in many colors - including camo)
• side flaps may not block enough light for people with large heads
• should have come out sooner

Video above: Official Promotional info-ad for the TV-Hat. From (http://youtu.be/9SJsk1L2RUg). .

Losing lifelong Koloa homes

SUBHEAD: Meeting on Grove Farm eviction notice tonight, Thursday at 6pm at Koloa Neighborhood Center. By Joan Conrow on 13 Decmeber 2011 for Kauai Eclectic - (http://kauaieclectic.blogspot.com/2011/12/musings-losing-lifelong-homes.html) Image above: Abandoned Koloa plantation home and an abandoned way of life on Kauai. This cottage sat next to the Koloa Neghborhood Center when the issue of a moratorium on development culminated in a meeting that accomplished nothing on 5/9/06. Photo by Juan Wilson. WHAT: Meeting on Koloa Camp evictions WHERE: Koloa Neighborhood Center WHEN: at 6:00pm, Thursday, December 15th, 2011 Another piece of Kauai's history is on the chopping block. Grove Farm has issued eviction notices to 13 families living in Koloa Camp — the oldest remaining plantation camp on the southside. Ironically, Grove Farm wants to demolish the low-rent homes so it can build, mmm, affordable housing. Except the new units would be the China-made modular kine. The residents, including multi-generational families and seniors who have lived their entire lives in the homes, must be out by March 8. They got notice just two weeks before Thanksgiving, casting a pall over the holiday season. “The biggest thing that really breaks my heart is a local company like Grove Farm would do that to senior citizens. It's almost shameful,” says Kepa Kruse, a Na Hoku Hanohano award-winning musician who grew up in the camp. His father, John Kruse, who sailed on Hokulea and formerly chaired the Kauai-Niihau Island Burial Council, still lives there. “A lot of these people have nowhere to go, so I think they're just gonna stay here,” Kepa says. “It's hard to relocate your lifestyle. This is real local style. People raise chickens and have gardens. We're gonna lose the old style Kauai charm.” The 24 acres scheduled for redevelopment lie behind Koloa Post Office. The land borders the parcel where monkeypod trees were cut down three years ago, despite intense community opposition, to make way for the Shops at Koloa. The mall stalled when major tenants sued to break lease, leaving the developer, Eric A. Knudsen Trust and David Nelson of Detroit, unable to get financing. “The developer had big dreams and cut down all the trees and the land is just sitting there, infested with rats,” Kepa says. “We fear the same thing will happen here.” He says 30 families living in another camp near Waikomo Stream and Hapa Road were previously evicted and their homes destroyed to make way for an affordable housing project that still hasn't broken ground. “Developers see these old plantation homes and think, that would be a nice development,” Kepa says. “But for local people, that's their childhood, the buildings they grew up in. Even though it's old, it still has value. It's meaningful.” Residents are wondering why Grove Farm is pushing for the evictions when it apparently hasn't yet submitted plans its plans for the project to the county. Kepa says the land is in a flood zone and borders streams inhabited by the endangered Koloa duck, factors that could delay or prevent development. The community is also concerned about how the proposed 50-unit project would affect traffic on narrow Wailana Street. “These are valid questions we're bringing up and it's like they're trying to keep it hush-hush,” he says. Residents have been trying to get answers from Grove Farm, to no avail. So they went to the Koloa Community Association for help, and a meeting is now scheduled for 6 p.m. Thursday at the Koloa Neighborhood Center to discuss the issue. Grove Farm Vice President Mike Tresler has been invited, although Kepa is uncertain whether Tresler will show. “He doesn't want to meet with us.” Koloa Early School also has received an eviction notice, and the Koloa Canoe Club would be similarly displaced. “We as a community feel it's a very reasonable thing for Grove Farm to address these concerns and also delay the evictions until these concerns are addressed,” Kepa says. In the meantime, residents have been meeting each Sunday afternoon to discuss strategy. “It's really amazing to see the community coming together to fight this,” Kepa says. “I know with some of the developers their intentions are good, but I wish they would open their heart to the community before they press on the gas pedal. Kauai is pretty special, and if we lose the things that make it that way, you might as well move to Oahu.” The residents have organized under the name Save Koloa Camp, and you can check out their website here. I hope to attend the Thursday meeting and hear what the developer and some of the other residents have to say. Meanwhile, I'm wondering whether all those folks who were upset about the monkeypods being cut will be similarly motivated to support the families who are on the verge of losing their lifelong homes. .

Waimea residents sue Pioneer

SUBHEAD: GMO seed company facing substantial lawsuit after ignoring residents for a decade about health risks. By Vanessa Van Voorhis on 13 December 2011 for Garden Island News - (http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/article_82ff2c3e-2632-11e1-9ca7-001871e3ce6c.html) Image above: Waimea River looking north. Zone highlighted by red outline is area of disturbed soil used for GMO experimental testing that sits on bluff upwind of Waimea Town that lies to left of river. Pioneer headquarters and laboratories are at lower left of zone. From GoogleEarth via Juan Wilson. Click to enlarge. On behalf of more than 150 Waimea residents, attorneys on Tuesday filed a lawsuit in Fifth Circuit Court on O‘ahu against Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a DuPont company.

The 58-page lawsuit alleges that Pioneer’s practices in the farming of genetically modified seed crops on fields next to Waimea unlawfully allowed pesticides and pesticide-laden fugitive dust to blow into residents’ homes on almost a daily basis for more than 10 years.

Honolulu attorney Gerard Jervis and Las Vegas attorney Kyle Smith said the amount requested in the lawsuit was not disclosed in the filing, but added that the amount is “substantial” and will redress and remedy the impact to residents and diminished value of more than 100 homes.

The suit, accompanied by numerous exhibits, contends that despite ongoing community complaints and a petition by Waimea residents in 2000 requesting relief, Pioneer’s GMO operations have continually generated excessive fugitive dust and used inherently dangerous pesticides without taking preventative steps to control airborne pollutants as promised by Pioneer and as required by state and county law.

The plaintiffs also allege that long-term, excessive exposure to dust and pesticides have resulted in reduced property values and physical damage to their homes.

They claim that they have been faced with constant cleaning and must live with windows and doors closed year-round for fear of pesticide- and dust-related health problems.

“The community is covered,” Jervis said. “(Pioneer) plows all the time. They send out notices regarding planting and spraying — planting is just another word for plowing … (Residents) are living in lock down, unable to open their doors or windows.”

He said residents contacted him a year ago and asked for help.

During the last year, he has had key people looking at the situation, including toxicologists and researchers. It eventually led to a sit-down meeting with DuPont at their request, Jervis said, “but that didn’t go anywhere.”

The fields up above Waimea have been plowed and left bare, Smith said, which creates live dust plumes a couple of hundred feet high.

“We’ve been bringing in some of the best experts in the country and the state to look at what’s going on,” he said, adding that the vast majority of the plaintiffs have lived in the area for decades.

This suit will not address health impacts, Smith said, because those are “thorny” issues, though a large number of residents claim they suffer from asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

“When you deal with dust long-term, there’s a host of respiratory impacts,” he said, but this “first” lawsuit seeks to address the impact on property values and cleaning.

Cindy Goldstein, the business and community outreach manager for Pioneer Hi-Bred, said on Tuesday she could not comment on the lawsuit.

“We’ve been a good community partner for over 40 years, and even though this suit has been filed, we’ll continue to be a good community partner,” she said. “Whenever someone files a suit, I can no longer comment.”

Pioneer leases the property it farms from Gay & Robinson Inc. and Robinson Family Partners, which are also named in the suit.

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Is methane situation really that bad?

SUBHEAD: Yesterday TreeHugger announced it might be time to join an end-of-world cult because of the pace of arctic permafrost melt. [Editor's note: The chief Science Editor for TreeHugger has a different view of arctic methane release.] By Matthew McDermott on 15 December 2011 for TreeHugger - (http://www.treehugger.com/climate-change/arctic-methane-situation-really-bad-headlines-make-it.html) Image above: Melting Arctic Ocean leads to release of undersea methane. From original article.

A few days ago the "shocking" headlines came out, describing some new research on how much methane is now seeping out of the Arctic seafloor—a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide, but much shorter lived in the atmosphere—as the region warms and permafrost melts.

It wasn't the first research documenting this, as TreeHugger has reported over the past few years.

But is it really as bad as, in particular, The Independent, makes it out to be? Is it really time to join an end-time cult (if that ever really would be a good idea) as has been I presume tongue-in-cheek suggested? Massive and quick release of methane from melting permafrost would indeed be a pretty dire thing for the climate, but is it actually happening as has been popularly portrayed?

Perhaps not.

Dot Earth quotes from a summary of the research in question from the American Geophysical Union:

The authors found that roughly 1 meter of the subsurface permafrost thawed in the past 25 years, adding to the 25 meters of thawed soil. Forecasting the expected permafrost thaw, the authors found that even under the most extreme climatic scenario tested this thawed soil growth will not exceed 10 meters by 2100 or 50 meters by the turn of the next millennium. The authors note that the bulk of the methane stores in the east Siberian shelf are trapped roughly 200 meters below the seafloor.

Read more of the Dot Earth piece to get a more measured reading of the situation: Methane Time Bomb in Arctic Seas - Apocalypse Not

See also: Ea O Ka Aina: Permafrost melt accelerating 12/14/11 .

The Future Can't Pay Its Bills

SUBHEAD: Grandiose plans to create large of algal biodiesel farms or vast solar arrays won't be financed. By John Michael Greer on 14 December 2011 for the Archdruid Report - (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/12/future-cant-pay-its-bills.html) Image above: Architects rendering of floating algae farms and vertical bio-airships above the South China Sea. From (http://www10.aeccafe.com/blogs/arch-showcase/2011/03/08/hydrogenase-in-shanghai-china-by-vincent-callebaut-architect). I want to expand here on some of the points raised in last week’s post, because they deal with factors in our situation that operate well below the surface. One of the things that makes the predicament of industrial society so difficult for most people to notice, in fact, is that its effects are woven so deeply into the patterns of everyday life. Over the last decade, for example, crude oil prices have more than tripled; over the last decade, behind a froth of speculative booms and busts, the world’s industrial economies have lurched deeper into depression. Peak oil researchers have pointed out for years that the former trend would bring about the latter, but long after events proved them right, the connection still remains unnoticed by most people. To be fair, the way most people and nearly all economists think about economics makes this sort of blindness to the obvious hard to avoid. It’s standard these days to treat the circulation of money—the tertiary economy, to use a term from my book The Wealth of Nature—as though it’s all that matters, and to insist that the cycles of nature and the production of goods and services (the primary and secondary economies) will inevitably do whatever we want them to do, so long as there’s enough money. This is why, for instance, you’ll hear economists insisting that the soaring price of oil is good for the economy; after all, all the money being spent to buy oil is getting spent in turn on other things, right? What this ignores, of course, is the fact that the price of oil is going up, in large part, because petroleum is getting steadily more difficult to extract as we exhaust the easily accessible sources, and so the cost of oil production is going up while the amount of oil being produced is not. As a growing fraction of industrial civilization’s capacity to produce goods and services has to be diverted into oil extraction in order to keep the oil flowing, the amount of that capacity that can be used for anything else decreases accordingly. Notice, though, that this diversion isn’t an obvious thing; it happens one transaction at a time, throughout the economy, as laborers, raw materials, capital, and a thousand other things go into oil production instead of some other economic sector. The place to begin making sense of the shape of the process under way, it seems to me, is the intriguing article by green economist Herman Daly, cited in last week’s post, about the way that the World Bank’s pursuit of global growth via the worship of economic orthodoxies ran headfirst into a shortage of "bankable projects"—in plain English, economic projects that would yield the ten per cent or so per year necessary to pay off the loan and also make a profit. The World Bank, as Daly recounts, tried to make up for the shortage by lowering its standards, and pouring money into projects that counted as bankable only in the same imaginary world where Pets.com stock and subprime mortgage-backed securities count as good investments. The point I’d like to make here, though, is that a shortage of bankable projects has been a problem for some time now in regions not normally consigned to the Third World. The Rust Belt town where I live, Cumberland, Maryland, is one example. Until 1974 it was a significant industrial center, with two large breweries, a tire factory, a fabric mill, and several smaller concerns. 1974, though, was the year that the consequences of America’s first brush with peak oil hit home, and Cumberland was one of the targets. A combination of soaring raw material costs, slumping sales, and competition from overseas shuttered every factory in town, and none ever reopened. Cumberland, like the rest of the Rust Belt, suddenly had a shortage of bankable projects. The shortage wasn’t total—a handful of "big box" stores found construction loans during the retail-empire boom of the 1990s, for example—but rock-bottom real estate prices, favorable tax policies, low labor costs, and two colleges nearby to provide workforce training at state expense couldn’t lure factory jobs back into the region. That same experience is being repeated now all over America, and for that matter across much of the industrial world. Capital shortage isn’t an issue—with two rounds of quantitative easing and a tacit agreement on the part of bank regulators not to raise awkward questions about the actual value of the paper assets owned by banks, there’s plenty of money available to lend—but loans aren’t being made, and the reason given by bank after bank is that next to nobody who wants to borrow money has a credible plan that will allow them to pay it back. That claim has been rejected with some heat by commentators, but I’ve come to suspect that it may be more accurate than not. That was exactly what happened to Cumberland, after all; in the changed economic environment after 1974, a factory built here wouldn’t have made enough money to pay back the loans that would have been needed to build it, and so the loans weren’t made. Increasingly, that seems to be true of the industrial world as a whole. All this can be described, in the terms I used in The Wealth of Nature, as a widening mismatch between the tertiary economy of money and the secondary economy of goods and services—or, to put the matter even more simply, a rising tide of paper wealth chasing a falling tide of actual value. Still, I’ve come to think that there’s another way of looking at it—one that unfolds from the perspectives I’ve been discussing here over the last few weeks. Let’s step away for a moment from the game of arbitrary tokens we call "money," and look at the economy from a thermodynamic perspective, as a system for producing goods and services by applying energy to an assortment of raw materials. Until the coming of the industrial revolution, the vast majority of the energy that went into human economic systems went from sunlight to crops to human and animal muscle, which produced and distributed goods and services. The industrial revolution transformed that equation adding torrents of cheap abundant fossil fuel energy to the annual income from photosynthesis. Only a small fraction of the labor force and other resources had to be diverted from food production to bring this flood of energy into the economic equation, and only a small fraction of fossil fuels had to be cycled back into the fossil fuel extraction process; the rest of the labor force, other resources, and all that additional energy from fossil fuels could be poured into the rest of the economy, producing goods and services in unparalleled amounts. Physicist Ilya Prigogine has shown by way of intricate equations that the flow of energy through a system increases the complexity of the system. If any further evidence was needed to back up his claims, the history of the world’s industrial economies provides it. The three centuries that followed the development of the first functional steam engines saw economic complexity, measured by the creation of new job categories, soar to a level almost unimaginably greater than any previous civilization had achieved. The bonanza of wealth produced by adding fossil fuel energy to the sun’s annual contribution spread throughout the industrial economies, and the ways and means by which money sprayed outwards from the pockets of coal magnates and oil barons quickly became institutionalized. Governments, businesses, and societies ballooned in complexity, creating niches for entire ecosystems of office fauna to do tasks the presidents and tycoons of the nineteenth century had accomplished with a tiny fraction of the personnel; workloads obeyed Parkinson’s Law—"work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion"—and everyone found that it was easier to add more staff to get a job done than to get the existing staff to do it themselves. The result, in most industrial societies, is an economy in which only a small fraction of the labor force actually has anything directly to do with the production of goods and services, while the rest are kept busy managing the sprawling social and economic machinery that has come into being to organize, finance, manage, staff, market, advertise, sell, analyze, tax, regulate, review, praise, and denounce the production of goods and services. What seems to have been lost sight of, though, is that this immense superstructure all rests on the same foundation as any other economy, the use of energy to convert raw materials into goods and services. More to the point, it depends on a certain level of surplus that can be produced in this way, and that depends in turn on being able to add plenty of fossil fuel energy to the economic system without having to divert too large a fraction of the labor force, resource base, and energy supply into the extraction of fossil fuels. Some sense of the difference made by fossil fuels can be measured by comparing the economies of the industrial age to those of societies that, by any other standard, were near the upper end of human social complexity—Tokugawa Japan and Renaissance Italy are the ones that come to mind. Urban, literate, and highly cultured, each of these societies had the resources to support extraordinary artistic, literary, and intellectual creativity. Still, they did this with economies vastly simpler than anything you’ll find in a modern industrial society. The division of the labor force among economic roles makes a good measure of the difference. In both societies, the largest economic sector, employing around fifty per cent of the adult population (nearly all adult women and most elderly people of both sexes), was the household economy; a good half of the total economic value produced in each society came out of the kitchen gardens, spindles, looms, and other economic facilities associated with households. Another thirty per cent or so of the population in each society, including most of the adult men, was engaged full time in farming and other forms of direct food production; maybe ten per cent of the adult population worked in the skilled trades; and the remaining ten per cent or so was divided between religious professionals, military professionals, artists and performers, aristocrats, and merchants who lived by buying and selling goods produced by others. The limited range of categories available in those societies was not the result of inadequate cleverness. If some Italian despot or Tokugawa shogun had decided he needed a staff of human resource managers, corporate image consultants, strategic marketing specialists, and the rest of the occupational apparatus of modern business life, say, he would have been out of luck, and if he tried anyway, he would have been out of a job—the resources needed to train and employ some equivalent of modern office fauna would have had to be diverted from more immediate necessities such as training and employing an adequate force of condottieri or samurai, which was not exactly a viable strategy in those times. This is why Italian despots and Tokugawa shoguns got by with relatively small staffs of clerks, scribes, feudal subordinates, and maybe an astrologer; that’s what their economic systems could afford. Equally, an aspiring craftsman or merchant faced real challenges in expanding his business beyond fairly sharp limits. In a few cases, a combination of luck, technical skill, and adequate transport allowed one region to take on a commanding role in some specific export market, profit considerably from that, and build up an impressive degree of infrastructure; the golden age of Greece was paid for by the profits from Greek wine and olive oil exports, for example, and the woolen trade brought similar benefits to late medieval Flanders. Far more often, though, local needs had to be supplied by local production, because the surplus energy that would have been needed to power long distance trade on a large scale simply didn’t exist, or couldn’t be spared from more pressing needs. Thus the institutional arrangements that governed economic life before the industrial age were as closely tailored to a world of relatively scarce energy, in which most people worked in the household or farming sectors of the economy, as today’s institutional arrangements are tailored to a world awash in cheap abundant energy. That last point defines the crisis of our times, however, because we no longer live in a world awash in cheap abundant energy. We’ve still got a lot more energy than Renaissance Italy or Tokugawa Japan had, to be sure, but the per capita surplus is not what it once was, and a growing fraction of what we’ve got has had to be diverted to cover increases in direct and indirect energy costs of energy production. Meanwhile, the institutional arrangements are still firmly fixed in place, and they aren’t optional; try starting a business sometime without dealing with banks, real estate companies, licensing boards, tax authorities, et al., and you’ll quickly discover how non-optional these arrangements are. The mismatch between the economy we’ve got and the economy we can afford has many implications, but one of the largest is precisely the issue I raised earlier in this post: across the industrial world, there are very few bankable projects to be found, even at a time when there are millions of people who need work, and who would happily buy products if they had the chance to earn the money to do so. Our economy is burdened with an unproductive superstructure it can no longer support. The globalization fad of the 1990s, which arbitraged the difference in wage costs between Third World sweatshops and industrial-world factories, was in effect an attempt to evade the resulting difficulties by throwing the industrial nations’ working classes under the bus, and it only worked for a decade or so; as so often happens in the declining years of a civilization, a short term fix was treated as a long term solution, and a brief remission of symptoms allowed the underlying crisis to worsen steadily. Over the long run, the mismatch is a problem that will solve itself; once the unraveling of the industrial economy goes far enough, the superstructure will come apart, leaving a great many human resource managers, corporate image consultants, strategic marketing specialists, and the like with about as much chance of finding jobs in their fields as they would have had 17th-century Osaka or 14th-century Milan. In the short and middle term, though, the mismatch will almost certainly continue to show itself in exactly the same way that it’s been visible over the last few decades: more and more often, business ventures simply won’t be able to make enough money to cover startup costs or to stay in business. Of course there will be exceptions. We are talking about a shift that will appear, as it has appeared so far, as a shifting of statistical averages, and the background of ordinary economic fluctuations will make it more than usually difficult to tease out the signal from the noise. Even in hard times, some ventures make fortunes; what makes hard times differ from boomtimes is that the fortunes are fewer, and the odds of making one of them come more and more to resemble the odds of walking away from a Vegas casino with a six-figure jackpot. All this has two implications, it seems to me, that are of core importance for the shape of our future. The first is simply that those of my readers whose plans for the future depend on holding down a job may have a very hard row to hoe. The shift under way in the economy will more than likely squeeze the current model of economic life from both ends—as it becomes harder to find, keep, and earn a decent living at an ordinary job, businesses will continue to fold, debase their products, or both, and so it will also become harder to convert the income from an ordinary job back into goods and services worth having. One of the core themes I’ve been discussing here for some time now, the need to move at least one family member out of employment into the household economy, is in part a response to that situation; what you produce yourself for your own consumption doesn’t pay a share of the costs of the economic superstructure. Beyond that, the deterioration of the official economy is accompanied, as pretty much always happens, by the growth of alternative economic networks that allow goods and services to be exchanged outside normal channels; it may be a while before those networks become solid enough to support more than a few people, but taking part in exchanges through these networks even in their early stages may be worthwhile. The second implication also relates to a core theme of this blog, though it’s on a larger scale. While other economic arrangements are certainly imaginable, the one we have right now is strictly limited in what it can accomplish by what can make a profit: to repeat Daly’s term, it has to be a bankable project, or by and large, it won’t get done. This may just turn out to be a far more dangerous limitation than anybody has yet realized. There are, after all, any number of plans for grand projects in response to the end of the age of cheap abundant energy; each of them would require the investment of a great deal of capital, labor, raw materials, and other resources; and under present arrangements, none of them can go forward unless someone can count on making a profit from making them happen. Under present arrangements, in turn, it’s likely that none of them will be profitable enough to get a construction loan or to cover their operating costs once they get built. We’ve already seen a solid prefigure of this in the ethanol bubble of a few years ago, in which firms in corn states rushed to build ethanol plants. Even with government subsidies and a guaranteed market, a great many of those plants are now bankrupt and shuttered. It’s an open secret that many recent solar and wind energy projects make money only because of government subsidies. Grandiose plans to turn large swathes of Nevada into algal biodiesel farms or vast solar arrays are arguably even more likely to be subject to the same rule—and the subsidies in these latter cases would be ruinously expensive. Earlier posts here have discussed some of the other reasons why such projects will not be built; if the pattern I’ve sketched here is anything to go by, though, the future these projects imagine won’t arrive, because it won’t be able to pay its bills. .

Permafrost melt accelerating

SUBHEAD: Sign up for your favorite end times cult soon - Arctic permafrost is gushing massive plumes of methane. By John Laumer on 13 December 2011 for TreeHugger - (http://www.treehugger.com/climate-change/sign-your-favorite-end-times-cult-soon-permafrost-gushing-methane-skyward.html) Image above: Massive methane plumes rise out of melting permafrost. From original article.

Fossil Fuelers, Right Wing Think Tanks, & Republicans may have hosed our future irretrievably. Waiting ten more years for a half-made climate treaty to be finalized is not acceptable on the basis of these observations alone.

Russian scientists are reporting a very grim omen. Methane has been observed gushing forth from a 1,000 meter in diameter plume, erupting from melting arctic permafrost. There are likely thousands of similar methane plumes gushing skyward from permafrost plains similar to the one pictured.

Do we rush now toward untested geo-engineering options, letting the military industrial complex take charge with expensive rocketry and sulfur cannons? I'd rather see Obama get forceful on the subject, cutting the legs out from under the Newt, who'll otherwise spout off his own gushing plume of made up solutions from the election fields of Iowa.

Here's an excerpt from UK Independent coverage:

The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.

In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov, of the Far Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.

"Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing," Dr Semiletov said. "I was most impressed by the sheer scale and high density of the plumes. Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them."

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Nicotine Pesticides and Bees

SUBHEAD: Free Documentary Film Viewing at KCC Saturday, December 17th at 4pm . By Jimmy Trujillo on 13 December 2011 in Island Breath - Image above: Detail of cartoon showing how many ways can we not see the reason for bee colony collapse disorder. Click to see whole cartoon enlarged. From (http://handymemory.blogspot.com/2011/08/bee-colony-collapse.html). Nicotine Bees is a documentary by Kevin Hansen. Released in 2010, the video is about the worldwide collapse of honeybees and the role honeybees play as pollinators for an estimated one-third of the world’s food supply. The hour-long documentary explores the links between a new class of nicotine-based pesticides and the issue of Colony Collapse Disorder. To view a trailer of the movie, and more information on the film, go to http://pierreterre.com/video/nicotine-bees-trailer A discussion of local apiary issues will follow the 4pm screening. The showing is free and open to the public; audience members are encouraged to bring a non-perishable food item for a donation to Kauai Independent Food Bank. WHAT: Free Video Presentation of the documentary, "Nicotine Bees" WHERE: Kauai Community College, Multipurpose Room 114 in the Electronic and Technology Building WHEN: Saturday, December 17, 4:00 to 6:00 SPONSOR: Kauai Beekeepers Association, in partnership with the KCC Apiary Program CONTACT: For more information, contact Jimmy Trujillo 346 7725 or email: jtrujill@hawaii.edu

Postal Service on Chopping Block

SUBHEAD: The USPS faces drastic closures, thanks to a bogus financial crisis – cuts that threaten America's very way of life. By Philp Rubio on 13 December 2011 for The Guardian - (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/dec/13/deliver-usps-destruction) Image above: Postal employee delivering in a snowstorm. From (http://www.panoramio.com/photo/6484521).

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” - Postal Service motto

The unthinkable now threatens the US Postal Service: bankruptcy. With no relief forthcoming from Congress, the USPS hopes to save itself by planning the closing of about 3,700 post offices next year, along with 252 mail processing centers.

Around 120,000 postal workers will lose their jobs with another 100,000 positions going unfilled. Saturday delivery will be gone, and first-class letter delivery will be slowed. Some historic postal buildings, including those with New Deal-era murals, have already been sold off.

How could this venerable institution founded in 1775, which ran deficits for most of its existence as the "US Post Office Department", face a possible shutdown?

Don't blame the internet. Online communications and transactions have cut into first-class mail use, but have also helped generate mail volume, particularly parcels. The internet is not the source of USPS red ink, although it provides a popular narrative for those who have wanted to privatise the USPS for years and are using the current crisis to push that agenda. The USPS still delivers 40% of the world's mail, and has done so without any taxpayer subsidies for 40 years.

In fact, the USPS has consistently exceeded the mandate of the 1971 Postal Reorganisation Act (PRA) that it continue to provide universal service and be self-supporting in its new status as a quasi-corporate government agency. (The USPS and PRA are products of the 1970 great postal wildcat strike against low wages.)

So how did an organisation that actually earned a $6131m revenue surplus over the last four years – which included the worst recession since the 1930s – get so deep in debt, with a $10bn deficit this past fiscal year?

The USPS is the victim of an invented crisis. The 2006 Postal Enhancement and Accountability Act forced the postal service to unnecessarily prefund its retiree health benefits 75 years into the future at the rate of $5.5bn a year over a ten-year span.

Picture a homeowner whose bank suddenly demands its mortgage paid in full not in 30 but in three years, with the homeowner reduced to desperate but futile measures of selling off furniture and appliances to avoid foreclosure.

Don't blame the salaries of postal workers: their selection by high exam scores, training and accountability, plus good wages and benefits has produced high productivity and a low quit rate. The postal workforce has, in fact, shrunk from nearly 800,000 in 1999 to 560,000 today. Most of those job cuts had to do with increased automation, but many have come at the price of service – despite the post office's original constitutional mandate.

The post office has historically been key to American communications and commercial progress. The post office has also long been a job opportunity site; for African Americans, that opportunity only began in March 1865, with the overturning of white-only postal employment laws. For black America, postal work then became a destination, tradition and antidote to private-sector job discrimination. Jazz giants Charles Mingus and Herbie Hancock once worked for the US Post Office. So, too, did comedian/activist Dick Gregory and actor Morgan Freeman. But many more were career employees, like Frasier Robinson Jr, the paternal grandfather of First Lady Michelle Obama. The rate of black postal employment compared to whites was two to one by 1970.

Since the 1960s, about 21% of the postal workforce has been African American, with black majorities in some cities. Their activism was pivotal to breaking down discrimination and segregation in the post office and its unions, making the USPS one of the most diverse workforces in the US today. It has been crucial to black community development and middle-class entry, and the loss of postal jobs now has been most devastating to blacks and veterans.

Since the American civil war, city and rural delivery of first-class letter mail, advertising and periodicals have been major examples of post office innovation. The "new" parcel post service in 1913 provided relief to customers previously gouged by inflated prices and limited service by the private sector. Today, the USPS is the hub of a $1.3tn mailing industry that employs almost 8 million workers.

Several competing bills are before Congress whose aim is to either save or essentially scrap the USPS. The bills to save it range from removing blocks to USPS competitiveness to allowing it to reclaim an estimated $50bn in pension funds that the Office of Personnel Management has overcharged it during the last few decades, and apply it to the retiree health benefit prefunding. The postal unions have joined national and local popular protests opposing the cuts. About 30% of Americans do not access the internet, and many rural areas also depend on their local post offices as community centers.

The post office has always been part of a nationwide and global network that is not just about communication, but also about creating jobs and nurturing communities. Who will provide universal service at reasonable rates if the USPS is gone?

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