Our modern lifestyle is crap! I know, because on the whole I have divorced it. I have never been happier than since I quit working (for a wage of course, at the age of 46!) June next year, I will ditch my car, and I can’t wait! Finally organised so I no longer need it.

I grow much of my own food (spent $50 shopping in the last 2 weeks), am totally water and energy self sufficient (apart from the 60L of petrol I still use a fortnight), and I’m debt free. Free of the economy. I need so little money to live on, it’s AMAZING! I’m also so healthy now, I haven’t even so much as had a cold in over two years (I’m 54 now). Once I’ll have ditched the car, my footprint will be sustainable. Totally. And my living standard is the BEST it’s ever been. I do what I want, when I want, well almost. Just give me six more months.

JQ then goes on to say: On the one hand, claims that we are bound to run out of resources, made most vigorously by the Club of Rome in the 1970s, have repeatedly been refuted by experience. Most natural resources have actually become cheaper, but even in cases where prices have risen, such as that of oil, the economic impact has been marginal, relative to the long-run trend of increasing income. The recent increase in the price of oil, for example, might, if sustained, reduce income by about 1 per cent, or around 4 months of economic growth.

Really JQ? We’re not running out of resources? So they fall out of the sky to replenish do they? I don’t know where you’ve heard commodity prices have been falling. They’re all UP! Copper wire has doubled in price just this year (I know, I’m still building my house). Gold, silver, zinc, lead, nickel, all up, all past their peak of production most likely. Supply can no longer meet demand, just as the Club of Rome predicted! Why is it they are ALWAYS mis-quoted? They tried about six different models of growing resource use, and every model predicted a collapse of civilisation within 100 years of their report, 1970. We are now 35% of the way into this period, and they are BANG ON!

But of course, you’re an economist JQ, and you measure everything with dollars! I’m an energy man, and I measure everything in MegaJoules (MJ). So when you say the increase in the price of oil will reduce income by about 1%, I say so what? What if you can’t drive to work because of shortages, how much will your income be reduced then?

By ABARE’s very own figures, unless a shitload of oil is found very very soon, Australia could be totally out of the stuff within SIX YEARS. It will then be all imported, just as everybody else in the world wants a piece of the action.

Worse, as we ‘run out’ and slide down the backside of Hubbert’s Peak, the quality of the oil worsens (thicker, sourer) and the depths at which it needs to be extracted from get deeper and deeper, such that more and more energy has to be wasted to distil it to the standard we have all become accustomed to. The same applies to ALL resources. The easiest and best resources get used first, known as the low hanging fruit syndrome.

Furthermore, food volumes produced on this planet have been in decline for five years straight. Of course, the number of people keeps going up at about 4 Australias per annum. So less food is available, and the price goes up. But she’ll be right JQ, market forces will ensure that we with the most money will always be able to get our lot….. Hang everyone else.

Your precious economy is on the brink of collapse. Right now. Yes, the end is nigh. Inflation and interest rates rises will see lots of people going bankrupt as they can no longer fuel their 4WD’s, and nobody wants to take them off their hands.

Your statements on air quality are also fanciful. All we’ve really done is export the pollution to where all our ‘stuff’ is now made, namely China.

Do yourself a favour JQ, buy a copy of “Limits to Growth”, and read it again (you have read it, right?).

Mike Stasse

I don’t entirely accept its pessimism. I think that there is a chance that its most grim predictions can be avoided if we can begin to change the direction of our society soon. A necessary first step would be to challenge the predominant ideology of neo-liberalism which has been the rationale for handing across so much power from elected governments to unelected corporations in recent decades, the most striking and disastrous example being the privatisation of Telstra.

—

On “The Final Frontier”

Hello Everyone,

The latest issue of Discover Magazine contains a very important article by John Horgan’s titled, “The Final Frontier: Are we nearing the limits of knowledge? A new investigation seeks the truth behind an old scientific taboo”:

http://www.discover.com/issues/oct-06/cover/

Though the article’s subject matter generates a lot of heated argument from scientists, John Horgan is merely stating the obvious: Humans are not omniscient, therefore science is limited.

What John Horgan has noticed is diminishing marginal returns for scientific research. The most dramatic example of science’s diminishing returns, notmentioned in the article, is seen in NASA’s degeneration following the monumental accomplishment of the Apollo project. Technological optimists really did believe that walking on the moon was merely a stepping stone to bigger andbetter things: A lunar base, colonization of Mars and exploration of space. Since Apollo, however, NASA has remained stuck in Earth orbit, and it has done so very poorly with an obsolete and deadly Space Shuttle technology.

There’s a distinct possibility that the Peak Human Space Flight occurred back in the 1970′s.

Why is science experiencing diminishing marginal returns? In the article, David Lee or Cornell University is quoted, “Fundamental discoveries are becoming more and more expensive and more difficult to achieve.” In other words, human scientific efforts have already obtained nearly all of the cheap and easy knowledge, most of the expensive and difficult knowledge, and is now encountering the prohibitively expensive and hence impossible knowledge.

But the most important observation in the article:

“The ‘that’s what they thought then’ response implies that because science advances rapidly over the past century or so, it must continue to do so, possibly forever. This is faulty inductive reasoning. A broader view of history suggests that the modern era of explosive progress is an anomaly — the product of a unique convergence of social, economic, and political factors — that must eventually end. Relativity theory prohibits travel or communication faster thanlight. Quantum mechanics and chaos theory constrain the precision with which we can make predictions. Evolutionary biology reminds us that we are animals, shaped by natural selection not for discovering deep truths of nature but breeding.”

Any thinking person should recognize that limits exist. The general public, however, has been fed a steady diet of science-fiction optimistic misconceptions. People really do believe that humans have an infinite capacity to increase knowledge and technology, and also that technological solutions will always materialize just-in-time (seconds before disaster during a television program’s climax). …

(The full post can be found here on Energy Resources or here. The post concludes …)

…

Was it worth it? That’s what I would like to know. Did we destroy the Earth and our own future for a worth while cause? At this point in which life is so easy (for the prosperous people of the world) it all might seem worth it, but billions are allowed to suffer. In the future, prosperity will come to an end and the formerly prosperous people will suffer like everyone else. At that point,I suppose, people will begin to realize that we humans are fools, and that we have doomed our species to Hell on Earth by destroying so much for so little.

Our gains are transient, our losses will endure. A day will come in which humans will really need to have healthy ecosystems to provide their food supplies, but they will find that previous generations have so destroyed the environment that their ecosystem cannot possibly sustain humans. What will they think of us, then?

They are going to hate us. We will represent a physical manifestation of Satan to them. And for good reason, the price of our technological “heaven” will bepaid in their living Hell.

We have destroyed humankind’s future and driven our species to the brink of extinction. Human footprints on the moon won’t mean much when there are no longer any human footprints on the Earth.

The reason you gave on recycling was patent hogwash.

Had it occurred to you to at least first pay me the courtesy of demonstrating that you had understood the arguments I had put, before dismissing them as ‘patent hogwash’? Are saying that you therefore believe that materials can be recycled at 100% efficiency in every cycle? Unless this can be done, or at least done at an efficiency very close to 100%, then recycling cannot be continued indefinitely. Also I think I recall that you agreed with my point that it is not possible to recycle concrete or ceramics. Do you now instead maintain that those points are hogwash also?

There is plenty of (energy) arriving from the sun day after day to recycle everything, …

Yes, there is energy arriving from the sun, but capturing it, concentrating it, storing and distributing it so that we can use it for tasks such as transport, mining, agriculture, recycling and manufacturing on the massive scale that needs to be done to maintain the humankind’s current requirements, which, as I said before are orders of magnitude greater than what have been humankind’s requirements for nearly all of its history, is something that has yet to be demonstrated in practice and there is no way you can possibly know that it can be done.

The problem is, as I have said ad nauseum, a technical one.

What is the point of this cliche?

Of course it is a technical problem, but one that has to be solved on an unimaginably massive scale. For you to attribute to the ‘invisible hand’ of the free market an ability to cause technology to conjure, out of a world depleted of fossil fuels, sufficient wealth to maintain a world population of 13,000,000,000 presumably on average incomes of well over AU$100,000 PA, makes the cargo cultists of New Guinea look immeasurably more rational and numerate by comparison.

… virtually no economist or scientist of any repute is to worried about an overall lack of energy, …

Garbage!

Stop wasting people’s time with such unfounded sweeping generalisations.

… the problem is whether oil will run out too fast to allow an orderly change. You, and Ender, seem to think that oil will run out faster than we can change over. I disagree, …

And if you are wrong, what then?

I put it to you that most people who care enough to have thought about the issue are very worried that there may not be time. Certainly, if people were to pay any undue attention to the kind of nonsense you are peddling, we would waste what little time we do have left.

there are so many examples of governments promising one thing in an election campaign, only to do exactly the opposite (Hawke and Keating promising “never” to introduce a CGT springs to mind) that when a party campaigning for government does not say exactly what they are going to do and then do it, it almost counts as telling the truth.

As I know I have asked elsewhere, where have I ever made excuses for the behaviour of Hawke and Keating? What possible relevance does this have to anything?

Grow up. Stop expecting the full truth, or even the truth, from the people we elect. …

This time, you have taken things too far.

You rebuke me and insult me for daring to take exception to your own miserable low expectations of our political leadership.

As far as I am concerned you would be doing myself and everyone else a huge favour if you were to cease wasting our time by posting your tedious repetitive message that no matter what the problem is, the answer is always the free market.

I wrote in my previous post:

Unlike you, I have more faith in the intelligence of ordinary people, if they are properly informed, …

Your first response is to tell me how both you and the Government know better than the electors what is good for them than they do themselves:

I believe (“work choices”) is an improvement on what went before. The pity is that they had to do it in a rushed way and get it in quickly so the (expected) good effects would occur before the next election. It is because they are not brave that they had to do it that way.

If you want to argue that “Work Choices” will somehow eventually turn Australia a better society, then you are welcome to do so elsewhere, but the simple incontrovertible fact is that John Howard would not be Prime Minister today if he had told workers that he had planned to take away their protection from unfair dismissal, entitlements to shift penalty rates, overtime penaty rates, public holidays, annual leave and so many other rights we had taken for granted up until now.

When you rationalise in this way one of the most grotesque examples of deceit by government that I know of in a Western democracy, then it seems to me that your objection to government action to confront the threat posed by fossil fuel depletion on the grounds that governments must necessarily always be corrupt and dishonest is extremely disingenuous.

You wrote:

There is only one resource we are likely to run out of over the next century – oil. All the other resources we are currently using are either plentiful or recyclable. Substitutes already exist for all of oil’s functions. Granted, some are higher cost. Some may be lower cost, but all would have a substantially lower cost than the risk of allowing an elected dictatorship.

There are no alternatives to petroleum that are anwhere near as conventient and cheap to produce. Adaption to alternatives will require at least the replacement of hundreds of millions of motor vehicles and items machinery in use today as well as the whole infrastucture which extracts refines and distributes petroleum. Also means to continue the production of plastics, fertiliezers, pesticides and pharmaceuticals have to be found.

There is simply no basis to assume that markets can somehow find a replacement for this resource upon which the whole world’s economy is now dependant. Governments must take action now in order to preserve what little of this resource we have left so that it can be used to make the necessary transtion, instead of being needlessly wasted.

Copper is another resource which is likely to soon reach its peak in production. I have also explained above why we cannot depend upon the recycling of copper and metals and other materials indefinitely.

A democratically elected dictator is a dictator nonetheless – the more power is concentrated in their hands, the more likely corruption is.

And you have shown yourself to be foremost amongst the apologists for that ‘democatically elected dicatator’ who now rules from Canberra.

You’re the one who thinks that governments, once elected, have mandates to do anything they please, even to pass legislation such as the “WorkChoices” legislation without it having even been put to the public.

You defended the circumvention of the normal powers of scrutiny by the Senate so that this Government could rush through its privatisation legislation.

Here are your own words:

As for the government – for some odd reason it is full of politicians. In this case they are trying to do what is right (at least in their opinion), rather that what they believe to be popular. As a result, they are trying to keep their heads down. The reason it is being rushed through is to get it done ASAP so that it will be forgotten by the next election.

… and :

James, politicians are politicians. Do not expect great and brave stands from them, on either side of the House. When they are doing something they know they need to do, or at least believe they need to do, do not expect then to poke their heads above the barricades. They do it as quickly as possible with the minimum possible fuss. This happens regardless of which party is in power.

Unlike you, I have more faith in the intelligence of ordinary people, if they are properly informed, and, unlike you, I don’t think it is acceptable to have political ‘leaders’ who want the public to forget, by the time of the next election, what they are now doing in their name.

I see no reason, why it shold not be possible for a government, which is far more democratic, open and accountable than the current Federal Government, to be able to lead society in making the necessary hard choices that have to be made if we are to avoid the collapse of our society.