So there was David Suzuki on TV reminding me to turn all the lights out last night, although he was kind enough to tell me it was okay to leave the TV on.
I wasn't going to bother with Earth Hour. I feel the same way about flicking all the lights out for an hour as I do about wearing a poppy. Symbolic gestures like this are so often hypocritical, done for public consumption and little else.
But then I fell for the flip side: if I don't turn off all the lights, people around here will think poorly of me. I'll be branded an Earth-raping planet-killer. They'd be wrong, of course, but they'll all be so sure they're right that being wrong won't really matter.
Peer pressure. It's kind of a shock to see that I haven't completely outgrown the juvenile desire to fit in.
So all the lights went off. The Leafs-Habs game stayed on, per the aforementioned special dispensation from David Suzuki, conveniently beamed to me just prior to 8:00 p.m. As I watched that game, I kept thinking about how my television draws considerably more power than all the light bulbs in my house (all but one of them flourescent) put together. And hey, if I turn the TV off, I'll still be using three-quarters of that power unless I actually unplug it too. People don't realize that: if you go a month without turning anything on in your house, unless it's all unplugged, you'll only reduce your power consumption by 25% or so.
Halfway through Earth Hour, I went outside to survey the street. The houses on either side of me were lit up like Christmas trees, but the rest of the street was quite a bit darker than usual.
I couldn't help but notice all the street lights were still blazing merrily away, though, and mentioned that to my wife upon coming back in.
"Well, they can't sacrifice safety", she said, or something to that effect. Big-city crime is just starting to appear in this city that thinks it's a village. Not for the first time I wished I was born a few generations ago, in a time when they could have turned all the street lights off, if they had wanted to. Cars have headlights, don't they? And back then, for the most part the worst hooliganism you could expect would be the egging of the odd house.
Really, it's startling how many street lights there are. Toronto has more than 160,000. Imagine the savings if they were extinguished or even dimmed.
It'd never happen, not voluntarily, at any rate. Our society has far too much invested in turning night into day. I'm looked at strangely when I say I'm abed at 9:00 most nights; for most people the average bedtime seems to be 11:00, midnight, or even later. But hey, I'm doing my part. Our lights are out much earlier than most people's. Every night.
The Toronto Star, predictably, devoted most of its paper to Earth Hour. I have to admit the pictures were interesting. Toronto's skyline had darkened considerably. There were still many, many lights on in skyscaper offices, which I for one have never understood. It can't be security: anyone willing to scale sixty stories of masonry should just be handed whatever they came for. Surely there aren't that many people working in these offices at eight at night. So why haven't we followed Europe's lead and put motion sensors everywhere? The lights only come on if there's somebody in the room. If there isn't, why the hell would you need light?
That's only one of a whole host of pro-environment measures we can and should take. There are devices called thermocouplers that regulate the temperature of water, so you don't have to waste a gallon or so every time you're waiting for your shower water to warm up. Are they installed in the average bathroom? Of course not.
And just look at how energy-inefficient the standard kitchen is. I'll quote here from Spider Robinson's "The Crazy Years" (ISBN 1-932100-35-0):
The largest two items in the room are a heat-making machine and a heat-losing machine. They sit side by side--and yet...they are not connected in any way. Hmmm.
Let's look closer. The heat-loser is--bafflingly--designed to stand on its end, so that you MUST spill money on the floor every time you open it in access or even inspect its contents. And they put the coldest part ON TOP.
The heat-maker is complementarily designed to spill money on the ceiling. Not just the four elements on top...the central module...has a door which--inexplicably--opens FROM THE TOP, so that you cannot touch the contents during cooking, even momentarily, without wasting ALL the heat. The whole unit is utterly unprogrammable, and lacks even the simplest temperature readouts: everything is done by guess.
All that may sound trivial, but multiplied over pretty much every kitchen in the Western world, you end up with a profligate waste of energy resources. Besides, it all stems from a mindset we seem to have carried with us since the dawn of civilization: energy's infinite, earth is infinite, and all of it's ours for the taking.
Human waste would make ideal fertilizer, but we've found a better use for it: none. We flush it down the crapper, wasting gallons of potable water every time we do so. All the garbage we generate--and even with raised awareness, it's a ridiculous amount--could be incinerated, quite cleanly, yielding energy in the process. But that's horrible for the environment, don't you know. Better to bury it in landfills where it can fester for centuries.
Never mind all that: If we're really serious about greenhouse gas emissions, where are all the nuclear plants?
And please, for the love of Gaia, stop telling me I've got to save the planet. According to no less an authority than George Carlin--and when you finish reading this, you'll recognize him as a consummate authority--"The Planet's Fine". This is excerpted off the album "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics".
We're so self-important. So self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven't learned how to care for one another, we're gonna save the fucking planet?
I'm getting tired of that shit. Tired of that shit. I'm tired of fucking Earth Day, I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world save for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. They don't care about the planet. Not in the abstract they don't. Not in the abstract they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We've been here, what, a hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we've only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we're a threat? That somehow we're gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that's just a-floatin' around the sun?
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles...hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages...And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet...the planet...the planet isn't going anywhere. WE ARE!
We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
You wanna know how the planet's doing? Ask those people at Pompeii, who are frozen into position from volcanic ash, how the planet's doing. You wanna know if the planet's all right, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble, if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. Or how about those people in Kiluaea, Hawaii, who built their homes right next to an active volcano, and then wonder why they have lava in the living room.The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?" Plastic...asshole.
On that note, I'm gone. Would those still in attendance please remember to shut off the lights?
Showing posts with label Civilization Collapse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Civilization Collapse. Show all posts
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Monday, December 17, 2007
Required Reading
...right here, folks.
"A child, however, who had no important job and could only see things as his eyes showed them to him, went up to the carriage.
'The Emperor is naked,' he said."
--Hans Christian Anderson, "The Emperor's New Clothes"
Every Monday morning, Mr. Kunstler delivers an inimitable dose of cheery pessimism. He's outdone himself this morning.
Only one question remains in my mind--perhaps he'll answer it next week: how long can they possibly spin out the denial? If your daily media intake consists of radio, television, and/or a cursory glance at a newspaper, you'd be excused for thinking everything is pretty much hunky-dory. The "newsertainment" services are going full bore with their usual Hollywoodies sticking out, distracting us from the real fun and games going on behind the curtain.
You get the occasional glimpse whenever the business reports come on. The Dow has dropped several thousand points on "credit concerns" over the past six or eight months...of course, that's in dribs and drabs, "corrected" the next day or even later the same day, the net effect being a stock market bobbing as if in a bathtub. Even those in charge seem to be unaware the plug's been pulled.
The late, great Robert Heinlein called it TANSTAAFL--"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch." I'd dare to update the master's saying thusly: FLOGOSL..."Free Lunches Only Go On So Long". You can't deny there have been a great many executives in a great many corporations taking home an obscene amount of pay in perks, bonuses and stock options, with no regard to their companies' actual performance. In Japan, CEOs resign in disgrace if their companies don't meet expectations. Not so here: run your concern into the ground and walk away with a free lunch of millions of dollars.
This can't go on, but I'm honestly curious to what lengths they'll go to preserve the illusion that everything is fine, or at least correctable. I'm also curious at what point people will stop what they're doing and point and stare at the naked civilization around them.
"A child, however, who had no important job and could only see things as his eyes showed them to him, went up to the carriage.
'The Emperor is naked,' he said."
--Hans Christian Anderson, "The Emperor's New Clothes"
Every Monday morning, Mr. Kunstler delivers an inimitable dose of cheery pessimism. He's outdone himself this morning.
Only one question remains in my mind--perhaps he'll answer it next week: how long can they possibly spin out the denial? If your daily media intake consists of radio, television, and/or a cursory glance at a newspaper, you'd be excused for thinking everything is pretty much hunky-dory. The "newsertainment" services are going full bore with their usual Hollywoodies sticking out, distracting us from the real fun and games going on behind the curtain.
You get the occasional glimpse whenever the business reports come on. The Dow has dropped several thousand points on "credit concerns" over the past six or eight months...of course, that's in dribs and drabs, "corrected" the next day or even later the same day, the net effect being a stock market bobbing as if in a bathtub. Even those in charge seem to be unaware the plug's been pulled.
The late, great Robert Heinlein called it TANSTAAFL--"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch." I'd dare to update the master's saying thusly: FLOGOSL..."Free Lunches Only Go On So Long". You can't deny there have been a great many executives in a great many corporations taking home an obscene amount of pay in perks, bonuses and stock options, with no regard to their companies' actual performance. In Japan, CEOs resign in disgrace if their companies don't meet expectations. Not so here: run your concern into the ground and walk away with a free lunch of millions of dollars.
This can't go on, but I'm honestly curious to what lengths they'll go to preserve the illusion that everything is fine, or at least correctable. I'm also curious at what point people will stop what they're doing and point and stare at the naked civilization around them.
Monday, September 03, 2007
Hide in your big house while ours falls down...
I ran across a reference to this over at author Dan Simmons's site. If you don't choose to follow the link, in brief, it's an article from CNN about a new home in West Hartford, CT.
This newly built home is 50,900 square feet (4729 square meters) in size: only slightly smaller than the White House. It has, among many, many other things, a 103-seat movie theater and a 4900 square foot (455 square meter) games room.
I had surfed on over to the Simmons site immediately after perusing the weekly jeremiad over at Jim Kunstler's space. Kunstler is also an author (his books include The Long Emergency, and he's always good for a pull-me-down to start your week. Lately, what with the ongoing financial crisis in the United States, you can almost see him rubbing his hands together in glee. It's pretty clear from even a perfunctory reading of his blog that he hates our so-called "civilization" and hopes it collapses soon.
He may get his wish: between Peak Oil, environmental catastrophes and geopolitical upheaval, life as we know it on this planet may be in jeopardy. He certainly thinks so, anyway, and as the saying goes, you're not paranoid if they're really after you.
I was going to respond on Dan Simmons' forum to the article about the enormous house, but stopped short when I saw what others had written. Many of the respondants castigated the sociologist quoted in the article, Susan Eisenhandler, for saying what I (and I'm sure many others) are thinking:
"Do you actually need to have that amount of space to live a good life? There are homeless people. There are impoverished people. There are serious social concerns, and we're not addressing that."
So what? ran the prevailing wind of thought on that forum. As long as the guy's not a crook (and Enron, Tyco and the like nothwithstanding, most rich people aren't), who cares what he does with his money? The guy probably gives more to charity than you'll ever earn.
And who's this we? Since when are "we" responsible for every sad-sack homeless person?
There was exactly one halfway decent argument for such mega-mansions, advanced by someone calling him (her)self "goldston": that the super-rich, craving the anonymity denied them in the wider world, must create their own worlds within their homes.
Fair enough, I suppose. I don't wipe my ass with hundred dollar bills, nor, frankly, do I aspire to anything like that level of wealth, so I imagine I can't possibly understand the stresses and impulses governing the rich.
Eventually, I decided I couldn't let this go, though. Despite my inner coward yammering away, I responded to the thread.
This is what I wrote over there, while donning an asbestos suit:
This article and the reaction to it really set my teeth on edge.
There is nothing wrong with being rich. There's nothing wrong with being VERY rich. There is everything wrong with being ostentatious, with flaunting your wealth at every turn. And if building such a behemoth of a house isn't a blatant example of flaunting one's wealth, I don't know what is.
Eisenhandler, as far as I'm concerned, made a perfectly valid point which many here were quick to ignore while they bashed her quaint, oh-so-un-American conceit that we are our brothers' keepers. And her point was this: "Do you really need that amount of space to have a good life"?
Would you, any of you, say you have a good life?
Do you, any of you, live in a house even remotely close to that large?
Didn't think so.
The average size of an American (and Canadian, so people don't think I'm Yankee-bashing) home has increased by more than twenty percent in the past ten years. For what? Most of us are moving further and further out into the suburbs, seeking those wide open spaces, insulating ourselves in our own cocoons, disavowing the whole notion of community--let alone the "deep community" discussed (and held as an ideal!) elsewhere on this forum. The Chase house is only an extreme example of this.
Who am I to say what Chase can do with his billions? Nobody. He can do whatever the damn hell he wants. If building such a house makes him happy, hey, great. Maybe he'll be one of those alien rich people who's actually happy with what they have, who doesn't hear a voice whispering "more...more...more" twenty four hours a day.
Maybe. But I doubt it.
After posting that, I got to thinking about what I'd read at Jim Kunstler's site. Now, Kunstler is, as I have noted, strong medicine. He's not the most pessimistic person I've found when it comes to the state of the world and its imminent demise, but his views are apt to stick in most folks' craws. He believes, for example, that
we'd better drop the idea that there is any way whatsoever to preserve our system of happy motoring. The car as a mass market phenomenon, and enabler (dictator, really) of all our daily life arrangements, is finished...[he is] hugely worried (obviously) that even the intelligent-and-educated fraction of our society cannot focus on anything but how to keep all the cars running.
What's so bad about cars, especially if some way can be found to run them on renewable energy? In his view, the car is nothing less than the scourge of civilization. All by itself, it has prompted endless waves of suburban sprawl (destroying what used to be closely-knit downtown communities, not to mention untold amounts of arable land, in the process). It has encouraged drive-thru everything, which in turn is a net contributor to the national epidemic of obesity and all its attendant health issues. It has homogenized the national geography to the point where one place looks pretty much like any other place. And it has an incestuous relationship with the culture of material wealth that is sucking the soul out of the country. A car is the pre-eminent status symbol, even to people like Chase building megamansions: no matter how palatial your estate, it's stationary. A Maserati will go anywhere, allowing people far and near to see what a small penis (excuse me, what a large bank account) you have.
On my bad days, I agree with him on every particular. Then I hop into the car and go someplace, often someplace I probably should have walked or cycled to.
There is a storm coming, on that Kunstler and I agree. Whether that storm arrives in earnest by the end of next year, or decades from now, it will come. There is a vast library of informative books on Peak Oil and its ramifications, and I encourage everyone to read up. While you're at it, it probably wouldn't hurt to learn how to grow your own food. I hate to sound like Chicken Little, but...well, according to the BP (British Petroleum) Statistical Review of World Energy,
"It's no secret anymore that for every nine barrels of oil we consume, we are only discovering one".
If there's one thing that meandering through various books on Peak Oil has convinced me, it's that I have been understating our addiction to oil. I've said before that if your eyes are open, it's a very good bet you're looking at something either made of oil, or made with something made from oil. At the very least you transported it to its present location using oil. What I left unsaid (because really, it's just too frightening to contemplate for long) is that it isn't just the material things. My professional and even personal security rests on the assumption the supermarket shelves will always be full. (Any large city is three days of starvation away from mass civil unrest.)
By no means am I suggesting everyone head for the fallout shelters tonight. But I feel it's very important to keep a close eye on world events, especially when so many potential crises are linked to each other and can manifest in a heartbeat.
The rich, like Arnold Chase, will use their money to insulate themselves from the coming storm. It has always been thus: the elite create the conditions for a depression, then run from them.
If Kunstler's right, there'll be no running from this one.
In the meantime, I really do feel there are better uses for millions of dollars than building another monument to profigacy....
This newly built home is 50,900 square feet (4729 square meters) in size: only slightly smaller than the White House. It has, among many, many other things, a 103-seat movie theater and a 4900 square foot (455 square meter) games room.
I had surfed on over to the Simmons site immediately after perusing the weekly jeremiad over at Jim Kunstler's space. Kunstler is also an author (his books include The Long Emergency, and he's always good for a pull-me-down to start your week. Lately, what with the ongoing financial crisis in the United States, you can almost see him rubbing his hands together in glee. It's pretty clear from even a perfunctory reading of his blog that he hates our so-called "civilization" and hopes it collapses soon.
He may get his wish: between Peak Oil, environmental catastrophes and geopolitical upheaval, life as we know it on this planet may be in jeopardy. He certainly thinks so, anyway, and as the saying goes, you're not paranoid if they're really after you.
I was going to respond on Dan Simmons' forum to the article about the enormous house, but stopped short when I saw what others had written. Many of the respondants castigated the sociologist quoted in the article, Susan Eisenhandler, for saying what I (and I'm sure many others) are thinking:
"Do you actually need to have that amount of space to live a good life? There are homeless people. There are impoverished people. There are serious social concerns, and we're not addressing that."
So what? ran the prevailing wind of thought on that forum. As long as the guy's not a crook (and Enron, Tyco and the like nothwithstanding, most rich people aren't), who cares what he does with his money? The guy probably gives more to charity than you'll ever earn.
And who's this we? Since when are "we" responsible for every sad-sack homeless person?
There was exactly one halfway decent argument for such mega-mansions, advanced by someone calling him (her)self "goldston": that the super-rich, craving the anonymity denied them in the wider world, must create their own worlds within their homes.
Fair enough, I suppose. I don't wipe my ass with hundred dollar bills, nor, frankly, do I aspire to anything like that level of wealth, so I imagine I can't possibly understand the stresses and impulses governing the rich.
Eventually, I decided I couldn't let this go, though. Despite my inner coward yammering away, I responded to the thread.
This is what I wrote over there, while donning an asbestos suit:
This article and the reaction to it really set my teeth on edge.
There is nothing wrong with being rich. There's nothing wrong with being VERY rich. There is everything wrong with being ostentatious, with flaunting your wealth at every turn. And if building such a behemoth of a house isn't a blatant example of flaunting one's wealth, I don't know what is.
Eisenhandler, as far as I'm concerned, made a perfectly valid point which many here were quick to ignore while they bashed her quaint, oh-so-un-American conceit that we are our brothers' keepers. And her point was this: "Do you really need that amount of space to have a good life"?
Would you, any of you, say you have a good life?
Do you, any of you, live in a house even remotely close to that large?
Didn't think so.
The average size of an American (and Canadian, so people don't think I'm Yankee-bashing) home has increased by more than twenty percent in the past ten years. For what? Most of us are moving further and further out into the suburbs, seeking those wide open spaces, insulating ourselves in our own cocoons, disavowing the whole notion of community--let alone the "deep community" discussed (and held as an ideal!) elsewhere on this forum. The Chase house is only an extreme example of this.
Who am I to say what Chase can do with his billions? Nobody. He can do whatever the damn hell he wants. If building such a house makes him happy, hey, great. Maybe he'll be one of those alien rich people who's actually happy with what they have, who doesn't hear a voice whispering "more...more...more" twenty four hours a day.
Maybe. But I doubt it.
After posting that, I got to thinking about what I'd read at Jim Kunstler's site. Now, Kunstler is, as I have noted, strong medicine. He's not the most pessimistic person I've found when it comes to the state of the world and its imminent demise, but his views are apt to stick in most folks' craws. He believes, for example, that
we'd better drop the idea that there is any way whatsoever to preserve our system of happy motoring. The car as a mass market phenomenon, and enabler (dictator, really) of all our daily life arrangements, is finished...[he is] hugely worried (obviously) that even the intelligent-and-educated fraction of our society cannot focus on anything but how to keep all the cars running.
What's so bad about cars, especially if some way can be found to run them on renewable energy? In his view, the car is nothing less than the scourge of civilization. All by itself, it has prompted endless waves of suburban sprawl (destroying what used to be closely-knit downtown communities, not to mention untold amounts of arable land, in the process). It has encouraged drive-thru everything, which in turn is a net contributor to the national epidemic of obesity and all its attendant health issues. It has homogenized the national geography to the point where one place looks pretty much like any other place. And it has an incestuous relationship with the culture of material wealth that is sucking the soul out of the country. A car is the pre-eminent status symbol, even to people like Chase building megamansions: no matter how palatial your estate, it's stationary. A Maserati will go anywhere, allowing people far and near to see what a small penis (excuse me, what a large bank account) you have.
On my bad days, I agree with him on every particular. Then I hop into the car and go someplace, often someplace I probably should have walked or cycled to.
There is a storm coming, on that Kunstler and I agree. Whether that storm arrives in earnest by the end of next year, or decades from now, it will come. There is a vast library of informative books on Peak Oil and its ramifications, and I encourage everyone to read up. While you're at it, it probably wouldn't hurt to learn how to grow your own food. I hate to sound like Chicken Little, but...well, according to the BP (British Petroleum) Statistical Review of World Energy,
"It's no secret anymore that for every nine barrels of oil we consume, we are only discovering one".
If there's one thing that meandering through various books on Peak Oil has convinced me, it's that I have been understating our addiction to oil. I've said before that if your eyes are open, it's a very good bet you're looking at something either made of oil, or made with something made from oil. At the very least you transported it to its present location using oil. What I left unsaid (because really, it's just too frightening to contemplate for long) is that it isn't just the material things. My professional and even personal security rests on the assumption the supermarket shelves will always be full. (Any large city is three days of starvation away from mass civil unrest.)
By no means am I suggesting everyone head for the fallout shelters tonight. But I feel it's very important to keep a close eye on world events, especially when so many potential crises are linked to each other and can manifest in a heartbeat.
The rich, like Arnold Chase, will use their money to insulate themselves from the coming storm. It has always been thus: the elite create the conditions for a depression, then run from them.
If Kunstler's right, there'll be no running from this one.
In the meantime, I really do feel there are better uses for millions of dollars than building another monument to profigacy....
Thursday, May 24, 2007
One Song Glory
Anyone out there ever seen Rent, either the stage musical or the movie adapted from it?
Rent is a modern recasting of La Vie Boheme, concerning a down-and-out group of New Yorkers, living and loving and dying on the dirty streets of Avenue A. It's inspiring and dispiriting in equal measure: an occasionally light and frothy tragedy packed with life lessons.
One of its characters, an AIDS-afflicted former rock star named Roger, is obsessed over the course of the play with writing one final tune encapsulating his short, bittersweet life. He laments, in part
One song (glory)
One song before I go (glory)
One song to leave behind
Find one song, one last refrain (glory)
From the pretty boy front man, who wasted opportunity
One song--he had the world at his feet
The lyrics to that particular tune came to mind today, unbidden, as I considered the state of the world...and shuddered.
There are a lot of people out there in the world pushing doom and gloom of late. Doom and gloom has become a multibillion dollar industry, operating on many fronts. Right now climate change is merely the most visible front for that industry, a warm front, as it were. But there are many other problems facing the human race behind the scenes, both natural and man-made (well, since we're part of Nature, perhaps it's fair to say they're naturally man-made). I've discussed s few of these issues before and don't really want to get into them again here and now.
No, what I find more interesting than constant warnings of imminent collapse is the unrelenting optimism pervading the world lately in the very face of it all.
I've taken to calling the stock market Pamplona. Today notwithstanding, it's deep into the kind of prolonged running of the bulls not seen since, well, 1929. For those of you not up on your history, in October 1929 the stock market came back to earth with a horrific thud that reverberated for decades. Indeed, the market never made it back to pre-Black Thursday levels until 1954!
Now they say hindsight's always 20/20 (depending on whose hind you've sighted)...but in order to reap the benefit of hindsight you have to be willing to look behind you. Our society doesn't often do that. For that matter, it doesn't look ahead much, either. No, most of the time we're too busy looking around at the glorious present. Stuck with our heads up our assets, in other words.
It all brings summer 1929 to mind rather forcibly. Then as now, people were in hoc up to their eyeballs, swimming in a sea of speculation. In 1929, bankers cheerfully lent people up to two thirds the value of the stock they were so eager to acquire. Nowadays, similar tactics are in play when it comes to home mortgages. There are millions of people in the United States holding what are strangely called "sub-prime mortgages" (the rates are well above the prime lending rate), and many of them have faced or are facing foreclosure on their homes as they are unable to meet the terms of their loans--which were freely distributed like so much confetti, often without the most basic due diligence.
Why would a lending institution take such risks? Two reasons I see. One, because if they didn't, somebody else would. There's money galore in this kind of predatory practice, at least in the short term (borrowers often find themselves unable to even touch the principal, forking out payments covering nothing but interest). God forbid some other bank should be reaping all that short-term profit.
And reason two is simple: the housing market's been on a tear for so long that somehow we've convinced ourselves that it'll just keep inflating indefintely. Irving Fisher, arguably the world's first celebrity economist, stated a few days before the crash of '29, "Stock prices have reached what appears to be a permanently high plateau".
An aside: in the wake of that famously disastrous prediction, Fisher suffered from a virulent cancer of the credibility. Ever-observant hindsight suggests his prescription to cure the Great Depression could well have worked--except that it was greeted with howls of derisive laughter. Lesson: one screwup does not a screwup make.
A minority of attentive shareholders saw Black Thursday coming and got the hell out in time. A few fortunes were made in the middle of so many being destroyed. (Believe me, they were careful in subsequent years not to appear too rich.)
It's hard to abandon a bull market, it really is. But history suggests that this one's unsustainable. If you're heavily invested, you might consider how much money is enough.
But a stock market crash is small potatoes to what else might be in store. A thank you to Jim Kunstler for driving a few points home.
I've been paying close attention to the oil industry lately. They're awash in glorious profits, of course--they've got the world at their feet--and it seems like they can pull excuses out of their asses for the ever-increasing price of gasoline. Here's the thing, though: at least a few of their excuses hold, uh, oil.
Refineries have been running at 90 percent capacity or above for months on end, just to meet demand--which is still growing. The huge demand for their product limits the oil companies' ability to slow or shut their plants down for required maintenance...all but ensuring glitches and foulups. The only answer would be to build more refineries--which Big Oil's loath to do, as it costs money better suited to the wallets of stakeholders and oh, yeah, nobody really wants an oil refinery in their backyard anyway.
So demand's going up and price is going up and not to put too fine a point on it, but supply is not going up. Oh, there's lots of oil left, but it's increasingly difficult and expensive to get to--not to mention recovery operations wreak utter hell on the surrounding environment.
Look around you. I defy you to find something, anything, that did not involve oil in its manufacture or subsequent transport to you. Once the supply of oil really begins to get pinched, I suggest most of us lack the imagination to adequately predict the flow of events.
It'll make 1929 look like a minor and temporary correction.
Rent is a modern recasting of La Vie Boheme, concerning a down-and-out group of New Yorkers, living and loving and dying on the dirty streets of Avenue A. It's inspiring and dispiriting in equal measure: an occasionally light and frothy tragedy packed with life lessons.
One of its characters, an AIDS-afflicted former rock star named Roger, is obsessed over the course of the play with writing one final tune encapsulating his short, bittersweet life. He laments, in part
One song (glory)
One song before I go (glory)
One song to leave behind
Find one song, one last refrain (glory)
From the pretty boy front man, who wasted opportunity
One song--he had the world at his feet
The lyrics to that particular tune came to mind today, unbidden, as I considered the state of the world...and shuddered.
There are a lot of people out there in the world pushing doom and gloom of late. Doom and gloom has become a multibillion dollar industry, operating on many fronts. Right now climate change is merely the most visible front for that industry, a warm front, as it were. But there are many other problems facing the human race behind the scenes, both natural and man-made (well, since we're part of Nature, perhaps it's fair to say they're naturally man-made). I've discussed s few of these issues before and don't really want to get into them again here and now.
No, what I find more interesting than constant warnings of imminent collapse is the unrelenting optimism pervading the world lately in the very face of it all.
I've taken to calling the stock market Pamplona. Today notwithstanding, it's deep into the kind of prolonged running of the bulls not seen since, well, 1929. For those of you not up on your history, in October 1929 the stock market came back to earth with a horrific thud that reverberated for decades. Indeed, the market never made it back to pre-Black Thursday levels until 1954!
Now they say hindsight's always 20/20 (depending on whose hind you've sighted)...but in order to reap the benefit of hindsight you have to be willing to look behind you. Our society doesn't often do that. For that matter, it doesn't look ahead much, either. No, most of the time we're too busy looking around at the glorious present. Stuck with our heads up our assets, in other words.
It all brings summer 1929 to mind rather forcibly. Then as now, people were in hoc up to their eyeballs, swimming in a sea of speculation. In 1929, bankers cheerfully lent people up to two thirds the value of the stock they were so eager to acquire. Nowadays, similar tactics are in play when it comes to home mortgages. There are millions of people in the United States holding what are strangely called "sub-prime mortgages" (the rates are well above the prime lending rate), and many of them have faced or are facing foreclosure on their homes as they are unable to meet the terms of their loans--which were freely distributed like so much confetti, often without the most basic due diligence.
Why would a lending institution take such risks? Two reasons I see. One, because if they didn't, somebody else would. There's money galore in this kind of predatory practice, at least in the short term (borrowers often find themselves unable to even touch the principal, forking out payments covering nothing but interest). God forbid some other bank should be reaping all that short-term profit.
And reason two is simple: the housing market's been on a tear for so long that somehow we've convinced ourselves that it'll just keep inflating indefintely. Irving Fisher, arguably the world's first celebrity economist, stated a few days before the crash of '29, "Stock prices have reached what appears to be a permanently high plateau".
An aside: in the wake of that famously disastrous prediction, Fisher suffered from a virulent cancer of the credibility. Ever-observant hindsight suggests his prescription to cure the Great Depression could well have worked--except that it was greeted with howls of derisive laughter. Lesson: one screwup does not a screwup make.
A minority of attentive shareholders saw Black Thursday coming and got the hell out in time. A few fortunes were made in the middle of so many being destroyed. (Believe me, they were careful in subsequent years not to appear too rich.)
It's hard to abandon a bull market, it really is. But history suggests that this one's unsustainable. If you're heavily invested, you might consider how much money is enough.
But a stock market crash is small potatoes to what else might be in store. A thank you to Jim Kunstler for driving a few points home.
I've been paying close attention to the oil industry lately. They're awash in glorious profits, of course--they've got the world at their feet--and it seems like they can pull excuses out of their asses for the ever-increasing price of gasoline. Here's the thing, though: at least a few of their excuses hold, uh, oil.
Refineries have been running at 90 percent capacity or above for months on end, just to meet demand--which is still growing. The huge demand for their product limits the oil companies' ability to slow or shut their plants down for required maintenance...all but ensuring glitches and foulups. The only answer would be to build more refineries--which Big Oil's loath to do, as it costs money better suited to the wallets of stakeholders and oh, yeah, nobody really wants an oil refinery in their backyard anyway.
So demand's going up and price is going up and not to put too fine a point on it, but supply is not going up. Oh, there's lots of oil left, but it's increasingly difficult and expensive to get to--not to mention recovery operations wreak utter hell on the surrounding environment.
Look around you. I defy you to find something, anything, that did not involve oil in its manufacture or subsequent transport to you. Once the supply of oil really begins to get pinched, I suggest most of us lack the imagination to adequately predict the flow of events.
It'll make 1929 look like a minor and temporary correction.
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