[Peakoil] James Kunstler yesterday + Michael Raupach next Saturday

[Keith Thomas]

James Kunstler reminds us this week that "The Era of Happy Motoring" is 
over - for ever - in the US (see below). The collapse of easy credit, 
the deteriorating road infrastructure and the morphing of financial 
stress into political resentment and anti-social behaviour mean that 
any ideas of continuing Happy Motoring with compressed air cars, 
electric cars, hydrogen fuel cells (haven't heard much about them 
lately, have we?) is delusional. If you add to all that the equally 
important factors Kunstler does not mention: climate change, peak oil, 
peak lithium and general overshoot, including population, the 
accelerating collapse of antibiotics and the inability of our leaders 
to wake up and face these impending realities, expect to see more signs 
of permanent change. As Reg Morrison wrote in Plague Species: "Watch 
the action without the sound track and this truth becomes obvious." 
Consider the signs, not the words - the words describe a virtual 
reality - the signs describe - reality.

There's a talk in Canberra next Saturday by Michael Raupach addressing 
the biggest knot of problems facing humanity today: human population 
growth (a topic fraught with prejudice and suffering from mainstream 
reluctance to address it rationally and scientifically and with the 
objective seriousness it demands), climate change and our very human 
reluctance to do anything effective about either.

Almost all other talks and events fail to bring these three issues 
together. Bringing them together is often described as being 
"politically incorrect", though that term is inadequate for this 
particular challenge.

The Challenge of Climate Change: the roles of human population, human 
aspiration and the finite capacity of Planet Earth

Speaker: Dr Michael Raupach, (CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, 
Global Carbon Project)

Date and time: Saturday 13 June 2009 at 3:30 pm

Venue: Havelock House, 85 Northbourne Avenue, Turner

Sponsor: Sustainable Population Australia

--------------------------------------------
Keith Thomas
www.evfit.com
--------------------------------------------
Lagging Recognition
  By James Howard Kunstler
http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/06/lagging-recognition.html#more
on June 8, 2009 6:37 AM

Through the tangle of green shoots and sprouting mustard seeds, a 
certain nervous view persists that the arc of events is taking us to 
places unimaginable.  The collapse of General Motors and Chrysler 
signifies more than the collapse of US car manufacturing.  It spells 
the end of the motoring era in America per se and the puerile fantasy 
of personal liberation that allowed it to become such a curse to us.
    
Of course, many Nobel prize-winning economists would argue that it has 
only been a blessing for us, but that only shows how the newspapers are 
committing suicide-by-irrelevance. And if other societies, such as 
China's late-entry industrial start-up, want to adopt a similar 
fantasy, they will only find themselves all the sooner in history's 
garage with a tailpipe in their mouths.
    
Here in the USA, we will mount the most strenuous campaign to keep the 
motoring system going -- in fact, we're already doing it -- but it will 
fail just as surely as two (so far) of the "big three" automakers have 
failed. It will fail because car-making is only one facet of a larger 
network of systems that is coming undone, namely a revolving debt cheap 
energy economy.
     
Americans will never again buy as many new cars as they were able to do 
before 2008 on the terms that were normal until then: installment 
loans.  Our credit system is completely broken.  It choked to death on 
securitized debt engineered by computer magic and business school 
hubris.  That complex of frauds and swindles coincided with the 
background force of peak oil, which meant, among other things, that 
economic growth based on ever-increasing energy resources was over, and 
along with it ever-increasing credit.  What it boils down to now is 
that we can't service our debt at any level, personal, corporate, or 
government -- and that translates into comprehensive societal 
bankruptcy.
     
The efforts of our federal government to work around this now, to cover 
up the "non-performing" debt and to generate the new lending necessary 
to keep the old system going, is a tragic exercise in futility.  I'm 
not saying this to be a "pessimistic" grandstanding doomer 
pain-in-the-ass, but because I would like to see my country make more 
intelligent choices that would permit us to continue being civilized, 
to move into the next phase of our history without a horrible 
self-destructive convulsion.
    
Another consequence of the debt problem is that we won't be able to 
maintain the network of gold-plated highways and lesser roads that was 
as necessary as the cars themselves to make the motoring system work.  
The trouble is you have to keep gold-plating it, year after year. 
Traffic engineers refer to this as "level-of-service."  They've learned 
that if the level-of-service is less than immaculate, the highways 
quickly enter a spiral of disintegration. In fact, the American Society 
of Civil Engineers reported several years ago that the condition of 
many highway bridges and tunnels was at the "D-minus" level, so we had 
already fallen far behind on a highway system that had simply grown too 
large to fix even when we thought we were wealthy enough to keep up. 
Right now, we're pretending that the "stimulus" program will carry us 
over long enough to resume the old method of state-and-federal spending 
based largely on bonding (that is, debt).
    
The political dimension of the collapse of motoring is the least 
discussed part of problem: as fewer and fewer citizens find themselves 
able to buy and run cars, they will feel increasingly aggrieved at the 
system set up to make motoring virtually mandatory for all the chores 
of everyday life, and their resentments will rise against the elite 
that can still manage to enjoy it.  Because our car-dependency is so 
extreme, the reaction of the dis-entitled classes is liable to be 
extreme and probably delusional to an extreme, too. 
    
You can already see it being baked in the cake. Happy Motoring is so 
entangled in our national identity that the loss of it is bound to 
cause a national identity crisis.  In places like the American south, 
the old Dixie states, motoring lifted more than half the population out 
of the dust, and became the basis of the New South economy.  The sons 
and grandsons of starving sharecroppers became Chevy dealers and 
developers of suburban housing tracts, malls, and strip malls.  They 
don't have any nostalgia for the historical reality of hookworm and 
14-hour-days of serf labor in hundred-degree heat. Theirs is a 
nostalgia for the present, for air-conditioned comfort and convenience 
and the groaning all-you-can-eat Shoney's breakfast buffet off the 
freeway ramp.  When it is withdrawn from them by the mandate of events, 
they will be furious.
    
Given the history of the region and the predilections of its dominant 
ethnic group, one might imagine that they will want to take out their 
gall and grievance on the half-African politician who presides over the 
situation. Among the ever-expanding classes dis-entitled from the 
so-called American Dream, the crisis is only marginally different in 
other regions of the nation. Mr. Obama faces a range of awful dilemmas, 
and it is painful to see them go unrecognized and unacknowledged by his 
White House.  It's hard to imagine that the president and his elite 
advisors are blind to these equations, but as the weeks tick by they 
seem stuck in a box of limited perception.
     
We're in a strange hiatus for now.  "Hope" levitates the legitimacy of 
the dollar, the stock markets, and the authority of leadership. In the 
background, implosion continues, debt goes unpaid, banks ignore bad 
loans to keep them off their books, jobs and incomes vanish, cars and 
other things go unsold, and a tragic wishfulness strains to sustain the 
unsustainable. Our expectations are inconsistent with what is happening 
to us.
    
It will be very painful for us to walk away from the car-centered 
life.  Half the population faces the ugly obstacle of being hopelessly 
over-invested in a suburban house and all the life-ways associated with 
it. There will be no easy way out for them, whatever they chose to do 
politically, whatever noise they make, whomever they scapegoat, 
whatever fantasies they cultivate about what the world owes them, or 
who they think they are.
     
Mr. Obama should not waste another week pretending that we can keep 
this old system going.  The public needs to know that we will be making 
our livings differently, inhabiting the landscape differently, and 
spending our days and nights differently -- even while we suffer our 
losses.  The public needs to hear this from more figures than Mr. 
Obama, too, from leaders in the state capitals, and the agencies, and 
business and education and what remains of the clergy.  But somebody 
has to set in motion the chain of recognition, or events will soon do 
it for us.
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