Things Have Changed

SUBHEAD: Something old and played-out is limping offstage, and something new is stepping on.

By James Kunstler for Kunstler.com on 16 March 2020 -
(https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/things-have-changed/)


Image above: Painting by Mark Bryan in 2012  titled "The Causeway". From (https://www.artofmarkbryan.com/landscape/). Click to enlarge.

At least in wartime, the bars stay open. That’s how you know this is a different thing altogether from whatever else you’ve seen in your lifetime.

Even those of us who signed up for this trip — that is, who expected a long emergency — may be a little bit in cosmic awe at just how much shit is flying into the ol’ fan. I know I am. The gods must have glugged down a mighty draft of Dulcolax.

Did you get the feeling, as I did, watching the Sanders-Biden debate the other night — the inadequate versus the irrelevant — that the world they were blathering about possibly doesn’t exist anymore?

The world of institutions that actually function? Like, the ones that conjure up whatever sum of money you demand to keep all the wheels spinning? 

Remember that Hemingway line about the guy who went broke? Slowly, then all at once. That’s us.

Medicare for all now? Really? 

More like, a year from now every physician in America may be the equivalent of the old country doc toting a black bag around to home visits. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough horses left in America, and the few buggies we’ve got are all in the museum.

The mega financial bubble-of-bubbles is deflating with frightful velocity precisely because of the efforts since 2008 to artificially inflate it. The Federal Reserve gave it one final blast Sunday night — while everybody else was counting their rolls of toilet paper — and the effect was like blowing hot air into a shredded Zeppelin. Stock futures are “limit down” as I write, before the Wall Street open. 

Gold is getting pounded into the ground like a grape stake and silver is so low it looks like the hedge fund managers are down to pawning grandma’s table service. (Hint, the PMs will bounce back hard; the rest, probably not so much.)

Nobody really knows how deep and how harsh this gets (and perhaps the ones who have a clue ain’t sayin’). But the situation presents two salient questions: how much disorder is entailed in this ordeal? And what does the world look like when the convulsion phase of this thing is over?

Americans have never been through anything remotely like this. The disorders of the Civil War were sharp and horrendous military operations conducted mostly in cornfields, pastures, and woods (yes, and some small cities like Richmond, pop. 38,000, and Atlanta, pop. 10,000). When the smoke cleared, battered Dixieland emerged to numb civil order. 

Up in Yankeedom, the New York draft riots ran for a week around the small patch of Manhattan island, but everybody else went along with Mr. Lincoln’s program.

After all that, America got on quickly with the lively business of the 19th century: railroads, mines, factories, and all that. The world wars took place in foreign lands, and the home-front scene of the 1940s now looks nostalgically idyllic.

The stresses mounting on the national scene today reflect the extreme fragilities of the way-of-life we constructed since then, and an awful lot of bad choices we made in the process, like suburbanizing the nation and making everybody a hostage to happy motoring. 

I won’t belabor that point, except to ask how are those vast regions of the country going to manage daily life as the supply chains wobble? I’d say a shortage of toilet paper may only be the beginning of their problems.

The cities — at least, the few that didn’t already implode from the inside out — made assumptions about how big and tall they could grow which don’t jibe with the new circumstances chugging ferociously down the line.

Just think what a lockdown of the global economy will do to all those residential skyscraper projects lately hoisted up in New York, San Francisco and Boston? I’ll tell you: They are assets instantly converted into liabilities. 

And how will these cities even begin to pay for maintaining their complex infrastructures and services when the money for all that no longer exists and there’s no way to pretend that it will ever come back? Answer: They won’t be able to keep borrowing and they won’t manage. These cities will depopulate and there will be battles over who gets to live in the parts that still may have some value, like riverfronts.

I guess just about everybody can now see the idiocy of concentrating the nation’s commercial life in super-gigantic organisms like Big Box stores. It seemed like a good idea at the time, like so many blunders in history, and now that time is over. 

Any ecology thrives on redundancy — a lot of players doing similar things at the appropriate scale — and America’s chain retail model for a commercial ecology was an obvious fiasco waiting to happen. 

The people who run that, and other people who run other things in our society, must be wondering whether those supply-chains from China will come back. It’s no different than the cargo cults of the Solomon Islanders circa 1947, after the military airplanes stopped landing with all their magical goodies: time to go back to fishing from the dugout canoe.

The foolish, idiotic identity politics ginned up by the Left and their racially-inflamed, sexually-disturbed scribes in the Thinking Class have successfully destroyed the last shred of an American common culture that held the country together through earlier vicissitudes. So, one concludes that we’ll be left stewing in poisonous tensions, and perhaps some violent conflicts, before those matters head toward some sort of resolution.

Where does this all lead? Eventually, to a land and a people who operate their society in a very different way at a much more modest scale. The task of reorganizing our national life is immense. (There will be plenty to do, so don’t worry about that.) 

You can forget about the grandiose techno-narcissistic visions of electrified motoring and a robotic nirvana of perpetual sex-crazed leisure. Everything we do has to be downscaled, from whatever manufacturing we can cobble back together to rebuilding commercial ecosystems at a finer grain from region to region — in other words, what we now call small business, geared locally.

Expect giant AgriBiz to founder on a shortage of capital, especially, and expect smaller farms to organize emergently, worked by more humans working together. That is, if we want to keep eating. Expect the small towns in the well-watered parts of the country to revive while the groaning metroplexes spiral down into entropic sclerosis.

Consider the value of our vast inland waterway system and the opportunities to move goods on them, when the trucking industry unravels. Consider lending a hand at rebuilding the railroad system in this country.

There will be economic roles and social roles for all those willing to step up to some responsibility. Young people may see tremendous opportunity replacing the wounded economic dinosaurs wobbling across the landscape. It’ll be all about going local and regional and making yourself useful in exchange for a livelihood and the esteem of others around you — aka, your community.

Government has been working tirelessly to make itself superfluous, if not completely ineffectual, impotent, and rather loathsome in the face of this crisis that has been slowly-but-visibly building for half a century.

Something old and played-out is limping offstage, and something new is stepping on. Aren’t you glad you watched all those debates?

IB Editor Juan Wilson's note: I have admired James Kunstler from around 2005 when I read his book 'The Long Emergency'.  The subtitle of the book was "Surviving the converging catastrophes of the twenty-first century". The book changed my life as if I had found myself standing on a trapdoor and then realized it was about to open wide. Jim had kn the delicacy and weakness of our civilization's dependence on fossil fuels. Back then my wife Linda and I were visiting upstate New York each summer. One year, around 2007, we visited Jim in Saratoga, NY, near his home. I found him sharp, amusing, and observant. Back then I was earning part of my living as a movie script consultant. After Jim wrote his fictional novel 'World Made By Hand' in 2008, I talked to him about trying to turn the book into a movie. He had some interest so I connected with his agent and followed through with treatment that included a opening segment that described the experience of his protagonist, Robert Earle, in the fast transformation of his suburban lifestyle as the Grid brakes down and he relocates to upstate New York  Jim and his agent turned it down. We have remained friendly acquaintances   Following his publication of 'Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology And The Fate Of The Nation' in 2012 Linda and I visited Jim in his new haunt in upstate Greenwich, New York. He had bought some acreage not accessed by a public road and built a deer proof eight foot high fence all around it. The place featured a large vegetable garden and extensive arbor of fruit trees. He was hunkering down for an end of times. Well folks, the take away from his latest post to his website indicates that the time is ripe for a major breakdown. I'm hoping that if we can avoid a nuclear war, or other substantial suicidal behavior humans may end up with a smaller population in a more stable environment with less pollution. One can only hope. But as Betty Davis says in the 1950's movie 'All About Eve' - "Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night!"

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Farewell to Bargain Shopping

SUBHEAD: Perhaps Generations X, Y & Z will recognize an opportunity to go into business.

By James Kunstler on 7 January 2019 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/a-farewell-to-bargain-shopping/)


Image above: Photo image of K-Mart closing announcement by James Kunstler from original article.

[IB Publisher's note. Mr. Kunstler nailed it today! His humor is that of the grave, but it still amuses as it stings. Our little island of Kauai The Macy's is barely hanging on at the Kukui Grove Mall but our only mall has lost its Sears and K-Mart as well as Border's Books, Sports Authority, and a host of other national chains.The Walmart has hung on in Lihue but is quickly morphing intoi a competitor to Costco with an ever larger percentage of grocery floor space - Besides economy of size Costco seems to be aiming for the connoisseurs, restaurateurs and foodies - while Walmart is trolling for everyone else, including elderly, handicapped, and bottom feeders.We do much of our shopping through Azazon and are just waiting for CEO Jeff Bezos to buy the US Postal Service to stay in business.  Fortunately we still have a Home Depot to keep our homes intact, but that will likely disappear when new home building grinds to a halt. All those stores are a 30 minute (if your lucky) drive from here in Hanapepe. Thank god we still hava a Napa Auto Supply and Ace Hardware with walking distance. Hunker down folks. We have visited Jim Kunster's town outside of Albany, NY. and found it much like our former home in Panama, NY where you coulkd noit buy a can of soup or quart of milk without half an hour in a car.]

France has its Yellow Vests. Here in USA, we have a few poor shlubs hoisting the “Going Out of Business” signs on the highway in front of the K-Mart.

The store in my little flyover town in upstate New York announced that it would shutter in March, and the sign-hoisting shlubs appeared out on Route 29 the first Saturday in January, an apt kick-off to a nervous new year.

K-Mart’s parent company, Sears, is moving into liquidation, meaning anything that’s not nailed down must be converted into cash to pay off its creditors.

The store’s closing is viewed as both an injury and an insult to the town.

There just isn’t anywhere else to buy a long list of ordinary goods, from dish-towels to tennis balls without a 17-mile journey west, which means an hour behind the wheel coming-and-going, plus whatever time you spend picking stuff up inside.

And, of course, many people in town feel that this is just another way of Wall Street saying “…you deplorable, pathetic, tapped-out, drug-addled, tattoo-bedizened yokels are not worthy of a K-Mart….”

The K-Mart occupied the better part of a small strip mall at the edge of town, which also boasts a Dollar Store, which appears to sell stuff that fell off a truck.

There’s another, newer strip mall beyond it with a supermarket, a drug store, and a Tractor Supply outlet that probably stole a lot of K-Mart’s business after opening a few years ago.

There’s much speculation about what’ll go into Kmart’s soon-to-be vacant space, about 80,000 square feet of crappy tilt-up construction not far from the end of its design life, with a flat roof that has groaned under heavy snow loads for four decades. Nobody I talked to has a clue.

Probably not Neiman Marcus, for starters. I’m thinking: maybe an evangelical roller rink. It’s too big for a wig shop, or a motorcycle thug-wear boutique, the usual bottom-feeders in the declension of commercial collapse.

More likely, nothing will replace it. The national chain retail model has fallen apart, along with new car sales. Something is up in this foundering land, despite all the heraldic trumpet blasts on cable news about the “booming economy.”

What’s up is the international implosion of the bad debt, and the fading illusion that it doesn’t matter. It has any number of ways to express itself, from store closings, to dissolving pensions, to stock market instability, to divorce, homelessness, and war.

It’s what you get from a hyper-financialized economy that doesn’t really produce wealth but only steals it from somewhere else. It’s not the fault of “capitalism,” which, in theory just stands for the management of a society’s savings. America doesn’t save, it borrows.

Zero interest rates made savings a mug’s game, and zero interest rates were necessary to extend the borrowing far beyond the credible boundaries of repayment. Debt isn’t capital, it just pretends to be for a period of time. Wall Street made its trillions off the time-value of that pretense and now time is up.

Even in the hardship economy we’re sailing into, people will need to buy and sell things and it is very hard to see how that fundamental process of exchange might be reorganized going forward.

Back in the 1990s I attended many a town meeting (in many towns) where chain stores applied for permits to set-up operations. It was often contentious. There was always a contingent of locals — organized by the chains themselves — waving placards that said “We Want Bargain Shopping.”

And there were the short-sighted town officials drooling over the real estate tax “ratables” that chain stores represented. Their adversaries feared that their locally-owned Main Street businesses would be killed, and that was exactly what happened, in very short order.

You could see it coming from a thousand miles away. Now the Big Boxes are going down. Boo Hoo….

What will emerge out of the current disorder? Perhaps Generations X-Y-and-Z will recognize an opportunity to go into business — as an alternative to purchasing a degree in gender studies for $200,000 (at 6 percent interest).

There will be lots of opportunities, even in a world with generally less shopping.

 But it may require a deeper collapse to sweep away the impediments, both practical and mental, before that awareness turns to action.


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What now?

SUBHEAD: America coughed up Clinton like a hairball and swallow the Cheeto-colored bolus Trump

By James Kunstler on 14 November 2016 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/what-now/)


Image above: "Trump-O-Matic" painting by Mark Bryan. From (http://www.artofmarkbryan.com/trump-o-matic-trump-art-caricature/).

Not to put too fine a point on it, America coughed up Hillary Clinton like a hairball last week — the catch being it then had to swallow the Cheeto-colored bolus called Donald Trump.

It was worth it to see the fog of Hillary-smuggery lift across the cable TV networks since the “I’m With Her / It’s Her Turn” fog was a cover for the looting operation that the permanent Washington DC establishment had turned into, including the Clinton Foundation.

Obviously, the nation is reeling from this emetic, struggling to process the meaning of it all.

The big “tell” for me came at a moment in last week’s Slate Political Gabfest, a leftish-oriented podcast, when moderator David Plotz asked his sidekicks John Dickerson (of CBS News) and Emily Bazelon (of The NY Times) what the Democratic Party might do to regain legitimacy after this electoral disaster. Dead silence on the air. Nothing came to mind.

Something came to my mind as a long-time disaffected (registered) Democrat: jettison the stupid identity politics and get back to reality. Alas, that may be too much to ask. For now, the party lies in ruins without a single figure of stature to represent a coherent set of ideas other than boosting the self-esteem of its favor-seeking constituent groups.

Here’s my idea: how about forming a credible opposition to the so-called Deep State, the matrix of racketeering and empire-building that has drained the life out of this polity. That was impossible with the racketeer-in-chief leading the blue electoral ticket, but now the dynamic stands naked and obvious, answering the question: what to do next?

Another catch, of course, is that opposing the Deep State of Rackets is pretty much what Mr. Trump has promised to do, if “draining the swamp” means anything. He never quite articulated it clearly beyond that metaphor, but you can bet that’s what the DC establishment is so alarmed about. Trump’s behavior on the campaign trail is now being hailed in the media as a kind of genius.

To me, it still seems oafish to an extreme, and it remains to be seen how such a blunderer might finesse our escape from the empire of rackets and the racket of empire. He begins to look like a man in a tunnel staring down the harsh light of the onrushing gravy train.

Mr. Trump might not know it yet, but his chief task will be managing contraction. It would appear to be problematic, since his chief promise — “to make America great again” — is based on restarting the epic expansions of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Well, things have changed. This is no longer a virgin continent filled with motherlodes, untapped oil bonanzas, and fabulous soils begging to be exploited. In fact, we’re close to being played out where those resources are concerned. And the techno-industrial economy engineered out of those assets is wobbling badly.

There is a Great Wish that this system might be replaced just-in-time with some as-yet-unrealized Green Alt Economy of solar-charged driverless electric cars — but, of course, the unchallenged pathetic idiocy of the assumed car dependence at the center of this fantasy ought to tell you how exactly unreal it is.

The contraction we face has mandates of its own, and it doesn’t include the continuation of Happy Motoring on any terms. I’m quite certain that the Trump forces haven’t even imagined it.

I would propose three meta-matters in consideration of how America might survive the disorders of the Long Emergency: the financialization of the economy, the burdens of empire, and the fiasco of our suburban living arrangement.

The financialization of the economy is already playing into its disastrous climax as I write, with bond markets tanking all over the planet. What this means is that the long-ignored chickens of risk associated with debt are coming home to roost.

As they do, they are going to shit over everything on the financial landscape. Industrial societies have been borrowing from the future to a grotesque degree for decades, pretending that these debts were assets rather than liabilities.

That perception is about to change, and with it an enormous amount of presumed notional wealth is going to disappear. That will manifest in rising bond yields (and falling bond values), cratering currencies, panicked capital flows, banking emergencies, and weird action in markets.

If that seems too metaphysical, you can also think of it as contracting economies and the withering of global trade relations. There’s also the chance it will express itself in kinetic conflict, i.e. war.

My sense of things is that this meta-predicament alone could overwhelm the Trump government from the very start. We could have problems with money orders of magnitude worse than anything FDR faced in 1933, with bank closures, the seizing of accounts, and the paralysis of everyday business.

That would easily lead to civil disorders, a breakdown in law, and the immiseration of most Americans. It could also lead to previously unimagined political outcomes, such as a discontinuity of government. This is connected with the second meta-problem, the burdens of empire.

The USA is squandering its vitality trying to maintain a half-assed global empire of supposed interests, economic, ideological, and existential. Lately, this hapless project has only resulted in wars with no end in places we don’t belong.

It includes reckless experiments such as the promotion of regime change (Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, Egypt, Syria), and senseless, provocative exercises such as the use of NATO forces to run war games near Russia’s border.

The monetary cost of all this is off the hook, of course, redounding to the financial mess. Reigning in these imperial impulses could be on the Trump agenda, but his own gold-plated imperial pretensions suggest that he might actually make the situation worse by conflating a reduction of our empire with a loss of the very “greatness” he wants to reclaim.

As it happens, America may be forced by economic circumstances to yield the burdens of empire. The world is about to become a bigger place again as globalism winds down and the larger nations establish more realistic spheres of influence. We better get with the program.

Thirdly comes the question of how Americans inhabit the terrain: the suburban fiasco and all its accessories and furnishings.

You can just stick a fork in that. The great project awaiting this country is how we might redistribute our people into re-scaled walkable communities with re-localized economies, including re-scaled agriculture. It’s going to happen whether we like it or not. It’s only a matter of how disorderly the process may be.

Obviously all the suburban crapola out there also represents a tremendous load of presumed wealth. The vested “value” in suburban houses alone is the underlayment of structured finance.

There is almost no conscious political awareness in any party — including the Greens — as to how we might attempt to work this out.

But, for example, and for a start, Mr. Trump might consider the effect that national chain “Big Box” shopping has had on Main Street America. It literally destroyed local commercial economies all over the land, and with it numberless vocational niches and social roles in communities.

He can’t sign an edict against the Big Box empire, but his people might start imagining the process of rebuilding local networks of commerce and actively de-incentivizing the Big Box business model.

That model has many other ways to fail, incidentally, and already is failing to some degree between the impoverishment of its customers and the growing problems with global supply lines. But anything that might lubricate the transition would be better than the stark collapse of the current arrangement.

The chatter this week has been all about the upcoming “infrastructure” orgy that Trump will undertake. That depends first of all on how badly the financial sector cracks up. I hope we do not squander more of our dwindling capital on the accessories of car dependence, because that addiction is on the way out.

One thing Mr. Trump might get behind is restoring the passenger railroads of America so that we can at least get around the continental nation when the Happy Motoring fiesta grinds to a halt.

It would put an awful lot of people to work on something with real long-term benefit — it ties into the restoration of Main Street towns and their economies — and it is a do-able project that might give us the needed encouragement to get on with the many other necessary projects awaiting our attention.

In case you were wondering, I was not jumping up and down cheering the Trump victory, amazing as it was. I figured the good news was that Hillary lost and the bad news was that Trump won. Now, we just have to roll with it.

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Global Warning

SUBHEAD: This is a new normal. Records will keep tumbling, with blistering heatwaves and droughts.

By Ellen LaConte on 9 January 2013 for Life Rules  -
(http://www.ellenlaconte.com/records-will-keep-tumbling-with-blistering-heatwaves-here-to-stay/)


Image above: Photo by Chris Tangey of a fire devil, or fire tornado,  in Alice Springs, Australia. He said it “sounded like a fighter jet”.  From (http://justmcgregor.tumblr.com/).

This is a post about last straws. In this case, the straw that has finally broken my Pollyanna spirit. It happened at lunch today, Wednesday, January 9th, after I read Ben Cubby’s Sydney Morning Herald coverage of scorching temperatures — 104 degrees F over Christmas and 120 predicted — in Australia and scanned the last 2012 issue of the New Yorker.

Granted, my heretofore sturdy if cockeyed optimism had suffered a hairline fracture when I noticed earlier in the morning that the mercury in my back porch thermometer had hit 60. This is North Carolina, I thought, not Georgia. 60 is a March afternoon, not a January morning. 

It was a double issue of the New Yorker. The theme was “World Changers.” Smack in the middle was an article, the fatal blow to my natural optimism, about the mother of all world changers. It was about Arctic shipping lanes, or so it seemed to be. For me it was about the mother of all world changers: climate instability, A.K.A., global warming. Called “Polar Express,” it opened with a dramatic double-spread photo of a scarlet hulled tug boat cutting a swath toward me through thin Arctic ice, opening the way for the massive bulk-carrier ship Nordic Odyssey to haul freight from Murmansk, Russia to Huanghua, China much faster and cheaper than that freight could be moved over land.

The caption under the photo concluded: 

“Because the extent and thickness of ice during the Arctic summer have diminished in recent years, the Northeast Passage — for centuries an obsession of explorers — could soon become an everyday part of merchant shipping. By the middle of this century, it may be possible to traverse the North Pole in a canoe.”

The author’s assignment for this piece was reportorial, not polemical. Not his job to detail the implications of that prediction. But, like the momentum that throws you forward when you haven’t got your seat belt on and the car stops suddenly, flinging you at a dashboard and windshield that will surely break your ribs and face, the period at the end of that last sentence flung me toward its terrifying implications. How could he not have added in a footnote or parentheses, how could all his readers’ minds not leap like mine did to the thought that, if the Arctic is virtually ice free all year, then nothing about the world’s weather is the same, and if that’s the case, nothing about our lives and world is the same and the least of our worries is getting shipping containers from eastern Russia to China and back.

In Life Rules, I compare the world’s presently converging and mutually reinforcing environmental, economic, social and political crises to the syndrome of illnesses an HIV patient experiences when her disease shifts into full-blown AIDS. Among the symptoms of AIDS is rampant high fever. The viral fossil-fuel driven global industrial economy — Earth’s equivalent of HIV — has tipped the Earth’s climate from slow, sporadic, scattered warming events into full, potentially fatal fever. If 2013 is the tipping point, it’s already too late for us to prevent the worst that an overheated planet can do to us and Life as we know it. But if there’s still wiggle room, then we must understand this:

Efforts to grow and expand the already viral global economy by investing ever funnier money and ever dirtier-and-dearer (more expensive) fossil fuels in it are exactly equivalent to injecting a patient suffering from AIDS with more HIV.

The prognosis? If we keep doing what we’ve been doing Life will last, but Life as we know it — and a lot of us — won’t. And neither will the economy that’s doing us in or, for that matter, any kind of fossil-fueled, industrial economy.

The cure? Recent fiscal cliff negotiations in the US, bail out discussions in the EU and failed efforts at the Doha climate talks are proof that the world’s leaders and Powers will not take the necessary steps to prevent this disaster. It’s up to us. Only if a critical mass of us ordinary humans organize ourselves locally and regionally to

• use remaining funny-money and fossil-fuels to drop back from and then drop out of the global economy (It’s only existed for 60 years; we can live without it as surely as we can’t live with it);
• rise up en mass in opposition to all leaders whose policies support it rather than us; and
• create new forms of money and methods of self-organization that support non-fossil (post-carbon), full-employment, self-reliant communities committed to long-term functional survival for the many rather than VERY short-term fiscal success for the few.

Can we prepare for and perhaps survive, in Bill McKibben’s terms, the strange, unwelcoming new Eaarth that climate change will create?

• If the global economy, and your national and local economies, are already leaving you by the wayside,
• if you already believe we are running out of time to mitigate climate change,
• if you suffer what the predatory economy is doing to other species and Earth’s ecosystems,
• if you want there to be a habitable planet for your children and grandchildren

... then now’s the time for a second American Revolution and complementary uprisings, occupations and revolutions in every country around the world.

It’s time to gather with others in your community who are among those being economically, environmentally and politically Left Behind, assess your available natural and human resources, and use your combined skills, talents, and experience to conceive and create shadow economies and governments that can heal, protect and serve the Earth’s immune system of natural and human communities long term.

It’s  going to be 70 degrees Fahrenheit in central North Carolina this weekend and we’re in drought. It should be in the mid-40s and wet. But talk of “should be” is nostalgic, not useful now. Instead, let’s talk realistically about what will be if we don’t face up to climate instability and what could be if we do.

How about, let’s pretend the world’s worsening weather is a threat akin to a pending asteroid collision, because, though its effects will be less sudden and simultaneous, it is. How about we call it “Global Warning.”

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Burning Deep Purple 1/8/13
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Climate Change Emergency

SUBHEAD: The latest evidence on climate change demands a radical reappraisal of our approach.

By Ian Dunlop on 2 October 2012 for the Club of Rome - (http://www.clubofrome.org/?p=5183)


Image above: Jorgen Randers presenting 2052 at Club of Rome meeting in Bucharest on  "The Power of the Mind". The report he made in 1972 was frightning in its accuracy. From (https://gabrielaionita.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/the-conference-the-power-of-the-mind-club-of-rome-celebrates-40-years-since-the-first-report-on-the-state-and-future-of-the-world/). See also (http://transitionculture.org/2012/08/17/an-interview-with-jorgen-randers-its-the-story-of-humanity-not-rising-to-the-occasion/).

The Arctic has been warming 2-3 times faster than the rest of the world. In the last few weeks melting of the Arctic sea ice has accelerated dramatically, reducing the area and volume to levels never previously experienced.  Some 80% of the summer sea-ice has been lost since 1979; on current trends the Arctic will be ice-free in summer by 2015, and ice-free all year by 2030, events which were not expected to occur for another 100 years. More concerning, the Greenland ice sheet this year has seen unprecedented melting and glacial ice calving, adding to a trend which will substantially increase sea level rise.

Beyond the Arctic, the world is in the fifth year of a severe food crisis, largely climate change driven, which is about to become far worse as the full impact of recent extreme drought in the US food bowl works its way through the global food chain, leading to substantial price rises.  Drought around the Mediterranean contributed to this food crisis, and has played a large part in triggering the Arab Spring, and the Syrian conflicts. Globally, the escalation of extreme weather continues.

Science is clearly linking these events to climate change, with human carbon emissions as the prime cause.

Does any of this matter? Yes – It is the most urgent issue now confronting the world, for the evidence indicates that climate change has moved into a new and highly dangerous phase. The polar icecaps are one of the vital regulators of global climate; if the ice disappears, the absorption of far more solar radiation accelerates ocean warming, with increasing risk of large-scale release of carbon dioxide and methane from melting permafrost. This in turn may initiate irreversible runaway warming. Energy, food and water security are also poised on a knife-edge in both the developed and developing worlds

These changes are occurring at the 0.8^oC temperature increase, relative to pre-industrial conditions, already experienced, let alone the additional 1.2^oC which will probably result from our historic emissions. The “official” target, of limiting temperature increase to no more than 2^oC, is way too high.  Current policies, proposed by governments around the world, are far worse and would result in a 4^oC plus temperature increase. Official panaceas, such as carbon capture and storage, are not working.

Political and business leaders glibly talk about adapting to a 4^oC world with little idea of what it means – which is a world of 1 billion people rather than the current 7 billion.  Not much fun for the 6 billion departing.

To paraphrase Churchill:

“— the era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. We are now in an age of consequences”. 

We know how to establish genuine low-carbon economies, which would stave off the worst impacts of climate change, but we have left it too late for gradual implementation. They have to be set up at emergency speed, akin to the mobilization of economies on a war-footing pre-WW2.

Yet we hear nothing of this from the political, business or NGO institutions who should be leading our response. Why?

Financial incentives are the main culprit, in particular the bonus culture which has spread through the Anglo-Saxon world since the early 1990s.  Recently there has been some recognition that this might be a problem. The Chairman of Rio Tinto acknowledged that “the spiral in executive remuneration over the last two decades, simply cannot continue”, and chief executives are graciously deciding to forgo their annual bonuses in the light of adverse corporate performance.  Very worthy, but the damage caused by this culture is far more insidious than a debate about quantum. It threatens the very foundations of democratic society.

The bonus mentality inevitably led to short-termism – few directors or executives are prepared to give serious attention to long-term issues such as climate change when their rewards are based almost entirely on short-term performance. As Upton Sinclair put it: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it”.

Many privately agree that climate change needs far more urgent action that we are seeing, but few are prepared to speak out for fear of derailing “business-as-usual”. This is a fundamental failure of governance – directors have a fiduciary responsibility to objectively assess the critical risks to which their companies are exposed, and take action to ensure these risks are adequately managed.

But if they acknowledge climate change as a serious risk, they are bound to act, which requires a radical redirection of business away from our addiction to high-carbon fossil-fuels, powerful vested interests losing out in the process.  Better then to stick to absolute denial, irrespective of the consequences.

This flows through to politicians, NGOs and bureaucracies, who are subjected to immense pressure from the corporate sector not to rock the  “business-as-usual” boat, the result being politically expedient and contradictory climate policies.

Ethically and morally indefensible it may be, but that is what a deregulated market has delivered, and why it is so dangerous for the health of democracy.

Adversarial politics and corporate myopia are incapable of addressing life-threatening issues such as climate change.  It is time for communities to go around these barriers and demand leadership prepared to take emergency action, before the poisoned chalice we are passing to our grandchildren becomes even more toxic.

• Ian Dunlop is an independent commentator, Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development, Director of Australia21, and a Member of the Club of Rome.  He chaired the Australian Coal Association 1987-88, the Australian Greenhouse Office Experts Group on Emissions Trading 1998-2000 and was CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors 1997-2001.

.

Try Wait

SUBHEAD: The state's solution is to wait until it is an actual emergency and give the finger to due process and transparency.

 By Andy Parx on 22 September 2011 for Parx News Daily - (http://parxnewsdaily.blogspot.com/2011/09/try-wait.html)

 
Image above: View east from the old lifeguard tower location on Kekaha Beach... or what was once a beach. Photo by Juan Wilson 9/11/11.

 [IB Editor's Note: Since last February the beach between Kekaha Community Center and the Ditch One relocated lifeguard stand has disappeared. In places it seems 200 feet of sand has been swept away by the ocean. The ocean is now crashing against rocks ten feet away and ten feet below the Kaumualii Highway. A single winter storm could breach the road. If they had not moved the lifeguard tower it would be gone already. Scarey it was so quick.]
 
The kvetch-fest over Governor Neil Abercrombie's "emergency" declarations- and the fact that he failed to tell anyone about one of them for months- suspending environmental and planning laws to clear ordinance from the beaches and oceans and nene from the Kaua`i Airport area would be deafening if it weren't for the paywall blocking the state's "newspaper of record," making it an unproductive endeavor to link to columnist Dave Shapiro’s traditional harangue or, surprisingly, Cynthia Oi's tome on the subject.

But while some debate whether these are in fact emergencies under state law, another "emergency" proclamation by his Governorship has got to be the slowest developing crisis in history showing that if you wait until the molehill becomes a mountain you can create a pressing matter of epic proportions out of anything.

The fact that a stretch of the highway near Lumahai has been falling into the ocean is no surprise to anyone who has driven the stretch in the past decade. But Abercrombie's "emergency declaration" on September 7 would make you believe that rather than it being a result of glacial-paced erosion, some menehune came in last month with pickaxes and chopped away at the coastline all in one night. The fact is that the declaration is the result of almost a decade of trying to get the state to get its act together.

We can remember current State Senator Ron Kouchi as Kaua`i County Council Chair- that would place it before 2003- grilling then County Engineer Cesar Portugal about what was thought to be the imminent loss of the northbound lane of the state highway. What should be a state problem has since been a subject of concern for every council and county engineer ever since. While the county has been making temporary fixes, the state has dragged its feet in moving the highway 40 feet inland- the current "emergency" solution which was first proposed 10 years ago.

But that would have taken due process, pubic hearings and most importantly environmental impact statements, certified shoreline determinations and, quite probably, a plan to be approved by the Army Corps of Engineers, as we heard in council testimony over the years. But noooo. The state's solution is to wait until it is an actual emergency and give the finger to due process, public hearings, transparency and, most importantly, any thoughtful review of the fact that if this section is falling into the ocean, what's next?

That might raise the nasty problem of why we're putting things like bike paths- and even new homes under the county's new process for granting exemption from what had been widely acknowledged to be the strongest shoreline protection law in the country- 10 feet away from the shoreline in an age when climate change could well remove that 10 feet in as many years. Is this the future of how the state's environmental and shoreline protection laws will be handled when the ocean come in to stay? Wait long enough to suspend them?

Apparently.


Image above: Juan Wilson and view east from the old lifeguard tower location on Kekaha Beach on a cloudy day. We were over a 100 feet from the Kaumualii Highway. Photo by Linda Pascatore 2/8/11.

 .

Suspended Agitation

SUBHEAD: Considering the mess we're in President Obama should call it quits and sign on with the home team - Goldman Sachs. By James Kunstler on 27 June 2011 for Kunstler.com - (http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/06/suspended-agitation.html) Image above: Illustration with Obama "Ding God's Work". From (http://heseemsrealnice.blogspot.com/2009/11/goldman-sachs-doing-gods-work.html).

Woe is unto the world. It doesn't know whether to shit or go blind. The rule of law has been replaced by Murphy's Law. The story in Greece gets more and more curious. One of the latest proposals is to ask holders of Greek bonds to go along with a voluntary rollover, meaning we will pay you on Tuesday for a hamburger today, even though we already owe you for ten years of weekly hamburgers.

Odd how the financial innovation never ceases. This last great new idea: that bonds never really have to pay off, will do wonders for the bond market everywhere. People will clamor for bonds that come with no clear terms and probably no redemptions. Now, the buzz around the cosmic meme-sphere is saying fuggedabowt Greece, we're gonna do the same thing with Portugal and its sillyass bonds. Enter China.

Europe is about to enjoy the greatest monetary Chinese fire drill ever staged. Wen Jiabao will wave a magic wand and the Euro will fly above mundane reality on dragon wings allowing everybody in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and Italy to hold a senior management job at the motor vehicle bureau with retirement at 53. Then, with 80 percent of their former pay, they can open cafes where people still working at the motor vehicle bureau can spend the better part of each afternoon sipping Ouzo and arguing politics, finance, sports... or just enjoying the antics of the boorish German tourists.

Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs's man in Europe, Mario Draghi, will take a seat in Jean Trichet's big chair at the European Central Bank around November of this year. It was Goldman Sachs, apparently, that erected a giant credit default swap house of cards for Europe to live in happily-ever-after - except in the event of a default accident, in which case Goldman Sachs would receive all the money ever printed on God's green Earth, plus commissions, premiums, penalty payouts, interest, and bonuses... and homeless Europe would then be welcome to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut - or make that a strawberry Bismarck! Personally, I don't see how the various players can delay some sort of crisis until November. The European currency experiment is a bust and too many big banks are just plain insolvent. Can Wen Jiabao launch another flying dragon that seeds the European skies with counterparty payoffs that will rain down from Dublin to Athens and keep everybody happy?

Don't get the idea that the USA can just occupy a grandstand seat and stuff its fat face with Cheez Doodles while the current act plays out in the center ring of the world financial circus. Plenty of intermingled American interests depend on how things work out over there, not the least of which is the fact that the International Monetary Fund is actually a proxy American bail-out operation. It worked just fine in the old days when its exertions focused on little urchin nations like Swaziland, but wait until the Tea Party hears that America runs twelve thousand cafes for European motor vehicle bureaucrats to while away the afternoons drinking Ouzo in. (At least maybe we can get them to drink Old Mr. Boston anisette liqueur instead.)

It does prompt one to think we might try something like that here. Would it not improve the national character generally if our citizens spent more time arguing politics in cafes than lying on the couch watching a TV figment named "Snooki" throw standing crotch-locks on every unemployed forklift driver in the mythical kingdom of New Jersey?

If I were Barack Obama, I'd think twice about presiding over this irresolvable muddle of engineered swindles, sinking prospects, booby-trapped budgets, and played-out lies for another term. Let Hillary step in and try to keep this leaky Flying Dutchman out of the drink. She's looking more and more like Winston Churchill physically every day now, anyway. Maybe she is acquiring something like his stolid habits of mind, too. If I were President Obama, I'd just call it quits and sign on with the home team: Goldman Sachs. He can have Mario Draghi's old job - chief of the international division. They'll love him in all those peculiar little countries where people wear hats that look like rat-traps and flavor their beer with the cocoons of nectar-sipping moths. They'll enjoy it when he forecloses on them, and maybe even ask for more. "Here, take our grandchildren's baby teeth, too!" I wish him and his beautiful family well in their new life as distinguished private citizens-of-the-world. I just hope Michele Bachman and her probable running mate, Jesus, don't steal the next election. They'll rip out the Obamas' vegetable garden and put a Nascar track there so that all of Ms. Bachman's 27 children can have jobs selling miniature bibles in the parking lot. ("Prayed over by qualified preachers twenty-four hours a day!")

By the by, many observers were amused by last week's cute trick of releasing sixty million barrels of oil from the world's strategic reserves at the rate of two million-a-day in an effort to pretend that the world doesn't have a basic oil production problem. It is, of course, at the bottom of the world's financial disarray, because if you can't increase energy inputs that feed an industrial economy you don't get growth and then the whole idea of compound interest falls apart because it is predicated on a perpetual increase in wealth. Hence, debt collapses in on itself. The world is caught up in an epochal contraction now, and it manifests in situations like the Greek emergency. But soon it will be a universal emergency.

The lesson, if I may be tendentious for moment, is that the human race is welcome at any time to begin living differently, at a smaller scale, much more locally, with fewer automatic machines doing all the work for us, and more time spent on useful and necessary activities than on television fantasies. Got a problem with oil? Don't imagine that you're going to run WalMart - or, for that matter, Goldman Sachs - on wheat-straw distillates. Something is in the air this week and it is making a lot of people very nervous. If you loaded up the old investment portfolio with shale gas stocks, I feel especially sorry for you.

.

James Howard Kunstler profile

SUBHEAD: "We are unable to construct a coherent consensus about what is happening to us and what we ought to do about it." - JHK  

By Lindsay Curren on 1 December 2010 in Transition Voice - 
(http://transitionvoice.com/2010/12/interview-james-howard-kunstler)

 
Image above: "Gas" by Edward Hopper, 1941, Whitney Museum. Click to enlarge.

In the peak oil community, converts to the predicament tend to gravitate toward a figure who tells the story in a way that makes sense for them. Whether it’s the measured and scholarly caution of Richard Heinberg, the “I’ve been there” stories of a Dmitry Orlov, the hopeful glean of Rob Hopkins, or the addled sense of a lax government pointed out by Michael Ruppert, followers have their faves.

In that vein, I have to admit that I’m firmly a Kunstlerite.

I first really heard about peak oil as peak oil when I worked as a washingtonpost.com discussion moderator. I covered business and political discussions, and energy came up from time to time, especially after Bush took office.

Peak oil made sense to me right away. But it was when I read James Howard Kunstler‘s The Long Emergency that I had the equivalent of a conversion moment. Though I had already read Heinberg’s Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines, and got the straight ahead gist of things, there was something about Kunstler’s clear elucidation mixed with his uniquely vigorous prose that brought the story off the page and into my rapidly beating heart.

It was beating that way because he terrified me.

It was comforting then to get to the end of the book and discover an odd turn he took.

Telling the story of “My Long Emergency,” Kunstler proceeded to essentially wax philosophical about the whole crazy American matrix he was born into, its fantastic creations and flagrant excesses, and how he recognizes that he’s been a most fortunate individual to have lived in relative comfort and opportunity.

He confesses in that closing section that while he takes the energy situation seriously, he’s not become a ready survivalist and is overall rather content. Essentially he betrays his optimism as the capper to 300 pages spent dissecting a society, culture and economy in gross negligence and decline.

That small counterpoint to his exhaustive coverage and analysis of the oil situation and its implications for humanity provided both a window into the man and a direction for me to follow as I took my own steps forward into peak oil related activities.

And because he made me feel like I didn’t have to buy a shoulder-launched missile and stockpile freeze-dried peaches, I wanted to know what other wisdom he had to offer.

I watched The End of Suburbia, read Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century, devoured his Monday morning blog and cleared my Thursday nights to tune into kunstlercast.com, his weekly musing on the built environment. I checked his touring schedule to see if he’d be down in our neck of the woods, hoping to bring him to speak to our Transition group. Essentially I perused almost every inch of his website to learn more about him.
And what I learned was surprising. Shocking even.

Renaissance Man

In the End of Suburbia you get a pretty good feel for Kunstler’s take on things, and his tone. At first glance he’s impatient, urgent, acerbic, and makes clear if not in words then in his vibe that he’s not one to suffer fools gladly.

On his blog, which is nothing like reading his informed yet measured and accessible non-fiction works, there are no holds barred. Instead, every Monday he thrashes to pieces the pretenses and vanities of a society gone mad in most entertaining prose. It’s damn funny. If you didn’t know he was half joking in his phrasing you might think this guy is really agitated and extreme. But he writes that column like watching Jon Luc Godard’s Alphaville; dark comedy over an exposé of truth.

In short, I’m a fan, which I confess makes me kind of biased. But it doesn’t make me entirely uncritical of some of his work. I’ve asked him some challenging questions to clarify his meaning and even to rebuff his assumptions. Regardless, seeing his overall strengths amidst an initially bracing style has lent a certain sympathy to wanting to understand his nature. It makes me want to see the whole Kunstler if you will, and not just the cutting and impatient thrasher who’s judging the whole world, deeming it unfit for his aesthetic pleasure.


 Image above: "Lilac Tree off Franklin Square". Painting by James Howard Kunstler. From (http://www.kunstler.com/paintings%205.html)
 
I’d actually go so far as to call Jim Kunstler a modern day Renaissance man. He writes non-fiction, fiction and plays (I had the pleasure to produce his amazing play Big Slide with our local Transition group); offers a Simmelian analysis of the signs of our times in his musings on architecture and urban development; has tried his hand at small architecture projects; and he paints. Beautifully. If he seems like nothing but an edgy, curmudgeonly killjoy its because you haven’t yet seen his “Lilac Tree Off Franklin Square.” And that’s the gotcha from his website.

The jig is up, Kunstler. Clearly you have a heart of gold. Even his lamentations on a degraded world accompanied by his plaudits for its many beauties reveal not so much his need to express uncensored disgust as it does his need to protect and defend beauty, truth, and goodness against daily assaults of indignity.

Sometimes you have to dig around to get the full story.

And now, the numbers

In addition to the many other things he does (including releasing another novel this year), Kunstler has increasingly taken up the role of economic observer, bringing his particular brand of intellectual justice to the hoard of Wall Street white-collar criminals and the entire government and business apparatus that supports them—whether by collusion, apathy, or negligence. And its on that subject that he agreed to take some questions from Transition Voice.

If only I had been able to see him on one of his many appearances this year I would have really picked his brain. But I caught up with him in between his recent trips to Australia (yes, Kunstler has the world’s biggest carbon footprint and his personal garden can’t possibly offset it), via email to ask him what he thinks of the economic horror show plaguing our times. Does he agree with Jeff Rubin that high oil prices will bring on inflation? Or with Nicole Foss, that a crippling deflation and a dried up money supply is just around the corner?

“I agree with Nicole Foss. The oil predicament doesn’t help, but the frauds and swindles of ‘innovative’ finance – and the fantastic layers of criminal misbehavior within it – have been enough to demolish the banking system.”

But he also blames, “…the absence of the rule-of-law, the failure of regulators to regulate, enforcers to enforce, and now prosecutors to prosecute. As Nicole and her co-blogger at The Automatic Earth, ‘Ilargi,’ have often reminded us, this financial fiasco has morphed into a political crisis calling into question the very legitimacy of current governance.”

The players

A journalist himself before chucking corporate wage-slavery long ago to take up independent writing and small-town living, Kunstler picked his subjects based on what moved him. “When I was a full-time newspaper reporter I was what they used to call a ‘feature writer.’ I wrote non-hard-news stuff, and I generally followed my own nose on stories.

I took an interest for a while in investigating religious cults, which were plentiful in the 70s. They sucked in a lot of lost young people when the hippie era ran out of steam and I was fascinated by the power dynamics in these groups and how people surrendered their autonomy to charismatic self-appointed gurus — who were often sinister opportunists out for a buck.”

For Kunstler, marginal characters also held a special fascination. He wrote about, “… hired killers, con men, loan sharks, transvestites, traveling tent-show evangelists, various colorful crazy people,” preferring it to the dull stuff. “I hated beat reporting. I couldn’t sit through city council meetings and the usual routine venues for news-gathering. Luckily, there were other reporters who seemed to thrive on that, so I could go my own way.”

The playwright in Kunstler loves a good character, and memorable criminal hucksters and outcasts from society continue to show up throughout his work. His observations take in the business cabal unloading suburbia’s excesses onto a cartoon happy people, and he creates charming but ruthless con men like Billy Bones, the balladeer bandit in his latest novel, The Witch of Hebron. (In Witch, he also renders the young Jasper with startlingly sensitive insight, a tremendously hued portrayal of a child.)

But what inspires him to turn his mind to our failing economy? “I read The New York Times online. Even though it’s a piece of crap these days with vapid, pusillanimous writers-of-opinion like Krugman, Friedman, and Brooks, it’s still (unfortunately) the so-called newspaper of record.” But he also reads The Automatic Earth, Naked Capitalism, Zero Hedge, and Charles Hugh Smith.
And he has plenty of ideas of his own on Wall Street and finance.

“The role of finance up until a decade or so ago was to deploy capital, surplus wealth gained from productive activities, for new productive activities,” he explains. But then we off-shored and outsourced manufacturing. After that, Kunstler says Wall Street needed, “…to find ways to make money in the absence of productive activity.”


Image above: "Homage to Edward Hopper" (Fast Food at Exit 15 0f I-87) painting by James Kunstler. From (http://www.kunstler.com/paintings.html).

The devil’s workshop

Kunstler says Wall Street, “…turned to rackets based on getting something for nothing,” explaining that this, “…coincided with the computer revolution, which enabled financial folk to make their operations incomprehensibly complex and abstruse, destroying ‘transparency’ and the ability of markets to perform their chief function of ‘price discovery.’”

This had serious consequences, Kunstler explained. “Eventually, nobody knew the value of things being sold as investments, such as mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations made out of mortgage-backed securities.

Meanwhile, the mortgage mills like Countrywide, Ditech, and others connived with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac (the so-called GSEs), and the big banks to blow up the housing bubble by giving mortgage loans away to anyone with a pulse and then unload them onto the chumps at the end of the chain – pension funds, insurance companies, et cetera. That’s what pumped up house prices.”

After it blew up, Kunstler observes that, “…nobody could establish the value of all those securities backed by mortgages and the derivatives of these things, which were hopelessly recondite, including credit default swaps. Around 2008, all this mischief was joined by new rules issued by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) allowing the banks and other institutions to evade reporting the real value of the securities they had created – quite a bit of which resided in their own vaults (another loss of ‘transparency’).”

The result?

“All this malfeasance and hugger-mugger is the biggest and most hopeless financial mess in the history of the human race.”

Kunstler views the Federal Reserve as part of the problem, not the solution. The Fed has, “…only made things worse with its incessant interventions aimed at concealing the massive losses, propping up insolvent banks, and preventing all the swindles and rackets from unwinding,” he says.
He bemoans the impact the whole mess creates, calling it “rampant financial criminality” and arguing that, “it will bankrupt everything in its path, provoke a world-wide political crisis, and perhaps thrust us into something like a dark age.”

Strong words, but is he so far off?

Pitchforks

When Wall Street was bailed out, many Americans expressed outrage, but that outrage changed nothing. In fact banking scandals where the perpetrators are rewarded have become so commonplace that Americans seem able to do little more than grouse about them, helpless to effect change and too tired to express any truly unified movement for financial reform. We’re not seeing something like the French Revolution, after all.

But are there circumstances that might change this?

“Just because the public has not reacted so far doesn’t mean they’ll sit still indefinitely,” Kunstler says. “It wouldn’t necessarily take a crisis, either, to set them off. That’s the magic of tipping points and phase change. Sometimes nobody even notices the incendiary event. I’m kind of surprised the Hamptons have not been burned down so far, but I believe we’ll see very vivid expressions of public wrath sooner or later.”

It may be another bailout that would precipitate a populist blowback. Bank bailouts were a real touchstone issue for many voters, especially those who favored Tea Party candidates. Yet if the bailout money had been given to individuals, a share for every adult American say, the Right would have deemed it socialism. I wondered why, when business is bailed out, we don’t hear an equivalent analysis of the managed economy as enabling, care taking, nannyish?

In Kunstler’s view, it’s “because we are a politically puerile nation composed of people who understand little, routinely vote against their own real interests, and believe in things that are inconsistent with reality.”

Ouch. So what will break through to people to get them to deal with reality and address their own needs?

Kunstler doesn’t think for the present moment that it’s going to be oil. That’s been displaced, he says, by financial markets that “are coming apart at the seams…due to sequential national bankruptcies in Europe. This contagious political crisis underway looks like it will soon destroy the Euro, and it has shoved the oil predicament to the sidelines.”

The problems he lists haven’t been dealt with because, as Kunstler says, there’s been, “A failure of leadership plain and simple. Nobody has been held accountable for demolishing the banking system.”
Kunstler voted for Barack Obama but has since become deeply disillusioned. “I feel that his failure to uphold the federal statutes against systematic racketeering ought to be an impeachable offense. Of course those in the legislative branch who might bring such a proceeding are themselves bought and paid for by the very racketeers in question. I agree with those who say this is now a political crisis of the basic legitimacy of governance.”

“We’re not entitled to a happy ending,” he says.

Ploughshares

But that’s the big picture. Kunstler has some hope for localities, as he illustrated in both of his recent novels. And of Transition efforts he thinks the people are, “earnest and fairly realistic by and large. Most of them seem to understand the losses we face. They want to continue some semblance of civilized living in the face of all that. I wouldn’t discount them.

But he’s less patient with pie-in-the-sky visions that have no basis in resource reality. “I have a bigger beef with the bigtime professional enviro-greenies like Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute, who promote techno-fantasies about running all the cars by other means – as if car dependency itself were not a problem.”

Car-dependency is a huge problem for Kunstler. When he’s not bemoaning the attitude behind “happy motoring” he’s railing against cars and roads as a dying paradigm. “Anyone who is interested in how I see things working out can read my ‘post-oil’ novels: World Made By Hand and The Witch of Hebron. I think we’ll lose a lot and gain a lot at the same time.”

But Kunstler doesn’t think that much advance talk on Peak Oil will move the needle in public perception. He thinks the general public wont pay attention until they’re “marooned in their driveways.”

He puts it bluntly. “We are unable to construct a coherent consensus about what is happening to us and what we ought to do about it. Life is tragic. Sometimes societies make terrible mistakes. Just because you collectively lose your sense of consequences doesn’t mean that you don’t have to live with consequences.”

Fortunately for him he can paint, tell a story, build things.

And he’s basically cheery.

Skidding Towards Fall

SUBHEAD: Obama appears a well-intentioned functionary sailing his ship-of-state steadily into a maelstrom.

By James Kunstler on 2 August 2010 in Kunstler.com - (http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/08/skidding-toward-fall.html)
 
   
Image above: Illustraion by Chris Van Allsburg for his book "The Wreck of the Zephyr". 

This economy has a destination for sure, but it's not in the direction where all eyes are trained in moist hopefulness: that glimmering horizon of longed-for growth. You will not get that kind of growth -- the kind that increases the overall wealth of the organism in question. A few people will make more money than they did before, but overall we are in an epic contraction. More people and organizations will go broke than will thrive. It will seem very unfair.

The true destination of the US economy is to get smaller and for two reasons mainly: 1.) Capital ("money") is vanishing out of our system steadily and rapidly due to a massive collective failure to repay money owed on loans, mortgages, debts, and assorted obligations. 2.) Access to the primary resource we depend on for powering the economy (oil) is increasingly beyond our control -- even worse, under the control of people who would like us to eat shit and die.

We really have a choice between two ways of dealing with this. We can downsize and re-scale consciously and coherently, or we can continue to chase after the phantom of growth and allow the nation to fall into a shambles of desperation. So far into this long emergency of an economic fiasco, we seem to have chosen the pursuit of a phantom. That's what President Obama was doing last week in Detroit, shilling for a new electric automobile which, he said, will make us "energy independent." If Mr. Obama believes this, then it isn't a very good advertisement for an Ivy League education.

I'd like to know how many Americans believe that electric cars run on virtually free energy (but I don't have pollsters on my payroll). I'd bet a lot of them do, including President Obama. Sorry to rain on this uplifting parade. At best, such a car fleet would run on coal -- that is coal-fired electric power plants -- but even that is a ridiculous fantasy when you actually pencil-out the details.

Not to mention that a nation full of people with dwindling or vanishing incomes won't be in a position to fork over forty-grand for one of those new pseudo "green" vehicles. Also not to mention -- wait for it -- that due to rapidly vanishing capital there will be far fewer car loans available.

The only thing growing in this part of the picture is the number of Americans who cannot possibly qualify for a car loan under normal terms that would require regular repayment of interest-and-principal. (Plenty of Americans qualify for the new "innovative" kind of loan -- the kind that you never have to make payments on, but for the moment, the banks are choking to death on them, so additional approvals may lag for a time.)

It's instructive that so much current hoopla about economic growth revolves around the issue of cars. For, if anything, reality is telling us very clearly that the mass motoring paradigm is near its end.

Our determination to prop it up at all costs, despite the grave impairments of available capital and energy resources is a symptom of our detachment from reality. It's also a fine illustration of the psychology of previous investment, which prompts a desperate society to squander its scarce remaining resources on the very things that are putting it out of business.

We don't need need more highways. We're about to find out that we don't have the money to keep up regular repairs on the highways we already have. The hundreds of millions of "stimulus" dollars that President Obama flung into "shovel-ready" highway projects was among the more tragically dumb mistakes he made early on, and he has apparently learned nothing along these lines since then.
 

Interestingly, NPR ran a local story over the weekend -- an obscure little item -- saying that Amtrak was determined to raise the average speed of its passenger trains running north from Connecticut through Vermont from 40 miles-per-hour to 60mph. That would be some triumphant accomplishment! It would bring us back to about an 1860 level of service. Of course, I happen to believe that we will be lucky in a few years if we are able to enjoy an 1860's standard-of-living, so maybe this little side venture in public transport is perfectly in tune with America's future.

Otherwise, these are just ominous days of drift in a place of stillness where the uncomplaining robot traders tirelessly work their magic in the server farms of Wall Street, while their putative "handlers" enjoy the dainty pleasures of the Hamptons -- which seem to center these days on pounding back vast draughts of premium vodka in conjunction with Red Bull, cocaine, hydroponic ganja, Viagra, and Klonopin to round off all those edges. And let's not forget the catered delicacies circulating on trays passed by super-models -- the yellowtail tartare tidbits, the green olive pesto crescents, the firecracker shrimp canapés. I wonder if the nibblers ever stop to reflect on how many of the un-privileged "out there" get by lately on dog food and ketchup.

My timing is notoriously faulty, they say, but I can't ignore the sensation of being seasick-on-dry-land that tells me something awful is at hand. President Obama appears more and more Gorbachev-like to me, a well-intentioned functionary sailing his ship-of-state steadily into a maelstrom. The course is set and ain't nobody going to make a move to change it.

Of course, Mr. Obama is no more to blame than Mr. Gorbachev was -- if anything one can't help but admire Gorby's steering of the creaky old Soviet ghost ship into drydock with nary a pint of blood spilled in the process -- but what's really striking in America today is the massive failure of leadership in the layers below Mr. Obama, and in all the other sectors of American culture where CEOs, chairpersons-of-the-boards, deans and provosts, doctors of this and that, generals and attorneys-general, even diverse clergy in all their arresting head-gear cannot collectively advocate for reality.

This failure of credentialed and elected authorities will surely unleash the crazies as we skid toward fall. Legitimacy hates a vacuum. The absence of a reality-based consensus for action will invite a consensus based on other things such as the lust for vengeance, the labeling of scapegoats, patriotic gore, and all the alternate trappings of a politics-gone-mad. Enjoy the heat and the clam rolls wherever you are in the meantime, and when you come home don't be surprised if you no longer recognize the country you're in.

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The Long Emergency begins?

SUBHEAD: In NYC Con-Ed fights to keep lights on. Is this what the beginning of the 'Long Emergency' looks like?

Image above: Con-Ed Headquarters in NYC (center rear) with Zeckendorf residential towers in foreground seen from Union Squire. Juan Wilson worked on 3D modelling of building for Davis-Brody & Associates in the mid 1980's. From (http://newyorkdailyphoto.blogspot.com/2007/04/towers.html). By Patrick McGeehan on 7 July 2010 in New York Times - (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/nyregion/08heat.html)

From the 19th floor of Consolidated Edison’s headquarters in Manhattan, generators were dispatched to supplement a burning substation. Emergency alerts were relayed to major customers and companies. The go-ahead was given to cancel Little League night games on Staten Island to conserve the wattage used by field lights.

Con Edison, with an ability that might strike some as Big Brother-like, even exercised its ability to periodically shut off central air-conditioning units in some 20,000 homes and businesses to ease the burden on its system.

The scene inside Con Ed’s command center showed both the urgency of the utility’s efforts, and the nature of its reach — this was one of the few times it has adjusted residential thermostats from afar — as it struggled to cope with another record-setting day of heat and demand.

On one giant screen on the west wall, the number of megawatts being consumed was teetering at a dangerously high level, reflecting the unyielding heat, which again broke the daily record as it hit 100 degrees.

Another screen displayed real-time information revealing the spots — isolated, for now — where customers had lost power. And where there were problems, a Con Edison supervisor’s name would be affixed to it, for all to see at the afternoon emergency briefing.

From Con Edison’s base of operations in Rye, a plea rang out: “I would like to request another 4kv generator to support this grid because it doesn’t look like this section’s coming back any time soon.” That was Anthony Suozzo, a general manager of electric operations, asking for four kilovolts; he was dealing with a substation in Westchester County that had just caught fire, knocking out power to more than 1,700 customers.

So it went throughout the area, as accommodations were made to try to avert brownouts or blackouts. Horse racing at Belmont Park was called off. New Jersey Transit canceled some morning trains. Amtrak warned customers of delays on its Northeast Corridor service on Wednesday because trains were operating at reduced speeds.

There were reports that a woman who died in Queens on Tuesday was the first heat-related death in the city, but officials had not confirmed that. A spokeswoman for Charles S. Hirsch, the chief medical examiner, said that the woman’s autopsy would be conducted on Thursday.

As the temperature hit triple digits for the second straight day Wednesday, memories of the catastrophic failure of part of New York City’s power grid in 2006 were still vivid inside and outside Con Ed’s makeshift command center near Union Square.

In Astoria, Queens, business owners and elected officials remained wary about the utility company’s methods and its ability to keep the lights and air-conditioners running through a suffocating heat wave. Having endured the wrath of customers who suffered four years ago through that local blackout, which lasted more than a week, the dozens of Con Edison officials in the command center were intent on responding to signs of trouble as soon as they appeared on the giant charts projected on the wall.

As the number of equipment failures mounted by the hour, Con Edison turned to outside contractors for help. Unable to borrow crews from neighboring utilities that were coping with the regionwide swelter, the company brought in independent wire stringers who had been working in Massachusetts.

“No utilities are giving up their crews today,” said John Miksad, Con Edison’s senior vice president of electric operations.

Con Ed was using all available tools for suppressing demand for power throughout its service area. For a second day, it had put all of its emergency programs into effect, which combined to cut usage by about 400 megawatts, according to Mr. Miksad. With them, consumption peaked just below 13,000 megawatts on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons. Without them, it would easily have surpassed the all-time high of 13,141 megawatts, he said.

One lesser-known contributor to the savings was a program that allows Con Ed to reprogram the thermostats in about 20,000 homes and businesses. Those customers are equipped with central air-conditioning systems controlled by thermostats with small antennas.

In times of unusually high demand for electricity, Con Ed tells Carrier, the maker of heating and cooling systems, to send a radio signal that causes those thermostats to cycle on and off every 30 minutes. Doing so shaved about 25 megawatts off the peak demand this week, Con Ed officials said.

“A megawatt here, a megawatt there can make a difference on a day like today,” Mr. Miksad said.

At the 311 help-line center in downtown Manhattan, the number of calls rose with the mercury. Calls came from seniors looking for the closest cooling center, and from parents looking to have nearby fire hydrants fitted with sprinkler caps. (In the last six days, 311 received 4,226 calls related to gushing fire hydrants — the highest category by far.)

Still, considering that fewer than 4,000 customers had no power at 4 p.m., when it was 100 degrees, New Yorkers as a group had little reason to complain. But they complained anyway.

At the Igloo Café in Astoria, the owner, Harry Panagiotopoulos, said he believed that Con Edison had reduced his power a few days ago. What else, he said, would explain why his thermostat read 86 degrees at noon, when he had it set to cool the place to 69?

“A lot of people walk in, they turn around, they walk right out,” Mr. Panagiotopoulos said. He said he had tried complaining to the utility but, he added, “When you’re a monopoly, a legal monopoly, you don’t care.”

Such bitter sentiments, whether accurate or not, are rampant in northern Queens, said Michael N. Gianaris, an assemblyman who happened to be having coffee in the Igloo when Mr. Panagiotopoulos was interviewed.

“The animus toward Con Edison is as raw as it was four years ago,” said Mr. Gianaris, who has been one of the company’s most vocal and unyielding critics.

Having reacted too slowly in 2006 as one overloaded cable led to another and another, Con Edison is now straining to prove that it has learned some lessons from the disaster in Astoria. Back then, the company failed to recognize the severity of the problem it faced and vastly understated its effects.

“We’re much more proactive with communications now,” Mr. Miksad said, adding that the company has developed a strong working relationship with the Fire Department and the city’s Office of Emergency Management. He also emphasized that Con Edison has spent more money rebuilding and upgrading its network in the last five years than it had in the previous decade or two.

But Mr. Gianaris said the company had still not pumped enough money into modernizing its infrastructure. He did, however, credit Con Edison with having learned from the 2006 blackout how to react faster to small failures that could rapidly lead to widespread losses of power.

“There are plenty of places that are as vulnerable as Queens was four years ago,” Mr. Gianaris said. “If they make it through this week without any major outages, it will be more a testament to the lessons they learned four years ago than the investment in infrastructure.”

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Long Emergency Fierce Urgency

SUBHEAD: Sometime this summer the tide will reverse and we'll contend with more than just shrieking wildlife suffocating in crude.

By James Kunstler on 14 June 2010 for Kunstler.com - (http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/06/fierce-urgency.html) 



Image above: A pelican nibbling at the surface of the sea in better times. From (http://images.new-jersey-birds.com/labels/Florida.html). 

The exquisite morbidity of the BP oil spill has concentrated the collective national mind like few other events in this ongoing long emergency. How many times a day does it occur to you -- perhaps while sitting in traffic, or oogling some girl in a nearby cubicle, or cruising the freezer stacks in the supermarket -- that one mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico that crude is just blasting away into the deep blue sea?

Anyway, it troubles my hours. But what if it hadn't happened? What if the nation's attention was not fixed on the "fierce urgency" of this disaster and we were left with all the tiresome familiar problems of politics and economy?

After the financial storms of May, people in the knife-and-fork-using nations may feel that all our troubles with money have been sorted out and settled. Greece had an apoplexy and Europe somehow survived -- at least so far. Spain fell to its knees and apparently remains there, in mid-aria, waiting for an orchestra to strike up the next measure.

Portugal is trying to hide in plain sight, like a beach-goer who has lost swimsuit in the surf. Hungary choked on something last week and was left sitting at the table with its face in a plate of goulash. Iceland has been put on, well, on ice after stiffing its British account holders. The Brits have discovered that they have enough money to run their country in the style of Edward the Confessor.

France is weeping over all the Spanish, Greek, and Portuguese bad paper in its bank vaults. Italy, having become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Silvio Berlusconi, is eating a sparse lunch under the grape arbors. The Baltic states are sinking into a northern peat bog of penury.... And Germany remains upright, wondering how it can wiggle out of this sad-ass collective of fazed cookies.

June so far is a strange ebb tide of of events relating to the world's money, but when the water goes out like that, you know it's sure to return before long, and the peaceful mud-flats of June may vanish under a summer tsunami.

I know I'm not alone in the creepy feeling that really nothing has been sorted out and the world is waiting to get hammered six days to Sunday by the consequences of living too large for too long. The markets have been stranded, too, gyrating on the peculiar life-support of robot-traders -- since all the humans have packed up and left the scene for higher ground.

The corporate creaming-off of anything not nailed down in America continues apace, with the cream ending up as icing on the petit fours passed around the twilight lawns of East Hampton.

President Obama may be lucky that he has something he can pretend to be decisive about in the BP oil spill. It's allowed him to completely avoid taking a public stand on crucial parts of the financial reform legislation working its way through congress like a stinking bolus.

For instance, where does Mr. Obama stand on the reform of credit default swap activities? This dark realm of swindling has come close to choking the American money system to death -- and might yet do the job -- but the president hasn't offered up a word of leadership on it.

My guess is that the gestures of reform will leave reform completely unfinished by the time the high water of events starts rushing back in. All the structural fault-lines will remain as even more decay sets in and new cracks appear. Something is gonna give this summer.

It all comes down to one thing: the world is mismanaging contraction. The world will not solve the problems of massive over-complexity with more complexity. But scaling down is apparently not an option, though it will happen whether we participate or not. The USA is like Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener who, when asked to do anything, replied, "I prefer not to." His preference led him to a pauper's grave.

The future attempts to regulate undersea oil drilling will send many companies to do their thing in other parts of the world where nobody gives a shit what you do offshore as long as you pony up the royalties to the grifters in charge onshore. America is going to lose a whole lot more of its own oil production. Smaller companies may shut down altogether from the cost of complying with new safety rules and an inability to get insurance.

The oil from deep water in the Gulf of Mexico was how we hoped we would offset the ongoing depletions in Alaska. We're going to have to import even more oil than the two-thirds-plus we already depend on. One thing President Obama -- nor anyone else with an audience or a constituency -- will speak a word about is our massive, incessant purposeless motoring.

Pretty soon, the oil missing from the Gulf will leave a message at the 7-Eleven stops in Dallas and Chattanooga, and before the year is out the cardboard signs that say "Out Of Gas" may hang on the pumps.

A great hue and cry will rise out of the Nascar ovals and righteous lady politicians with decoupaged hair-doos will invoke the New World Order and the Book of Revelation in their rise to power. Reasonable men with moderate views will dither on the sidelines, afraid to offend one faction or another.

Sometime this summer that ebb tide of events is going to reverse and we'll have more to contend with than just the shrieking wildlife suffocating in orange gunk, and the ruined spawning grounds of the shrimp, and the lost livelihoods of the sportfishing charter guides, and the tarball covered beaches and devalued real estate.

We decided to de-complexify the hard way, the way that brings about as much pain and disorder as possible until we discover that the long emergency beats a path straight into a world made by hand. .