Collapse_of_Civilization
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Dan Allen, Energy Bulletin Then I returned and spoke again to the land. I said, “Tell me, what do the people of the machines want?” And I waited a very long time in silence. And when the land finally spoke it said this...
DAN ALLEN | Energy Bulletin
“We – those of us who care about life – have a choice. At each and every second we have a choice. We can open up to life, in all its complexity and horror and joy and sorrow and death and messiness. Or we can try to deny this complexity, this messiness, this life, and we can try to reduce it. …And of course once having opened up to the complexity and beauty of life, we really have no choice but to fight to defend this complexity and beauty from all those who would destroy it.” -- Derrick Jensen, Dreams (2011) “Which side are you on, boys?
Occupying Post-Collapse America: What if the industrial death-urge lived on? | Energy Bulletin
As economic growth fails how do we live? Part I: The four horsemen of the economic apocalypse | Energy Bulletin
by Craig A. Severance As recently as a year ago it was considered heresy to suggest economic growth would not soon resume. Now, however, as The Big Engine That Couldn't has faltered for several years, it is becoming increasingly clear the economy is running off the tracks .
A conversation with Dmitry Orlov about Europe | Energy Bulletin
[Première publication sur Orbite.info: Un entretien avec Dmitry Orlov ] I came upon Dmitry Orlov's writings—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.Axialization — Blogs, Pictures, and more on WordPress
Thursday In several posts I have suggested a generalization of Karl Jaspers idea of an “Axial Age.” For Jaspers (and Lewis Mumford, and others who have followed them), the “Axial Age … more →
Welcome to Armageddon, USA: A Tour of America’s Most Toxic Town | Magazine
Larry Roberts angles his white Mercury Grand Marquis into the empty parking lot of a tiny café, G & J’s Gorillas Cage, and cruises into a space near the front door. The restaurant’s red and white metal trim is faded and rusted, and the lightbulb-lined roadside sign has been dark for years. Hand-painted placards in the windows advertise burger baskets, corn dogs, and a couple of untruths—”Last Place in Picher!” and “Yes, We’re Open!” When it closed in March, the Gorillas Cage was the only restaurant left in Picher, Oklahoma.
Following on from yesterday's discussion , I want to make a point that seems like it must have been made before, but I cannot quickly find a good discussion of it. That is that the net energy of pre-industrial agriculture, taken as a whole energy-gathering system, must have been low, with EROEI probably on the order of 1.1-1.6 depending on place and time. Prior to the industrial revolution, the main source of primary energy in society was biological - agriculture and forestry, with a significant assist from water mills. The biological energy was used to feed horses (used themselves in ploughing, but also in transportation), as well as agricultural workers.
The Net Energy of Pre-Industrial Agriculture
We must first realize that EROI is a somewhat theoretical concept; it is a unitless ratio that does not describe actual flows of energy. What society really cares about, and what is really used to grow economies around the world, are actual flows of energy. More precisely, the economy utilizes flows of net energy.
The Oil Drum | The Energy Return on Investment Threshold
Atemporality for the Creative Artist | Beyond The Beyond
*An unrepentant sympathizer took the trouble to type up a full transcript of my speech at Transmediale 10 on February 6. *Since this volunteer made such a noble effort, it deserves to be pitched straight into the “Internet meme ooze” of blogs and social media. Here you are.Bringing It Down To Earth
We’ve covered a lot of ground in the last two months or so, and at this point I want to summarize the territory thus explored and link it back into the core of this blog’s project—the search for a realistic understanding of the troubled future ahead of us, and a meaningful way to respond to it. One crucial part of that response, I’ve suggested, relates to that tangled realm where consciousness meets the unconscious drives that shape so much of our experience of the world: a realm that contemporary thought addresses, however incompletely, through the science of psychology, and that the older lore of magic approaches in a much more comprehensive and potent way. That latter lore is only one part of the toolkit we’re going to need to deal with the storms to come, but it’s an important part, and it’s well suited to deal with issues most of today’s proposals for the future leave unanswered.
"Clean." "Green." What do those words mean?
The myth of renewable energy | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
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Death Squared ☠^2 « GardenSERF's Plot
Today’s Outside the Box is the latest chapter in my ongoing discussion with Dr. Woody Brock on the rationale of the politics of economics. In this essay, Woody explains how political science has taken a back seat to economics, and how to redress the imbalance we find today between what he terms “Res Politica” (the rule of politics) and “Res Economica” (the rule of economics or money). Where the rubber meets the road here is that our important economic decisions are increasingly being made by politicians (who are not particularly well-schooled in either economics or political science), with consequences that are likely to be dangerous.
Res Politica versus Res Economica | The Big Picture
The US Supreme Court has taken up the issue of so-called ObamaCare: the controversial plan to extend private health insurance to all citizens, with a stiff tax penalty for those who refuse to purchase private health insurance. I know something about it, since I live in Massachusetts, a state that adopted so-called RomneyCare, after Mitt Romney, who was our governor at the time, and is now running for president. ObamaCare is modeled on RomneyCare.
ClubOrlov
[A timely guest post from Gary. tl;dn: Hubbert was right. Again.] In light of recent events such as the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street I thought it would be pertinent to review Hubbert's Third Prophecy about the cultural crisis he expected. He wrote about it in the attached article entitled "Exponential Growth as a Transient Phenomenon in Human History". In case you are not familiar with Hubbert's first two prophecies, he predicted both the US and world oil peak very accurately. In 1956 Hubbert predicted the US oil peak would be sometime between 1969 and 1971.