End of More

25 March 2013

Norman Pagett writes:

Bacteria were here for 2 billion years before we were, and will be here long after we’re gone.
It is important to consider what bacterial life forms actually do…as opposed to thinking of them as just ‘bugs’. Their combined support system keeps us alive….Is this for our benefit, or are we just their prairie on which to graze and find sustenance? It is a certainty that if we were not here, bacterial life would continue unchanged. If bacteria vanished, we would all be dead in less than a week. So are we or they the most important in the grand scheme of things?
Also they have the ability to kill off any other animal, and use its carcass for their own purposes, ie to render it down into raw energy for re-use by other life forms—which bacteria then colonise and expand their numbers to continue their own life cycle. Continue reading →

March 25 2013

Norman Pagett writes:

the concept of ”renewables” is bandied out in the general media, and lulls millions into thinking we can go on with our industrialised lifestyle irrespective of oil depletion and expense.
Energy is energy after all
Except that it isn’t
Renewables , almost universally, deliver electricity, and while we can do a lot with electricity, we can’t eat it.
On the other hand we can convert oil into food. That is the critical difference
neither can we rearrange it in some physical sense to form objects that we need to carry our our daily living tasks, which is what we do at the molecular level with hydrocarbons. No other product of our industry allows us to do that Continue reading →

25 March 2013

Norman Pagett writes:

“The demand is for growth and more growth, it can go on forever if only money is circulated endlessly and people spend it endlessly. Osborne has convinced himself, as have all governments, that the problem we face is a cashflow problem; it isn’t, it’s an energyflow problem.
A cynic might suggest printing it on rolls, (dare one mention Quantitative Easing?) and tearing off as much as is needed every time you use the bathroom, because using cashflow economics your money will eventually have that sort of value.
Osborne doesn’t understand that the world economy is in a death spiral because it’s based on energy input (primarily oil) not money circulation. Continue reading →

MAR 20

Paul Gilding

There are signs the climate movement could be on the verge of a remarkable and surprising victory. If we read the current context correctly, and if the movement can adjust its strategy to capture the opportunity presented, it could usher in the fastest and most dramatic economic transformation in history. This would include the removal of the oil, coal and gas industries from the economy in just a few decades and their replacement with new industries and, for the most part, entirely new companies. It would be the greatest transfer of wealth and power between industries and countries the world has ever seen. Continue reading →

21 March 2013

Norman Pagett writes:

Wealth is an abstract concept, the only real measure of it is the amount of work you can buy for what you have to offer in exchange for it. ie barter, …..I will exchange this pig for your labour in fixing my roof. So you get the food energy from the pig which gives you the muscle energy to fix my roof, with some excess to feed your wife and kids at home.
Not having a leaky roof means I can conserve my energy by using less to keep warm and dry and healthier. Continue reading →

19 March 2013

Norman Pagett writes

It is an unfortunate complacency that sees food as something that just appears on supermarket shelves.
Food is just ‘there’.
It always has been, we assume it always will be.
We allowed ourselves to become disassociated from our food sources.
Food in whatever form, is embodied energy, neatly delivered to drive our bodies on a day-to-day basis. That delivery uses 10 calories of energy to put 1 calorie on our plates, so to supply 2500 calories of food requires 25000 calories of external energy from somewhere. It isn’t somehow ‘free’, all energy has to be paid for, one way or another.
And that means oil. (fertilisers, tractors, trucks) Every item of food you pick off a supermarket shelf has a portion of energy embedded within it that was used in the process of putting it into your hand.
When oil was cheap, things worked fine, we all had cheap food. Cheap oil drove our industries so we all had jobs as well Continue reading →

by Tim Morgan on March 18, 2013

If the Cypriot government’s proposal to “tax” – for which read “steal” – the funds of depositors in its banks is remarkable, the novelty lies in the blatant nature of the expropriation rather than in the principle of the state helping itself to private property. Though generally acting in subtler ways, governments have always felt remarkably few inhibitions about such confiscation. Continue reading →

18 March 2013

Norman Pagett writes:

We think of oil and its ever rising price and imminent depletion as a ‘now ‘ problem.
It isn’t.
Back in the 1930s, the USA had more oil than could be consumed, and producers were beginning to see oil as an uneconomic product, even though it came out of the ground ‘free’ the costs of drilling rigs and shipping it around meant that high cost US wells were becoming uneconomic in the face of cheaper oil that could be imported from the fields of the middle east. Continue reading →

15 March 2013
Norman Pagett writes:

globalisation has been under way since we first wandered out of Africa, only the scale of it is a
 recent phenomenon.
Yet the forces that drove our ancestors are still with us. They moved to exploit opportunities, some successful, some not, taking 50000 years to walk around the world, extracting resources, leaving groups in one area then moving on to new lands and creating new racial groups on the various land masses. Continue reading →

15 March 2013

Norman Pagett writes:

We are ignoring the danger of widespread civil unrest,thinking that such disorder is endemic only to the unstable nations of the middle east and elsewhere.

there is the odd certainty that the oncoming crisis can be ”fixed” if only politicians ”do something” and bring about a return to a life of cheap food cheap gas and cheap housing. We are blind to the fact that all of those were dependent on cheap energy
but we still insist all that’s necessary is to elect the right political party to office.
Obama gets elected, and is expected to fix things immediately, the guy does his best, but is as helpless as you and me—and knows it.
 Continue reading →