Thursday 9 December 2010

Bottom Massage

“… 200 years of abundant energy have allowed us to build an extremely complex civilization based on dozens of interrelated systems without which we can no longer live - at least not in the style to which we have become accustomed … Those who believe that ten years from now we will be able to get along with much reduced government have little appreciation of how modern civilization works or how bad things are going to get as fossil fuel energy fades from our lives …”

Read more at “peak oil crisis: the future of government” by Tom Whipple.

And more on 'bottom bouncing' at Shadowstats, where Walter J. "John" Williams notes that "despite minor changes to the system, government [economic] reporting has deteriorated sharply in the last decade or so." Can this be purely accidental? Surely not. After all, covering the hideous truth in a cheering blanket of confusion always helps, leaving only a few suspicious buggers to write dry headlines like  "November Jobs Increase Was Statistically Indistinguishable from Decline."

2 comments:

  1. Peak Oil is a very dangerous idea. If is Malthusian Doctrine at its worst. Which says population outruns the ability of nature to supply it.

    This is so easy to disprove its amazing that so many intelligent people have fallen into the trap and keep doing so. For example

    World energy demand = 15 tW
    World energy supply (Sun) = 150,000 tW

    Supply exceeds demand by 10,000 times. There is plenty of energy to go around, forever. Or for today with a population of 65 Trillion people.

    The apparent shortage of energy is due to the powerful elite holding out of use the most fertile resources. Big Fossil. The sun. Abolish that corruption and we could proceed.

    Please do not say we cannot access that energy. History shows that technology not stifled by corruption would ramp up within a few years.

    Denial of these simple observed facts is part of the problem, not the solution.

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  2. Thanks for your comments, Robin.

    I'm amused that you say "Peak Oil is a very dangerous idea. If is Malthusian Doctrine at its worst. Which says population outruns the ability of nature to supply it."

    Whether an idea is "dangerous" or not is irrelevant to its truth, so I can't see why you even brought that up.

    You may not like it, but the simple biological fact is that populations increase exponentially if unchecked by disease, starvation and predation. It was from reading about this fundamental understanding of Malthus' that Charles Darwin gained his brilliant insight into evolution.

    But maybe you are a Creationist as well?

    And lastly, there is a world of difference between Sun energy falling into space and being able to harvest it. Plants are most successful at this, but stupidly modern humans seem suicidally intent on exterminating our beautiful, diverse and useful biosphere and turning the Earth into a wasteland of human flesh.

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