Banff Transition

The Road Down from Empire: “Here in the Appalachians, at least, there’s something about the month of January that encourages sober thoughts.  Maybe it’s the weather, which is pretty reliably gray and cold; maybe it’s the arrival of the bills from the holiday season just ended, or the awkward way that those bills usually arrive about the same time that the annual crop of New Year’s resolutions start landing in the recycle bin.  Pick your reason, but one way or another it seems like a good time to circle back and finish up the theme I’ve been developing here for most of a year now, the decline and fall of America’s global empire and the difficult task of rebuilding something worthwhile in its wake.”

Clusterfuck Nation: “Everything that makes the town tick is in danger of unraveling. The ski industry can’t possibly survive the eventual effects of peak oil, and the collapse of commercial aviation will put an end to the conveyer belt of tourists.” James Kunstler speaking of Aspen, Colorado.

Post-Carbon Institute: “As the world economy crashes against debt and resource limits, more and more countries are responding by attempting to salvage what are actually their most expendable features—corrupt, insolvent banks and bloated militaries—while leaving the majority of their people to languish in “austerity.” The result, predictably, is a global uprising. This current set of conditions and responses will lead, sooner or later, to social as well as economic upheaval—and a collapse of the support infrastructure on which billions depend for their very survival. …

“[I]t will increasingly be up to households and communities to provide the basics for themselves while reducing their dependence upon, and vulnerability to, centralized systems of financial and governmental power. This is a strategy that will require sustained effort and one that will in many cases be discouraged and even criminalized by national authorities.The decentralization of food, finance, education, and other basic societal support systems has been advocated for decades by theorists on the far left and far right of the political spectrum.”

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…."

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”

The Archdruid Report: “The role of ecosystem limits in sustainability is tolerably well understood. Less often grasped, because of its unwelcome implications, is the second category of limits that has to be addressed, which might best be called complexity limits. … This is why, for example, I’ve suggested here that the internet is not going to make it very far into the post-abundance future. To keep the internet up and running takes a vastly complex technological structure, ranging from gigawatts of electricity from centralized power plants, through silicon chip factories and their supporting industries and supply chains, to universities that can train people in the wide range of exotic specialties that keep the net functioning.”

Winter Watch: “Every 10 percent increase in global food prices equates to a 100 percent increase in anti-government protests, according to a recent report from the International Monetary Fund. Looking at recent increases in foodstuff commodities — up a total of 45 percent since the arrival of QE2 last year — it’s no wonder there are revolutions, civil wars and riots breaking out across the globe. According to the IMF, a  45-percent increase in foodstuffs should quadruple the levels of unrest, and that seems to be precisely what’s happening”.