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How Do You Like the Collapse So Far?
Richard Heinberg, The Ecologist (via Global Public Media)
Take relentless population growth. Add decades of expanding per-capita resource consumption. Simmer slowly over rising global temperatures.

What do you get?

Traumatic information: that is, information that wounds us through the very act of obtaining it.

Everyone knows things are going wrong. But if you understand ecology, you know this in a way that others don’t. It’s not just that the current crop of world leaders is idiotic. It’s not just a matter of a few policies having gone awry. We’ve been on a perilous track since the dawn of agriculture, capturing more and more biosphere services for the benefit of just one species. Fossil fuels recently gave our kind an enormous economic and technological boost-but at the same time enabled us to go much further out on an ecological limb. No one knows the long-term carrying capacity of planet Earth for humans, absent cheap fossil fuels, but it’s likely a lot fewer than seven billion. The implication is not just sobering; it’s paralyzing.

So what to do with such traumatic knowledge? An argument can be made for denial. Why ruin people’s day if there’s nothing they can do, if it’s too late to unseal our fate?

But we don’t know that it’s too late.
(5 June 2008)

10 Times the Price and 10 Times Crappier
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon's Book
... Now we all know the statistics - you know, the ones for things like fact that the American military budget is 10 times the budget of the next biggest military power, China, or that we spend much more than all the other countries put together. But somehow seeing the number laid out in Johnson’s analysis led me to a new thought - the 10 Times More = 10 Times Less Rule.

What is this rule? Simply this - if we in America use 10 times as much as another country, or spend 10 times as much on something, not only will we use more and pay more, but we’ll get less. What we get will, inevitably be at least twice as crappy as the much cheaper model, and often as much as 10 times worse.

Is this really a rule? Well, let’s start with the military budget. Look, I’m a lefty and no big fan of our invasions, but my feeling is if we’re going to spend 10 times more in our military budget than our nearest threat we should be a lot better than everyone else - that is, we should be able to crush anyone we want like flies. Again, I’m not saying I’m for this fly crushing thing, just that spending that much should pay off. Instead, we keep discovering the same freakin’ thing - that people who want you out of their country are way more passionate than 20 year olds who just want some bucks for college, and that a 2 million dollar tank can get its ass kicked by a 300 dollar IED.

... Or what about our food? The average bite of American food takes 10 calories of oil to produce a single calorie of American food. The average Indonesian’s dinner comes in at about 1 a calorie of oil (this all assumes that the average Indonesian can get food, but let’s assume they can). And let me clearly reassure you that the average Indonesian’s cheap-ass bowl of laksa - noodles, broth, coconut milk, maybe a piece of fish - taste 100 times better than a Big Mac or a bag of Doritos. That is, we put in all this oil and what comes out - food that tastes like crap, is really awful for us, and can’t even remotely approach the quality of the street food you’d find in almost any third world country on earth.
(5 June 2008)

Did you know? - The Energy Bulletin version
Wag the Dog, YouTube
A more cynical look at effects of globalisation that the Did you know? 2.0 video at shifthappens.wikispaces.com/ did not address.
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It’s been over a year since the original “Did You Know?” video went viral (See www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U). It was originally intended to provoke discussion about the suitability of the US education system for the fast paced globalised world in which we now live.

However, in light of the fact that globalisation is not panning out to be as rosy as the authors of that video seemed to be portraying a couple years ago — what with the credit crunch, recession worries, energy crisis, food crisis, and general reduction in freedom — I thought it would be a good time to create my own version this video, albeit with a decidedly Energy Bulletin twist.
(3 June 2008)