End of More

7 March 2013
Norman Pagett writes:

there is a very clear cut and simple reason why our current debt-economy will collapse
when we started deep mining of coal with the use of steam engines (to pump the water out) it was found that the colossal amount of energy extracted supplied enough ‘excess’ to finance the next coalmine. (or any other enterprise linked to mining and engineering)
Therefore money could always be borrowed (invested) on the certainty of even more energy being produced from every new mine (and of course oilwells later on)
so energy became the collateral for our debts.
while numerous securities may be offered for ‘investment’ ultimateky that security has its basis in the production and conversion of energy to manufacture to goods necessary to sustain our commercial infrastructure.
as long as energy was cheap, this worked fine. Unfortunately energy isnt cheap any more, and the ponzi scheme we created around it is collapsing

4 March 2013

Norman Pagett writes:

We watch in horror as the violence erupts across the Middle East, ethnic groups wracked by violence towards one another, in lands where tolerance had been normal for centuries.
So why now?
Syria is the current murderous focus, but why?
Few care to point out that 800,000 herders, farmers and their dependent families have lost their livelihoods in the countryside during last decade through extreme drought, and as a result have been forced to migrate to already-overcrowded cities. Syria’s drought is set to worsen over the next 20 years as climate change takes effect, making increased conflict inevitable as food supplies get tighter, and civil war makes it harder to get hold of. Continue reading →

Posted Feb 27, 2013

by Richard Heinberg courtesy of the Post Carbon Institute

The math is not difficult. The US has an annual GDP of $14 trillion, and the nation’s current $1 trillion in annual deficit spending is seven percent of its GDP. Growth in GDP has recently been running at about two percent annually (though in the last quarter of 2012 the economy actually contracted slightly). The relationship between deficit spending and GDP growth may not be exactly 1:1 but it’s probably quite close. The conclusion is therefore inescapable: doing away with a substantial portion of deficit spending would reduce GDP by a roughly corresponding amount, almost certainly causing the economy to tip over into recession. Continue reading →

26 February 2013

By Bob Berwyn Summit Voice
FRISCO — Some of the West’s biggest reservoirs could dry up completely as the region gets warmer and drier in coming decades, and major increases in storage capacity probably won’t help address regional water shortages, according to a new study authored by researchers with Colorado State University, Princeton and the U.S. Forest Service.
In the Colorado River Basin, “Lakes Powell and Mead are projected to drop to zero and only occasionally thereafter add rather small amounts of storage before emptying again,” the scientists concluded, adding that smaller upstream reservoirs might still be useful. Continue reading →

25 February 2013

Norman Pagett writes:

in a groundbreaking report one of Canada’s top energy analysts has exposed the delusion of the ‘new fuels’, tarsands bitumen, shale gas and shale.
David Hughes, of the Post Carbon Institute makes a powerful argument that the US “is highly unlikely to achieve energy independence unless energy consumption declines substantially.”
While the number of operating wells has increased by 90% since 1990, the average productivity of those wells has declined by 38%. To keep up with this rate of decline is going to demand a drill rate of 8600 every year costing nearly $50 billion. Continue reading →

21 february 2013

Norman Pagett writes:

Most people see pentagon civilians as earning wages, just like everybody else. It’s not like that. Government employees are paid by the surplus created by the rest of us. That’s been happening since prehistory. The first farmers needed soldiers to protect their crops. Those soldiers could only be paid by the excess food-energy those farmers produced. This is the rigid basis for all ‘economies’.
Now fast forward 10000 years.
We are in exactly the same situation now, only worse. We’ve run out of ‘excess energy’, but we built up a non-food producing class of government employees when we had lots of cheap energy to spare. World governments could afford to employ millions of paper-pushers instead of plow pushers because we were producing enough energy (from fossil fuel) to do that. Since prehistory, only the scale has changed. Continue reading →

20 February 2013

Norman Pagett writes:

A pension is a debt, and like all debts, it can only be paid from future prosperity.
Unfortunately there isn’t any, that’s why pensions are unaffordable. We’re not making enough profits to pay them, nor will we be able to do so. Current pensions are supported on the momentum of past prosperity, there will be no future wealth to carry them on.
But why not? We’ve always made profit in the past, why can’t it go on?
Because we created that past on cheap energy, coal oil and gas. Without it we couldn’t have built our cities, roads, railways, factories, hospitals or boosted our population to 7 billion. We thought all that was GDP, but it wasn’t, it was fuelburning, and our employment, in fundamental terms, was feeding the machines. Our lives depended on industry running faster to produce more. Continue reading →

By Colin Todhunter

10 February, 2013
Countercurrents.org

In his January editorial piece in Kisan Ki Awaaz (National Magazine of the Farmer’s Voice), Krishan Bir Chaudhary claims there is a conscious attempt by officialdom in India to remove farmers from farming. If his claim were to be valid, it would come as little surprise when we consider that, due to the restructuring of agriculture in favour of Western agribusiness, over 250,000 farmers have committed suicide in India since 1997. If there is such as ploy, the strategy would appear to be going according to plan. And that’s not even factoring in the unconstitutional land grabs that have booted farmers off their lands to make way for nuclear power plants, various ‘developments’ or ‘special economic zones’. Continue reading →

17 February 2013

Norman Pagett writes:

the economy is not about wages or money
the economy is an energy equation, or more accurately a dynamic of surplus energy
In a primitive context, I must either grow or kill my energy source, and use that to rear my offspring and support their mother and myself.
My existence is in a state or equilibrium, and no ‘economy’ can exist because I need to consume most of the energy I produce.
But if I collaborate with 99 other people who can support 10 to do other ‘work’ then those individuals have to be paid. They are paid with the ‘excess energy’ of the 99 people who can ‘afford’ their support.. Wages are paid to a ‘specialist’ for his skill (blacksmith, soldier, priest or whatever) Continue reading →

16 February 2013
Damien Perrotin

Client States

As you probably know, France has been at war for two weeks now. This does not change everything to our daily life and I don’t plan to raid the nearby supermarket for supply (well, maybe for cat food but that’s a vital necessity) and I am more likely to be stricken by a stray meteor than blown up by an islamist bomb. The bulk of the political class supports the war and while the anti-imperialist crowd can still be heard, it is far less loud and numerous than usually and while there are a few questions to ask our president about the procedure – he didn’t notify the National Assembly, for instance – the principle of the intervention is contested only by marginals and outsiders.

What is most interesting in this affair, however, is not the war, or whether it is just or not it is justified, but the fate of client states in the time of decline. Continue reading →