Excerpts from Palin's big speech:
Our opponents say, again and again, that drilling will not solve all of America's energy problems -- as if we all didn't know that already. But the fact that drilling won't solve every problem is no excuse to do nothing at all. Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we're going to lay more pipelines ... build more nuclear plants ... create jobs with clean coal ... and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal, and other alternative sources.We need American energy resources, brought to you by American ingenuity, and produced by American workers.
Lie No. 1 shows chutzpah, I'll give her that much. Just two months ago, Palin said "I beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can't drill our way out of our problem." Perhaps someone told the would-be energy expert that even billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens knows her July claim was absurd.
Lie No. 2 is that her "opponents" want to do "nothing at all." Aside from the fact that Obama is willing to compromise on offshore drilling, his energy plan is by far the most comprehensive one ever put forth by a candidate from a major party.
Lie No. 3 is that "a McCain-Palin administration" would "move forward on solar, wind, geothermal, and other alternative sources." Sorry, she and McCain are soul-mate Luddites. She thinks, "Alternative-energy solutions are far from imminent and would require more than 10 years to develop." McCain thinks, "The truly clean technologies don't work,"which is why he has consistently voted against renewables, even though, like Palin, he claims to support them.
Lie No. 4 is "The Big Energy Lie," which subsumes all the other lies in her entire remarks on energy. The Big Energy Lie is that either John McCain or the Republicans in Congress actually believe in an "all of the above" energy policy. Congressional Democrats will hopefully force votes this fall that will show that claim for the disingenuous deceit it is.
Perhaps the only truth thing Palin said on energy that is true is "We need American energy resources, brought to you by American ingenuity, and produced by American workers." I could not agree more. That's what energy efficiency and wind power and solar PV and solar baseload are.
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Comments View as Flat
wesrolley Posted 8:36 am
04 Sep 2008
When will any journalist ask McPalin....
How will you reduce greenhouse gases by increasing the supply of oil and coal?
If the earliest that anyone talks of delivering a pilot project for cleaner coal is 2015, how do you address CO2 until then?
If wind and solar system that are working now are too futuristic, why do you even mention systems that are not even designed yet?
If you want to mine more coal, will you enforce the Clean Water Act against mountain top removal operations?
I don't really expect any corporate journalist to do this... just wondering.
Wes Rolley CoChair - EcoAction Committee Green Party US
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GreyFlcn Posted 9:13 am
04 Sep 2008
Oh
Say, not really energy related.
But is anyone covering the issue that Bristol bay represents 1/3rd of America's seafood.
And Palin just Oked dumping toxic mining rubble into it.
-David Ahlport
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GreyFlcn Posted 9:31 am
04 Sep 2008
Links
http://www.truthout.org/article/elise-wolf-bush-may-open- ...
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&tab=wn ...
-David Ahlport
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mreinbold Posted 4:26 pm
04 Sep 2008
When will any journalist ask Messiah
What is the nature of your long term association with well known unrepentent domestic terrorist, William Ayers?
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saluki Posted 4:39 pm
04 Sep 2008
Who is lying?
"Lie No. 1 shows chutzpah, I'll give her that much. Just two months ago, Palin said "I beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can't drill our way out of our problem." Perhaps someone told the would-be energy expert that even billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens knows her July claim was absurd."
It's only a lie if you insist on using the word "drilling" literally. If you interpret it to mean that we can produce all of the oil that we need domestically, it's very true.
First there are numerous oil reserves still untapped in Alaska, the Gulf, costal Florida, costal California and even the continental US. It's true that even if we tapped all of these we would be unlikely to have complete energy independence. The possibility of hitting more large oil fields in the deep gulf waters is still possible, and could take us a long way to energy independence, but there is no guarantee. However, we have oil shale reserves in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado that are larger than all of the middle east reserves put together. Efficient extraction methods have been developed over the last 5 years that can give us that shale oil at a price between 15 and 30 dollars a barrel. These methods no longer require large amounts of water and their environmental impact is fairly small. Drilling together with shale oil could give us complete oil independence. The construction of the nuclear reactors that Palin wants to build could further reduce our need for oil. So altogether, Palin is telling the absolute truth and the leftists and the environmentalists are the liars.
"Lie No. 2 is that her "opponents" want to do "nothing at all." Aside from the fact that Obama is willing to compromise on offshore drilling, his energy plan is by far the most comprehensive one ever put forth by a candidate from a major party."
Obama was forced to that position by the public outcry over 4 dollar gas. So he proposed the drilling compromise as a way to retain his chance to get elected. There is still no indication that if elected he would do anything but issue a few token licenses with so many strings attached that the oil companies couldn't use them. Comprehensive energy policies that rely on pie in the sky plans about impractical and uneconomic renewable sources are just so much snake oil to sell to the public. We have already found that bio fuels have the effect of reducing the worlds food supply. Windmills are looking more and more like their low frequency noise is causing medical problems for humans and animals that live within a mile of them. And in order for them to begin to be practical they would have to be distributed over tens of thousands of square miles. Solar is still hugely expensive. So for all practical purposes, Obama would do nothing at all. Oil prices would continue to break the budgets of families and enrich dictators across the world. Again, Palin is correct.
"Lie No. 3 is that "a McCain-Palin administration" would "move forward on solar, wind, geothermal, and other alternative sources.""
That this is a lie is simply a lie on your part. You know very well that you are pretending to read their minds and their intentions. I have no doubt that when renewable sources become technically practical and economically viable that both McCain and Palin would support them. And before that there is no reason to jump to an idiotic solution. Both McCain and Palin support nuclear however, and we could start down that road immediately.
"Lie No. 4 is "The Big Energy Lie," which subsumes all the other lies in her entire remarks on energy. The Big Energy Lie is that either John McCain or the Republicans in Congress actually believe in an "all of the above" energy policy."
Again, this is another lie on your part - along with simple stupidity. It's that circular left wing reasoning that says "they are evil, and that proves they will screw us." I expect clearer thinking from my 6 year old daughter.
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amazingdrx Posted 4:42 pm
04 Sep 2008
Bristol?
Bay, pregnant with toxic rubble, bearing a toxic seafood supply (1/3 of our total seafood)? And Palin ok'ed it?
What does that remind me of? Anybody? I'm drawing a blank here.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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vakibs Posted 7:06 pm
04 Sep 2008
saluki you are wrong
oil reserves and oil extraction are different
The ANWR has about 6 to 15 billion barrels of recoverable oil. US annual oil imports are 1500 million barrels. When you compare the two numbers, you might think ANWR has enough oil to last for several years. But drilling takes time and it cannot produce beyond a capacity of oil. Additional drilling will not show effects before 5 to 8 years. And after 5 years, it can produce a maximum of 80 million barrels per year. That is, it can solve only 1/20th of the US oil import problem. A completely insignficant thing.
shale oil is dirty, slow to extract
and there is not as much of it as you think there is. Drilling for all the possible shale oil will solve at best another 1/20th of the US oil import problem.
solar and wind energy technologies have become mature
That is why there is a lot of private investment in these sectors. Obama says he will pump in a lot of money for R&D in these sectors, so that future technologies will be even better. Left to itself, oil industry is currently spending less than 1% of profits for research in alternative energies. McCain and Palin will give no money for R&D and expect the free market to somehow solve all the problems.
Nuclear energy is sustainable only if you reuse nuclear waste
So far, it has been only Obama and Biden who have clearly mentioned that they support reuse of nuclear waste by 4th generation breeder reactors. They want to pump in significant amount of money for the R&D in breeder reactors, fuel reprocessing, and improving the safety of nuclear reactors. Simply put, they are for the 4th generation nuclear reactors.
McCain and Palin support the 2nd generation reactors which use 0.5% of the nuclear material, and want to store enormous chunks of nuclear waste produced by these reactors in the Yucca mountain. Simply put, McCain and Palin want to burn all the coal, all the U235 and all the oil that we have as quickly as possible. And we will find out very soon (after 50 years) that there is nothing to burn. And they care a zilch about a more important problem which is the environmental disasters of global warming.
Obama and Biden have a comprehensive plan for green, sustainable energy. But the problem is there are several people like you who can digest only half-baked truths and incomplete information as spawned by the Republican propaganda. If you care about future, think, drill for the right kind of information, and drill inside your own head for better ideas.Cheers :)
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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GreyFlcn Posted 10:35 pm
04 Sep 2008
Consider
Well, the market is better at "Engineering".
It's just not that good at foundational scientific research. (i.e. The step before Engineering.)
-David Ahlport
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 12:05 am
05 Sep 2008
Political will, political won't
Political Will, Political Won't
---------------------------------
The accepted wisdom of today's environmental reform movement is founded on two core assumptions. The first is that most of the technical solutions we need to address the world's various crises are available, or at least could be swiftly developed by sufficiently intelligent, hard-working people. The second assumption is that all that's lacking for a successful outcome is the political will to put these technical solutions into effect.
Whether the discussion turns to replacing coal-fired power plants with wind turbines and using electric cars instead of gas-driven SUVs, converting industrial agricultural practices to organic permaculture, or reversing the decline of ocean life though international regulations, it is an article of faith in the reform movement that we know what we need to do and all that's lacking is a sufficiently visionary leader to put more planet-friendly solutions in place.
Both those assumptions ignore significant aspects of the situation - aspects that must be addressed for the envisioned reforms to be successful. This article examines those two assumptions with an eye to uncovering the confounding issues.
The array of problems
As the following laundry list of negative trends clearly illustrates, the scale and diversity of the problems we face are significant.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is approaching 400 parts per million.
We are emitting carbon dioxide 10 times faster than one of the world's largest known volcanic eruptions (the Deccan Traps) that was implicated in the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65 million years ago.
Ice caps and glaciers are disintegrating.
World oil production is on a 4 year plateau despite prices that have quadrupled during that time.
In our oceans the coral reefs are dying, dead zones are expanding, and predatory fish species (the ones we eat) have declined by 90% in the last 50 years.
The biomass of prey fish in the Great Lakes has fallen by 92% since 2000.
The estimated extinction rate for plants and animals is at least 75 species per day.
The Great Pacific Garbage Dump is full of plastic.
Over 75,000 square miles of arable land is lost each year to urbanization and desertification.
A billion people in over 110 countries are seriously affected by desertification.
Nearly a third of the world's cropland has been abandoned since WW II because of damage by intensive agriculture and erosion.
On the American Great Plains, half the topsoil has been lost in the last hundred years.
The Ogallala aquifer in the western United States is being drained up to 100 times faster than it is being refilled.
Indian farmers have drilled over 21 million water wells using oil-well technology. They take 200 billion cubic tonnes of water out of the earth each year for irrigation.
We have eaten more grain than we have grown in 7 of the last 8 years.
World carry-over grain stocks were 130 days of consumption in 1986 - today, it's only 53 days.
The global per capita grain supply has fallen from 340 kg in 1984 to 300 kg today.
The world price of fertilizer is rising exponentially.
The IPCC predicts that climate change will cut African food production in half by 2020.
The cost of food is skyrocketing world-wide. Some countries have responded by banning exports of wheat or rice.
We are in the beginning stages of a global financial crisis that could result in either a deflationary or hyper-inflationary depression lasting for a decade or more.
These sorts of problems are known as wicked problems. That means they are messy, circular, aggressive and interlinked, so that trying to solve one may worsen others. Each problem shows a trend, and all the trends appear to be worsening inexorably. In some cases the trends have been visible for centuries (for example the loss of arable land and desertification), sometimes for decades (as with the loss of aquatic biomass), and some like Peak Oil for a scant few years. In all cases the global trends show no signs of reversing, however much effort has been expended to alter their local or regional trajectories . As their effects become more pronounced, it becomes easier to see their potential to hit our globalized industrial civilization like a planet-sized version of Hurricane Katrina.
As daunting as the individual problems are, the key to understanding the importance of this list is recognizing the degree of the linkages between them. In many cases, trying to solve one problem can inadvertently make others worse. One prominent example is the attempt to address global warming through the use of ethanol as a vehicle fuel. While there may have been some merit to that primary intention, the secondary effects - increasing dead zones in the oceans due to fertilizer runoff, and rising food prices due to the use of food crops as fuel - eliminated the overall benefit of the effort, and even created a net negative outcome.
Similar knock-on effects have occurred in in other areas. The attempt to raise food production through irrigation and the use of petroleum-based fertilizers has depleted water tables and reinforced a style of agriculture based on a finite resource. The attempt to increase global living standards (and thereby reduce population growth) by exporting production facilities to regions with lower wage and environmental standards has backfired by increasing levels of water, air and soil pollution - increases that have been felt well beyond the boundaries of those regions. One dark quip that addresses this sort of backfire is, "Around every silver lining there is a cloud."
When viewed from this perspective it becomes obvious that dealing with the panoply of problems besetting our world involves considerably more than just knocking them down one at a time. If we don't apply holistic, system-level thinking to the converging crisis, our well-meaning efforts stand an excellent chance of making the overall situation worse.
I have concluded that it is a mistake to think of "solving" these problems in any global or final sense. Some of them may be improved regionally, especially if they are not in local conflict with other competing problems. The logical corollary is that there will be other regions where those same problems cannot be solved, due different local circumstances.
The big question, however, concerns those problems that are not contained, that do not respect national or regional boundaries. Global warming and the death of ocean biomes affect us all, and failures to address these problems in any region can make the situation worse for everyone. In these cases, it's obvious that a collective global response is called for - a response that brings together the political, economic, industrial and opinion-making institutions of our world. If these institutions acted together they might have a chance of implementing the deep and wide-ranging changes the situation calls for.
Unfortunately, until now we have seen precious little evidence of such a collective response. For example, we have repeatedly seen climate change conferences break down or issue watered-down statements that fail to address the scale of the accelerating crisis. While individuals, citizens' groups and even some governments are obviously aware of the urgency, collective action repeatedly fails to gain the required global traction.
This state of affairs is no accident. This is not because of some dark and sinister cabal or conspiracy to hold back change in the name of personal profit, though there probably are some instances of that. The real reasons are at once more banal and more worrisome than the Bilderberg watchers assume. In the next section I will examine the structural reasons for this sorry situation.
Politics, the high art of civilization
In order to understand the role that politics plays in our collective failure to address the predicament described above, we need to examine the nature of modern civilization.
Now, when I use the term "modern civilization" I'm not just talking about the growth of industrialism over the last two hundred years. I'm not even talking about the growth of Western culture over the last two thousand years. What we usually think of as "modern civilization" is the development, refinement and culmination of cultural changes that began ten thousand years ago.
In turn, in order to understand modern civilization, we need to look even farther back, at how humans lived before we became "modern and civilized" and what happened to push our species across that threshold.
Human beings have been around in one form or another for two and a half million years, first as homo habilis, then as homo erectus, and finally as homo sapiens. For virtually all of those 2.5 million years, we lived in harmony with our environment. While it may not always have been a comfortable life (how could it have been, without color cable television or cars?), we were nonetheless perfectly adapted to our habitat. This statement is supported by two facts: over most of that period our presence caused little or no damage to the planetary biosphere; and during that time the human population was essentially stable, growing to only 5 million or so in two and a half million years, for a net addition of a scant two people per year.
Recently there have been some remarkable discoveries about the quality of life in the times before modern civilization. We have always known that society back then consisted of hunter-gatherers, organized as tribes. The classical impression was that the lives of these savages were, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". Recent investigations have shown that in fact hunter-gatherer societies enjoyed a remarkable quality of life characterized by low levels of effort, plenty of leisure time, good nutrition, low levels of disease, egalitarianism, very low levels of suicide, homicide and warfare, a high degree of personal autonomy and close-knit communities. In the words of Marshall Sahlins, hunter-gatherers were "the original affluent society." In one of our more damaging semantic restatements we have defined "subsistence" living as bad and "sustainable" living as good - even though in the context of a hunter-gatherer society, they mean exactly the same thing.
So here we have a species that was exquisitely adapted to its environment, living an affluent yet sustainable life, treading lightly on the earth, never outgrowing or overrunning its habitat, at least in terms of the species as a whole. We lived in this harmony with our world for two and a half million years, or 99.6% of the time we have been on the planet. Then suddenly, in the last ten thousand years - a mere 0.4% eye blink of time - our population increased over 1000 times, we decimated the earth's stocks of non-renewable resources, we cut down over 90% of the planet's forests, we fished her oceans to the edge of extinction, and we live in a near-constant state of conflict with each other. In this grievously short time we have brought about all the wicked problems listed above. Pardon my French, but what the hell happened?
In a word, it was agriculture.
About 10,000 years ago humanity developed organized, settled agriculture. Over the next couple of thousand years our predominant social model changed from hunter-gatherers to cultivators. We settled down (as one has to, to raise crops), and started to form larger social structures - villages, towns and cities. Nobody is precisely sure why we developed agriculture, when our previous ways of life had been perfectly satisfactory for millions of years. It may have been precipitated by climate changes, or growing populations in some areas, or it may have been just one of those things. There is no doubt that the threshold of radical human change is clearly demarcated by fields of grain.
Hierarchy
The shift to settled cultivation entrained a host of other changes. Our diet was dramatically impoverished. Levels of chronic disease and malnutrition increased. Levels of social violence escalated. However, the most significant change was the introduction of hierarchies that had not previously existed in our social systems.
Why the development of agriculture resulted in the simultaneous appearance of social hierarchies is still a matter of debate. My opinion is that it happened because the risk to farming communities from crop failures was very high. If the crops failed, these communities contained too many people to survive on local foraging or hunting - both because population densities were so high and because the habitat destruction caused by farming had reduced the amount of local wild food. There was also no way to bring in food from some other unaffected region. Therefore the risk of crop failures had to be mitigated. This mitigation involved many activities. For example, local hunting kept larger crop-eating pests at bay, irrigation helped in times of drought, and shamanic intercession took care of storms and blights.
Each of these activities of hunter, irrigation engineer and shaman was highly specialized in comparison to the more generic farming skills required for planting and harvesting. Such specialization conferred power on the holders of those skills. This was especially true in the case of shamans, whose power could not be entirely learned, but was said to emanate come from a mysterious connection with the supernatural. Their attempt to exercise control over nature gave the shamans the real ability to exercise control over other people however ("Obey me or the gods will frown on us, and the crop failure will be your fault!"), and the first systematic hierarchies were born.
Surplus
The other significant change introduced by organized agriculture was the psychological effect of reliable surpluses of food. While the previous two and a half million years of our existence had been shaped by sustainable subsistence, agriculture introduced the possibility of producing more food than we needed, letting us distribute the required amount to the members of the community and store the excess.
Centralizing the production of food and managing its distribution reinforced the development of hierarchies. Since some of the food was needed by people who had no direct hand in producing it (such as weavers, shamans and granary guards), some means had to be found of giving them equitable access to it. This meant coming up with a way of defining relative values for different kinds of work, and establishing a medium of exchange. In one stroke the concepts of money and wages appeared, resulting in a further transfer of power to those who established the value of work and controlled the money supply (and indirectly the access to food).
As important as that development was, there was yet another fundamental cultural change brought about by the simple existence of a food surplus. For the previous two and a half million years, human wants had been satisfied by the concept of "enough". People worked until they had enough, then they stopped. Now there was almost always "more than enough". The perception that there was more than enough food caused a radical change in how we looked at the world.
Food surpluses and the development of a medium of exchange made trade for non-food goods possible. The continued trade of ongoing food surpluses enabled a continuous growth in the material comfort of peoples' lives. It did not take long for people to become accustomed to this new state of affairs. As memories of the past faded over just a few generations, the new conditions of growing abundance were rapidly accepted as the "natural" order of things.
Modern Civilization
We now have the two critical preconditions for "modern civilization". The first is the belief that a continuous growth in material prosperity is the natural order of the human universe. The second is the belief that a power hierarchy is essential for the smooth functioning of the system.
As always happens with hierarchies, power flows uphill. Along with it go the perquisites of power, the most important being the right to higher levels of material abundance than those lower in the pecking order. In order to ensure that this comfortable situation is maintained, part of the accumulated social power is used to protect the situation. This is done by strongly defending the two fundamental preconditions: the idea that both material growth and the need for hierarchy are natural, essential and unquestionable. Indeed, the status quo is best served if the rest of the community sees this situation as simply part of the matrix of the universe, the only possible way life could work, and that any suggestions to the contrary are the result of either some nefarious agenda or outright insanity.
Guardian Institutions
Over the centuries an interlocking system of guardian institutions has grown up to protect and defend the two key ideas of growth and hierarchy.
Our economic and financial institutions cooperate with business and industry to set the value of work and control the money supply (thereby controlling access to food). In this role it doesn't make any difference whether an economy is capitalist, socialist or communist. The core belief it guards is always the same one.
Our educational institutions teach successive generations how the system works, giving them the tools to integrate into it and manipulate it at the same time as training them to see this as the only possible way the world could work.
Our communications media reinforce this message by enlisting people in the growth paradigm. They do this both though overt messages like advertising and covert messages embedded in the story lines of entertainment.
Our religious institutions (as distinct from the religions they purport to enshrine) are primarily normative social structures. Many incorporate an overt message that one should be content with things as they are. There are often injunctions against questioning authority, as all authority is seen to devolve from the supernatural - just as it did for the shamans of the early agricultural era.
Our legal institutions enforce the norms of hierarchy in ways too numerous to count. These range from the protection of privilege (one law for the rich, one for the poor) to the preferential defense of property rights over human rights.
Our political institutions sit at the tip of the pyramid. Political institutions encode, enshrine and manage the application of social power. Politics is the institution that legitimizes all the others. Because of its unique ability to make laws and its access to the legalized violence that defends those laws, politics is the fullest expression of the power hierarchy of modern civilization.
At the base of the hierarchy, supporting it all, are an ever-diminishing number of farmers who apply ever-increasing amounts of knowledge, technology and petroleum to ensure an ever-expanding supply of food. Because at the core it is their food that makes the whole edifice possible.
So where does that put us in relation to the array of wicked problems we listed at the beginning? Simply put, every one of these problems is the result of unbridled growth. They are the logical results of the continual exercise of the first precondition of modern civilization, the drummer we have been marching to for ten thousand years since the invention of agriculture.
Why politics is the problem, not the solution
In light of this analysis it should be obvious why we are repeatedly failing to address any of these wicked problems. The only permanent "solution" to any of them is the secession of growth. That idea is anathema to our guardian institutions. And as the occupants of the pinnacle of power, our politicians have every reason to derail efforts in that direction, no matter how small.
Politics, regardless of party or ideology, is part of the problem and can never be part of the solution. While it may be easier for the average person to live under the rule of a more humane parcel of rogues, at its heart politics is the primary guardian institution of modern civilization. The role of all politics is to ensure that power is managed, and power is always managed for the benefit of the holders of power. It doesn't matter whether the power managers are Democrats, Republicans, Tories, Grits, Social Democrats, Communists or a military junta. They all fulfill the same role in service of the same beneficiaries.
In order to fulfill that role they unite with the other guardian institutions - the economic, industrial, legal. religious, educational and communications organizations. Together these institutions create, maintain and guard a noetic milieu (a globalized intuitive, non-rational consciousness) in which any values that challenge the two fundamental preconditions to modern civilization are seen as incomprehensible, self-evidently absurd, dangerous or even insane. Since the primary value system these guardians protect is the paradigm of continuous material growth, the most dangerous of all radical ideas are any proposals to limit, halt or reverse that growth.
Conclusion
The influences of our guardian institutions are firmly embedded in our global culture. They have such power and such general support at all levels of society that it is ultimately fruitless to try and remove them from power by either direct or indirect confrontation. The penalties for trying this are severe and ruthlessly applied.
In light of this, is there any hope for a return to a sustainable, egalitarian, interconnected, considerate and just civilization? I strongly believe that there is, but getting there will be neither sure nor easy.
The institutions that stand between us and such a future are trapped by their dependence on the very paradigm they are sworn to protect. They defend the belief that permanent material growth is natural, possible and inevitable. While they defend that belief with laws, guns and television, ultimately their power comes from people who accept that premise. If people stop believing that such growth is possible the institutions' power declines, no matter how many defense mechanisms they engage. If growth falters, the people lose faith and the institutions crack and crumble.
Look back at the list of problems that led off the article. Every single one of them is the result of our growth encountering limits. While we may be able to figure out ways to temporarily circumvent some of these limits, the pattern is now clear. The growth of modern civilization is slowing down, and is even showing evidence of coming to a halt. For a guardian institution that depends on growth for its very survival, this is like a diagnosis of terminal cancer.
What that means is that these institutions will inevitably start losing their monolithic top-down power. This dis-integration will leave "cracks in the sidewalk of civilization". And just as grass grows through cracks in real concrete, small communities and individuals will start to appear through the metaphorical concrete of our industrial civilization.
No one can predict when, where or how the dis-integration will appear. It will take different forms in different places. The response of the guardians will probably be violently draconian in most cases. But there are places where communities have already formed in anticipation of such an opportunity. Like "Gaia's antibodies" they will work to heal the wounds, widen the cracks, and let the sunshine and fresh air revitalize the hidden earth. As the seed stock of the next phase of civilization they will spread their values on the wind.
The next cycle of human experience on this planet will be very different from any that has gone before. We will have fewer resources, but more knowledge. We will have to deal with toxic landscapes, a warming climate, shifting rainfall patterns and the emergence of new diseases. To balance that we will have better communications and longer memories than any civilization that has gone before us. We will not fall back into the stone age, but neither will we motor off happily into the sunset in our electric cars. There will be hardship and misery, but there will also be joy - the joy that comes from looking forward, from participating in our communities, from the love of those around us. Above all, there will be the future.
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Acknowledgments
I'm indebted to the writing of Daniel Quinn and John Zerzan, as well as to Riane Eisler for her book "The Chalice and the Blade". I'd also like to acknowledge the philosophy of Anarcho-Primitivism for its critique of civilization (though perhaps not for its suggested solutions).
September 3, 2008
© Copyright 2008, Paul Chefurka
This article may be reproduced in whole or in part for the purpose of research, education or other fair use, provided the nature and character of the work is maintained and credit is given to the author by the inclusion in the reproduction of his name and/or an electronic link to the article
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jimmieatplanet Posted 1:17 am
06 Sep 2008
Palin's big speech on coal and absent Ethanol
I didn't once here anything in her speech at the RNC about Corn Ethanol. Her party's big leader President George Bush was the Pied Piper for Ethanol Corn, now it's become a big problem when it comes to food prices and engine failures in cars. She had nothing to say because she knows it's a big problem. Also, what is the big idea about clean coal, what is the difference between dirty and clean coal? All I know the coal I got in my stocking one year for Christmas and my parents claimed that Santa Clause only delivers clean coal to all the naughty children and not dirty since it would slow down the Reindeer if they had dirty coal on the sleigh. The point is that coal is dirty no matter what kind of environmental restrictions you put on it transforming it into energy!
Future Generation at work!
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charles77 Posted 7:51 am
16 Sep 2008
Economic and Energy crisis, the real 3 a.m. call f
Lehman Brothers fails today. Falling values for homes continues to affect financial institutions all across the country. The real truth is that the crisis in the economy and the energy crisis are really one and the same. As the price of energy, and everything else has soared, this has a ripple effect throughout the entire economy. Gas cost more, so you have less to spend on other things and all the people that work in the stores that sold you those things now have a lower income. They therefore cannot afford to buy things, like houses, and on and on down the line. Plus the cost of everything that you have to buy goes up. Everything in every store you ever visited got there by truck. Any energy prices are causing the cost of driving a truck to go up. There is an underlying energy cost in virtually every single product that you buy, be it houses, electronics or food. Farmers had to buy gas to plow their fields, plant their seeds, harvest the crops, and transport the crops to market and on and on.
The underlying economic problem in this country for quite some time is the very simple fact that we import more than we export. You can relate how this works to a household budget. Your imports are the amount that you spend your exports are the amount of income you earn and if you continuously spend more than you earn, you're not going to end up doing very well economically. For years, the biggest factor in our trade deficit has been the importation of oil. Decades ago when oil was cheaper, we decided to make a trade-off. That trade off was a willingness to spend money to import oil and produce less domestically, because it was dirty. The oil spills off the Gulf coasts and off the coast of California were an annoying problem for anyone who went to the beach. I am old enough to remember visiting the beach as a youngster, and at the steps of every hotel along the beach there was basically some rags in a bucket of kerosene or some similar solvent to clean your off the bottom of your feet so you wouldn't track oil back into the hotel. The technology has greatly advanced. Offshore wells now have shut off valves below the seafloor. They close automatically in an emergency to prevent large quantities of oil from leaking into the sea. As a side note, 80% of all the oil on the earth that's ever been formed has already leaked to the surface. The amount of oil spilled into the ocean today by man is only a tiny fraction of natural leakage of oil. Oil is lighter than water or rock, and after enough rock builds up over the top of it, it gets squeezed and the pressure goes up. If there are any fissures or cracks in the rock, it rises to the surface. Bacteria consume it and it becomes part of the food chain. After all, crude oil is pure organic material; it only causes problems in high concentrations, like a major oil spill. There have been no major oil spills off the coasts as a result of offshore drilling in many years.
And most importantly, the economics of our decision to import oil instead of producing it domestically has changed. At current world prices, and especially their peak price reached a few months ago, we are spending hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars to import oil. The cost of the Iraq war is also an economic drain but the economic drain of the Iraq war is only about 20 or 30% of the economic drain of importing oil. In 1973, the Arab oil embargo caused a similar economic crisis in our country. Of course the obvious effects were the gas lines and the increased price of filling up your car at the pump. But our entire economy suffered greatly. Inflation soared and jobs were lost. Pretty much the same thing that we're experiencing right now. It was because of the ripple effects of energy prices, which is an underlying cost to produce virtually everything we eat or use in our daily lives. This is somewhat mitigated however, if the energy that we are paying increased prices for comes from inside the US. Because the net wealth stays inside our country, increased income from producers of oil is used to purchase goods, products and services that everyone else depends on for their income. If the money flows outside of the United States it is a net loss of wealth.
Earlier this year, when the price of energy soared, that was the 3 a.m. wake-up call. It should have been easily foreseen by Obama and McCain and everyone else that the ripple effects of virtually doubling of energy prices would have throughout the economy. The fallout was going to be brutal and widespread. McCain reversed his earlier position, and the position of pretty much everyone else, and said it was time to open up the outer continental shelf, but not ANWR, for drilling. He made it part of the way but didn't really propose an all-out plan to increase production. Obama came out against offshore drilling. It's McCain that got a grade of "incomplete" and Obama, a grade of complete failure.
The real solution to both the energy and related economic crisis is to become energy independent. Either Obama or McCain could have said the following statement and passed their 3 a.m. test:
"We are in a national emergency. We must become energy independent. This emergency requires the concerted efforts of our most creative and hard-working people all across the country. We need to greatly increase our investments in alternative energy sources, especially carbon free sources, like nuclear, wind and solar. But we also must realize that the time has come to explore every resource we have available to us. We need to produce every additional alternative energy source we can produce, and we need to extract every last barrel of oil and cubic foot of natural gas on American soil that we can find in an environmentally sound way. And we need to do it very quickly. We are out of time."
The question of course is which candidate will figure this out, and will they figure it out before it's too late.
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