Author: Rob Mielcarski

My Election Platform

Here is my election platform:

“We are in severe overshoot. Vote for me and I promise to make the world a less bad place for your children. We will implement policies to ensure needs are met but wants are not. There will be forced conservation and a ban on the export of non-renewable resources, higher interest rates to curtail debt and growth, a one child policy, cessation of immigration, and a capital tax on the rich to narrow the wealth gap.”

How many Canadians would vote for me? Probably one, me.

If people understood what is going on and overrode their inherited denial filter, how many would vote for me?  Probably most.

By Mac10: Locus of Denial: Why I Don’t Watch CNN

The mysterious Mac10 at Ponzi World often has insightful and important things to say.

He also tends to be refreshingly brief.

I thought this post was particularly good and it has a denial theme for bonus points.

Locus of Denial: Why I Don’t Watch CNN

By Eric Holthaus: The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here

A nice update on climate change by Rolling Stone magazine.

“Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state’s Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide.”

The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here

By Eric Holthaus: Earth’s Most Famous Climate Scientist Issues Bombshell Sea Level Warning: More than 10 feet in 50 years

I observe that each new forecast is worse than the previous best guess.

Just what you’d expect from a non-linear system with self-reinforcing feedback loops that is past its tipping point.

Earth’s Most Famous Climate Scientist Issues Bombshell Sea Level Warning

By Nicole Foss: The Death of Democracy in a Byzantine Labyrinth

It’s good to see Nicole Foss writing again. This is one of the better articles on Greece I have read.

“Crisis may be postponed, but at great cost. It cannot be prevented. Once a credit bubble has been blown, it will eventually implode, as all structures grounded in ponzi dynamics do. When it does, as we have noted before, politics will get much uglier no matter which part of the political spectrum comes to power.”

I agree with every word that Nicole wrote, and yet there is a layer of truth missing.

Everyone is broke. Everyone is living beyond their means. Everyone’s means (energy, climate, soil,  etc.) are in decline. More debt is not a solution for anyone and will only make things worse. The only peaceful path forward is voluntary conservation and population reduction.

Put another way, everyone is drawing down their capital. Those with the most capital (Germany) can extend and pretend a little longer than those with the least capital (Greece).

The Death of Democracy in a Byzantine Labyrinth

All Roads Lead to the Same Destination

Most experts think Greece’s debt is unpayable and must be written down, yet the ECB has to date been unwilling to do so. Why?

I have been arguing from intuition that they can’t. This article provides some data to explain the impossible situation Europe faces.

The Greek Bluff In All Its Glory

Tim Garrett has shown that there’s no way out from catastrophic climate change. I think it’s also becoming clear that we have no way out from a peak oil debt driven economic collapse.

So what’s going to cause us the most pain first?

My bet is on economic collapse. But the climate is putting up a pretty good fight and may pull ahead. Or maybe the climate will trigger an economic collapse.

All roads lead to the same destination.

50/50 Democracy

I see polls are showing a 50/50 split between yes and no in Greece.

This is consistent with a theory I have to explain why so many of our democratic choices end up split close to 50/50 regardless of the issue.

The only issue most people care about is money and most elections and referendums boil down to how to share a finite pie.

The 50% of people with more wealth than the other 50% do not want to give any up.

The 50% of people with less wealth than the other 50% want to take some wealth from the other group.

Therefore most elections end up being very close to 50/50.

Post Peak Oil Choice: Inflation or Deflation?

Greece is what a post peak oil world looks like. Low paying jobs. Smaller and then no pensions. Less and then no health care. Fewer and then no public services. Everyone angry and blaming something except the real issue: falling per capita net energy.

Imagine medieval Europe. That’s our destination, at best.

Krugman and others are saying that forcing Greece to increase taxes and reduce expenditures will make things worse. Instead they think Greece should be able to print money to pay their debt on the assumption that a devalued currency will increase exports and thus solve the problem with economic growth.

This may have been a valid strategy prior to peak oil, but not now. Growth is no longer possible. This means the Greek standard of living will continue to fall regardless of government or central bank policies.

Given this reality, a country can choose to reduce incomes and wealth with deflation or inflation. I prefer deflation, but reasonable people might prefer inflation.

That’s the essence of the Greek referendum: Do you want to get poorer with deflation or inflation?

Peak Oil and Debt

Greeks, on the one hand, want to maintain their standard of living and need debt to do so. Banks, on the other hand, want to grow their business and are motivated to loan more. When physical constraints to growth exist, like peak oil, this is a deadly mix. If you get in over your head on debt then both parties will experience a lot of pain.

The bigger picture is that most countries in the world are living well beyond their means, and equally important, their means are in decline due to peak oil. The main mechanism we use to live beyond our means is to grow debt faster than income. This works for a while but only delays, and then makes MUCH worse, the inevitable day of reckoning.

I think it is time we had an adult conversation and took action to acknowledge we are living well beyond our means and that our means are in decline.

We should shrink the public sector to a level we can afford without debt.  If you value public services then vote to keep them with higher taxes. Debt only works when growth is possible. We must stop using debt in a post peak oil world.

Debt is analogous to CO2. We could (or could have) collapsed the economy and held at less than 2 degrees, which would have been painful, but we chose not to and are now on a path to a much worse fate.

Greeks and Referendums

Great, let’s have a referendum to decide if we should pay our debts.

Why don’t we all do that? If I vote no, do I get to stop paying my credit card?

The developed countries are filled with people who think they are entitled to a comfortable life. News flash! We’re on the down side of the Hubbert curve.

Each and every year from now on our standard of living will drop.

To the Greeks: why don’t you have a referendum on whether we should discover more oil?