Question Everything

Congratulations USA — You Elected These Clowns

A three-ringed circus - The executive branch, the legislative branch, and, not to be forgotten, the judicial branch. Enjoy America.

The Spectacle Before Our Eyes

I am enthralled with the comedy that is unfolding in Washington. Nothing I could have imagined could have better underscored my thesis about the lack of wisdom in human beings than what we see unfolding before us.

It is a game. The brinksmanship game played with the full faith of the American credit structure. I could care less. The reality of biophysical economics will ultimately determine the outcome of this game. And there will be no winners. The posturing that is taking place in Washington is simply entertainment. They have no clue as to what is happening to us.

No. More than anything else, what you are watching is the ultimate failure of Homo sapiens, self-named and inappropriately so, to fit the environment. Our leaders are just a microcosmic focus of our failures to learn from mistakes and adapt.

Let's consider what the ‘leaders’ (and oh boy do I use that term loosely) are arguing about. Some time back, someone thought it would be a good idea to put a limit on the amount of debt that the country should carry so they suggested a debt ceiling. Sounds good enough. One should not carry more debt than one can afford to pay off some day. Just like revolving credit it is too easy to keep building the debt level and then get caught unable to meet the payments for both principal and interest. After a while, you are lucky to pay any interest and that keeps building because you aren't paying down the principal either. It is a vicious cycle. Far too many people have personal experience with this phenomenon with their credit cards.

Well why shouldn't the same principle apply to the country as a whole. It is conceivable that if national income doesn't rise over time, that the country could find itself with more debt load than it could service. So to protect against borrowing too much, establish a ceiling. Sounds OK.

But, of course, just like needful consumers who just have to have the latest iPod^TM the government has always found things it just needs to buy (votes or warships). And just like consumers it is easy to just borrow the funds needed to buy. OK, it is a little more complicated in terms of how this is accomplished but the principle is exactly the same. And note that it doesn't matter which party is in charge, the effect is always the same (with the singular exception of Clinton who at least brought down the rate of spending relative to the rate of income for a little while).

Now we get to the interesting part. You establish a debt ceiling, but over and over again you find you really need that latest widget. In order to give yourself permission to borrow more money to buy that widget, you simply raise the debt ceiling. Simple. And stupid.

Your ability to pay back on a debt depends entirely on your future ability to have more income than expenditures so as to have an excess to apply to the principal and interest. Now, of course, this doesn't preclude rolling debts over into yet future time periods, but the fact remains that in those time periods you have to make even more income. You can't go on increasing your debt unless you are also increasing your income by enough of a margin to do a little more than break even. And therein lies the fallacy. Unless income growth matches or exceeds debt growth, there is no way in hell or mathematics that you can come out ahead. Nor, of course, can your creditors.

For the country the accepted surrogate measure of national income is the gross domestic product (GDP). Lucky for the government, it gets to define how to compute the GDP and it has found a method, over the years, for redefining it so that it always seems to go up (except, of course, during recessions). Wow! The government is telling itself (and the public) that it will have more income in the future so it will be able to pay off its debt. Very convenient, don't you think?

Well, to be a little fair about it, the government had some help from the private sector in making the numbers look good. GDP has been grossly inflated by the financial sector creating monetized transactions, which then get counted into GDP, out of thin air. They report their income from the inflation in paper assets, including mortgages backed by inflation in housing prices. Well now we know the latter was not real. And we will soon discover that the stock market valuation that seems to be doing OK is not real either. The financial sector has been making the GDP look good for decades now. So do wars. Every time the US buys another warship GDP goes up. What happens to GDP when the warship gets sunk? But very soon now, that Ponzi scheme will come to a halt. And when it does I think we will watch in horror as the national income is revealed to have been either zero or even negative for the past decade.

My model of biophysical economics has already demonstrated that increasing debt becomes impossible when net energy needed for doing real wealth production peaks and goes into decline. And we in the US have passed the peak of net energy production. Even if we get serious about increasing efficiency in the use of what energy we have it will not be sufficient to restore a healthy wealth production economy to the point that it can service our prior debts (and here I mean both private and public). We will default, I have no doubts.

Raising the debt ceiling (as has been done over 100 times!) is one of the stupidest ideas I have ever encountered. It is made even more dangerous given the energy situation we face. And more dangerous still because the politicians, or should I say clowns, running things in Washington DC have absolutely no clue about the future of energy and the economy. They keep holding onto the belief (without any evidence whatever) that the economy will come roaring back. Jobs will be created. Consumers will spend again. Tax revenues will rise just because more people are working and spending. And life will return to normal. They have to belive this and tell the story to their constituents (and how they are helping make it happen) so that they will keep their jobs. Most of these clowns aren't so dumb that they don't realize that if they don't get re-elected that they will likely not have an adequate income themselves! So they continue to tell the public what it wants to hear, as opposed to what it needs to hear. And the expedient fix to everything is to raise the debt ceiling so the government can borrow more money in order to pay off its prior debt obligations (and entitlement programs have taken on all the form of debt for this purpose).

You couldn't make this kind of nonsense up if you tried.

To be honest, I really don't care if the Congress finds a pathway to passing a debt ceiling increase or not. It is a non-issue in the larger picture of a world that is destined for crash. But what I am interested in is the behavior and thinking of the participants. I hope you are watching this as well. Our species has reached its level of incompetence! What the circus in Washington is demonstrating, better than anything I could have come up with, is just how insanely incompetent our leaders are. And since we put them there, how incompetent we are!

OK, they just might come up with some kind of compromise in the 11^th hour and avoid the so-called default situation. It really doesn't matter though. They have already proved their incompetence to govern beyond any reasonable doubt with their incessant posturing and ideological fervor. Neither the left nor right has shown any comprehension of what is really ailing humanity and the economy. They are all blinded by their ideological beliefs.

Here is the greater tragedy. The current spate of congress persons and the president are probably the best we can do! That's right. These are the brightest and best that would ever acquiesce to occupy public service offices^*. They are there because they can't serve any other useful function in society. Politicians are politicians because they don't have any talents other than convincing rhetoric! They don't really need to understand anything because the electorate doesn't exercise critical thinking anyway. The sad fact is that the electorate is pathetically ignorant. Congratulations USA. You have achieved the status of a nation of fools.

Of course, America, you fell for that rhetoric. Look, I am guilty too, as much as I hate to admit it. I actually wanted desperately to believe that Obama got it. He talked about sacrifice. I thought, maybe, he would be able to lead us through what I know will be trying times. Fool me once. I confess. I voted for him.

But I would like to believe that I won't make the same mistake twice. He has proven to me that he really doesn't get it. Or he is just plain disingenuous. Either way I will not vote for him again.

And that leaves me with a real conundrum. And it leaves you readers with a conundrum as well if I am right. If you understand anything I have written you will recognize the problem. Who exactly would you choose as a leader? Who is running that you would entrust with the job?

Well you may have noticed that on the Democratic side there are no challengers to Obama. On the Republican side there is... Oh right, no one worth even considering. So what will you do come 2012? An independent candidate perhaps? Who?

This will sound crazy. I recommend that when you vote in 2012 you might write in your own name for president! Write in anyone you like for vice president! Seriously what choices do you have? OK I realize you are throwing away a vote. But imagine. What will happen if you vote for Obama and whoever (presumably Joe Bidden again)? Will you get reality? You might actually be better off voting for Michelle Bachman! At least you would know that you are getting another clown. And it might be worth it to accelerate the process and get the pain over with.

I haven't looked into this yet, but Americans Elect might be an alternative approach. This group is looking to capitalize on the apparent democracy of the Internet to nominate the best possible people for president without resort to ideological leanings. See what you think.

Meanwhile, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

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^* You know the old saying: Those who can do, those who can't teach, and those who haven't a clue run for office or become administrators! Naturally I take exception with the first part, but maybe some of my former students think I should have stayed in industry because I couldn't teach either!

Are You Witness to the Beginning of the End?

Bring in the Clowns

When things started falling apart in the Roman Empire, around the beginning of the end, they put a lot of investment into providing entertainment to the masses to divert their attention from what was barreling down the road at them. It kind of worked because the citizens never really figured out that they should be doing anything different in their lives to get ready for the end of their civilization.

The current situation reminds me of that kind of approach.

The Circus in Washington DC

Can you believe what is going on in Washington, DC?

If ever there was substantial evidence for my thesis that we human beings are not sufficiently sapient to conduct our affairs on this planet I have to claim this is it.

What we are witnessing in Washington DC is the epitome of human foolishness, the exact antithesis of wisdom. Members of Congress from both parties and the President of the United States are playing a political game with the future of the United States as the stakes. The President was right about one thing. These people are children, in the worst sense of that word — immature.

Neither the left nor the right gets a pass in my book. Both ideologies are simply devoid of understanding what is happening to human societies. I read Robert Reich's blog this morning and hung my head. I consider Reich as one of the cleverest economists out there when it comes to labor economics, but his sad devotion to the progressivist ideology that says a growing consumer-based economy is the solution to our woes makes be cringe. He seems totally oblivious to the fact of peak resources that will curtail any kind of economic growth, period. He and Paul Krugman are in the same Keynesian fog about governments being the consumer of last resort. To these two having the US government pile on more debt (meaning the US will need to raise the debt ceiling again and again) in order to ‘pay’ for creating jobs is the solution to the problem of our ‘stalled’ economy. A growing GDP is a healthy GDP — end of story.

Therein lies the seed of “truth” underlying the conservatives' arguments about spending cuts. They are rightly concerned that spending more than you get in income is a bad idea — always. Of course what they are ideologically incapable of seeing is that part of the revenue problem is their insistence that taxes cannot be raised in any way shape or form. And especially protected are the rich, those they have labeled “the job creators”. You have to hand it to the conservatives. They know how to perform rhetorical wizardry! Never mind that there is actually no evidence that giving the rich tax breaks actually creates jobs. Never mind that there is no evidence that jobs can be created in any sense when your net energy is declining rapidly; energy being the main ingredient in the work of producing real physical wealth. Their policies are at the root of the disparity in incomes between rich and poor. But both ends of the political ideology spectrum have completely failed to understand that growth itself is finished.

Of course, readers will know that I never held out any hope that our “leaders” would be able to fix anything. The problems we face, not only as a nation but as a world, are far beyond anything that they can even conceptualize, let alone find policies that could work. Right now the world needs leaders with realistic visions, not necessarily telling a constituency what they want to hear, but telling them the truth about what to expect in the future from our rapidly impending decline. We need leaders able to see what needs to be done to mitigate the threats and minimize the pain. We need leaders who will show the rest a pathway forward. Not one of the people currently serving in government in the US (and I would suggest anywhere else in the world) has that capability. Our pathetic reliance on “open democracy”, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that money, not votes, actually does the talking, has gotten us here. Our inability to think critically and act on our reading of reality is to blame for our not having competent leadership. So, I suppose I would have to say we deserve what we are about to get.

I simply want to call attention to the machinations involved in the ‘budget’ negotiations, the cluelessness about why the economy is tanking and why jobs are not coming back, as these examples reinforce my contention that Homo sapiens, even the most clever of us, are not fit to survive any longer. If the President, congressmen and women, and seated judiciary in Washington represent our brightest, then woe be unto us Americans. But if they are not our brightest, what does that say about the electorate who sent them there? Either way, woe be unto us.

In a way, I suppose I should be grateful to the lot in Washington (and other capitals) for the entertainment value of watching the clown acts they are performing. That is why I am talking about the “circus” in Washington. John Stuart nailed it this morning! In my memory I cannot think of a time when there was so much posturing and in-fighting going on when the stakes seemed so incredibly high. Maybe a better analogy would be The Three Stooges. Obama is Moe, Reid is Larry, and Boehner is Curly. Keep the hilarity coming boys.

The Circus in Europe

Before you Europeans start to suffer too much schadenfreude, recall that there are serious problems in the EU. More members are facing debt crises than the core EU economies, primarily Germany, will be able to cover. Europe's energy situation is in chaos and there is no clear way out. MENA migrants seem on the verge of overrunning several European countries and the native citizens are getting restless. Tempers are flaring.

Various personalities, like France's Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and presumptive challenger to French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, are in disrepute right at a time when stability of leadership is absolutely essential to the European Union. Bring in the clowns.

The Circus in Asia

Japan — facing the continuing crisis of Fukushima. China — facing environmental and social crises. Workers are demanding more as they want to emulate the consumptive behaviors of the west. All Asian nations facing fossil fuel crises. Leadership? Bring in the clowns.

The Circus in Africa

No one is going to think this is entertaining. Africa is a mess and getting worse by the day. Somalia? OK, this is more like the lion tamer act, really dangerous. The clowns are the foreigners who really don't know what to do, the UN, the IMF, the World Bank. Try solving Somalia's drought with capitalism boys.

The Circus in the Mid East

Israel, Palestine, Water? Maybe this is more like Buffalo Bill's wild west show. Cowboys and Indians at war. Just because the calvary is wearing white hats doesn't make them the good guys. Once again the comic relief comes from the foreign communities, their diplomatic jawboning. Reminds me of Jerry Lewis, except, of course, he was kind of funny.

The Circus in the 'Stans

Pakistan, Afghanistan. Need I say more? You get the point.

How Ends Begin

Seriously. Need I Go On?

So tell me. Where in the world are things going right? Where in the world are we humans solving the problems and getting on with good living? Where in the world is the circus NOT playing?

Ends start when you can't answer those questions.

Now lets talk about real beginnings of real ends. If you are familiar with the logistic function, you know that it applies to every natural growth phenomenon we have ever seen. If you graph the function, size of the growing system as a function of time, it produces an ‘S’-shaped curve. This mathematical representation seems to apply universally to growth and development of real systems. The bottom part of the S is accelerating growth. The top part is decelerating growth. At the very top, the peak, growth stops completely, afterwards what happens depends on whether the system is in steady-state with its environment or not (e.g. if there are enough resource inputs to sustain the system). The mid point represents a flip from accelerating growth to decelerating growth. And that is the beginning of the end. It is a crucial point to note, to be aware of, because it means that things that were true before the point (called an inflection point) will be less and less true after the point. It also means that things that were less true before that point become more true after. For example, positive feedback loops predominate before the inflection point which is what leads to exponential growth. After the inflection point negative feedback loops tend to predominate, leading to deceleration.

The history of human extraction of fossil fuels has followed just such a curve. Extraction rates have been accelerating for a long time but, at least in the case of oil, went through the inflection point about twenty years ago (globally speaking). The rate of extraction has been decelerating since then as the logistic function predicts. But deceleration is not the same thing as declining. The growth of extraction rates were still growing, but at a decelerating rate. This is a little confusing to those who have not studied calculus. But it is like what happens when you take your foot off of the accelerator pedal after you have been pushing it to get your car to go faster. Your car doesn't stop just because you stopped giving it gas. Rather its velocity (speed) starts to decline. You're still going forward but at an increasingly slower rate until eventually you would stop. That is deceleration. The inflection point of fossil fuel extraction is like this. We continued to pull oil out of the ground at increasing volumes, but at each time increment (say each year) we pulled it out slightly less quickly. We entered the deceleration phase but didn't pay much heed because the extraction was still growing.

It wasn't until the deceleration was bringing us to no growth in extraction rates that we started really feeling the impact. This is what is meant by peak oil. The rate of extraction is now flat and will soon start to actually decline. It will be as if we came to a standstill in our car, put it in reverse and then started giving it the gas. We are about to go backward. And there is no changing this fact. Oil and the other fossil fuels are finite in amount. The S-shaped curve is the result of this fact.

The Beginning of the End of the Economy

We didn't really notice the inflection point in the extraction rate of oil. But there was an even more insidious inflection point that we not only didn't notice, we didn't even think to look because we didn't actually understood what it might mean.

If the extraction rate of oil is now at its peak, it turns out that the total net energy available to the economy to use to do work peaked many years before, perhaps twenty to thirty. That's right. About the time the extraction inflection point hit the world, the actual net energy, the energy that we get from oil products after we expend energy to get that energy, was rapidly approaching its peak. It had gone through its middle inflection point perhaps fifty years ago. The reason we didn't notice is because we have no way to directly measure net energy. We can easily count the barrels of oil we pump (gross energy), we can also count the gallons of various liquid fuels like gasoline. But because there are losses along the way in the actual energy content being finally delivered, we haven't until recently realized that the net energy returned on energy invested (EROI) has been steadily, and perhaps exponentially, declining. In other words, we are getting less return for the same effort. It is the energy return that we are interested in because this is what we use to run our economy. At least, for liquid fuels, our transportation economy (over 90% of it).

While the energy returned from oil only represents about 35-40% of our total economic consumption of energy, one might think this is not a great deal to overcome if our oil supply is declining and our lowered EROIs amplify that decline. We should be able to compensate with alternative energies. We should be able to electrify our transportation system, or create biofuels to take the place of oil products. Indeed many of the clowns from the circuses believe this to be the case. But the numbers and the laws of thermodynamics don't support the belief. That won't happen, especially if we insist on keeping things going the way they are now (or better), which is exactly what the clowns are promising.

The problem is in how key transportation has become in our overall, globalized economies. All regions do not have the broad array of resources that go to make up the modern world base of economic wealth. Regions have to trade in order to spread the wealth around. Each area has some kind of competitive advantage (well almost every region). They can trade their value added for imports that they want or need. Without transportation, every region would soon become poor in everything except whatever resource they have locally. The net energy available for transportation is what makes the world work. Take that away, or seriously curtail it, and the world ceases to work. No real wealth production, no paying off debts, no jobs, nothing but decline in paper and physical wealth alike.

And So, Let the Circus Acts Begin

Most people know why Rome had a circus in the late stages of the empire's decline. Of course we have our gladiators (football and NASCAR), we have our clowns (politicians and most economists), we have our ring masters (the media). And we are certainly willing to pay the ticket price for the show (capitalism, advertising, and paychecks). Enjoy it while it lasts. Every show comes to an end eventually.

Our institutions are failing right and left. Our leaders (politicians, corporate CEOs, media moguls — don't get me started on Murdoch!) are actually incompetent at anything like leading the masses to higher ground as the flooding starts. They seem to be only able to grab more of the paper-based wealth for themselves. Perhaps they plan to eat the database records of their supposed net worth after the computers fail while sitting on their rooftops watching everyone else drown in the flood waters swirling around them. But no one is immune from the decline of net energy. They may, in the short-run, accumulate paper assets that they plan on using after the crash. But they will find that those assets are worthless in a world where there is no energy for wealth creation or even transportation of food stuffs from regions that can grow them to regions that need them.

What evidence can you give that there is reason to think that the systems we have created, and the species we have become, are worthy of continuance into the future? Indeed, what evidence can you provide that suggests we are capable of extending our mind sets into the future of the planet?

Believe it or not, I don't pose these questions to depress you. I ask these questions to spur your thinking, to spur you to action. Only a small fraction of people who read these pages will understand what I am trying to do. But that is enough, if I am successful in getting you to focus on your own future.

Focus on sapience. If you are going to have faith in anything it should be faith in the wisdom of the sapients. Having faith in our leaders is proving to be life threatening. The hard part is recognizing wisdom in others. It won't look like charisma, or rhetoric, and certainly not like ideology. It takes a certain amount of humility to keep yourself from assuming that you are wise enough so that you don't need the wisdom of another. Only then might you hope to see those who really are wise and bind your fate to theirs. No guarantees that will work out for you. But I do guarantee that if you stick with the clowns you might be laughing all the way to the point when the circus tent collapses. Then not so much.

News Flash for Paul Krugman (and other progressivists)

In his column today in the New York Times, (neo) economist Paul Krugman lambasted the government for not ‘creating jobs’, “No, We Can't? Or Won't?”.

He advanced a theory that the government could create jobs and that this would be the solution to the economic woes of the country, but they won't because of all of the political hoopla surrounding the budget deficit and debt load. All we hear in the news these days is about the wrangling between Republicans and Democrats about how to reduce the deficit and start paying off our debt. Krugman, and many progressivist economists see that as a distraction to the immediate problem that they feel is keeping the economy from growing again (or growing at an acceptable rate in their views). Here is a list of the excuses he thinks are being used.

• “Excuse No. 1: Just around the corner, there’s a rainbow in the sky.”
• “Excuse No. 2: Fear the bond market.”
• “Excuse No. 3: It’s the workers’ fault.”
• “Excuse No. 4: We tried to stimulate the economy, and it didn't work.”

With each one he gives reasons why these excuses are false.

Here is a news flash for Professor Krugman. Nothing anybody can do, not government, not the financial markets, not corporations sitting (supposedly) on cash, and especially well-intentioned economists, NOBODY, can create jobs. Certainly not the kinds of jobs that pay so-called living wages. And basically, no jobs period.

A job is where a person does some work to create something or some service of value to someone else who is willing to pay for it. Jobs entail the use of resources to produce those products and services. When the costs of the resources go up they become a more significant part of the overall cost of production and would, in times of plenty, simply be countered with an increase in prices paid by the customers.

Customers have to have the cash to buy the goods or services. If they are paying out more cash for necessities like food and shelter, for example, they have less to buy the extras that are produced by most jobs in the US. We have become a service-based (read: retail) economy, remember? Customers have not gotten incrementally more cash from their own jobs (i.e. pay increases) and so can't actually afford to keep buying the same stuff.

Well, actually they did try that for a little while, didn't they? Instead of more cash from higher wages they borrowed. They borrowed on credit cards and they took out additional mortgages on their appreciating real estate! But that didn't really work out for them, did it? It is time to pay the piper. Just ask the Greeks and now, it seems, the Italians (Spain, Ireland...).

The central problem for all economies throughout the world is that energy is the absolute basis of work. It is the single common input to all work regardless of types of material inputs used. It is what is needed to even extract and process the material inputs. It is what is needed to produce enough food to feed the workers. In short, it is the fundamental basis of the economy (see: “Yet Another Look at Cost Inflation”)

And the reason that no jobs are getting created, why nobody is significantly investing in projects that will really provide the number of jobs needed to keep the unemployment rate down and the GDP growing is very simple. The amount of energy consumed in extracting more energy has gotten to be such a huge percentage of the total that the net energy available to the economy is now shrinking and by my estimates has been in that mode since the late 1970s. Less actual energy available to do work means less work. Even after you factor in any gains that have been made over the last 30 years in efficiency (not to be confused with the economic measure called ‘productivity’) the fact is that we have now reached a point where the loss of net energy is being felt increasingly with each passing day.

The price of oil is an indicator of this phenomenon. Prices have been steadily rising over this same time period. Moreover, they have been highly volatile on a daily/weekly or even monthly basis, indicating tremendous nervousness in the markets which in dynamical systems is a sign that something important is about to happen. We will see the same thing happening with coal and natural gas. It is inevitable.

Let me make this as simple as I possibly can. To obtain the energy we need to do even the most efficient work we can do in, say, converting natural resources to human use, it takes increasingly more energy, meaning that it costs more in dollars. Since energy goes into EVERYTHING, then everything will be more expensive as time goes on. The economies of the world will cease growing (actually after you factor out of GDP the phony money created from financialization, they are already in decline), even China, and the idea of jobs being created, by any means possible, will be dead. This is happening now, today, already! And there is absolutely nothing that Obama, or Congress or any government in any nation can do to change the course of the future (save magically inventing an entirely new replacement fuel for fossil fuels).

What should governments be doing. For starters they need to tell the truth about how the world actually works. Of course this is unlikely for two reasons. One, most politicians haven't any real clues because the vast majority of them never took physics (or if they did the lessons obviously didn't stick). Two, politicians are in the business of getting elected and telling people the bad news is not going to work very well for that.

And, of course, capitalist corporate enterprises suffer from the same stupidity/myopia so they can't allow governments to tell the truth. The whole kerfuffle over global warming is the quintessence of this massive blindness and stupidity. It is a perfect model for why we will never get from government what we really need.

After telling the truth, governments need to organize around a simple, but difficult principle. They need to consolidate, even nationalize, energy infrastructure and adopt rules of commerce that forbid profits (yes I am saying there needs to be an end to capitalism as we know it) and support enterprises whose products and services are geared toward efficient energy production. Most of all, and as a key example of what I am talking about, governments need to focus on food security. As our industrial agriculture system is utterly dependent on fossil fuels to produce the amount of food needed to feed the population, governments need to be working right now on plans for rationing fossil fuels toward food production while at the same time investing in a completely new food infrastructure based on organic (permaculture) approaches. Food is not going to merely get more expensive (and by the way, economists, what is the substitute for food?) it will become scarce to the point that many more people will be malnourished or starve.

Governments will need to heavily tax or even confiscate the real resources of the current day rich. The rich are rich mostly on paper (or in computer memories). Their assets are largely imaginary, but as long as the financial system based on fiat money is in play, they can leverage their supposed holdings for whatever real assets (like yachts and jets) they want. But that fiat money system is going to come to an astonishingly rapid end in the not too distant future. So the rich will not have the leverage they now enjoy. The Lloyd Blankfeins and Wall Street Wonders of the world will end up just as poor as the rest of us. And if governments don't act quickly to advantage whatever remaining leverage exists, say to invest in old fashioned railways and building sailing ships for international trade (no more freeways please), and to convert those frivolous hard assets into plowshares (metaphorically speaking) then you can bet that when the SHTF, the poor people will simply take what the Blankfeins possess and do it themselves. But I suspect not in an orderly way.

OK. I've told you what should be done to avoid the worst-case scenario, or at least minimize the pain we will all feel in the throes of a shrinking economy. Now the question is what could be done? Or more to the point, what will be done? You probably already know where I would go with this. While experts like Krugman wail about jobs creation as the path to the return of growth and Obama's economic counselors get in bed with the ideologues in the Republican/Tea Party, governments like the US will do all of the wrong things to actually serve their populations. They will waste resources trying to make things the way they used to be and completely miss the fact that things can never be that way again. They will, in short, make matters worse rather than better.

Those of you who read through this tirade nodding your heads in the affirmative and I are helpless in terms of doing anything to stop this train wreak. The momentum and mass stupidity is simply too overwhelming. Our only recourse is to use our understanding of what is really happening, what is really causing our economic woes, to help us think through what each of us can or should do to prepare for the worst (and of course always hope for the least worst!) I've offered my opinions in past blogs (see: “What is a Feasible Living Situation for Future Humans” and “A Feasible Living Situation - Cont.” for example ideas). Good luck to you all.

Does Anybody See an Alternative to Obama?

Not Just Disillusionment

This goes beyond just being disappointed in Obama's choices and performance. I don't think I ever had any illusions that he would somehow ‘fix’ things. I have written plenty about how we are faced with unfixable situations. But, when he was elected I had a weak hope that he would at least tell the American people the truth about our economic situation. When he appointed Steven Chu, a real physicist (Nobellist no less), to Energy Secretary my hopes raised a little higher still. But then he appointed his ‘Chicago School’ contingent as economic advisors and I realized all was lost for even the prospect of reality entering the political discourse of this nation. Even Chu has turned on reality as he continues to voice the politically-expedient party line about clean coal and green energy. I know the man knows the laws of thermodynamics. I know he has some concept of conversion efficiencies. I know he understands the physical limitations of real-time solar energy availability. He's a physicist damn it. He has to know these things.

On top of that he has to have a pretty good idea of the limits of scaling what works in the lab to what works in the field. Surely he comprehends the rates at which large-scale conversion projects are going to be slow given the rate of conventional energy depletion and the limitations on our financial resources. He has to have a pretty good idea about the physical limits of resources needed to build out alternative energy infrastructure. I know, from personal communication with someone who talks to the man, that he definitely knows about peak oil and energy return on energy invested, at least conceptually. So what is going on in Washington that we can't see?

The question that keeps haunting me is this. If Chu knows these things, why doesn't Obama, the president he advises? And more insidious, if Obama has been briefed why does he continue to fail to tell the American people and the world what the real situation is with respect to why the economy is so bad?

I suspect, in my darker thoughts, that he does know. But maybe he also knows how futile all the green talk really is. Maybe he understands the situation far better than I gave him credit for. Maybe the reason he hasn't turned toward some kind of jobs creation program rather than focusing on and giving credence to the Republican myopic focus on debt reduction, is that he knows it is futile. But then I have to wonder. If he does know, why on earth would he want to get re-elected? Does he really want to go down in history (should any history be preserved through the future turmoil) as the president who oversaw the collapse of the American culture/society?

My deepest problem with Obama is that if he knows he should tell the story and help get the people in this country and others around the world ready for the coming collapse. There are things that people can do to ready themselves. It won't be pretty, but it will be gawdawful ugly if people are caught by surprise. People don't react well to losing their beliefs overnight.

Of course, if he doesn't know then perhaps we can be a little lenient in our assessments. But that doesn't help the situation at all. Either way he is proving not to be the leader we need at this juncture of human history.

The Republican Side????

This is a joke, right? Are the Republicans serious? These are the candidates they offer?

Honestly I have become mildly convinced that we have been witnessing a case of sympatric speciation as three major ‘races’ of Homo sapiens differentiate. The races? Conservative (with a sub-species called libertarian), liberals (sub-species progressive), and independent (or also known as unable-to-compete). Sympatric speciation takes place without a physical barrier to separate races subsequently allowing them to then diverge independently (allopatric speciation — the form most people know about). Usually there is some behavioral differentiation, perhaps accompanied by a weak morphological marking, within a single population that causes a rift, followed by strengthening of that rift by a form of sexual selection (assortative mating), and an eventual strong separation between breeding populations even in the same range (for humans that is the whole Earth). The new species, even in incipient form, occupy different econiches. In most cases this has to do with food types that select for differentiation in feeding behaviors. But in humans this appears to be mental attitudes and behaviors such as degree of altruism inherent.

Homo conservatist incipient is certainly a lot less altruistic and seems to build its behaviors around the concept of maximizing personal profit. Right at a time in mankind's history when a maximum of cooperation and sharing might be needed to minimize the damage to the genus, this doesn't seem like a winning strategy. Perhaps in a world that really could provide ever expanding sources of ever higher powered energy that strategy would prove positively selective and that eventual species would rule the world.

It is no wonder that their mantra is “Drill-baby-drill” They need a continually growing supply of energy to further expand the economy, turning nature into human wealth that they can accumulate personally. This regardless of what damage it does to the environment that is the ultimate source of their sustenance!

This is the platform of the political right. The transformation from merely being a political ideology to becoming an embedded way of thinking is nearly complete. We can only wonder in horror at the damage Homo conservatist incipient would do to the world if given any kind of power. Crap! We don't have to imagine it. Look at what is happening in the Congress right now. Look at the Tea Party. This incipient species depends on instincts more than actual evidence-based reasoning, even as they fool themselves into thinking they are using logic based on not-to-be-questioned axioms. They have a herd mentality approach to survival coupled with a ‘What's mine is mine - go get your own’ mentality. Very dangerous, I think.

The Independents/Third Party Side???

As the human mental ecosystem breaks into pieces there are several miscellaneous sub-species that are feeding at the margins but not finding particularly fruitful grounds. Independents are sometimes characterized as unable to make up their minds (undecideds) or look for a middle-of-the-road, or centrist, position (the averagests). Then there are a very small few who base their decisions on the details of the situation or proposition, recognizing that sometimes a problem needs a conservative approach, at other times different problems require a liberal approach, while at yet other times still different problems require a middle approach. In other words, they like to figure out what needs to be done based on the facts in the case and not some ideological belief that guides all decisions. These latter are, in number, like the tiny insignificant mammals that scurried about at the feet of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago, just before the comet hit the Yucatan peninsula. Many of this sub-species are correctly altruistic under general circumstances. That is, even if a problem demands a conservative approach the point is that the maximum number of people will benefit from the solution (e.g. as in conserving our park lands — the original meaning of conservative!)

The problem for all in this category is that there isn't enough mental food for them to feed on. These mental econiches are simply not big enough to gain any advantages. So most of these variants are bound to go the way of the Dodo.

This, of course, translates into the fact that no one in this group could hope to gain enough votes in the political battle to get elected (selected for!) And even if that happened, say by a miracle, the electorate is not likely to follow the lead or listen to the story.

The Democrat Side????

Homo liberalis incipient is just as fraught with problems in terms of their overall strategy for survival. They are literally too altruistic without actually having the requisite understanding of how to translate their urges into effective actions. They will literally give away the wealth, especially the accumulated wealth of others, without a clue as to where that wealth actually comes from. In fact, their instincts misinform them in that they believe that wealth will always grow greater so that everyone can grow in benefits. They have a vague notion that some forms of wealth creation, if not properly regulated, are causing damage to the environment and want to stop that. But they honestly believe that wealth growth is inherent in the system and as long as we don't let bad greediness lead to excesses, we should all achieve Nirvana.

So this sub-species is similarly bound to the notion of growth of energy even if they don't understand that that is what they need. They assume that either growth doesn't depend on energy per se, or that all of these so-called green technologies will provide what we need. They suffer from delusional thinking.

Which may bring us back to Mr. Obama, a supposed liberal who may, as it turns out very much be the archetype for this sub-species. I had hoped that Mr. Obama was in that little sub-species that behaved either conservatively or liberally only when appropriate to the nature of the problem. I do think he has basic altruistic motivations. But his approach to governing suggests he may be in the averagist sub-species. Or maybe he really can't make up his own mind and is just taking directions from those who influence him the most (he did come from Chicago after all).

Alternatives?

Are there any alternatives? If my only half-serious hypothesis about sympatric evolution having proceeded to the incipient species stage (where separation of mental econiches in nearly complete) then sadly there are not. The left will be represented by Obama seeking a second term. In all likelihood, if he wins, he will continue to fail at truth telling (or even truth knowing). If he loses it will be to a conservative, possibly of the Tea Party ilk. No independent looks even feasible at this point. So it is likely that the leader will not, or cannot tell the people the truth about energy and resource reality.

In all likelihood the entrenched, moneyed interests in this world would snuff any leader that broke the news to the public. The rich, who are members of the Homo conservativist incipient sub-species, are accumulating all the gold they can carry thinking that will save them if worse comes to worst. I believe we are witnessing their hoarding strategy that is motivated by an instinctive sense that what is happening in the world now is prelude to the end. The people who hold the 80% of the virtual wealth (money) in this world are not totally dumb, just terribly unwise. They actually do sense that the end is near and they are turning to the only source of comfort they have ever understood in their lives - more money. I suspect they imagine they will buy safety in gated communities or hideaways in Honduras. They will be able to buy security in a world gone haywire. So, of course, they contribute disproportionately to making it go even more haywire, or hastening the coming of the end. Wait until they find out just what security money will be able to buy when the poor hoards realize they've been had.

So, here we are. A new grand leader election cycle is upon us. And these are the candidate choices we have to consider. To be very honest, I suspect I will sit this one out. At this stage my only thoughts about joining the electorate would be to vote for a Homo conservativist incipient under the theory that we should just get it over with and such a president would help accelerate that process. Sad thought, huh?