Mimesis, Civilization and Collapse

A must-read article from The Archdruid. Fascinating and disturbing.
The Broken Thread of Culture

The Oil Shale Bubble

You really should read this. Connects the dots between the financial impropriety and ecologically disastrous energy policies.

Wall Street culture—not to mention the entire suite of economic expectations that guides the behavior of governments, businesses, and most individuals in today’s America—assumes that the close-to-zero return on investment that’s become standard in the last few years is a temporary anomaly, and that a good investment ought to bring in what used to be considered a good annual return: 4%, 6%, 8%, or more. What only a few thinkers on the fringes have grasped is that such returns are only normal in a growing economy, and we no longer have a growing economy.

Sustained economic growth, of the kind that went on from the beginning of the industrial revolution around 1700 to the peak of conventional oil production around 2005, is a rare anomaly in human history. It became a dominant historical force over the last three centuries because cheap abundant energy from fossil fuels could be brought into the economy at an ever-increasing rate, and it stopped because geological limits to fossil fuel extraction put further increases in energy consumption permanently out of reach. Now that fossil fuels are neither cheap nor abundant, and the quest for new energy sources vast and concentrated enough to replace them has repeatedly drawn a blank, we face several centuries of sustained economic contraction—which means that what until recently counted as the groundrules of economics have just been turned on their head.

You will not find many people on Wall Street capable of grasping this. The burden of an outdated but emotionally compelling economic orthodoxy, to say nothing of a corporate and class culture that accords economic growth the sort of unquestioned aura of goodness other cultures assign to their gods, make the end of growth and the coming of permanent economic decline unthinkable to the financial industry, or for that matter to the millions of people in the industrial world who rely on investments to pay their bills. There’s a strong temptation to assume that those 8% per annum returns must still be out there, and when something shows up that appears to embody that hope, plenty of people are willing to rush into it and leave the hard questions for later. Equally, of course, the gap thus opened between expectations and reality quickly becomes a happy hunting ground for scoundrels of every stripe.

The Logic Of The Future

John Robb :


One way to accomplish [trading energy for computation] quickly (before the old system completely fails) is to decentralize production with networked resilient communities.  At that point, the global economy would be 98% information and all basic needs would be provided for locally.  Information only economies built on a base of self-sufficiency can be as different from capitalism as capitalism is from feudalism.

What Peak Oil Looks Like

Arch Druid :

Thus our civilization has entered what John Kenneth Galbraith called “the twilight of illusion,” the point at which the end of a historical process would be clearly visible if everybody wasn’t so busy finding reasons to look somewhere else. A decade ago, those few of us who were paying attention to peak oil were pointing out that if the peak of global conventional petroleum production arrived before any meaningful steps were taken, the price of oil would rise to previously unimagined heights, crippling the global economy and pushing political systems across the industrial world into a rising spiral of dysfunction and internal conflict. With most grades of oil above $100 a barrel, economies around the world mired in a paper “recovery” worse than most recessions, and the United States and European Union both frozen in political stalemates between regional and cultural blocs with radically irreconcilable agendas, that prophecy has turned out to be pretty much square on the money, but you won’t hear many people mention that these days. 

The point that has to be grasped just now, it seems to me, is that this is what peak oil looks like. Get past the fantasies of sudden collapse on the one hand, and the fantasies of limitless progress on the other, and what you get is what we’re getting—a long ragged slope of rising energy prices, economic contraction, and political failure, punctuated with a crisis here, a local or regional catastrophe there, a war somewhere else—all against a backdrop of disintegrating infrastructure, declining living standards, decreasing access to health care and similar services, and the like, which of course has been happening here in the United States for some years already.

The Physics of Collapse

Excellent systems model of how complex societies collapse.

Hat-tip : Jean-Luc Delatre

Re-inflate And Accumulate

Dmitry Orlov :

if the real physical economy is collapsing, unemployment keeps going up, more and more people are excluded from the economy all the time, then that gives you the ability to print money because the two things balance out. So you have this deflationary trend, of the economy collapsing, of property values and various asset prices falling, and at the same time you can re-inflate the economy by printing money. And that money ends up in the pockets of very few people who then use it to buy up physical goods. So that’s really the trend, we see this concentration of paper capital.

Email today from my electricity supplier :

Dear Mr P Jones

You may have heard that we're changing our prices. With reduced quantities of North Sea gas we now buy more energy on the global wholesale market. World events are pushing up these prices and distribution and network charges are also increasing. This is affecting all energy suppliers in the UK. Unfortunately, as a result, we have to increase our prices.

We're sorry to say this increase will affect you and your new prices will come into effect on 1st October 2011. You'll shortly receive a letter with details about the changes to your tariff so you don't need to contact us...

Meanwhile Vinay calls the collapse as "soon".

Kunstler :

For those of you interested in the reality side of things, here's the scoop: The price of oil is going to go way up, and way down, and way up again, and way down again until everyone is too broke to ask for any, and companies are too ruined to go get it for them, and governments are too broken to interfere in the process.

Today's fascinating miscellaneous links :

• Amazing account of the bias against maneuver aircraft and in favour of strategic bombers. Seems that people in air-forces just can't see the evidence in front of them.


• I support(!!!) Boris Johnson's gardening initiative.


• How will Peak Oil affect dentistry? - read and shudder.

It's now too late to stop global warming.

Now it's just a question of where to try to hold the line. (In the middle of all kinds of unknown unknown feedback loops.)

Meanwhile even the IEA admit peak oil is coming within 15 years. (Watch the video)

Fascinating and worthwhile read. How prepared is the US for a collapse?

Not sure how reliable this is, but could we be hitting Peak Oil in 2007?