Debt Rattle May 18 2014: How To Redress The Planet’s Energy Balance
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Detrit 12th Street bascule bridge, Chicago 1900 If we can agree for a moment that there is a very real possibility that we will have both much less ca
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle May 18 2014: How To Redress The Planet’s Energy Balance]I like the saying, “Conditions must be favorable.” Before man even thinks about limiting growth, seriously curtailing usage of available energy, conditions must be favorable. IOW, he’s going to need a knock on the side of the head before that happens, a significant wake-up call, enormous pain to get his head out of the sand. I don’t think he moves until this happens, whatever it is (a huge surge in prices, another nuclear meltdown, whatever). He won’t see until he HAS TO, until he is forced to.
Newton’s First Law of Motion: Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.
And this force must be far greater than the force we are exerting to keep things the same. It must “overwhelm from without and undermine from within.” This is necessary for long-term change, in order to have an epiphany. If the force is not great enough, we revert back.
Only when he is dropped to his knees will conditions be favorable for a change of mind.
Ken Rogoff: “It would be a very good investment of German taxpayers’ money to write down debt in the periphery countries. There are a lot of ways to do it. You can be very opaque about it. The taxpayers don’t ever need to know it happened.”
I like the “don’t ever need to know it happened” bit. Yeah, more opacity and nontransparency ought to do it (sarc)! Who raises a mind like that? I guess his parents must have had 10 feet of dirt under their carpet.
Mark Carney, ex-Goldman boy, ex-Governor of the Bank of Canada, now Governor of the Bank of England, soon to be Governor of the Bank of the Universe. He’s doing the same thing in England as he did in Canada: holding rates down artificially, laying the candy out on the table, and then chastising the children when they run for it. Yeah, he goes through all manner of monetary contortions, yet refuses to do the one thing that would stop the party in its tracks – raise interest rates.
He won’t do it because he’s afraid the party would end. He’s putting the warning out there just to cover his ass, but he’s been a major factor in keeping the party going. A destructive little parasite who has merely jumped from the Maple tree to the Royal Oak.
I don’t have 200 slaves. I don’t have 20 slave. I don’t have their equivalent energy.
I don’t know …. what is energy?Wiki says, “In physics, energy is a property of objects, transferable among them via fundamental interactions, which can be converted in form but not created or destroyed. The joule is the SI unit of energy, based on the amount transferred to an object by the mechanical work of moving it 1 metre against a force of 1 newton.[1]”
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“Work and heat are two categories of processes or mechanisms that can transfer a given amount of energy. “
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“There are many forms of energy, but all these types must meet certain conditions such as being convertible to other kinds of energy, obeying conservation of energy, and causing a proportional change in mass in objects that possess it. Common energy forms include the kinetic energy of a moving object, the radiant energy carried by light and other electromagnetic radiation, the potential energy stored by virtue of the position of an object in a force field such as a gravitational, electric or magnetic field, and the thermal energy comprising the microscopic kinetic and potential energies of the disordered motions of the particles making up matter. Some specific forms of potential energy include elastic energy due to the stretching or deformation of solid objects and chemical energy such as is released when a fuel burns. Any object that has mass when stationary, such as a piece of ordinary matter, is said to have rest mass, or an equivalent amount of energy whose form is called rest energy, though this isn’t immediately apparent in everyday phenomena described by classical physics.”
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“Lifting against gravity performs work on the object and stores gravitational potential energy; if it falls, gravity does work on the object which transforms the potential energy to the kinetic energy associated with its speed.”
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“More broadly, living organisms require available energy to stay alive; humans get such energy from food along with the oxygen needed to metabolize it. Civilization requires a supply of energy to function; energy resources such as fossil fuels are a vital topic in economics and politics. Earth’s climate and ecosystem are driven by the radiant energy Earth receives from the sun (as well as the geothermal energy contained within the earth), and are sensitive to changes in the amount received.”
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Forms of energy
Type of energy DescriptionKinetic (≥0), that of the motion of a body
Potential A category comprising many forms in this list
Mechanical data3=the sum of (usually macroscopic) kinetic and potential energies
Mechanical wave (≥0), a form of mechanical energy propagated by a material’s oscillations
Chemical that contained in molecules
Electric that from electric fields
Magnetic that from magnetic fields
Radiant (≥0), that of electromagnetic radiation including light
Nuclear that of binding nucleons to form the atomic nucleus
Ionization that of binding an electron to its atom or molecule
Elastic that of deformation of a material (or its container) exhibiting a restorative force
Gravitational that from gravitational fields
Intrinsic, the rest energy (≥0) that equivalent to an object’s rest mass
Thermal A microscopic, disordered equivalent of mechanical energy
Heat an amount of thermal energy being transferred (in a given process) in the direction of decreasing temperature
Mechanical work an amount of energy being transferred in a given process due to displacement in the direction of an applied force
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I still don’t know … what is energy?jal
Energy provides the ability to “do things”.
Power provides the ability to “do things fast”.No energy – no life.
Too little power – no jet planesIf anybody has the time, i would highly recommend watch this speech by an islamic scholar in Louisville. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a reader of the Automatic Earth!
(His speech begins at 15:40)
Humankind will cease to exist? Really? There’s practically no scenario–including a total nuclear exchange–that is likely to cause such a thing. So what’s the delight in dancing on something so unlikely it approaches impossible? Doesn’t it undermine confidence in your argument and/or judgment? Or is it just a continuation of family dynamic seen in Wal-Mart: that whoever shouts loudest must be right?
Reality: many, many people may die in the adjustment, and probably will. The number? Anyone’s guess but Revelation and some other cultural prophesies say 30-50%, which seems a good estimate from my experience—and if you delight in disaster even the worst wars in history have never accomplished that. Even the Mt. Tambura global catastrophe of 1815 didn’t really set humankind back at all. That’s an estimate that’s Billions and Billions (as Sagan would say) away from “everyone.” And since the globe is economically crushed with the elderly and medicine is carrying many chronic sick or drug-addled, the feeling of the effective numbers will seem far less. Not nice to say, but when the society loses the crushing weight of the non-working or non-productive it improves, which will be an offset. Also as in WWII, when you have the main inventions and infrastructure in place but fewer workers, the bounce back is surprising.
Estimating astonishing 10-sigma outliers doesn’t gain credibility. It shows you’ve got nothing to say, and no facts to say it with.
There’s a LOT to do and our situation is very grave. That makes the necessity of focusing on productive actions all the more important, and the estimate of scenarios of what is statistically likely all the more valuable.
Let’s stick to those actions so that we can save who can be saved instead of, as we saw in “Return of the King”, the recommendation is, “Go now and die in what way seems best to you.”
Really? Is that what this site is about?
@ Diablo,
Lots of species, dominant and non-dominant, have gone extinct.
It’s somewhere between possible and inevitable.
Calling timing is the tough part, huh?
We all suffer and die.
We are now facing a paradigm shift, and it is worth shaking ourselves pretty deeply, uprooting our presumptions, as we wander into this thing.
No amount of preparation is enough.
No redoubt is safe.
We are in this together, and cannot ignore the suffering of “others” abstractly.
I’m working, and meditating, reading, gardening, biking, opening the windows.
I am still completely dependent upon this voracious global economy for my needs, as are all of those who I love.
Tough spot we are in, compadre…
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