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neonvincentOnly two more sets of saved comments from the past to go until I fix my laptop.
My comment on Say Goodbye to Normal
Hi, Hammering Truth! Greetings from the other side of the Great Lakes State! I didn't have anything to say about the stock market collapse, which you mentioned, but I did have a couple of items about Donald Trump, about whom you talked at length. The first is that one can tell a lot about Trump from his supporters, who display their poor writing skills. His fans on Facebook had the most writing mistakes out of all the candidates, which says something about their intelligence and the thoughtfulness of Trump's ideas, if not Trump himself. The rubes may eat up what he's saying, but autotune his speech in Birch Run and set it to a dance beat and he's a hoot--that is, if one can still find him funny. Trump's being more sinister than gauche these days.
My comment on Retrotopia: The View from a Moving Window
You're following up on the idea that you and Kunstler share about the Great Lakes becoming the site of a post-Peak-Oil regional economy, something I described in Great Lakes cities and their roles in the regional economy. As someone who left California for Michigan 26 years ago, I agree. This part of the continent has much better prospects than California, which is becoming evident in the current drought. Speaking of which, I await your "Peak California" entry you've been promising.
I enjoyed the story itself so far. You weren't kidding when you agreed with me a couple of weeks ago that Bernie Sanders wasn't reactionary enough and you were going to propose something even more retrograde. My only disappointment was that there was no trace of the Cedar Point amusement park when your narrator rolled into Sandusky. I suppose a bunch of abandoned roller coasters would not have fit with the bucolic landscape you portrayed. Besides, the industrious people of Lakeland would probably have recycled all the steel and turned the peninsula the park now occupies into a port. Much more practical that way.
My comment on Uh Oh 7: Fictional spy dude to be paired with woman his own age; Redpillers declare end of cinema.
The irony of people who name their movement after the metaphor for choice in the Matrix movies turning up their noses at the actress who played Persephone in those movies would make my eyes roll so hard people could hear them in the next room if it weren't for my experience that MRAs wouldn't understand irony, even when it bites them in the butt. Personally, I'm glad Monica Bellucci is in this film. As I wrote last December, she's someone who should have been in a Bond film already. It's about time she finally appears in one.
As for female choices for Indiana Jones, I wrote about a rumor MTV floated four years ago about Jennifer Lawrence being the next to play the role. Too bad that's not likely to happen. I'd bet on Chris Pratt instead.
My comments on “There Goes Europe”
"They’ll have us at each other’s throats as they remain safely tucked away in their prime realty enclaves."
In the short run, maybe. In the medium run, I think Greer the Archdruid will be right; they'll make the mistake of hiring what Greer calls war bands for their security. That will lead to the long run result that the war bands will turn on them and take over. It will be one of the ways that society will turn capital, which requires resources to support, into waste that not only does not need capital, but becomes salvage for the next round of investment. A rapacious elite makes for good waste in that regard.
In the meantime, I'm going to repeat my suggestion that everyone drink heavily, at least during the presidential campaign, which has 14 more months to go. I have some debate drinking game rules for Carly Fiorina along with sheep themed beers. Also, as a general comment on the quality of the candidates, I recommend everyone drink to Deez Nuts for President. After looking at this motley group seeking to replace President Obama, I can see why a joke candidate is beating most of them!
"You might think we would look at this cheap oil as an opportunity to build a world less dependent on oil, but instead we look on it as an opportunity to purchase gas guzzlers — the American Way will not be negotiated! Freedom!"
That's one of the points I made in lowest Labor Day gas prices in 11 years both good and bad; people are using the current conditions as an excuse to buy less efficient vehicles. Within a couple of years, that will likely prove to be folly, either because the price of gas will shoot up again or because the U.S. will go into recession and a lot of those people will lose their jobs. Either way, they won't be able to afford their cars. Making that argument now won't make much of an impression. The locals are too happy that the recent gas price spike turned out to be a dead cat bounce.
My comment on Retrotopia: A Cab Ride in Toledo
@Unknown Deborah, I was going to mention cursive, but you beat me to it. That written (pun intended), a revival of cursive in the Lakeland Republic would be a fitting response to the current and ongoing collapse of cursive, something my wife took as a sign of the end of civilization. I think we have bigger fish to fry, but she may be on to something. Politicians in several states have passed laws requiring the continue teaching of cursive to combat its decline. None of them, as far as I can tell, are within the boundaries of the Lakeland Republic.
My comment on Collapsitarians and their doomster porn
FM: There are three superstars of the doomer porn blogosphere, each with his own approach. I will refer to them here as the Wizard, the Curmudgeon, and the Provocateur. They are all prolific writers who use their blogs to promote the sale of their numerous books (which I do not disparage, as given the current state of publishing, this seems to be the only way authors, save a chosen few, can hope to rise above the noise floor). That they are able to support themselves on their royalties, presumably supplemented by the occasional honorarium, speaks of their talents.
The Wizard (so called due to his background in mysticism and the occult, though this is not particularly featured in his collapse blog) takes an historical approach. Drawing from Spengler and Toynbee, he emphasizes the cyclical nature of the rise and fall of civilizations, puncturing the “myth of progress” as the fore defeated driver of economic theory since Adam Smith. His forum is strictly moderated for civility and propriety, but his followers are generally high minded. Typically they offer mélanges of social theory, religion and philosophy to answers to the coming crisis, or else describe their preparatory efforts through organic gardening and cottage industries. Political correctness is practiced to a degree.
The Curmudgeon’s background is ‘60s activism. His slant is cultural, aimed at the degradation of the American polity. His pieces are short, but highly entertaining, due to his capacity for hyperbolic vituperative hurled at the governing and elite classes, as well as the proletariat. The so-called “sheeple.” But ultimately he sounds like an exasperated missionary who has spent a lifetime watching his converts backslide. His forum is a looser ship that attracts a rowdy crowd of armchair Black Bloc types who misuse the space to express identity politics, anarchy and class envy en paroles. But the dialectic invariably
The Provocateur is Russian, though he chooses to live in the United States, as our harshest critics often do. Formerly his writings emphasized technical analysis of the unfolding crises, with suggestions on how to prepare. More recently, however, he has become a gadfly of the “West” (meaning primarily the U.S.A.), which he characterizes as a Great Satan, responsible for all ills, and upon which retribution will fall the hardest. This is not to say he lacks a case, but he presents it from a Russian centric point of view. The Motherland is held up in comparison as a paragon of stability and virtue that will weather the storm on national character. (The Soviet Union has failed, but the canard of the worker’s paradise lives on.)
His tone is similar to RT, the state channel that seems less intent upon informing the viewers as on discouraging them. And both seem to assume a lack of awareness of Russian history and current events. The Provocateur’s following tends to vote the party line, like good apparatchiks.
Despite divergent points of view, these writers and their followers agree on one thing: Collapse is certain and the only questions concern depth and timing. There is little to be done to mitigate the descent and reparation such as homesteading, stockpiling or relocation will ultimately be of small value. So we talk about it week upon week, parsing the lugubrious details.
socialbill: "I read Kunstler’s blog (I’m not sure whether is is the wizard, grumpy, or one of the 5 other dwarfs)."
He's the curmudgeon. John Michael Greer is the wizard. Dmitri Orlov is the provocateur. As for the rest of the Seven Dwarfs, I'd look at the rest of the featured subjects of Prophets of Doom with the possible exception of Michael Ruppert; he's dead. He believed his own projections about the world, decided he didn't want to see them come true, and shot himself.
FM: Neon, Thank you for describing the cast of characters! That’s useful to know!
You're welcome. I read enough of their blogs to recognize them by their biographies and angles on collapse. In fact, I still read Kunstler's and Greer's blogs, but found I generally avoid Orlov for exactly the reasons that I no longer pay attention to Russia Today (RT); both have become too obviously a media organ of a hostile power, one that is interested in encouraging trouble-makers, malcontents, and outsiders. Their ideology does not matter, only their discontent. Instead of Orlov, I recommend Ugo Bardi, whose blog is called Resource Crisis, but used to be called Cassandra's Legacy. He's a little more of a technological optimist than the rest of the trio.
As for your opinion of Kunstler, I see it hasn't changed for the better since I summarized it in Fabius Maximus and I discuss Kunstler, a conversation that my readers extended in Discussing Kunstler for the fourth year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News . If anything, it appears to have become a bit dimmer. I don't entirely disagree with you, he's too much of a stuck clock and he ignores or dismisses anything that doesn't fit his world view. He shares that with the rest of the Peak Oilers. Consequently, they viciously attack fracking. If it succeeds, it makes their predictions wrong, at least in the near term. Therefore, it can't succeed in their writings, even if it works in the real world.
FM: “If it {fracking} succeeds, it makes their predictions wrong, at least in the near term.”
that seems quite wrong. First, fracking technology already has succeeded.
"that seems quite wrong."
That's not stopping them.
"First, fracking technology already has succeeded."
Undeniably. The U.S. is producing more oil now than it has for the past 40 years. That's not their line of attack. They are not addressing the technology directly, not even the pollution from the fracking fluid and drilling waste. Instead, both Kunstler and Greer see the economics of fracking as the weak link in the chain. Kunstler has stated his firm opinion that oil above $70/barrel will bankrupt the general economy while oil below $70/barrel will bankrupt the drillers. Consequently, he doesn't see a way to keep cheap enough oil flowing long enough to sustain the U.S. economy the way it is currently structured. As for Greer, he doubts the profitability of fracking at even higher prices than $70/barrel. Instead, he sees the financing of fracking as a big speculative bubble that will cause a chain reaction when it bursts, eventually pulling the rest of the U.S. and world economy down with it.
I think both are wrong. While some drillers are indeed losing their shirts, the more efficient ones are able to make money at $60/barrel, which is why drilling increased in North Dakota when oil hit that level again. Also, the U.S. economy was expanding just fine when oil was at $90/barrel. Kunstler is right that there are oil prices too high and too low to keep things going for more than a year or so, but he's wrong about the band. So far, lower prices for petroleum have resulted in more unemployment in the oil patch and loss of profits and falling stock prices for the oil companies, but they have translated into more activity in the rest of the economy, which I documented in More on low gas prices for Labor Day 2015. The fracking bubble popping is not the same as the real estate bubble bursting, something I told Greer at the time. Instead, I said that 2014-2015 was more like 1998-1999 than 2007-2008. Of course, he dismissed my point.
"Second, most of the peak oilers predicted peaking in 2005 -2010 (many said in 2005-2008 that it had peaked in 2005). It’s now 2015. We have a large glut of oil, so that prices have collapsed from their $150 peak in summer 2008 to roughly $50 now — with more supply coming from Iraq and Iran, plus other nations that begin to use fracking."
They won't back down on that point, as their calculations did not include tight oil. In fact, they'll repeat the claim that annual total conventional oil production did indeed peak in 2005, as they forecast. Because they really doubt the economics of fracking, tar sands, and deep-sea drilling, they see all of that as oil too expensive to keep the economy going, so it doesn't really help the situation and therefore doesn't count. Even someone like Greg Palast, who dismisses Peak Oil as Greer and Kunstler explain it, acknowledges that Peak Oil is the end of cheap oil, not of all oil. That we had six of seven years of expensive oil during which the law of supply and demand raised prices in the face of higher demand and limited supply but failed to deliver more supply to meet the higher demand just encouraged them. "See, we really are running out of oil!" They haven't changed their tune and are still expecting fracking to fail economically, even if it succeeded technologically.
FM: Neon,
“That’s not stopping them.”
Of course not. They’re making good bucks selling doom. So long as there are buyers there will be sellers. That’s true even for outright harmful products such as tobacco products and heroin.
Re: fracking
It’s much simpler than you imply. Commodity prices are governed by boom-bust cycles. Cattle, corn, oil, etc. The large capital & time requirements for petroleum mean that the cycles are decades long, and therefore deep (unlike ag, where overproduction means less is produced next year). The Kunstler analysis you describe is quite bogus.
Oil has been one of the most cyclical industries — locked into boom-bust profits-bankruptcy roller-coaster — since Spindletop blew in 1901. Only government cartels stabilize prices, from the Texas Railroad Commission to OPEC.
That they “doubt the economics” of fracking and oil sands shows that they are either ignorant or conmen. As for their readers…
FM: Mark,
“and it seems I can only influence outcomes in a local, personal way.”
That is the ill effect of reading doomer porn. Their flood of one-sided, often bogus, information tends to create a passive — even defeatest — attitude. In fact you can influence outcomes on a national level. What will wreck America for sure is a large fraction of its citizens adopting that attitude.
America was created and built by citizens who took responsibility for the nation. When people decide all they can do is fiddle with the local school board and recycling contracts, we deservedly become pawns of the 1%.
My comments on The Parties Crawl Off to Die
"You are correct, of course, in the need for some third (and fourth?) party to pick up the scraps after the party."
They already exist, as I pointed out when Pizza Man Cain wanted a third party for conservatives three years ago. There are plenty of parties for conservatives, reactionaries, and other right-wingers, the Republicans, the Libertarians, the Constitution Party, and what's left of the Reform Party. There's even an attempt at reviving the Whigs for moderates. The Libertarians even have ballot access in most states. So do the Greens, which are the sole alternative on the Left to the Democrats in most of the country. One of the reasons they don't catch on is Duverger's Law, which “asserts that plurality rule elections structured within single-member districts tend to favor a two-party system,” according to Wikipedia. It's difficult for a third party to get a word in edgewise in that system, although it can happen where there are strong regional parties like the Bloc Quebecois in Canada or the Scottish National Party in the UK. They effectively become one of the two major parties in their region. On the other hand, a party with support spread over the entire country but coming in second or third nearly everywhere will get nowhere in a representative system, much the the UKIP, which received more votes than the SNP, but has only one member of Parliament. That's why Trump is running as a Republican; he'll have a much better chance staging a hostile takeover of the GOP than of running in his own party.
My comment on Another World is Inevitable
@Peter4045 "I can't think of any American equivalent to Corbyn." Bernie Sanders is considered to be the closest analog to Corbyn on this side of the Atlantic and some in the mainstream political press are making that comparison. As for people comparing Trump to Corbin, I think that's misplaced. Trump reminds me of a more charismatic Nigel Farage, the head of the UKIP. Imagine Farage with Silvio Berlusconi's most salient qualities and that's Trump.
@JMG One of the tendencies you've mentioned when people envision the future is either utopia or doom. Your solution has been to invoke ternary thinking and imagine third options, like you have in your "Journey to Retropia" series. One of the dooms du jour is Burning all fossil fuels could melt Antarctica. I doubt that will actually happen as the point of diminishing economic returns will kick in long before we frack all the shale and excavate all the tar sands. Still, the warmer, higher sea level world of "Star's Reach" appears unavoidable and is something we need to prepare for. As for utopia, I found examples of one of the hackneyed future you described in The case for colonizing space. One of the reasons given is to escape disaster, or what the techno-utopians consider disaster. I know that vision doesn't sell well here, but, who knows, Ugo Bardi's readers will probably enjoy it.
My comment on Fed Cred Dead
According to Greer, in a new Dark Age. That's the bad news. The good news is that he thinks that's a couple of centuries away, so none of us will see it. In the meantime, we have a presidential election, which leads to an answer to our host's rhetorical question: Trump won't be able to fix the situation. In fact, the situation created him, so why would he? As for what we can do, I still recommend we drink heavily to candidates who won't be president, namely a Flaming Volcano for Bobby Jindal and a brown frothy concoction for Rick Santorum. Bottoms up, although one shouldn't extend the metaphor too far in the latter case.
Comment at Michigan Liberal.
I thought he'd last until the Iowa Caucuses, but Vox reported Scott Walker — out of money and out of supporters — quits the race.
Dead candidate walking.
My comment on Retrotopia: Public Utilities, Private Goods.
Happy Autumnal Equinox! The world you're describing reminds me of an offhand comment I made when you discussed Steampunk that "the movement doesn't just express an interest in more elegant technology, but in more elegant people. I detect an interest in a world that hasn't lost its manners or its enthusiasm. Our current culture seems to be losing both." Your response was "so much of modern culture consists of the pursuit of ugliness and rudeness for its own sake; an alternative is worth pursuing." You've created a future that has both more elegant technology and more elegant people and shows it's an alternative to what's happening not only now, but in the Atlantic Republic as a projection of current trends. The Atlantic Republic looks like an ugly future, on might look at trash to energy as something even more worthy of attention than generating electricity from solar energy. That is exactly what my readers appear to believe based on page views. I'm not sure I agree with them.
My comment on Tick Tick Tick
I missed both interviews. Too bad. When I've listened to Putin, he came off as intelligent and articulate, even if ice runs through his veins and his attitudes seem retrograde to American ears. The contrast with Trump, who is exactly the opposite of Putin except for the retrograde attitudes, must have been jarring. And Trump thinks he'll get along with Putin and be able to cut deals with him that are good for us? Dude, don't get high on your own supply.
By the way, we just missed another failed Doomsday, as Sunday's blood moon wasn't be the end of the world, even though John Hagee prophesied that it would be. I'm extremely skeptical of supernatural demises of civilization and humanity after looking at the two failed Raptures of 2011 and the entire 2012 fiasco. We'll do ourselves in through entirely natural means, thank you very much.
As for leaders we're better off avoiding, I'll add Scott Walker to Trump. Fortunately, Walker shot his campaign in the head as soon as he realized it became a zombie. On the way out, he asked for others to join him so the survivor could become strong enough to defeat Trump. Good luck finding someone acceptable to the Koch Brothers that the GOP's rabid base will still vote for. Right now, they're even angrier at their own leadership than they are at the other party.
My comment on Say Goodbye to Normal
Hi, Hammering Truth! Greetings from the other side of the Great Lakes State! I didn't have anything to say about the stock market collapse, which you mentioned, but I did have a couple of items about Donald Trump, about whom you talked at length. The first is that one can tell a lot about Trump from his supporters, who display their poor writing skills. His fans on Facebook had the most writing mistakes out of all the candidates, which says something about their intelligence and the thoughtfulness of Trump's ideas, if not Trump himself. The rubes may eat up what he's saying, but autotune his speech in Birch Run and set it to a dance beat and he's a hoot--that is, if one can still find him funny. Trump's being more sinister than gauche these days.
My comment on Retrotopia: The View from a Moving Window
You're following up on the idea that you and Kunstler share about the Great Lakes becoming the site of a post-Peak-Oil regional economy, something I described in Great Lakes cities and their roles in the regional economy. As someone who left California for Michigan 26 years ago, I agree. This part of the continent has much better prospects than California, which is becoming evident in the current drought. Speaking of which, I await your "Peak California" entry you've been promising.
I enjoyed the story itself so far. You weren't kidding when you agreed with me a couple of weeks ago that Bernie Sanders wasn't reactionary enough and you were going to propose something even more retrograde. My only disappointment was that there was no trace of the Cedar Point amusement park when your narrator rolled into Sandusky. I suppose a bunch of abandoned roller coasters would not have fit with the bucolic landscape you portrayed. Besides, the industrious people of Lakeland would probably have recycled all the steel and turned the peninsula the park now occupies into a port. Much more practical that way.
My comment on Uh Oh 7: Fictional spy dude to be paired with woman his own age; Redpillers declare end of cinema.
The irony of people who name their movement after the metaphor for choice in the Matrix movies turning up their noses at the actress who played Persephone in those movies would make my eyes roll so hard people could hear them in the next room if it weren't for my experience that MRAs wouldn't understand irony, even when it bites them in the butt. Personally, I'm glad Monica Bellucci is in this film. As I wrote last December, she's someone who should have been in a Bond film already. It's about time she finally appears in one.
As for female choices for Indiana Jones, I wrote about a rumor MTV floated four years ago about Jennifer Lawrence being the next to play the role. Too bad that's not likely to happen. I'd bet on Chris Pratt instead.
My comments on “There Goes Europe”
"They’ll have us at each other’s throats as they remain safely tucked away in their prime realty enclaves."
In the short run, maybe. In the medium run, I think Greer the Archdruid will be right; they'll make the mistake of hiring what Greer calls war bands for their security. That will lead to the long run result that the war bands will turn on them and take over. It will be one of the ways that society will turn capital, which requires resources to support, into waste that not only does not need capital, but becomes salvage for the next round of investment. A rapacious elite makes for good waste in that regard.
In the meantime, I'm going to repeat my suggestion that everyone drink heavily, at least during the presidential campaign, which has 14 more months to go. I have some debate drinking game rules for Carly Fiorina along with sheep themed beers. Also, as a general comment on the quality of the candidates, I recommend everyone drink to Deez Nuts for President. After looking at this motley group seeking to replace President Obama, I can see why a joke candidate is beating most of them!
"You might think we would look at this cheap oil as an opportunity to build a world less dependent on oil, but instead we look on it as an opportunity to purchase gas guzzlers — the American Way will not be negotiated! Freedom!"
That's one of the points I made in lowest Labor Day gas prices in 11 years both good and bad; people are using the current conditions as an excuse to buy less efficient vehicles. Within a couple of years, that will likely prove to be folly, either because the price of gas will shoot up again or because the U.S. will go into recession and a lot of those people will lose their jobs. Either way, they won't be able to afford their cars. Making that argument now won't make much of an impression. The locals are too happy that the recent gas price spike turned out to be a dead cat bounce.
My comment on Retrotopia: A Cab Ride in Toledo
@Unknown Deborah, I was going to mention cursive, but you beat me to it. That written (pun intended), a revival of cursive in the Lakeland Republic would be a fitting response to the current and ongoing collapse of cursive, something my wife took as a sign of the end of civilization. I think we have bigger fish to fry, but she may be on to something. Politicians in several states have passed laws requiring the continue teaching of cursive to combat its decline. None of them, as far as I can tell, are within the boundaries of the Lakeland Republic.
My comment on Collapsitarians and their doomster porn
FM: There are three superstars of the doomer porn blogosphere, each with his own approach. I will refer to them here as the Wizard, the Curmudgeon, and the Provocateur. They are all prolific writers who use their blogs to promote the sale of their numerous books (which I do not disparage, as given the current state of publishing, this seems to be the only way authors, save a chosen few, can hope to rise above the noise floor). That they are able to support themselves on their royalties, presumably supplemented by the occasional honorarium, speaks of their talents.
The Wizard (so called due to his background in mysticism and the occult, though this is not particularly featured in his collapse blog) takes an historical approach. Drawing from Spengler and Toynbee, he emphasizes the cyclical nature of the rise and fall of civilizations, puncturing the “myth of progress” as the fore defeated driver of economic theory since Adam Smith. His forum is strictly moderated for civility and propriety, but his followers are generally high minded. Typically they offer mélanges of social theory, religion and philosophy to answers to the coming crisis, or else describe their preparatory efforts through organic gardening and cottage industries. Political correctness is practiced to a degree.
The Curmudgeon’s background is ‘60s activism. His slant is cultural, aimed at the degradation of the American polity. His pieces are short, but highly entertaining, due to his capacity for hyperbolic vituperative hurled at the governing and elite classes, as well as the proletariat. The so-called “sheeple.” But ultimately he sounds like an exasperated missionary who has spent a lifetime watching his converts backslide. His forum is a looser ship that attracts a rowdy crowd of armchair Black Bloc types who misuse the space to express identity politics, anarchy and class envy en paroles. But the dialectic invariably
The Provocateur is Russian, though he chooses to live in the United States, as our harshest critics often do. Formerly his writings emphasized technical analysis of the unfolding crises, with suggestions on how to prepare. More recently, however, he has become a gadfly of the “West” (meaning primarily the U.S.A.), which he characterizes as a Great Satan, responsible for all ills, and upon which retribution will fall the hardest. This is not to say he lacks a case, but he presents it from a Russian centric point of view. The Motherland is held up in comparison as a paragon of stability and virtue that will weather the storm on national character. (The Soviet Union has failed, but the canard of the worker’s paradise lives on.)
His tone is similar to RT, the state channel that seems less intent upon informing the viewers as on discouraging them. And both seem to assume a lack of awareness of Russian history and current events. The Provocateur’s following tends to vote the party line, like good apparatchiks.
Despite divergent points of view, these writers and their followers agree on one thing: Collapse is certain and the only questions concern depth and timing. There is little to be done to mitigate the descent and reparation such as homesteading, stockpiling or relocation will ultimately be of small value. So we talk about it week upon week, parsing the lugubrious details.
socialbill: "I read Kunstler’s blog (I’m not sure whether is is the wizard, grumpy, or one of the 5 other dwarfs)."
He's the curmudgeon. John Michael Greer is the wizard. Dmitri Orlov is the provocateur. As for the rest of the Seven Dwarfs, I'd look at the rest of the featured subjects of Prophets of Doom with the possible exception of Michael Ruppert; he's dead. He believed his own projections about the world, decided he didn't want to see them come true, and shot himself.
FM: Neon, Thank you for describing the cast of characters! That’s useful to know!
You're welcome. I read enough of their blogs to recognize them by their biographies and angles on collapse. In fact, I still read Kunstler's and Greer's blogs, but found I generally avoid Orlov for exactly the reasons that I no longer pay attention to Russia Today (RT); both have become too obviously a media organ of a hostile power, one that is interested in encouraging trouble-makers, malcontents, and outsiders. Their ideology does not matter, only their discontent. Instead of Orlov, I recommend Ugo Bardi, whose blog is called Resource Crisis, but used to be called Cassandra's Legacy. He's a little more of a technological optimist than the rest of the trio.
As for your opinion of Kunstler, I see it hasn't changed for the better since I summarized it in Fabius Maximus and I discuss Kunstler, a conversation that my readers extended in Discussing Kunstler for the fourth year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News . If anything, it appears to have become a bit dimmer. I don't entirely disagree with you, he's too much of a stuck clock and he ignores or dismisses anything that doesn't fit his world view. He shares that with the rest of the Peak Oilers. Consequently, they viciously attack fracking. If it succeeds, it makes their predictions wrong, at least in the near term. Therefore, it can't succeed in their writings, even if it works in the real world.
FM: “If it {fracking} succeeds, it makes their predictions wrong, at least in the near term.”
that seems quite wrong. First, fracking technology already has succeeded.
"that seems quite wrong."
That's not stopping them.
"First, fracking technology already has succeeded."
Undeniably. The U.S. is producing more oil now than it has for the past 40 years. That's not their line of attack. They are not addressing the technology directly, not even the pollution from the fracking fluid and drilling waste. Instead, both Kunstler and Greer see the economics of fracking as the weak link in the chain. Kunstler has stated his firm opinion that oil above $70/barrel will bankrupt the general economy while oil below $70/barrel will bankrupt the drillers. Consequently, he doesn't see a way to keep cheap enough oil flowing long enough to sustain the U.S. economy the way it is currently structured. As for Greer, he doubts the profitability of fracking at even higher prices than $70/barrel. Instead, he sees the financing of fracking as a big speculative bubble that will cause a chain reaction when it bursts, eventually pulling the rest of the U.S. and world economy down with it.
I think both are wrong. While some drillers are indeed losing their shirts, the more efficient ones are able to make money at $60/barrel, which is why drilling increased in North Dakota when oil hit that level again. Also, the U.S. economy was expanding just fine when oil was at $90/barrel. Kunstler is right that there are oil prices too high and too low to keep things going for more than a year or so, but he's wrong about the band. So far, lower prices for petroleum have resulted in more unemployment in the oil patch and loss of profits and falling stock prices for the oil companies, but they have translated into more activity in the rest of the economy, which I documented in More on low gas prices for Labor Day 2015. The fracking bubble popping is not the same as the real estate bubble bursting, something I told Greer at the time. Instead, I said that 2014-2015 was more like 1998-1999 than 2007-2008. Of course, he dismissed my point.
"Second, most of the peak oilers predicted peaking in 2005 -2010 (many said in 2005-2008 that it had peaked in 2005). It’s now 2015. We have a large glut of oil, so that prices have collapsed from their $150 peak in summer 2008 to roughly $50 now — with more supply coming from Iraq and Iran, plus other nations that begin to use fracking."
They won't back down on that point, as their calculations did not include tight oil. In fact, they'll repeat the claim that annual total conventional oil production did indeed peak in 2005, as they forecast. Because they really doubt the economics of fracking, tar sands, and deep-sea drilling, they see all of that as oil too expensive to keep the economy going, so it doesn't really help the situation and therefore doesn't count. Even someone like Greg Palast, who dismisses Peak Oil as Greer and Kunstler explain it, acknowledges that Peak Oil is the end of cheap oil, not of all oil. That we had six of seven years of expensive oil during which the law of supply and demand raised prices in the face of higher demand and limited supply but failed to deliver more supply to meet the higher demand just encouraged them. "See, we really are running out of oil!" They haven't changed their tune and are still expecting fracking to fail economically, even if it succeeded technologically.
FM: Neon,
“That’s not stopping them.”
Of course not. They’re making good bucks selling doom. So long as there are buyers there will be sellers. That’s true even for outright harmful products such as tobacco products and heroin.
Re: fracking
It’s much simpler than you imply. Commodity prices are governed by boom-bust cycles. Cattle, corn, oil, etc. The large capital & time requirements for petroleum mean that the cycles are decades long, and therefore deep (unlike ag, where overproduction means less is produced next year). The Kunstler analysis you describe is quite bogus.
Oil has been one of the most cyclical industries — locked into boom-bust profits-bankruptcy roller-coaster — since Spindletop blew in 1901. Only government cartels stabilize prices, from the Texas Railroad Commission to OPEC.
That they “doubt the economics” of fracking and oil sands shows that they are either ignorant or conmen. As for their readers…
FM: Mark,
“and it seems I can only influence outcomes in a local, personal way.”
That is the ill effect of reading doomer porn. Their flood of one-sided, often bogus, information tends to create a passive — even defeatest — attitude. In fact you can influence outcomes on a national level. What will wreck America for sure is a large fraction of its citizens adopting that attitude.
America was created and built by citizens who took responsibility for the nation. When people decide all they can do is fiddle with the local school board and recycling contracts, we deservedly become pawns of the 1%.
My comments on The Parties Crawl Off to Die
"You are correct, of course, in the need for some third (and fourth?) party to pick up the scraps after the party."
They already exist, as I pointed out when Pizza Man Cain wanted a third party for conservatives three years ago. There are plenty of parties for conservatives, reactionaries, and other right-wingers, the Republicans, the Libertarians, the Constitution Party, and what's left of the Reform Party. There's even an attempt at reviving the Whigs for moderates. The Libertarians even have ballot access in most states. So do the Greens, which are the sole alternative on the Left to the Democrats in most of the country. One of the reasons they don't catch on is Duverger's Law, which “asserts that plurality rule elections structured within single-member districts tend to favor a two-party system,” according to Wikipedia. It's difficult for a third party to get a word in edgewise in that system, although it can happen where there are strong regional parties like the Bloc Quebecois in Canada or the Scottish National Party in the UK. They effectively become one of the two major parties in their region. On the other hand, a party with support spread over the entire country but coming in second or third nearly everywhere will get nowhere in a representative system, much the the UKIP, which received more votes than the SNP, but has only one member of Parliament. That's why Trump is running as a Republican; he'll have a much better chance staging a hostile takeover of the GOP than of running in his own party.
My comment on Another World is Inevitable
@Peter4045 "I can't think of any American equivalent to Corbyn." Bernie Sanders is considered to be the closest analog to Corbyn on this side of the Atlantic and some in the mainstream political press are making that comparison. As for people comparing Trump to Corbin, I think that's misplaced. Trump reminds me of a more charismatic Nigel Farage, the head of the UKIP. Imagine Farage with Silvio Berlusconi's most salient qualities and that's Trump.
@JMG One of the tendencies you've mentioned when people envision the future is either utopia or doom. Your solution has been to invoke ternary thinking and imagine third options, like you have in your "Journey to Retropia" series. One of the dooms du jour is Burning all fossil fuels could melt Antarctica. I doubt that will actually happen as the point of diminishing economic returns will kick in long before we frack all the shale and excavate all the tar sands. Still, the warmer, higher sea level world of "Star's Reach" appears unavoidable and is something we need to prepare for. As for utopia, I found examples of one of the hackneyed future you described in The case for colonizing space. One of the reasons given is to escape disaster, or what the techno-utopians consider disaster. I know that vision doesn't sell well here, but, who knows, Ugo Bardi's readers will probably enjoy it.
My comment on Fed Cred Dead
According to Greer, in a new Dark Age. That's the bad news. The good news is that he thinks that's a couple of centuries away, so none of us will see it. In the meantime, we have a presidential election, which leads to an answer to our host's rhetorical question: Trump won't be able to fix the situation. In fact, the situation created him, so why would he? As for what we can do, I still recommend we drink heavily to candidates who won't be president, namely a Flaming Volcano for Bobby Jindal and a brown frothy concoction for Rick Santorum. Bottoms up, although one shouldn't extend the metaphor too far in the latter case.
Comment at Michigan Liberal.
I thought he'd last until the Iowa Caucuses, but Vox reported Scott Walker — out of money and out of supporters — quits the race.
Dead candidate walking.
My comment on Retrotopia: Public Utilities, Private Goods.
Happy Autumnal Equinox! The world you're describing reminds me of an offhand comment I made when you discussed Steampunk that "the movement doesn't just express an interest in more elegant technology, but in more elegant people. I detect an interest in a world that hasn't lost its manners or its enthusiasm. Our current culture seems to be losing both." Your response was "so much of modern culture consists of the pursuit of ugliness and rudeness for its own sake; an alternative is worth pursuing." You've created a future that has both more elegant technology and more elegant people and shows it's an alternative to what's happening not only now, but in the Atlantic Republic as a projection of current trends. The Atlantic Republic looks like an ugly future, on might look at trash to energy as something even more worthy of attention than generating electricity from solar energy. That is exactly what my readers appear to believe based on page views. I'm not sure I agree with them.
My comment on Tick Tick Tick
I missed both interviews. Too bad. When I've listened to Putin, he came off as intelligent and articulate, even if ice runs through his veins and his attitudes seem retrograde to American ears. The contrast with Trump, who is exactly the opposite of Putin except for the retrograde attitudes, must have been jarring. And Trump thinks he'll get along with Putin and be able to cut deals with him that are good for us? Dude, don't get high on your own supply.
By the way, we just missed another failed Doomsday, as Sunday's blood moon wasn't be the end of the world, even though John Hagee prophesied that it would be. I'm extremely skeptical of supernatural demises of civilization and humanity after looking at the two failed Raptures of 2011 and the entire 2012 fiasco. We'll do ourselves in through entirely natural means, thank you very much.
As for leaders we're better off avoiding, I'll add Scott Walker to Trump. Fortunately, Walker shot his campaign in the head as soon as he realized it became a zombie. On the way out, he asked for others to join him so the survivor could become strong enough to defeat Trump. Good luck finding someone acceptable to the Koch Brothers that the GOP's rabid base will still vote for. Right now, they're even angrier at their own leadership than they are at the other party.
