Banff Transition

There must be some coal left at Bankhead. Maybe not enough to run a railroad, but enough to keep a small town warm. We need a Banff School of Mines.

 

The Archdruid Report: “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,”

 

Casaubon’s Books: “So what do you eat when you are poor? Well, your friends are going to be beans, lentils and grains. They are nutritious, tasty, simple, accessible and store well. If there’s any way you can come up with the money, buy them in big bags in bulk – a minimum of 10 lbs, 50 is better – much cheaper per pound.”

 

Global Guerrillas: “Within human social and economic systems, pathogenic behavior is spreading.  This is particularly true among powerful, successful, and wealthy people (finance, economics, politics, etc.) in the developed world.  What specifically do I mean by pathogenic?  An ever greater number of these people are adopting behaviors that are actively hostile to the human systems we rely upon.  They actually think it is OK to put these systems at risk for personal benefit.”

 

Club Orlov: “[I]t behooves us… to begin a serious examination of the… cultural adjustments necessary… before unmanageable crises arise….”

Hubbert said, "The third curve (on the left) is simply the mathematical curve for exponential growth.  No physical quantity can follow this curve for more than a brief period of time.  However, a sum of money, being of a nonphysical nature and growing according to the rules of compound interest at a fixed interest rate, can follow that curve indefinitely…Our principle constraints are cultural… we have evolved a culture so heavily dependent upon the continuance of exponential growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of non-growth…."

 

‘Russian Times: “[W]hat we are seeing is the structural crisis of the system. The structural crisis goes on for a long time. It really started more or less in the 1970s and will go on for another 20, 30, 40 years. … [Capitalism] has worked in some ways marvelously well for 500 years. It has been an extremely successful system in what it was trying to do but it has undone itself as all systems do.”

 

Casaubon’s Book “5. “Ordinary Human Poverty- The Great Depression, Plus Climate Change, Plus Peak Oil…” Seriously, this is my bet. And I don’t think I’m in the minority here – I think what we’re facing is a massive, probably worldwide economic depression, a very extended one from which the magic of fossil fuels will not lift us back into growth. I think we are facing using a lot less energy without the money and resources to make that easy on anyone. We are likely to see large scale unemployment, lots of poverty, people unable to meet very basic needs, and a very mixed level of response – some places doing better than others at helping people, some places essentially on their own, some places becoming very violent or unsafe, some places doing better – rather like the world we live in now, where some places are violent and some aren’t, hunger is increasing, access to basic necessities going down….”

 

The Archdruid Report: “It’s unquestionably inefficient in terms of your personal time and resources to dig up your back yard and turn it into a garden; that inefficiency, however, means that if anything happens to the hypercomplex system that provides you with your food – a process that reaches beyond growers, shippers and stores to the worlds of high finance, petroleum production, resource politics, and much more – you still get to eat”

 

NYTimes: “Around Löwenplatz, one of Zurich’s busiest squares, cars are now banned on many blocks. Where permitted, their speed is limited to a snail’s pace so that crosswalks and crossing signs can be removed entirely, giving people on foot the right to cross anywhere they like at any time.”

As he stood watching a few cars inch through a mass of bicycles and pedestrians, the city’s chief traffic planner, Andy Fellmann, smiled. “Driving is a stop-and-go experience,” he said. “That’s what we like! Our goal is to reconquer public space for pedestrians, not to make it easy for drivers.”