I saw this essay by Fast Eddy buried in the comment section of a post by Gail Tverberg.
It shed some light on what I perceive to be the insane foreign policy of the US.
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2015/08/10/how-economic-growth-fails/
I saw this essay by Fast Eddy buried in the comment section of a post by Gail Tverberg.
It shed some light on what I perceive to be the insane foreign policy of the US.
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2015/08/10/how-economic-growth-fails/
Mac10 in fine form.
“The death star of denial isn’t global climate change, it’s Globalization itself – the invisible outer-most layer that controls all of the other risk factors. It’s unquestioned.
We need not expect Billy Bob next door to give a flying fuck about mass extinction, droughts, wildfires, or double tornadoes, when Walmart is their biggest threat to survival. We are witnessing in real time, the end of Commie Capitalism. Socialism for Billunaires. The system by which the impoverished middle class bail out the ultra-wealthy who laid them off, all while being told how lazy they are for claiming food stamps. Were it not for the free aka. “Socialized” bailout in 2008 which encouraged even greater asinine speculation, this shit show would have ended a long time ago. We wouldn’t have had to listen to entitled boy-men lecturing us endlessly on foodstamp “Socialism”, if they had actually believed in true capitalism in the first place – the status quo would have already self-imploded under the weight of its own greed and “rational self-indulgence”.
Tonight the People’s Bank of China debased the Yuan by a record amount in their latest desperately ironic bid to save Commie Capitalism from itself. Unfortunately, they broke the cardinal rule of Globalization which is that the developed nations debase while the developing nations strengthen, the only way the carry trades work.
Now, the race for the bottom just went into a steep cliff dive. Because all Emerging Markets will have to now follow suit to maintain competitiveness. The global carry trades, lifeblood of Globalization, just went deeper in the hole.
Debt accumulation has been jeopardized.
Death star countdown sequence has commenced. History’s largest game of musical chairs is about to end with all of the remaining chairs taken away at the same time.
And then everyone will be on the same fucking page. Finally.”
Another brilliant article by Gail Tverberg who has one of the best understandings and ability to explain the economy and its imminent collapse.
If you only have time for one article a week, Gail’s should be at the top of your list.
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.
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
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
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).
This is the best article I’ve read on China and is a must read for anyone seeking to understand the difficulty of us voluntarily doing anything to make climate change less bad.
This article seeks to explain why China’s environmental crisis is so horrific, so much worse than “normal” capitalism most everywhere else, and why the government is incapable of suppressing pollution even from its own industries. I begin with an overview of the current state of China’s environment: its polluted air, waters, farmland and the proximate causes, including overproduction, overdevelopment, profligate resource consumption, uncontrolled dumping and venting of pollutants. I then discuss the political-economic drivers and enablers of this destruction, the dynamics and contradictions of China’s hybrid economy, noting how market reforms have compounded the irrationalities of the old bureaucratic collectivist system with the irrationalities of capitalism resulting in a diabolically ruinous “miracle” economy. I conclude with a précis of the emergency steps the country will have to take to take to brake the drive to socio-ecological collapse, with dire implications for us all.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31478-china-s-communist-capitalist-ecological-apocalypse
There’s lots of talk about renewable energy replacing fossil energy and reducing climate change.
What does the data show?
CO2 released per year continues to increase exponentially. We have not even leveled off, let alone begun to decline.
The portion of our energy that does not come from burning carbon is unchanged in 25 years.
http://euanmearns.com/global-energy-trends-bp-statistical-review-2015/
Oil companies were not profitable in 2013 when oil was $100 per barrel. The investment required to maintain existing production levels has been increasing at about 17% per year because the oil that’s left is harder to get. Oil companies today need $130 per barrel to be profitable but the price is $60 because consumers cannot afford $130 oil.
We can expect trouble.
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2015/06/09/why-eia-iea-and-bp-oil-forecasts-are-too-high/