[agelbert]

It’s time to give the crooks/corporations/governments the finger.

[agelbert]

[agelbert]

I agree with RE. This IS America. Sure, the top pigs are responsible for a lot of the scams and damage but the first nations genocide, the slavery, the Homestead Act that allowed white europeans just off the boat (they sent flyers to Europe!) to colonize “free” land in the west while the recently freed slaves were NOT included and NOT allowed to move to new territories out west, gun boat diplomacy, the gilded age, etc., ad nauseum was willingly embraced by the masses.

At any rate, we are here and THIS (see video below) is the only way we are going to survive.
I think this physicist has pretty well figured out our problem which is that the resource extraction/master-slave paradigm system comes from the disasterously bankrupt view that we are separate from each other and nature and can thereby kill, enslave and extract resources at our pleasure.

She outlines the failure of mechanistic reductionism (the basis of the scientific method) in weighing the total consequences of inventing, mining or industrialization.

She maintains that only when we stop denying reality according to particle physics and quantum theory that everything is connected to and thereby affected by everything else will we be able to move forward in harmony with nature and each other.

Vandana Shiva On Strombo: Full Extended Interview

[agelbert]

Greece is NOT going to pay the bondholders or even a significant part of any debt, PERIOD.

This guy can see what is going on in Greece;

https://thegreekperspective.blogspot.com/

[agelbert]

@Reverse Engineer,
No matter how this thing shakes out, I am not judging you for the Orkin man approach. I think it has merit as long as the procedure is conducive to a sustainable society.

Justification for violent behavior in the defense of innocents has always been a part of, not just human behavior, but many other animals as well.

I just saw this video and I think this lady knows the score pretty well. How she continues to believe that the planet can be saved without violence is beyond me but, despite having been exposed to nearly 250,000 farmer suicides in India due to corporate depredation, she still sees a way.

Her take on what constitutes an excess population is similar to mine.
What do you think of her views? (anyone else here that would like to comment on this video, please do).

[agelbert]

I did it again.When I posted Reverse Engineer’s initials, I transposed them to ER. Sorry, it shoyld have been RE. My transpositional aphasia and//or a bit of dyslexia is showing.

[agelbert]

@Ashvin,
Thanks for the compliment. After reading at this site for a while (and now the Doomstead Diner too), I am impressed with the depth of thought and analysis by just about everyone here. I thoroughly enjoy the intellectual stimulation of non abbreviated (I HATE twitter) comments. In the precarious situation we find ourselves in, at length discussions should be the norm.

As to the OMMP, correct me if I am wrong, but when you speak about minimizing the death of innocents even though a lot of death is now baked in the collapsing environment ‘pie’, you are advocating a type of triage system like doctors developed on battlefields. In ER’s view, the ‘triage’ would entail dispensing with the most incorrigible members of society that fed this collapse (the 1%). In medical triage, the most severely injured are the last to be attended. In the OMMP, the comparison to triage breaks down because the poor (i.e. the innocents) will be the very ones starving, rioting and killing for resources first so they will be those dying the most. I really don’t know how that sad and unjust outcome during the upheaval can be prevented. I leave it to people like you, ER and surly1 as well as others here like El Gallinazo to come up with some workable framework on this issue. Take me, for example. I have a pacemaker with about 4 years left until I stop being a modern version of the Eveready bunny. Somehow I don’t see Medtronic and the EP (electro physiologist doctor that puts in new batteries or a new pacemaker) medical network being available to me when my battery dies. My concern is more for my wife because there are no survivor benefits on my pension. It’s hard for me to think about it so I concentrate on broader issues.

As for Paul the Apostle, I think he was a great man who was genuinely converted by Jesus Christ Himself on the road to Damascus. I don’t have a beef with him justifying the turning away of the Jews as all part of God’s plan for the gentiles to be saved but the a remnant of the Jews would get with the program at the end of the days. I don’t have any problems with salvation by faith. I agree with Paul that the commandments of the Old Testament were impossible to keep and they were given to prove that works didn’t translate to salvation. It’s when he got into the nitpicking about hairstyles and obedience and who could teach and who couldn’t that he got too “Ten Commandments new version” (i.e. Jewish Pharisee legalistic crap) for me. He went off the legalistic deep end and none of that stuff should be in the New Testament. As a matter of fact, he himself says in one or two of his epistles that he doesn’t claim Holy Spirit inspiration on this or that but the Catholic Church ate that authoritarian pariarchal stuff up and plastered Pauls writings all over the place.

Paul’s writings have their place but not in a book that is all inclusive of humanity. Paul was way too legalistic. His beautiful writings about the gifts of the Holy Spirit and also how anything done without Love isn’t worth a hill of beans are in conflct with his rather obsessive control of who he allowed to accompany him and who he passed judgement on as to fitness for effective evangelism.

I’m sure he was a better man than I am but I don’t see any comparison in universal appeal with his writings and the Gospels. No, I don’t think he tried to rewrite them. I read somewher the Gospels were targeted to the Romans (Mark) and the Greeks and Jews and other gentiles with the Doctor (Luke) being a huge influence. The Gospel of John is almost poetic when you compare it with Paul’s writings.

To tell you the truth, I never got that deep into it. I just see all the divison out there now and how the MIC apologist pastors (since Viet Nam), racists and woman haters keep using Paul’s teachings (in a twisted way most of the time, to be sure) to advance hierarchical concepts and legalisms to keep people ‘in their place’. None of that is possible in the Gospels (although some pastors certainly give it the old college try).

[agelbert]

Sorry for the typos. I am not trying to modify the spelling of “stewardship” into only being “hip” if it’s called “stewardhip”.

Honest! :>)

[agelbert]

I really do not see much of a conflict between RE and Surly1.

I agree with both of them that our situation is untenable mainly because this is not a matter of ideology or corrupt and abusive relations between humans with power and those without; the master-slave world view is certainly something that must be dealt with but the environmental collapse that homo sapiens is engineering into the anthropocene die-off (as well a thousands of other species perishing along with Homo Sap) is the main concern.

The Orkin man metaphor may be a bit crude because it appears to be advocating genocide. I am certain that any Orwellian and mendacious VD (verbal dancer) resorting to screaming and hollering that “two wrongs don’t make a right” is avoiding the issue because the morality aspect of the problem is secondary to the utilitarian concern for the collapsing life support system on earth. That person may be attempting to cloud the issue of responsibility for the resource extraction paradigm that is destroying the ecosphere that lies squarely on the shoulders of the 1%. That person may claim that it is the masses of mankind that are causing all this and the answer to this is an ‘ethical’ population reduction of ‘useless eaters’ through conraception, one child policies, abortion, GMO mosquitos, a polluted water suppiy so ‘natural’ population control from death by dysentery and other fun events will solve the problem (Israel is doing just that to the Palestinians); The 1% and their apolgists are very good at dodging real issues that they are responsible for bringing about and laying all the blame on the 99%.

The population issue is real but we must not let it be used as a straw man to protect the 1%’s culpability. The population issue can only be addressed reasonably when we have an egalitarian society.

I propose a compromise that is morally acceptable to surly1 and RE (and, of course, myself).
When TPTB loss of centralized control that is occurring now sporadically begins to accelerate, we must advocate a world view that DOES NOT single out the 1% criminals as targets for genocide. What we must do is advocate a world view that singles out anyone that has a carbon foorprint above a sustainable level as a threat to the environment. The way to eliminate that threat is to emulate nature and USE that threat (a negative) as an asset (a positive). The barbarity aside, the silliness of Pol Pot in wanting the elite to push wheel barrows was more an exercise in vengeance and humiiation than a planned transition to a sustainable agrarian society. Stalin’s “No person ,no proplem” view of people that didn’t get with the program was counterproductive as well.

These offenders (the 1%) would be used to help bioremediate the environment. How? If you exceed your carbon footprint, then we immediately take a sufficient portion of your land or other resources and distribute it among other earthlings (not necessarily humans) that need some more living space such as endangered species as well as humans from densely populated areas that can now live someplace where they can have a decent quality of life while keeping a sustainable carbon footprint.

You do not want an underground of disgruntled elite organizing to terrorize and re-propagandize the populace into buying into the resource extraction paradigm. But, even more so, you do not want a popular blood lust and purge mentality centered on blaming an enemy instead of working to make a sustainable world. We need to use the same tools of propaganda that the elite now use but without the mendacious agenda of profit, profit, profit and the planet be damned. We need in-your-face actual history education for everybody from the cradle to the grave on what went down and why 24/7. It must be lived and breathed by the populace in a fun, Madison Avenue kind of way (without lies and distortions) permeating virtually all media involving living styles ,clothing, interpersonal realtions, etc. In the same (truthful) propaganda, snarky and continuously humorous demonization of predatory capitalist piggery must also be ubiquitous from television programs to radio on the internet or anywhere else. Think of a global version of the Daily Grist website or something like that.

The 1% ‘owns’ (stole through murder and mayhem) over 50% of everything out there that can be bought or sold. The evil these pigs do is directly proportional to their power to coopt the system of laws and human decency through the control of those resources. We free them (:>) of those assets so they can contribute to a sustainable biosphere/ ecosphere and they will have great difficulty convincing even their own offspring that the old way is better.

Strip off their assets and force them to engage in bioremediation or imprison them until they agree. While they are in prison tending duckweed ponds (grows on stagnant water and can use feces as ferilizer and grows faster than anything but algae, can be dried and burned as fuel as well as eaten and ducks love it, of course) on the wages they set up recently, we will use those resources to begin the bioremediaiton.

Pie in the sky? Perhaps. I recognize that “we” do not have the power to do this now. I recognize that the size of the cohort that defines “we” is still monstrously propagandized by the resource extraction greed is good paradigm so they would be quite willing to kill anyone wanting to disturb the pigfest. It will take a lot of pain for the “we” to be sufficiently numerous and influential to enact the reforms I mentioned. Even then there will be people who want the cathartic exercise of several heads on pikes or hanging from lamposts. We need to avoid that, not because it is immoral, but because it is not in our best interests if our goal is a sustainable society.
Remember that history books will be written about this period if we win. Think about how inspiring it will be for the young to read how we, after suffering all these depredations and watching our planet nearly be destroying by the evil of mindless greed, rather than go on a rampage of vengeance and polarization, simply used all the propaganda tools that the 1% previously misused to achieve a sustainable society. Think how this will blunt any fantasies by the descendents of the defunct elite to restore the old ‘glory, greed and gore for empire’. Their history must be their unending shame in their ancestors.

All that said, there is still the added dimension of total human existence. If our essence continues after death, then our material existence must be placed in a different context. I am a golden rule type Christian. I used to support war but I woke up around 1988. It’s wrong and killing is wrong unless it’s a kill or be killed situation. Even then, as a Christian, I can picture a situation where a Christian will allow himself to be killed without defending himself in order to blunt further bloodshed. I have not seen the inside of a church for over 20 years because I have come to the conclusion that organized “Christianity” in the U.S. is a pro-war anti-Christian propaganda front for the MIC. One can say that as soon as ‘saint’ Paul started reinterpreting the Gospels, the corruption of real Christianity began but that’s another subject.

I bring proper Chrisitian perspective into this because, in a sustainable society, the concept of proper stewardship of the environment as a type ‘mankind’s burdern’ must be discussed. We are self aware so therefore we can avoid nature’s programming and mess things up. We sure have. The distorted view of stewardhip preached by Judeo-Christian propaganda is a master-slave relationship. That is wrong and just feeds greed and justifies tyranny over nature as a gift from God rather than a responsibility to maintain the environment they same way it was when God gave us life. This responsiblity requires that we understand, whether atheist or theist, that we are a function of nature and not its master. The proper definition of our stewardship is that we are gardeners and it’s NOT our garden. It was here before we were so our duty is to tend it wisely or perish. Stewardhip is a JOB, not a privilege.

So if we win this thing, all the brainwashed “christians” with their assbackwards view of what stewardhip is will have to be re-educated along with anybody (mostly those in the Orkin man’s crosshairs) wanting to believe that humans can do whatever they want and it’s ‘okay’.

Let’s get an Orkin man that overcomes the insects and puts them to work for the environment.

[agelbert]

We are cursed with a rather effective propaganda machine that defends the status quo and works mightily to provide allegedly iron clad arguments exposing our desperate dependence on fossil fuels and the enormous debt we owe to them for our ‘wonderful civilization’. The media has cleverly weaved fact and fiction to present plausible arguments against the practicality of going cold turkey on fossil fuels and 100% on renewables. Not one word about the fact that fossil fuels are easy to meter and conveniently provide a constant revenue stream for the rich along with governmental control of a populace that simply cannot move or function without daily use of fossil fuels ever seems to be mentioned. Not one word about how renewables cannot be metered or taxed easily and how that feature gives everyone a large degree of independence aand flexibility in disaster situations to help themselves or a less fortunate neighbor is mentioned. On the other hand, the continuous and vociferous denial of the link between fossil fuels and environmental problems, regardless of scientific concensus on this very real link, never seems to go away either.
The actual history of the industrial revolution involving some very brutal measures to coerce humans to abandon horses, as only one of many coercive measures, for tranportation and farming are always ignored and replaced with a stream of pejorative comments about horse dung in big cities. People did not want to get rid of their horses! I am not simply talking about city ordinances and fines targeting horses. Right around 1865 a big push began to sell farm machinery. Amazingly, a huge horse plague hit the U.S. that year that killed a massive amount of horses. No explanation beyond “Civil War stress” blarney was ever given. These horses were not just city horses in population centers but out in the country as well. The move to horseless carriages began on the farm with steam power and hydrocarbon lubricants. The automibile came later along with the bone cancer. Bone cancer from the original automoblie fuel, benzene, is seldom mentioned by the media and apparently is considered no big deal in comparison to horse shit odor.
Moving on to the early 20th century, Rockefeller has a waste product in his refinery cracking towers (after separating all those great heavy and light lubricants) called gasolene and he talks Henry Ford into modifying the carburators to run on it. Of course the ‘minor’ problem with benzene fuel may have helped make the switch. There were electric cars on the road at the time. Cleveland had wind generators creating electricity at that time! You’ll never guess what happened to them and the electric trolleys all over many towns in the USA.
So, enough of that. Everyone here knows how predatory capitalism attempts to game the system to achieve price control and a monopoly. Once much more efficient and sustainable technologies are shoved aside by hook or by crook, the distorted and mendacious meme that our current technology is the result of friendly capitalist competition in the ‘free market’ is pushed. Predation occurs followed by propaganda versions of history. That is the real history of the industrial revolution in regard to our choices of energy production. Renewables got squeezed out, not because they couldn’t compete favorably, but because the pollution and health costs of fossil fuels got ‘externalized’. Along the way, the independence of the, mostly agrarian, American in energy production and use was crushed. A love afffair with the car was fostered to the point that in the late 1920’s more Americans had cars than flush toilets. Of course they were better off, ecologically speaking, without flush toilets, but the point is the job of selling Americans on fossil fuels was a done deal by that time. So please remember that nobody was doing us any favors, like the media wants to claim; they were selling us something in order to concentrate wealth and power in a few hands. They were using us as a cash cow to the point of introducing planned obsolecence, rampant consumerism to keep the factories going and simultaneously thwarting moves to sustainability like Henry Ford’s plan to make cars out of hemp plastic in the early1940s. We like new stuff and are always looking for the latest model year of the car or whatever because we have been manipulated by experts to do so. It has absolutely nothing to do with our health, well being or happiness. Bernays really messed us up.
Fast forward to the present where the witches brew of ecological harm brought about by industrialization has caught up with us. And NOW, all of a sudden, we just can’t live without all this ‘wonderful’ energy packed fossil fuel economy. Methinks somebody wants to slap a guilt trip on the chumps so they agree to clean up the mess even though the media keeps claiming there isn’t really that much of a mess. We, the masses, are accused of being wasteful pigs that bred like rats thanks to fossil fuels.

Where to begin? How about the fact that family size has been decreasing, not increasing, througout the industrial revolution? That’s right. The numbers were baked in by 1800 and the wars slowed them down a bit. Louis Pasteur and Lister did a hell of a lot more to create our present population ‘problem’ than fossil fuels. Most of the key scientific advancements in medicine were not exactly high tech and fossil fuel dependent. A human makes it past 5 years of age and he has a huge chance of living out his 3 score and ten. It was the enormous reduction in infant mortality brought about by antiseptic procedures that caused the population explosion, not fossil fuels. It’s a stretch to say that fossil fuels alowed people to obtain clean water to wash their hands before delivering a baby, but I’m sure the media verbal contortionists would toss it out there to further muddy the waters of historical truth. The much touted plumbing advancements that require machinery and factories powered by fossil fuels, while they did reduce disease in population centers and prolonged life, were setting us up for more fossil fuel use through improper humanure handling. I maintain that the main cause of our population explosion is knowledge of disease microbes, their propagation methods and our changes in hygiene as a result.

What about all this waste we now produce that we have been folded, spindled and mentally mutilated through Freud’s nephew Wall Street amygdala reptilian brain control propaganda? They set us up and now WE are the bad guys? They want us to shop till we drop and WE are the problem? And how much ‘waste’ do WE actually produce on a carbon footprint basis compared to the global 1%? Well, Senator Bernie Sanders stated recently that less than 1% of the U.S. owns about 40% of the assets (I’m not talking about income increases although they have gotten the lion’s share over the last ten years as well). Yes, I know he talks about banks too but he mentions those 400 or so elite families every now and then. Now figure the carbon footprint of those people and compare it with the rest of us. All those endless films about diapers, milk gallons and so on used in our middle class lifetimes with the obligatory landfill mountains thrown in are nothing compared with the horrendous and gigantic amount of crap these families generate. Isn’t it amazing that when it comes to pollution and wasteful habits, we are ‘all in this together’? No attempt is made to segregate out the worst offenders. On the contrary, the poor and middle class are constantly demonized as being irresponsible useless eaters. It’s all quite Orwellian on the part of the media.

But yeah, we do waste and we have a waste problem that is real so let’s talk about it.

Waste can certainly destroy a society, species or most of the ecosphere if, as many point out, we continue with the ridiculous paradigm that we can industrially do multi-generational damage to the life support systems humans depend on and not define this as suicide. It’s almost like our nuclear nuts and oil fetish fucks have morphed us into a mass version of the heaven’s gate cult. Those people thought they could hitch a ride on a comet by commiting suicide. Every single step in industrializaton has, for anyone willing to do the TOTAL math, NOT been ecospherically cost effective. The fact that a small group of humans has temporarily benefited at the expense of the overwhelming majority of humans and all other earthlings right now, not to mention the obvious acceleration in environmental degradation promising a super bleak future, seems to go right over the heads of way to many otherwise intelligent people. Just like the heaven’s gate cult, people are addicted to a dream that never was, PERIOD.
All talk about this and that from our youth and how much fun we all had and how nostalgic we are for those nicer times is the exact same phenomenum of a drug addict longing for his first high.
LISTEN UP! We are a function of the ecosphere. We DO NOT, despite all the best propaganda efforts of our scientific community, understand the mechanism of the ecosphere sufficently to tinker with it, let alone wantonly pollute it with “externalisms”. EXTERNALISMS!? That’s just some economist bullshit! There are NO externalisms inside the life bubble called the ecosphere; it just takes a while to catch up with you when you mine, bomb and toxify with chemicals NIMBY areas for a few centuries.
We are there and yet our scientific community and our financial community and our political wheeler and dealer con-artists with their new techno death toys and ‘miracle’ GMO crops and drug after drug to replace patent expirations, new ripoff scams, more war profiteering and emotional button pushing divide and conquer racist crap just DO NOT GET IT (or maybe they do get it and are insanely trying to make hay out of it).
The people in charge of our dysfunctional clusterfuck are akin to that psycho Whiteapple that led the heaven’s gate cult. They will not change to a sustainable paradigm because THAT requires subordination to the reality that we are a product of the ecosphere and the humble acceptance that we do not understand it yet so, until we do, we must henceforth emulate natural processes of cradle to grave recycling in all industrial technology and outlaw destructive activities like war or perish.
No, they prefer to insanely reduce the world population by environmental collapse in the ridiculous la-la land elite hope that then the ecosphere will cure itself and they can continue their merry resource extraction paradigm as if nothing happened. It won’t work because these reductionist morons in power with their scientific priesthood of techno nut balls are so full of pride from all their tremendous ‘contributions’ over the last two centuries that they cannot see the monstrous downside of the technology explosion and that, yes, technology can be developed and used in an environmentally friendly manner. They don’t want to do the work. They are supremely irresponsible and supremely greedy and incredibly stupid.

Instead of doing a rethink, they are just flooring the accelerator and increasing their propaganda blitz.

I am not against technology. Since about 1970 we have had the knowledge to use technology to produce an environmentally friendly and sustainable society free of poisons in food and industry in the scientific literature. It has been deliberately supressed time and time again. Imagine what it cost to cover the country with roads and power lines. Well, decentralized power, food and transportation would cost a hell of a lot less. It’s total bullshit that we can’t do this or that we are ‘hooked’ on oil or nuclear or natural gas. We could have switched away decades ago.
In the 70s NASA used solar panels to bring electricity to a Navajo community which was not served by the local electric utilities in a southwestern state. It worked great and the utilities went ballistic. They wrote to NASA requesting the solar panel project be stopped because, even though those areas targeted by NASA were not adequately served by the utilities, the fossil fuel free energy would ‘force’ the utilities to lower their rates. NASA stopped the project.

The planet earth DOES NOT have an energy crisis. For you engineering types out there, just do the math on the energy required daily to lift trillions of tons of water vapor out of the rivers, lakes and oceans and deposit this at higher elevations in the form of rain and then try to tell me about how much it COSTS (ZERO!) and how we are running out of energy.
What the planet earth has, is a HUMAN GREED AND STUPIDITY crisis among the 1%.
But suppose we could dispense with all the agenda laced perjorative propaganda about renewables, agree to clean up the planet and eliminate fossil fuel, nuclear and any other kind of poisonous technology because we have no other choice?

Can it be done? Yes. Will it be done? Probably not. I just heard today (June 11, 2012) on the Thom Hartmann show that phytoplankton replacement in a bay in Maine has dropped 500% over a period of a decade or so. The phenomenum has now been confirmed as occurring globally. Phytoplankton produce approximately 50% of the oxygen on this planet through photosynthesis. They are not regenerating adequately because increased ppm of CO2 (now 400 ppm) is acidifying the oceans and killing them. Can the elite be so insane that they plan to meter our oxygen? I hope not.
At any rate, we must accept that the fossil fuel economy is not an exercise in fun conveniences or a requirement to maintain ‘civilization’; it’s killing our oxygen supply now as well. We must switch to renewables.

In regard to available energy to maintain some level of ‘civilization’ with renewables, when I mentioned the world evaporation energy example, I wasn’t alluding to energy collection through hydroelectric power (although dams certainly help as long as salmon runs aren’t thwarted), but using this vast amount of energy available free to shed light on the scientifically bankrupt view of quantifying energy by using bomb calorimeters like we did in college and energy mass per mole in rapid oxidation. Nature has never done it that way. Everything in our culture always wants to scale up a process or else judge it as wanting. That is assbackwards from a sustainable biological process point of view. In our bodies, the reason we have enzymes lowering the energy of activation in myriad chemical reactions occurring per second is to keep us from overheating and/or rapid ph changes that would kill us but the fact is that the enzymes accomplish a task with less energy than a straight forward math computation of the chemical reaction energy requires. Capillary processes in us are unconcerned with “stream head'” like scientists or engineers are when they want to build a dam yet they work just fine manipulating Bernoulli forces to use the absolute minimum energy needed to move that blood so the heart pump doesn’t have to work as hard against vessel friction and pressure changes.
In our techno-love affair, everything we do is geared to centralized and maximum power. For example we really do not need a lot of stream head to power a house because we can gradually pump water up to a reservoir in our house to give us electricity on demand. But the techno math says you need X amount of head for Y amount of kilowatts. That’s only true if you need all of that all the time. Sure, not everyone lives by a river or a stream but that is simply a small example. A giant Sequoia pumps over one hundred gallons of water hundreds of feet up every day through transpiration. The tracheal elements can stretch water molecules 27 atmospheres as long as the vacuum holds. The technology to make artificial tree water pumps has been around for decades but our society is STUCK on the energy density per mole fixation like a teenager that wants a hot car to ride to school instead of a small electric rechargable scooter.

Have you heard about the roaring forties? That’s an area of latitude in the oceans of the southern hemisphere that is always turbulent. They alone could power the world’s energy demands after a ten year installation of wave and undersea current power collection systems that are already being deployed off of England and Scotland. In regard to corrosion issues with sea water and maintenance of deep water (massive pressures to deal with), I only ask that you consider technology equivalence hurdles that have long since been surmounted in nuclear power plants (the ultimate in corrosion challenges including hydrogen embrittlement that is not present with sea water) and oil undersea pipelines (pump sea water to a land reservoir and start the power cables from there as a cost effective low maintenance option). At present, ocean oil rigs (which are mostly metal) have sacrificial anodes placed on them so electrolysis in most areas is thwarted. The anodes are replaced as they are used up. And remember all we have learned through space exploration about metallurgy, high temperature insulation during re-entry and don’t forget microwave power transmission technology. We can do all this stuff. It’s really not as hard as putting a robot vehicle on Mars or building a space station in orbit. It’s telling that Einstein described the photoelectric effect at the very beginning of the 20th century but the US government has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to develop solar panels (we only did it when we needed them in space) but it spent a fortune on the development of the bomb in the 30s while a large part of our populace was going hungry. Have you ever wondered why the oil lobby never attacks nuclear power but spares no expense to demonize renewables with disengenuous propaganda and mendacity? Think about that a while. If you come to the conclusion that the nuclear power plants were put out there to make bomb material and get you to pay for it and were never, ever considered a viable alternative to fossil fuels for the production of electricity or a serious source of oil lobby competition, you win the prize.

There is also no excuse whatsoever for not using solar and electric power to run every single ship in the ocean. It would be child’s play to switch all automobiles and trucks to full electric as long we had geothermal, wind, tide and ocean current derived power 24/7, not to mention solar panels. Do you know what oil tankers do after they offload the oil? They fill huge portions of the holds with sea water (for ballast) and then dump it when they get back to reload with oil. This massive pollution goes on day in and day out. We have a guaranteed continuous oil spill as long as we have a fossil fuel ocean tanker economy. As for fertilizers and food production machinery requiring a massive amount of fossil fuels to feed 7 billlion humans, the fact is that using decentralized permaculture with humanure (after appropriate and low tech local processing to avoid disease pathogens) along with greenhouse technology for nordic climates can replace the fossil fuel required to run tractors, make fertilizer and insecticides and herbicides. I mention farm machinery because there is increasing evidence that plowing needs to be replaced by non-plowing with perennial crops in order to stop the massive top soil loss and lowered nutrition of crop yield (they look the same but don’t have the same nutritional content). Other posters here are up on humanure and they are right. I recommend anyone repulsed by this to think again. Feces are an inseparable part of being human and it’s high time we stopped with this Victorian idiocy of seeing it as bad stuff; it’s part of our salvation as a species. An added plus with humanure through the avoidance of chemical fertilizers is no more ocean dead zones and massive top soil degradation. Also the energy and water savings in not pumping human waste to be treated with chemicals (made with fossil fuels) in a sewage treatment plant would save billons of dollars.

Examples of how renewables can switch us off of fossil fuels quickly:
http://www.euronews.com/2012/05/27/germany-breaks-solar-energy-record
http://www.euronews.com/2012/06/06/solar-plane-completes-maiden-intercontinental-flight
http://www.euronews.com/2012/03/05/sea-solution-to-future-energy-needs
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/renewableenergy/3535012/Ocean-currents-can-power-the-world-say-scientists.html

Pelamis wave power device that looks like a giant snake:
http://www.weirdlyodd.com/10-renewable-energy-sources/

Zero energy balance hotel:
http://www.euronews.com/2012/05/16/go-green-get-growing

I think this can be done in TEN years, not forty:
http://www.euronews.com/2012/05/18/in-40-years-every-home-every-building-will-be-a-power-plant-says-jeremy-rifki

Growing food and the fossil fuel ‘requirement’ is a dependency created by the fossil fuel industry but we CAN shake that dependency without mass starvation and depopulation:
http://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/85/1/Fuel-and-food.html

“The strategic goal of biofuel is to supplement or even replace fossil fuels, the amount of which is constantly and rapidly diminishing.”
haitireconstruction.ning.com/page/biofuel-1

I’ve already mentioned my views on the population explosion and its causes but I wish to point out how the oil lobby has tried to make fossil fuel brownie points out of it.

Remember the green revolution of the 60s, 70s and 80s that supposedly caused the population explosion? The numbers are in. The yields are not statistically different with all the fossil fuel fertilizer, herbicides and insecticides than without them. The green revolution is a lie fostered by, you guessed it, the fossil fuel lobby. Their only valid claim is the fuel for machinery which now turns out to lower crop nutrition from top soil plowing degradation. This degradation is caused by a combination of chemical fertilizers and plowing (bare soil tends to blow away when dry or erode when wet) which leaches the soil of trace minerals needed to produce nutritious and tasty as opposed to bland crops. The way things stand right now, agricultural guidelines in the U.S. state that it’s okay to lose 4 tons of top soil per acre per year from ‘modern’ farming techniques. The government claims it is the price we pay for high ‘yields’. Are you comfortable with that? I’m not. Considering top soil regeneration takes over 100 years, I cannot believe we are doing anything but losing massive amounts every year.

And last but not least, the militaries of the world are the most voracious users of fossil fuel. We sure as hell do not need them to keep 7 billion fed and clothed. The U.S. Navy, in particular, has the top spot as fossil fuel user AND polluter.

We need gradual, decentralized trickle charge or slow pumping energy storage systems for sustainable humanity. Anything else is not viable for the planet. If we want to zip around at high speed and be able to have instant this and that, yes we have an energy crisis. If we want to emulate biological processes and eschew the love affair with higher energy density per mole of fossil and or nuclear poisons killing the planet, we don’t have an energy crisis.

Nature paces everything; so should we.

All that said, there is the 1% with their hubris and arrogance and there is the rest of humanity. The agenda of the 1% is a tad different from the rest of us.
I agree the knockdown is coming. The people controlling the levers of innovation and adaptation in our governments and the elite parasites that own them want this knockdown so it will come. I maintain that the false notion of a causal relationship between a large population and a polluted, unsustainable, fossil fuel dependent human society is the driving force behind this elite desire for a knockdown. The elites are the only truly unsustainable population on this earth because of their mega-carbon footprints. So, in true Wall Street Orwellian fashion, they blame the bulk of the 7 billion humans for THEIR piggery and slavish dependency on fossil fuels.
The 1% that owns our governments loves the predatory resource extraction paradigm despite the fact that some of them probably suspect that it will cause a population knockdown, not from lack of fossil fuels, but from environmental collapse. Billions of humans dying is considered a good thing by the 1%. They think it will solve the world’s environmental problems and provide a more manageable population of slaves. The 1% probably grumble about minimum gene pool diversity species population required in order to perpetuate homo sapiens. The 1% think robots will take care of all the ‘important’ work while medical technology available to the 1% will provide them with 150 year plus lifetimes. They are wrong and they are the cancer that is destroying humanity.

There’s a way to clean up this world and live sustainably. Killing off several billion is a straw man. It’s typical elite bullshit adding two an two and getting whatever answer keeps them in the catbird seat. The media will continue to block the truth from the people 24/7.

I apologize if I tried to cover too much ground here but this situation we are in has matured for well over a century and we need to see how we got here to understand, if we survive, how to prevent a new set of snakes from selling us snake oil in the future.

Feel free to pass all or any part of this rant with or without attribution. Everything I wrote can be researched free on the internet if you want to post links about horse plagues, NASA correspondence with utilities, Henry Ford and hemp plastic, Rockefeller chicanery, U.S. solar panel development reasons, Americans starving while the bomb was being developed, Bernays propaganda tools, etc.

A.G. Gelbert

[agelbert]

I’m going to try one more time to post it here and if that dooesn’t work, I’ll post it at the doomstead diner.

[agelbert]

@Reverse Engineer,
Did you get the consolidation of my posts you asked for? Every time I try to post it nothing happens.

[agelbert]

@Reverse Engineer,
I posted the consolidation, get a message that it has been posted here but it doesn’t appear. If you have not received it for some reason, let me know and I’ll chop it up into smaller pieces and post them in sequence if the document size is the problem.

[agelbert]

@Reverse Engineer,
Here is the promised consolidation. I hope you don’t consider it too long winded.

We are cursed with a rather effective propaganda machine that defends the status quo and works mightily to provide allegedly iron clad arguments exposing our desperate dependence on fossil fuels and the enormous debt we owe to them for our ‘wonderful civilization’. The media has cleverly weaved fact and fiction to present plausible arguments against the practicality of going cold turkey on fossil fuels and 100% on renewables. Not one word about the fact that fossil fuels are easy to meter and conveniently provide a constant revenue stream for the rich along with governmental control of a populace that simply cannot move or function without daily use of fossil fuels ever seems to be mentioned. Not one word about how renewables cannot be metered or taxed easily and how that feature gives everyone a large degree of independence aand flexibility in disaster situations to help themselves or a less fortunate neighbor is mentioned. On the other hand, the continuous and vociferous denial of the link between fossil fuels and environmental problems, regardless of scientific concensus on this very real link, never seems to go away either.
The actual history of the industrial revolution involving some very brutal measures to coerce humans to abandon horses, as only one of many coercive measures, for tranportation and farming are always ignored and replaced with a stream of pejorative comments about horse dung in big cities. People did not want to get rid of their horses! I am not simply talking about city ordinances and fines targeting horses. Right around 1865 a big push began to sell farm machinery. Amazingly, a huge horse plague hit the U.S. that year that killed a massive amount of horses. No explanation beyond “Civil War stress” blarney was ever given. These horses were not just city horses in population centers but out in the country as well. The move to horseless carriages began on the farm with steam power and hydrocarbon lubricants. The automibile came later along with the bone cancer. Bone cancer from the original automoblie fuel, benzene, is seldom mentioned by the media and apparently is considered no big deal in comparison to horse shit odor.
Moving on to the early 20th century, Rockefeller has a waste product in his refinery cracking towers (after separating all those great heavy and light lubricants) called gasolene and he talks Henry Ford into modifying the carburators to run on it. Of course the ‘minor’ problem with benzene fuel may have helped make the switch. There were electric cars on the road at the time. Cleveland had wind generators creating electricity at that time! You’ll never guess what happened to them and the electric trolleys all over many towns in the USA.
So, enough of that. Everyone here knows how predatory capitalism attempts to game the system to achieve price control and a monopoly. Once much more efficient and sustainable technologies are shoved aside by hook or by crook, the distorted and mendacious meme that our current technology is the result of friendly capitalist competition in the ‘free market’ is pushed. Predation occurs followed by propaganda versions of history. That is the real history of the industrial revolution in regard to our choices of energy production. Renewables got squeezed out, not because they couldn’t compete favorably, but because the pollution and health costs of fossil fuels got ‘externalized’. Along the way, the independence of the, mostly agrarian, American in energy production and use was crushed. A love afffair with the car was fostered to the point that in the late 1920’s more Americans had cars than flush toilets. Of course they were better off, ecologically speaking, without flush toilets, but the point is the job of selling Americans on fossil fuels was a done deal by that time. So please remember that nobody was doing us any favors, like the media wants to claim; they were selling us something in order to concentrate wealth and power in a few hands. They were using us as a cash cow to the point of introducing planned obsolecence, rampant consumerism to keep the factories going and simultaneously thwarting moves to sustainability like Henry Ford’s plan to make cars out of hemp plastic in the early1940s. We like new stuff and are always looking for the latest model year of the car or whatever because we have been manipulated by experts to do so. It has absolutely nothing to do with our health, well being or happiness. Bernays really messed us up.
Fast forward to the present where the witches brew of ecological harm brought about by industrialization has caught up with us. And NOW, all of a sudden, we just can’t live without all this ‘wonderful’ energy packed fossil fuel economy. Methinks somebody wants to slap a guilt trip on the chumps so they agree to clean up the mess even though the media keeps claiming there isn’t really that much of a mess. We, the masses, are accused of being wasteful pigs that bred like rats thanks to fossil fuels.

Where to begin? How about the fact that family size has been decreasing, not increasing, througout the industrial revolution? That’s right. The numbers were baked in by 1800 and the wars slowed them down a bit. Louis Pasteur and Lister did a hell of a lot more to create our present population ‘problem’ than fossil fuels. Most of the key scientific advancements in medicine were not exactly high tech and fossil fuel dependent. A human makes it past 5 years of age and he has a huge chance of living out his 3 score and ten. It was the enormous reduction in infant mortality brought about by antiseptic procedures that caused the population explosion, not fossil fuels. It’s a stretch to say that fossil fuels alowed people to obtain clean water to wash their hands before delivering a baby, but I’m sure the media verbal contortionists would toss it out there to further muddy the waters of historical truth. The much touted plumbing advancements that require machinery and factories powered by fossil fuels, while they did reduce disease in population centers and prolonged life, were setting us up for more fossil fuel use through improper humanure handling. I maintain that the main cause of our population explosion is knowledge of disease microbes, their propagation methods and our changes in hygiene as a result.

What about all this waste we now produce that we have been folded, spindled and mentally mutilated through Freud’s nephew Wall Street amygdala reptilian brain control propaganda? They set us up and now WE are the bad guys? They want us to shop till we drop and WE are the problem? And how much ‘waste’ do WE actually produce on a carbon footprint basis compared to the global 1%? Well, Senator Bernie Sanders stated recently that less than 1% of the U.S. owns about 40% of the assets (I’m not talking about income increases although they have gotten the lion’s share over the last ten years as well). Yes, I know he talks about banks too but he mentions those 400 or so elite families every now and then. Now figure the carbon footprint of those people and compare it with the rest of us. All those endless films about diapers, milk gallons and so on used in our middle class lifetimes with the obligatory landfill mountains thrown in are nothing compared with the horrendous and gigantic amount of crap these families generate. Isn’t it amazing that when it comes to pollution and wasteful habits, we are ‘all in this together’? No attempt is made to segregate out the worst offenders. On the contrary, the poor and middle class are constantly demonized as being irresponsible useless eaters. It’s all quite Orwellian on the part of the media.

But yeah, we do waste and we have a waste problem that is real so let’s talk about it.

Waste can certainly destroy a society, species or most of the ecosphere if, as many point out, we continue with the ridiculous paradigm that we can industrially do multi-generational damage to the life support systems humans depend on and not define this as suicide. It’s almost like our nuclear nuts and oil fetish fucks have morphed us into a mass version of the heaven’s gate cult. Those people thought they could hitch a ride on a comet by commiting suicide. Every single step in industrializaton has, for anyone willing to do the TOTAL math, NOT been ecospherically cost effective. The fact that a small group of humans has temporarily benefited at the expense of the overwhelming majority of humans and all other earthlings right now, not to mention the obvious acceleration in environmental degradation promising a super bleak future, seems to go right over the heads of way to many otherwise intelligent people. Just like the heaven’s gate cult, people are addicted to a dream that never was, PERIOD.
All talk about this and that from our youth and how much fun we all had and how nostalgic we are for those nicer times is the exact same phenomenum of a drug addict longing for his first high.
LISTEN UP! We are a function of the ecosphere. We DO NOT, despite all the best propaganda efforts of our scientific community, understand the mechanism of the ecosphere sufficently to tinker with it, let alone wantonly pollute it with “externalisms”. EXTERNALISMS!? That’s just some economist bullshit! There are NO externalisms inside the life bubble called the ecosphere; it just takes a while to catch up with you when you mine, bomb and toxify with chemicals NIMBY areas for a few centuries.
We are there and yet our scientific community and our financial community and our political wheeler and dealer con-artists with their new techno death toys and ‘miracle’ GMO crops and drug after drug to replace patent expirations, new ripoff scams, more war profiteering and emotional button pushing divide and conquer racist crap just DO NOT GET IT (or maybe they do get it and are insanely trying to make hay out of it).
The people in charge of our dysfunctional clusterfuck are akin to that psycho Whiteapple that led the heaven’s gate cult. They will not change to a sustainable paradigm because THAT requires subordination to the reality that we are a product of the ecosphere and the humble acceptance that we do not understand it yet so, until we do, we must henceforth emulate natural processes of cradle to grave recycling in all industrial technology and outlaw destructive activities like war or perish.
No, they prefer to insanely reduce the world population by environmental collapse in the ridiculous la-la land elite hope that then the ecosphere will cure itself and they can continue their merry resource extraction paradigm as if nothing happened. It won’t work because these reductionist morons in power with their scientific priesthood of techno nut balls are so full of pride from all their tremendous ‘contributions’ over the last two centuries that they cannot see the monstrous downside of the technology explosion and that, yes, technology can be developed and used in an environmentally friendly manner. They don’t want to do the work. They are supremely irresponsible and supremely greedy and incredibly stupid.

Instead of doing a rethink, they are just flooring the accelerator and increasing their propaganda blitz.

I am not against technology. Since about 1970 we have had the knowledge to use technology to produce an environmentally friendly and sustainable society free of poisons in food and industry in the scientific literature. It has been deliberately supressed time and time again. Imagine what it cost to cover the country with roads and power lines. Well, decentralized power, food and transportation would cost a hell of a lot less. It’s total bullshit that we can’t do this or that we are ‘hooked’ on oil or nuclear or natural gas. We could have switched away decades ago.
In the 70s NASA used solar panels to bring electricity to a Navajo community which was not served by the local electric utilities in a southwestern state. It worked great and the utilities went ballistic. They wrote to NASA requesting the solar panel project be stopped because, even though those areas targeted by NASA were not adequately served by the utilities, the fossil fuel free energy would ‘force’ the utilities to lower their rates. NASA stopped the project.

The planet earth DOES NOT have an energy crisis. For you engineering types out there, just do the math on the energy required daily to lift trillions of tons of water vapor out of the rivers, lakes and oceans and deposit this at higher elevations in the form of rain and then try to tell me about how much it COSTS (ZERO!) and how we are running out of energy.
What the planet earth has, is a HUMAN GREED AND STUPIDITY crisis among the 1%.
But suppose we could dispense with all the agenda laced perjorative propaganda about renewables, agree to clean up the planet and eliminate fossil fuel, nuclear and any other kind of poisonous technology because we have no other choice?

Can it be done? Yes. Will it be done? Probably not. I just heard today (June 11, 2012) on the Thom Hartmann show that phytoplankton replacement in a bay in Maine has dropped 500% over a period of a decade or so. The phenomenum has now been confirmed as occurring globally. Phytoplankton produce approximately 50% of the oxygen on this planet through photosynthesis. They are not regenerating adequately because increased ppm of CO2 (now 400 ppm) is acidifying the oceans and killing them. Can the elite be so insane that they plan to meter our oxygen? I hope not.
At any rate, we must accept that the fossil fuel economy is not an exercise in fun conveniences or a requirement to maintain ‘civilization’; it’s killing our oxygen supply now as well. We must switch to renewables.

In regard to available energy to maintain some level of ‘civilization’ with renewables, when I mentioned the world evaporation energy example, I wasn’t alluding to energy collection through hydroelectric power (although dams certainly help as long as salmon runs aren’t thwarted), but using this vast amount of energy available free to shed light on the scientifically bankrupt view of quantifying energy by using bomb calorimeters like we did in college and energy mass per mole in rapid oxidation. Nature has never done it that way. Everything in our culture always wants to scale up a process or else judge it as wanting. That is assbackwards from a sustainable biological process point of view. In our bodies, the reason we have enzymes lowering the energy of activation in myriad chemical reactions occurring per second is to keep us from overheating and/or rapid ph changes that would kill us but the fact is that the enzymes accomplish a task with less energy than a straight forward math computation of the chemical reaction energy requires. Capillary processes in us are unconcerned with “stream head'” like scientists or engineers are when they want to build a dam yet they work just fine manipulating Bernoulli forces to use the absolute minimum energy needed to move that blood so the heart pump doesn’t have to work as hard against vessel friction and pressure changes.
In our techno-love affair, everything we do is geared to centralized and maximum power. For example we really do not need a lot of stream head to power a house because we can gradually pump water up to a reservoir in our house to give us electricity on demand. But the techno math says you need X amount of head for Y amount of kilowatts. That’s only true if you need all of that all the time. Sure, not everyone lives by a river or a stream but that is simply a small example. A giant Sequoia pumps over one hundred gallons of water hundreds of feet up every day through transpiration. The tracheal elements can stretch water molecules 27 atmospheres as long as the vacuum holds. The technology to make artificial tree water pumps has been around for decades but our society is STUCK on the energy density per mole fixation like a teenager that wants a hot car to ride to school instead of a small electric rechargable scooter.

Have you heard about the roaring forties? That’s an area of latitude in the oceans of the southern hemisphere that is always turbulent. They alone could power the world’s energy demands after a ten year installation of wave and undersea current power collection systems that are already being deployed off of England and Scotland. In regard to corrosion issues with sea water and maintenance of deep water (massive pressures to deal with), I only ask that you consider technology equivalence hurdles that have long since been surmounted in nuclear power plants (the ultimate in corrosion challenges including hydrogen embrittlement that is not present with sea water) and oil undersea pipelines (pump sea water to a land reservoir and start the power cables from there as a cost effective low maintenance option). At present, ocean oil rigs (which are mostly metal) have sacrificial anodes placed on them so electrolysis in most areas is thwarted. The anodes are replaced as they are used up. And remember all we have learned through space exploration about metallurgy, high temperature insulation during re-entry and don’t forget microwave power transmission technology. We can do all this stuff. It’s really not as hard as putting a robot vehicle on Mars or building a space station in orbit.

It’s telling that Einstein described the photoelectric effect at the very beginning of the 20th century but the US government has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to develop solar panels (we only did it when we needed them in space) but it spent a fortune on the development of the bomb in the 30s while a large part of our populace was going hungry.

Have you ever wondered why the oil lobby never attacks nuclear power but spares no expense to demonize renewables with disingenuous propaganda and mendacity? Think about that a while. If you come to the conclusion that the nuclear power plants were put out there to make bomb material and get you to pay for it and were never, ever considered a viable alternative to fossil fuels for the production of electricity or a serious source of oil lobby competition, you win the prize.

There is also no excuse whatsoever for not using solar and electric power to run every single ship in the ocean. It would be child’s play to switch all automobiles and trucks to full electric as long we had geothermal, wind, tide and ocean current derived power 24/7, not to mention solar panels. Do you know what oil tankers do after they offload the oil? They fill huge portions of the holds with sea water (for ballast) and then dump it when they get back to reload with oil. This massive pollution goes on day in and day out. We have a guaranteed continuous oil spill as long as we have a fossil fuel ocean tanker economy. As for fertilizers and food production machinery requiring a massive amount of fossil fuels to feed 7 billlion humans, the fact is that using decentralized permaculture with humanure (after appropriate and low tech local processing to avoid disease pathogens) along with greenhouse technology for nordic climates can replace the fossil fuel required to run tractors, make fertilizer and insecticides and herbicides. I mention farm machinery because there is increasing evidence that plowing needs to be replaced by non-plowing with perennial crops in order to stop the massive top soil loss and lowered nutrition of crop yield (they look the same but don’t have the same nutritional content). Other posters here are up on humanure and they are right. I recommend anyone repulsed by this to think again. Feces are an inseparable part of being human and it’s high time we stopped with this Victorian idiocy of seeing it as bad stuff; it’s part of our salvation as a species. An added plus with humanure through the avoidance of chemical fertilizers is no more ocean dead zones and massive top soil degradation. Also the energy and water savings in not pumping human waste to be treated with chemicals (made with fossil fuels) in a sewage treatment plant would save billons of dollars.

Examples of how renewables can switch us off of fossil fuels quickly:
http://www.euronews.com/2012/05/27/germany-breaks-solar-energy-record
http://www.euronews.com/2012/06/06/solar-plane-completes-maiden-intercontinental-flight
http://www.euronews.com/2012/03/05/sea-solution-to-future-energy-needs
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/renewableenergy/3535012/Ocean-currents-can-power-the-world-say-scientists.html

Pelamis wave power device that looks like a giant snake:
http://www.weirdlyodd.com/10-renewable-energy-sources/

Zero energy balance hotel:
http://www.euronews.com/2012/05/16/go-green-get-growing

I think this can be done in TEN years, not forty:
http://www.euronews.com/2012/05/18/in-40-years-every-home-every-building-will-be-a-power-plant-says-jeremy-rifki

Growing food and the fossil fuel ‘requirement’ is a dependency created by the fossil fuel industry but we CAN shake that dependency without mass starvation and depopulation:
http://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/85/1/Fuel-and-food.html

“The strategic goal of biofuel is to supplement or even replace fossil fuels, the amount of which is constantly and rapidly diminishing.”
haitireconstruction.ning.com/page/biofuel-1

I’ve already mentioned my views on the population explosion and its causes but I wish to point out how the oil lobby has tried to make fossil fuel brownie points out of it.

Remember the green revolution of the 60s, 70s and 80s that supposedly caused the population explosion? The numbers are in. The yields are not statistically different with all the fossil fuel fertilizer, herbicides and insecticides than without them. The green revolution is a lie fostered by, you guessed it, the fossil fuel lobby. Their only valid claim is the fuel for machinery which now turns out to lower crop nutrition from top soil plowing degradation. This degradation is caused by a combination of chemical fertilizers and plowing (bare soil tends to blow away when dry or erode when wet) which leaches the soil of trace minerals needed to produce nutritious and tasty as opposed to bland crops. The way things stand right now, agricultural guidelines in the U.S. state that it’s okay to lose 4 tons of top soil per acre per year from ‘modern’ farming techniques. The government claims it is the price we pay for high ‘yields’. Are you comfortable with that? I’m not. Considering top soil regeneration takes over 100 years, I cannot believe we are doing anything but losing massive amounts every year.

And last but not least, the militaries of the world are the most voracious users of fossil fuel. We sure as hell do not need them to keep 7 billion fed and clothed. The U.S. Navy, in particular, has the top spot as fossil fuel user AND polluter.

We need gradual, decentralized trickle charge or slow pumping energy storage systems for sustainable humanity. Anything else is not viable for the planet. If we want to zip around at high speed and be able to have instant this and that, yes we have an energy crisis. If we want to emulate biological processes and eschew the love affair with higher energy density per mole of fossil and or nuclear poisons killing the planet, we don’t have an energy crisis.

Nature paces everything; so should we.

All that said, there is the 1% with their hubris and arrogance and there is the rest of humanity. The agenda of the 1% is a tad different from the rest of us.
I agree the knockdown is coming. The people controlling the levers of innovation and adaptation in our governments and the elite parasites that own them want this knockdown so it will come. I maintain that the false notion of a causal relationship between a large population and a polluted, unsustainable, fossil fuel dependent human society is the driving force behind this elite desire for a knockdown. The elites are the only truly unsustainable population on this earth because of their mega-carbon footprints. So, in true Wall Street Orwellian fashion, they blame the bulk of the 7 billion humans for THEIR piggery and slavish dependency on fossil fuels.
The 1% that owns our governments loves the predatory resource extraction paradigm despite the fact that some of them probably suspect that it will cause a population knockdown, not from lack of fossil fuels, but from environmental collapse. Billions of humans dying is considered a good thing by the 1%. They think it will solve the world’s environmental problems and provide a more manageable population of slaves. The 1% probably grumble about minimum gene pool diversity species population required in order to perpetuate homo sapiens. The 1% think robots will take care of all the ‘important’ work while medical technology available to the 1% will provide them with 150 year plus lifetimes. They are wrong and they are the cancer that is destroying humanity.

There’s a way to clean up this world and live sustainably. Killing off several billion is a straw man. It’s typical elite bullshit adding two an two and getting whatever answer keeps them in the catbird seat. The media will continue to block the truth from the people 24/7.

I apologize if I tried to cover too much ground here but this situation we are in has matured for well over a century and we need to see how we got here to understand, if we survive, how to prevent a new set of snakes from selling us snake oil in the future.

Feel free to pass all or any part of this rant with or without attribution. Everything I wrote can be researched free on the internet if you want to post links about horse plagues, NASA correspondence with utilities, Henry Ford and hemp plastic, Rockefeller chicanery, U.S. solar panel development reasons, Americans starving while the bomb was being developed, Bernays propaganda tools, etc.

A.G. Gelbert

[agelbert]

@Reverse Engineer,

Here it is:

We are cursed with a rather effective propaganda machine that defends the status quo and works mightily to provide allegedly iron clad arguments exposing our desperate dependence on fossil fuels and the enormous debt we owe to them for our ‘wonderful civilization’. The media has cleverly weaved fact and fiction to present plausible arguments against the practicality of going cold turkey on fossil fuels and 100% on renewables. Not one word about the fact that fossil fuels are easy to meter and conveniently provide a constant revenue stream for the rich along with governmental control of a populace that simply cannot move or function without daily use of fossil fuels ever seems to be mentioned. Not one word about how renewables cannot be metered or taxed easily and how that feature gives everyone a large degree of independence aand flexibility in disaster situations to help themselves or a less fortunate neighbor is mentioned. On the other hand, the continuous and vociferous denial of the link between fossil fuels and environmental problems, regardless of scientific concensus on this very real link, never seems to go away either.
The actual history of the industrial revolution involving some very brutal measures to coerce humans to abandon horses, as only one of many coercive measures, for tranportation and farming are always ignored and replaced with a stream of pejorative comments about horse dung in big cities. People did not want to get rid of their horses! I am not simply talking about city ordinances and fines targeting horses. Right around 1865 a big push began to sell farm machinery. Amazingly, a huge horse plague hit the U.S. that year that killed a massive amount of horses. No explanation beyond “Civil War stress” blarney was ever given. These horses were not just city horses in population centers but out in the country as well. The move to horseless carriages began on the farm with steam power and hydrocarbon lubricants. The automibile came later along with the bone cancer. Bone cancer from the original automoblie fuel, benzene, is seldom mentioned by the media and apparently is considered no big deal in comparison to horse shit odor.
Moving on to the early 20th century, Rockefeller has a waste product in his refinery cracking towers (after separating all those great heavy and light lubricants) called gasolene and he talks Henry Ford into modifying the carburators to run on it. Of course the ‘minor’ problem with benzene fuel may have helped make the switch. There were electric cars on the road at the time. Cleveland had wind generators creating electricity at that time! You’ll never guess what happened to them and the electric trolleys all over many towns in the USA.
So, enough of that. Everyone here knows how predatory capitalism attempts to game the system to achieve price control and a monopoly. Once much more efficient and sustainable technologies are shoved aside by hook or by crook, the distorted and mendacious meme that our current technology is the result of friendly capitalist competition in the ‘free market’ is pushed. Predation occurs followed by propaganda versions of history. That is the real history of the industrial revolution in regard to our choices of energy production. Renewables got squeezed out, not because they couldn’t compete favorably, but because the pollution and health costs of fossil fuels got ‘externalized’. Along the way, the independence of the, mostly agrarian, American in energy production and use was crushed. A love afffair with the car was fostered to the point that in the late 1920’s more Americans had cars than flush toilets. Of course they were better off, ecologically speaking, without flush toilets, but the point is the job of selling Americans on fossil fuels was a done deal by that time. So please remember that nobody was doing us any favors, like the media wants to claim; they were selling us something in order to concentrate wealth and power in a few hands. They were using us as a cash cow to the point of introducing planned obsolecence, rampant consumerism to keep the factories going and simultaneously thwarting moves to sustainability like Henry Ford’s plan to make cars out of hemp plastic in the early1940s. We like new stuff and are always looking for the latest model year of the car or whatever because we have been manipulated by experts to do so. It has absolutely nothing to do with our health, well being or happiness. Bernays really messed us up.
Fast forward to the present where the witches brew of ecological harm brought about by industrialization has caught up with us. And NOW, all of a sudden, we just can’t live without all this ‘wonderful’ energy packed fossil fuel economy. Methinks somebody wants to slap a guilt trip on the chumps so they agree to clean up the mess even though the media keeps claiming there isn’t really that much of a mess. We, the masses, are accused of being wasteful pigs that bred like rats thanks to fossil fuels.

Where to begin? How about the fact that family size has been decreasing, not increasing, througout the industrial revolution? That’s right. The numbers were baked in by 1800 and the wars slowed them down a bit. Louis Pasteur and Lister did a hell of a lot more to create our present population ‘problem’ than fossil fuels. Most of the key scientific advancements in medicine were not exactly high tech and fossil fuel dependent. A human makes it past 5 years of age and he has a huge chance of living out his 3 score and ten. It was the enormous reduction in infant mortality brought about by antiseptic procedures that caused the population explosion, not fossil fuels. It’s a stretch to say that fossil fuels alowed people to obtain clean water to wash their hands before delivering a baby, but I’m sure the media verbal contortionists would toss it out there to further muddy the waters of historical truth. The much touted plumbing advancements that require machinery and factories powered by fossil fuels, while they did reduce disease in population centers and prolonged life, were setting us up for more fossil fuel use through improper humanure handling. I maintain that the main cause of our population explosion is knowledge of disease microbes, their propagation methods and our changes in hygiene as a result.

What about all this waste we now produce that we have been folded, spindled and mentally mutilated through Freud’s nephew Wall Street amygdala reptilian brain control propaganda? They set us up and now WE are the bad guys? They want us to shop till we drop and WE are the problem? And how much ‘waste’ do WE actually produce on a carbon footprint basis compared to the global 1%? Well, Senator Bernie Sanders stated recently that less than 1% of the U.S. owns about 40% of the assets (I’m not talking about income increases although they have gotten the lion’s share over the last ten years as well). Yes, I know he talks about banks too but he mentions those 400 or so elite families every now and then. Now figure the carbon footprint of those people and compare it with the rest of us. All those endless films about diapers, milk gallons and so on used in our middle class lifetimes with the obligatory landfill mountains thrown in are nothing compared with the horrendous and gigantic amount of crap these families generate. Isn’t it amazing that when it comes to pollution and wasteful habits, we are ‘all in this together’? No attempt is made to segregate out the worst offenders. On the contrary, the poor and middle class are constantly demonized as being irresponsible useless eaters. It’s all quite Orwellian on the part of the media.

But yeah, we do waste and we have a waste problem that is real so let’s talk about it.

Waste can certainly destroy a society, species or most of the ecosphere if, as many point out, we continue with the ridiculous paradigm that we can industrially do multi-generational damage to the life support systems humans depend on and not define this as suicide. It’s almost like our nuclear nuts and oil fetish fucks have morphed us into a mass version of the heaven’s gate cult. Those people thought they could hitch a ride on a comet by commiting suicide. Every single step in industrializaton has, for anyone willing to do the TOTAL math, NOT been ecospherically cost effective. The fact that a small group of humans has temporarily benefited at the expense of the overwhelming majority of humans and all other earthlings right now, not to mention the obvious acceleration in environmental degradation promising a super bleak future, seems to go right over the heads of way to many otherwise intelligent people. Just like the heaven’s gate cult, people are addicted to a dream that never was, PERIOD.
All talk about this and that from our youth and how much fun we all had and how nostalgic we are for those nicer times is the exact same phenomenum of a drug addict longing for his first high.
LISTEN UP! We are a function of the ecosphere. We DO NOT, despite all the best propaganda efforts of our scientific community, understand the mechanism of the ecosphere sufficently to tinker with it, let alone wantonly pollute it with “externalisms”. EXTERNALISMS!? That’s just some economist bullshit! There are NO externalisms inside the life bubble called the ecosphere; it just takes a while to catch up with you when you mine, bomb and toxify with chemicals NIMBY areas for a few centuries.
We are there and yet our scientific community and our financial community and our political wheeler and dealer con-artists with their new techno death toys and ‘miracle’ GMO crops and drug after drug to replace patent expirations, new ripoff scams, more war profiteering and emotional button pushing divide and conquer racist crap just DO NOT GET IT (or maybe they do get it and are insanely trying to make hay out of it).
The people in charge of our dysfunctional clusterfuck are akin to that psycho Whiteapple that led the heaven’s gate cult. They will not change to a sustainable paradigm because THAT requires subordination to the reality that we are a product of the ecosphere and the humble acceptance that we do not understand it yet so, until we do, we must henceforth emulate natural processes of cradle to grave recycling in all industrial technology and outlaw destructive activities like war or perish.
No, they prefer to insanely reduce the world population by environmental collapse in the ridiculous la-la land elite hope that then the ecosphere will cure itself and they can continue their merry resource extraction paradigm as if nothing happened. It won’t work because these reductionist morons in power with their scientific priesthood of techno nut balls are so full of pride from all their tremendous ‘contributions’ over the last two centuries that they cannot see the monstrous downside of the technology explosion and that, yes, technology can be developed and used in an environmentally friendly manner. They don’t want to do the work. They are supremely irresponsible and supremely greedy and incredibly stupid.

Instead of doing a rethink, they are just flooring the accelerator and increasing their propaganda blitz.

I am not against technology. Since about 1970 we have had the knowledge to use technology to produce an environmentally friendly and sustainable society free of poisons in food and industry in the scientific literature. It has been deliberately supressed time and time again. Imagine what it cost to cover the country with roads and power lines. Well, decentralized power, food and transportation would cost a hell of a lot less. It’s total bullshit that we can’t do this or that we are ‘hooked’ on oil or nuclear or natural gas. We could have switched away decades ago.
In the 70s NASA used solar panels to bring electricity to a Navajo community which was not served by the local electric utilities in a southwestern state. It worked great and the utilities went ballistic. They wrote to NASA requesting the solar panel project be stopped because, even though those areas targeted by NASA were not adequately served by the utilities, the fossil fuel free energy would ‘force’ the utilities to lower their rates. NASA stopped the project.

The planet earth DOES NOT have an energy crisis. For you engineering types out there, just do the math on the energy required daily to lift trillions of tons of water vapor out of the rivers, lakes and oceans and deposit this at higher elevations in the form of rain and then try to tell me about how much it COSTS (ZERO!) and how we are running out of energy.
What the planet earth has, is a HUMAN GREED AND STUPIDITY crisis among the 1%.
But suppose we could dispense with all the agenda laced perjorative propaganda about renewables, agree to clean up the planet and eliminate fossil fuel, nuclear and any other kind of poisonous technology because we have no other choice?

Can it be done? Yes. Will it be done? Probably not. I just heard today (June 11, 2012) on the Thom Hartmann show that phytoplankton replacement in a bay in Maine has dropped 500% over a period of a decade or so. The phenomenum has now been confirmed as occurring globally. Phytoplankton produce approximately 50% of the oxygen on this planet through photosynthesis. They are not regenerating adequately because increased ppm of CO2 (now 400 ppm) is acidifying the oceans and killing them. Can the elite be so insane that they plan to meter our oxygen? I hope not.
At any rate, we must accept that the fossil fuel economy is not an exercise in fun conveniences or a requirement to maintain ‘civilization’; it’s killing our oxygen supply now as well. We must switch to renewables.

In regard to available energy to maintain some level of ‘civilization’ with renewables, when I mentioned the world evaporation energy example, I wasn’t alluding to energy collection through hydroelectric power (although dams certainly help as long as salmon runs aren’t thwarted), but using this vast amount of energy available free to shed light on the scientifically bankrupt view of quantifying energy by using bomb calorimeters like we did in college and energy mass per mole in rapid oxidation. Nature has never done it that way. Everything in our culture always wants to scale up a process or else judge it as wanting. That is assbackwards from a sustainable biological process point of view. In our bodies, the reason we have enzymes lowering the energy of activation in myriad chemical reactions occurring per second is to keep us from overheating and/or rapid ph changes that would kill us but the fact is that the enzymes accomplish a task with less energy than a straight forward math computation of the chemical reaction energy requires. Capillary processes in us are unconcerned with “stream head'” like scientists or engineers are when they want to build a dam yet they work just fine manipulating Bernoulli forces to use the absolute minimum energy needed to move that blood so the heart pump doesn’t have to work as hard against vessel friction and pressure changes.
In our techno-love affair, everything we do is geared to centralized and maximum power. For example we really do not need a lot of stream head to power a house because we can gradually pump water up to a reservoir in our house to give us electricity on demand. But the techno math says you need X amount of head for Y amount of kilowatts. That’s only true if you need all of that all the time. Sure, not everyone lives by a river or a stream but that is simply a small example. A giant Sequoia pumps over one hundred gallons of water hundreds of feet up every day through transpiration. The tracheal elements can stretch water molecules 27 atmospheres as long as the vacuum holds. The technology to make artificial tree water pumps has been around for decades but our society is STUCK on the energy density per mole fixation like a teenager that wants a hot car to ride to school instead of a small electric rechargable scooter.

Have you heard about the roaring forties? That’s an area of latitude in the oceans of the southern hemisphere that is always turbulent. They alone could power the world’s energy demands after a ten year installation of wave and undersea current power collection systems that are already being deployed off of England and Scotland. In regard to corrosion issues with sea water and maintenance of deep water (massive pressures to deal with), I only ask that you consider technology equivalence hurdles that have long since been surmounted in nuclear power plants (the ultimate in corrosion challenges including hydrogen embrittlement that is not present with sea water) and oil undersea pipelines (pump sea water to a land reservoir and start the power cables from there as a cost effective low maintenance option). At present, ocean oil rigs (which are mostly metal) have sacrificial anodes placed on them so electrolysis in most areas is thwarted. The anodes are replaced as they are used up. And remember all we have learned through space exploration about metallurgy, high temperature insulation during re-entry and don’t forget microwave power transmission technology. We can do all this stuff. It’s really not as hard as putting a robot vehicle on Mars or building a space station in orbit. It’s telling that Einstein described the photoelectric effect at the very beginning of the 20th century but the US government has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to develop solar panels (we only did it when we needed them in space) but it spent a fortune on the development of the bomb in the 30s while a large part of our populace was going hungry. Have you ever wondered why the oil lobby never attacks nuclear power but spares no expense to demonize renewables with disengenuous propaganda and mendacity? Think about that a while. If you come to the conclusion that the nuclear power plants were put out there to make bomb material and get you to pay for it and were never, ever considered a viable alternative to fossil fuels for the production of electricity or a serious source of oil lobby competition, you win the prize.

There is also no excuse whatsoever for not using solar and electric power to run every single ship in the ocean. It would be child’s play to switch all automobiles and trucks to full electric as long we had geothermal, wind, tide and ocean current derived power 24/7, not to mention solar panels. Do you know what oil tankers do after they offload the oil? They fill huge portions of the holds with sea water (for ballast) and then dump it when they get back to reload with oil. This massive pollution goes on day in and day out. We have a guaranteed continuous oil spill as long as we have a fossil fuel ocean tanker economy. As for fertilizers and food production machinery requiring a massive amount of fossil fuels to feed 7 billlion humans, the fact is that using decentralized permaculture with humanure (after appropriate and low tech local processing to avoid disease pathogens) along with greenhouse technology for nordic climates can replace the fossil fuel required to run tractors, make fertilizer and insecticides and herbicides. I mention farm machinery because there is increasing evidence that plowing needs to be replaced by non-plowing with perennial crops in order to stop the massive top soil loss and lowered nutrition of crop yield (they look the same but don’t have the same nutritional content). Other posters here are up on humanure and they are right. I recommend anyone repulsed by this to think again. Feces are an inseparable part of being human and it’s high time we stopped with this Victorian idiocy of seeing it as bad stuff; it’s part of our salvation as a species. An added plus with humanure through the avoidance of chemical fertilizers is no more ocean dead zones and massive top soil degradation. Also the energy and water savings in not pumping human waste to be treated with chemicals (made with fossil fuels) in a sewage treatment plant would save billons of dollars.

Examples of how renewables can switch us off of fossil fuels quickly:
http://www.euronews.com/2012/05/27/germany-breaks-solar-energy-record
http://www.euronews.com/2012/06/06/solar-plane-completes-maiden-intercontinental-flight
http://www.euronews.com/2012/03/05/sea-solution-to-future-energy-needs
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/renewableenergy/3535012/Ocean-currents-can-power-the-world-say-scientists.html

Pelamis wave power device that looks like a giant snake:
http://www.weirdlyodd.com/10-renewable-energy-sources/

Zero energy balance hotel:
http://www.euronews.com/2012/05/16/go-green-get-growing

I think this can be done in TEN years, not forty:
http://www.euronews.com/2012/05/18/in-40-years-every-home-every-building-will-be-a-power-plant-says-jeremy-rifki

Growing food and the fossil fuel ‘requirement’ is a dependency created by the fossil fuel industry but we CAN shake that dependency without mass starvation and depopulation:
http://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/85/1/Fuel-and-food.html

“The strategic goal of biofuel is to supplement or even replace fossil fuels, the amount of which is constantly and rapidly diminishing.”
haitireconstruction.ning.com/page/biofuel-1

I’ve already mentioned my views on the population explosion and its causes but I wish to point out how the oil lobby has tried to make fossil fuel brownie points out of it.

Remember the green revolution of the 60s, 70s and 80s that supposedly caused the population explosion? The numbers are in. The yields are not statistically different with all the fossil fuel fertilizer, herbicides and insecticides than without them. The green revolution is a lie fostered by, you guessed it, the fossil fuel lobby. Their only valid claim is the fuel for machinery which now turns out to lower crop nutrition from top soil plowing degradation. This degradation is caused by a combination of chemical fertilizers and plowing (bare soil tends to blow away when dry or erode when wet) which leaches the soil of trace minerals needed to produce nutritious and tasty as opposed to bland crops. The way things stand right now, agricultural guidelines in the U.S. state that it’s okay to lose 4 tons of top soil per acre per year from ‘modern’ farming techniques. The government claims it is the price we pay for high ‘yields’. Are you comfortable with that? I’m not. Considering top soil regeneration takes over 100 years, I cannot believe we are doing anything but losing massive amounts every year.

And last but not least, the militaries of the world are the most voracious users of fossil fuel. We sure as hell do not need them to keep 7 billion fed and clothed. The U.S. Navy, in particular, has the top spot as fossil fuel user AND polluter.

We need gradual, decentralized trickle charge or slow pumping energy storage systems for sustainable humanity. Anything else is not viable for the planet. If we want to zip around at high speed and be able to have instant this and that, yes we have an energy crisis. If we want to emulate biological processes and eschew the love affair with higher energy density per mole of fossil and or nuclear poisons killing the planet, we don’t have an energy crisis.

Nature paces everything; so should we.

All that said, there is the 1% with their hubris and arrogance and there is the rest of humanity. The agenda of the 1% is a tad different from the rest of us.
I agree the knockdown is coming. The people controlling the levers of innovation and adaptation in our governments and the elite parasites that own them want this knockdown so it will come. I maintain that the false notion of a causal relationship between a large population and a polluted, unsustainable, fossil fuel dependent human society is the driving force behind this elite desire for a knockdown. The elites are the only truly unsustainable population on this earth because of their mega-carbon footprints. So, in true Wall Street Orwellian fashion, they blame the bulk of the 7 billion humans for THEIR piggery and slavish dependency on fossil fuels.
The 1% that owns our governments loves the predatory resource extraction paradigm despite the fact that some of them probably suspect that it will cause a population knockdown, not from lack of fossil fuels, but from environmental collapse. Billions of humans dying is considered a good thing by the 1%. They think it will solve the world’s environmental problems and provide a more manageable population of slaves. The 1% probably grumble about minimum gene pool diversity species required in order to perpetuate homo sapiens. The 1% think robots will take care of all the ‘important’ work while medical technology available to the 1% will provide them with 150 year plus lifetimes. They are wrong and they are the cancer that is destroying humanity.

There’s a way to clean up this world and live sustainably. Killing off several billion is a straw man. It’s typical elite bullshit adding two an two and getting whatever answer keeps them in the catbird seat. The media will continue to block the truth from the people 24/7.

I apologize if I tried to cover too much ground here but this situation we are in has matured for well over a century and we need to see how we got here to understand, if we survive, how to prevent a new set of snakes from selling us snake oil in the future.

Feel free to pass all or any part of this rant with or without attribution. Everything I wrote can be researched free on the internet if you want to post links about horse plagues, NASA correspondence with utilities, Henry Ford and hemp plastic, Rockefeller chicanery, U.S. solar panel development reasons, Americans starving while the bomb was being developed, Bernays propaganda tools, etc.

A.G. Gelbert

[agelbert]

@Reverse Engineer,
Okay. Give me a day or so to write the thing up with a sort of pro and con format. As you may have noticed, my editing skills suffer from typos and misspellings so feel free to edit out the mistakes that I miss. My eyes are not as good as they once were.

I’ll get back to you.

[agelbert]

@Reverse Engineer,
I agree with much of Peter’s outlook.

In regard to corrosion issues with sea water and maintenace of deep water (massive pressures to deal with), I only ask that you consider technology equivalence hurdles that have long since been surmounted in nuclear power plants (the ultimate in corrosion challenges including hydrogen embrittlement that is not present with sea water) and oil undersea pipelines (pump sea water to a land reservoir and start the power cables from there as a cost effective low maintenace option). And remember all we have learned through space exploration about metallurgy, high temperature insulation during re-entry and don’t forget microwave power transmission technology. We can do all this stuff. It’s really not as hard as putting a robot vehicle on Mars or building a space station in orbit.

[agelbert]

@Reverse Engineer,
I agree the knock down is coming. The people controlling the levers of innovation and adaptation in our governments and the elite parasites that own them want this knock down so it will come. I maintain that the false notion of a a causal relationship between a large population and a polluted, unsustainable, fossil fuel dependent human society is the driving force behind this elite desire for a knock down. The elites are the only truly unsustainable population on this earth because of their mega-carbon footprints. So, in true Wall Street Orwellian fashion, they blame the bulk of the 7B for THEIR piggery and slavish dependency on fossil fuels.

There’s a way; there simply is a fossil fuel and nuclear bullshit blitz 24/7 to block that way.

Examples of how it can and is being done:
https://www.euronews.com/2012/05/27/germany-breaks-solar-energy-record
https://www.euronews.com/2012/06/06/solar-plane-completes-maiden-intercontinental-flight
https://www.euronews.com/2012/03/05/sea-solution-to-future-energy-needs
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/renewableenergy/3535012/Ocean-currents-can-power-the-world-say-scientists.html

Pelamis wave power device that looks like a giant snake:
https://www.weirdlyodd.com/10-renewable-energy-sources/

Zero energy balance hotel:
https://www.euronews.com/2012/05/16/go-green-get-growing

I think this can be done in TEN years, not forty:
https://www.euronews.com/2012/05/18/in-40-years-every-home-every-building-will-be-a-power-plant-says-jeremy-rifki

And about growing food and the fossil fuel ‘requirement’. The dependency was created by the fossil fuel industry but we CAN shake that dependency without mass starvation and depopulation:
https://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/85/1/Fuel-and-food.html

“The strategic goal of biofuel is to supplement or even replace fossil fuels, the amount of which is constantly and rapidly diminishing.”
https://haitireconstruction.ning.com/page/biofuel-1

[agelbert]

@Reverse Engineer,
I appreciate your 90% approval of my thoughts. I enjoy your prolific writing and respect your views. I wish I had that kind of energy.
I used the world evaporation energy example, not as a potential source of hydroelectric power (although dams certainly help as long as salmon runs aren’t thwarted), but as an example of the scientifically bankrupt view of quantifying energy by using bomb calorimeters like we did in college and energy mass per mole in rapid oxidation. Nature has never done it that way. Everything in our culture always wants to scale up a process or else judge it as wanting. That is assbackwards from a sustainable biological process point of view. In our bodies, the reason we have enzymes lowering the energy of activation in myriad chemical reactions occurring per second is to keep us from overheating and/or rapid ph changes that would kill us. Capillary processes in us are unconcerned with “stream head'” like scientists or engineers are when they want to build a dam yet they work just fine manipulating Bernoulli forces to use the absolute minimum energy needed to move that blood so the heart pump doesn’t have to work as hard against vessel friction and pressure changes. Don’t you see? In our techno-love affair, everything we do is geared to centralized and maximum power. For example we really do not need a lot of stream head to power a house because we can gradually pump water up to a reservoir in our house to give us electricity on demand. But the techno math says you need X amount of head for Y amount of kilowatts. That’s only true if you need all of that all the time. Sure, not everyone lives by a river or a stream but that is simply a small example. A giant Sequoia pumps over one hundred gallons of water hundreds of feet up every day through transpiration. The tracheal elements can stretch water molecules 27 atmospheres as long as the vacuum holds. The technology to make these artificial trees has been around for decades but our society is STUCK on energy density per mole fixation like a teenager that wants a hot car to ride to school instead of a small electric rechargable scooter.
You say that 7B humans rely on fossil fuel to exist. That’s what the fossil fuel lobby wants us all to believe. It’s not true.
Have you ever heard of the roaring forties? That’s an area of latitude in the oceans of the southern hemisphere that is always turbulent. They alone could power the world’s energy demands after a ten year installation of wave and undersea current power collection systems that are already being deployed off of England and Scotland. There is also no excuse whatsoever for not using solar and electric power to run every single ship in the ocean. It would be child’s play to switch all automobiles and trucks to full electric as long we had geothermal, wind, tide and ocean current derived power 24/7, not to mention solar panels. Do you know what oil tankers do after they offload the oil? They fill huge portions of the holds with sea water and then dump it when they get back to reload with oil. This massive pollution goes on day in and day out. We have a guaranteed continuous oil spill as long as we have a fossil fuel ocean tanker economy. As for fertilizers and food production machinery requiring a massive amount of fossil fuels to feed those 7B, the fact is that using decentralized permaculture with humanure (after appropriate and low tech local processing to avoid disease pathogens) along with greenhouse technology for nordic climates can replace the fossil fuel required to run tractors, make fertilizer and insecticides and herbicides. I mention farm machinery because there is increasing evidence that plowing needs to be replaced by non-plowing with perennial crops in order to stop the massive top soil loss and lowered nutrition of crop yield (they look the same but don’t have the same nutritional content) I have an article somewhere with the world numbers on that. I’ll get it for you if you want. A plus to avoiding chemical fertilizers is no more ocean dead zones and massive top soil degradation now occurring. Also the energy and water savings in not pumping human waste to be treated with chemicals (made with fossil fuels) in a sewage treatment plant would save billons of dollars.
Remember the green revolution of the 60s, 70s and 80s that supposedly caused the population explosion? The numbers are in. The yields are not statisically different with all the fossil fuel ferilizer, herbicides and insecticides than without them. The green revolution is a lie fostered by, you guessed, the fossil fuel lobby. Their only valid claim is the fuel for machinery which now turns out to lower crop nutrition from top soil plowing degradation.

And last but not least, the militaries of the world are the most voracious users of fossil fuel. We sure as hell do not need them to keep the 7B fed and clothed.

We need gradual, decentralized trickle charge or slow pumping energy storage systems for sustainable humanity. Anything else is not viable for the planet. If we want to zip around at high speed and be able to have instant this and that, yes we have an energy crisis. If we want to emulate biological processes and eschew the love affair with higher energy density per mole of fossil and or nuclear poisons killing the planet, we don’t have an energy crisis.

Nature paces everything; so should we.

[agelbert]

Waste can certainly destroy a society, species or most of the ecosphere is, as other posters have pointed out, we continue with the ridiculous paradigm that we can industrially do multi-generational damage to the life support systems humans depend on and not define this as suicide. It’s almost like our nuclear nuts and oil fetish fucks have morphed us into a mass version of the heaven’s gate cult. Those people thought they could hitch a ride on a comet by commiting suicide. Every single step in industrializaton has, for anyone willing to do the TOTAL math, NOT been ecospherically cost effective. The fact that a small group of humans has temporarily benefited at the expense of the overwhelming majority of humans and all other earthlings right now, not to mention the obvious acceleration in environmental degradation promising a super bleak future, seems to go right over the heads of way to many otherwise intelligent people. Just like the heaven’s gate cult, people are addicted to a dream that never was, PERIOD.
All this talk about this and that from our youth and how much fun we all had and how nostalgic we are for those nicer times is the exact same phenomenum of a drug addict longing for his first high.
LISTEN UP! We are a function of the ecosphere. We DO NOT, despite all the best propaganda efforts of our scientific community, understand the mechanism of the ecosphere sufficently to tinker with it, let alone wantonly pollute it with “externalisms”. EXTERNALISMS!? That’s just some economist bullshit! There are NO externalisms inside the life bubble called the ecosphere; it just takes a while to catch up with you when you mine, bomb and toxify with chemicals NIMBY areas for a few centuries.
We are there and yet our scientific community and our financial community and our political wheeler and dealer con-artists with their new techno death toys and ‘miracle’ GMO crops and drug after drug to replace patent expirations, new ripoff scams, more war profiteering and emotional button pushing divide and conquer racist crap just DO NOT GET IT.
The people in charge of our dysfunctional clusterfuck are akin to that psycho Whiteapple that led the heaven’s gate cult. They will not change to a sustainable paradigm because THAT requires subordination to the reality that we are a product of the ecosphere and the humble acceptance that we do not understand yet so we must henceforth emulate natural processes of cradle to grave recycling in all industrialization and outlaw destructive activities like war or perish.
No, they prefer to insanely reduce the word population by environmental collapse in the ridiculous la-la land elite hope that then the ecosphere will cure itself and they can continue their merry resource extraction paradigm as if nothing happened. It won’t work because these reductionist morons in power with their scientific priesthood of techno nut balls are so full of pride from all their tremendous ‘contributions’ over the last two centuries that they cannot see the monstrous downside of the teschnology explosion and that, yes, technology can be developed and used in an environmentally friendly manner. They don’t want to do the work. They are supremely irresponsible and supremely greedy and incredibly stupid.

Instead of doing a rethink, they are just flooring the accelerator and increasing their propaganda blitz.

And for those who might say I am a deep ecologist, I say there is proof that technology can bring us an environmentally friendly and sustainable society free of poisons in food and industry present in the literature since 1970. It has been deliberately supressed time and time again. Imagine what it cost to cover the country with roads and power lines. Well, decentralized power, food and transportation would cost a hell of a lot less. It’s total bullshit that we can’t do this or that we are ‘hooked’ on oil or nuclear or natural gas. We could have switched away decades ago. The planet earth DOES NOT have an energy crisis. For you engineering types out there, just do the math on the energy required daily to lift trillions of tons of water vapor out of the rivers, lakes and oceans and deposit this at higher elevations in the form of rain and then try to tell me about how much it COSTS (ZERO!) and how we are running out of energy.
What the planet earth has, is a HUMAN GREED AND STUPIDITY crisis.

[agelbert]

Ladies and Gentlemen, please grasp firmly your handbaskets.
Also, expect a rather exponential increase in temperature.

[agelbert]

@Karpatok in regard to the Carpathian mountains.
Here’s the greatest problem with the control of mountainous territory. Human soldiers, despite modern technology, are limited by the physics of ballistic trajectories in bullets. When you shoot horizontally, as in flat terrain warfare or policing conquered territory, the gunsite, if you have one, can be counted on for accuracy as to bullet shot groups. Them moment you have to change the angle up or down, the accuracy goes to hell. A bullet going upwards has a continuous ‘drop derivative’ (as in graphical calculus) which is different for every slight angle change. Shooting downhill is just as problematic for accuracy. Couple that with the ability of the locals to scope out your position routinely without drones or anything more high tech than a pair of binoculars and the invading army remains continuously at a disadvantage. The drain in resources in mega firepower and aerial platforms just to keep from getting overrun (forget controlling a large amount of territory) is massive and demoralizing. That’s one of the reasons that mainly the US but also the rest of NATO has resorted to nazi terror tactics out of shear frustration. They can’t ‘pacify’ the place so they terrorize it.
It still won’t work.

In addition to the above, mountains have lots of good hiding places. Every change in elevation is a new ball game the invading army has to deal with.

As for the other argument made here that the NATO countries will continue to fund this imperialism no matter what, I give you the fact that the Baltic Dry Index began tanking severelyin January. The last time that happened was about 9 months before the 2008 debacle.This time, it’s much worse because our debt has almost doubled since 2008. I don’t think the funny money trick is going to work this time around.

[agelbert]

There may be a lot of money to be STOLEN or DEFRAUDED or COERCED from the people in NATO countries but there actually isn’t a PENNY to be “made” out of the war profiteering scam in Afghanistan. The countries involved, especially the corporate front called the US government, is so far in debt that our fiat la-la-land money is losing credibility.
Don’t worry about Afghanistan and its’ people. They’ll be there long after we are gone. I had the misfortune to spend a little less than a year in the USMA at West Point as a cadet many years ago. I was taught military strategy. The bottom line to land warfare is NOT taking the terrain; it is controlling it after you take it. THAT makes a war effort cost effective or ruinous depending on many factors. The MAIN factor is physical terrain. A relatively flat area, regardless of weather, is easy to control and rape for corporate spoils. Mountainous terrain, cold weather areas being the most difficult, are never cost effective. Even tropical mountainous areas are a nightmare for armies to control for corporate exploitation. I give you Switzerland versus Austria (yes Austria has some high mountains BUT the population lives in the valleys and a large part of the country is not mountainous). Lebensraum would have included Switzerland if it would have been easy. Annexing Austria was easy.You don’t really believe the Swiss are just too powerful to be invaded, do you? How about New Guinea? The Japanese could never subdue this tropical and extremely mountainous island despite the lack of cold weather. The people there even now live relatively free lives (in the interior) growing and exporting their coffee from mountain airstrips.

You cannot EVER control Afghanistan, no matter how many drones , robots and troops you throw at it. It’s OVER there for NATO because ALL the NATO countries cannot squeeze more money out of their people due to the economic crisis enveloping them. And forget the police state tactics at home to force us to fund the war(s). No jobs = no money to be robbed, period.
I give it a year at the most. Always remember that, unless a country is attacked, every penny of swag going to war ‘profiteering’ (profit for a tiny group of psychopaths) is discretionary. Even the current effort to buy enough corrupt bastards in Afghanistan in order to allow ‘profitable’ exploitation of the drug and mineral resources is doomed to failure because the Russians and the Chinese are doing to us what we did to the Russians back in the 1980s. The Russians learned their lesson and the Chinese are funding businesses where the Afghanis are in control. They aren’t using the imperialist mafia model (demanding a huge percentage of the ‘take’ so as to control Afghanis through debt) and the Adghanis understand that.

The PR and flag waving bullshit will continue of course, but the fact is that it’s all over but the troop transport aircraft schedule.

[agelbert]

reposted from doomsteader article “Civilization, Really?” because I believe it is germane here as well.

The problem Freud had is that his outlook was anthropomorphic.

Take this paragraph, for example:

“Freud’s perspective is psychological, not philosophical and moral. He is less interested in what we should do than what we do in fact do, though he framed the questions as to whether or not we should regard civilization as a benefit or harm. This “should” however, is less a moral should than an investigation to see if this course of action is likely to lead to more or less happiness. Freud seems not to believe that his choice of happiness — the avoidance of pain and the achievement of pleasure — is a value. Rather, this need is implanted in us by nature in the deepest instincts with which we have evolved.”

Freud’s perpective is anthropomorphic rather than psychological. His claim of objectivity and disinterest in morality (i.e. the “rightness” or “wrongness” of some human behavior) is false because, as you pointed out, he is very interested in whether our actions produce a “benefit” or a “harm” in the form of generally accepted cultural practices in civilization.

Since he has a clear axe to grind against the golden rule because of the alleged unhappiness that the mythical super-ego visits on humans when they can’t give their aggressive/sexual nature full reign, it is normal and expected that would eschew morality as a positive influence on humans. He is clearly at odds with Aristotle who said that happiness cannot be directly achieved but can be obtained only through a life of virtue. Well, now we know where aggressive and sexual drives and behavior originate in the brain (amygdala) and where the “super-ego” resides as well (prefrontal cortex). We understand the biochemistry of aggression, sex and delayed gratification as well as feelings of ‘wellbeing’ and ‘happiness’.
The reality of using the basest instincts of humans to manipulate their purchasing habits (Freud’s nephew) and distract them through dog and pony shows so they can be scammed into wars and economic slavery does not mean that Freud was accurate or objective in his search for the formula for human happiness (I guess he would call it a non-neurotic or well adjusted existence).

What he needed to do and what we must do now is look at human existence as a function (as in mathematics) of the ecosphere. The fact that we are a product of the ecosphere requires us to recognize that we cannot view our happiness or viability separately from the viability of the ecosphere. If it’s viable, it is right. If it’s not viable, it is wrong. Science is the search for truth. The objective truth of the ecosystem components deems it WRONG to use resources in such a way that you diminish or destroy a portion of the ecosphere. The only RIGHT behavior for humans and their civilization is a behavior that recycles ALL resource extraction and any other human activity so the ecosphere remains in balance.

Our self awareness and advanced tool making MUST be accompanied by sustainable practices, period. If they aren’t, as is the present case, we and a large portion of the ecosphere perish because of our incredibly stupid practices.

Freud did something very valuable, however. He made it clear (indirectly, I believe) that we as a species have enormeous difficulty delaying gratification and easily give in to short term gratification. The industrial revolution and the consequent ability to do multi-generational damage to the ecosphere required MORE morality, not amorality. Our civilization needed to make it clear to all its’ membrs that we cannot mess it up for future humans and millions of other species that dwell on this planet because it is suicidal. This required generational level delayed gratification rather than Wall Street mad max resource extraction, war profiteering and I’m okay, you’re okay morality. We now know that giving in to that version of ‘happiness’ in our ‘civilization’ that Freud espouses as the ‘well adjusted’, neurosis free, aggressive, sexual desire driven human must be dumped if we and most of the planet are to survive. We need a world class super-ego, in other words.

A final note. In Freud’s day, the elite were noted, like they are today, for giving lip service to ethics and controlled behavior as well as integrity in business practices but were, in fact, the most conscience free members of society in everything they did from fomenting wars to rampant sexual activity. They were, and are, amygdala controlled people. Freud was just voicing, with great erudition and myriad rationalizations, what his elite group wanted to hear. Well, they heard it and so did Madison Avenue. And that is why, as Ashvin said the other day, things are FUBAR.

[agelbert]

The industrial revolution made mining a seed corn eater of the ecosphere. It’s taken a couple of centuries but this NIMBY poisoning has reached the point where even the most greedy corporation lover blinded by technology resource extraction ‘profits’ is realizing that THEIR IS NO ‘AWAY’.

The hypocrisiy of those nice orderly neighborhoods with their landscaping and gardening beauty while those that live in these privileged (mostly white) households invest in mining ecosphere destroying corporations is breathtaking.

The capacity for self delusion in humans is enough to make one believe we are genetically programmed to seek self destruction while we label it “economic growth”.

The ‘seed corn’ (a viable and productive soil) is almost gone.

[agelbert]

This FUBAR Planetary Clusterfuck is caused by human psychopathic predators that, unlike the predators in nature, are so willfully greedy and stupid that they failed to FOSTER THE HEALTH OF THE PREY POPULATION.

Any successful predator in nature selectively preys on it’s prey population so that the health and reproduction is enhanced. This ensures a continued food supply for the predator and the survival of his species.

Wall Street twisted Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ portion of the Theory of Evolution so out of proportion to reality that they effectively adopted a murder/suicide pact for humanity.

Fucking IDIOTS!

[agelbert]

If it wasn’t clear to those reading what might previous comment means, then let me make it clear.

The present celebration of power and conscienseless predation is not now, or ever has been, about the ‘need’ to abuse fellow human beings in particular and the ecosphere in general in order to extract a profit for some ‘worthy’ element of modern industrialized civilization.

It is absolute and total BS that profit drives all the brutal behavior we are saddled with.

The belief of the elite that they are ‘better’ than the 99% and must keep the 99% poor and devoid of any liesure whatsoever so the 99% never organize against their ‘betters’ is the total unadulterated psychopathic rationale.

Regardless of what the press or anyone else says that the predators are just ‘forced to compete’ or merely ‘profit driven’, nothing could be farther from the truth.

The Calvinists claimed to be Christans but they were, and are, just a propaganda front cloaked in religious piety designed to defend their actual ‘religion’. That ‘religion is the worship of hierarchy and the ‘joy’ of ensuring the slavery (by whatever euphemism they can come up with) of the 99%.

They are sadists, period. Never forget that quote by Calvin used to justify cruelty as necessary for obedience. The 1% will use anything at all, from distorting the survival requirements under the Theory of Evolution that Darwin wrote to make it appear like conscienseless predation was part of it (it never was – in fact predation is very selective and always fosters prey population health in successful species as opposed to the Wall Street bankrupt mentality) to wrapping themselves in religion or patriotism (you don’t seriously believe that giant American flag on the NY Stock Exchange is there because they are patriotic, do you?).

It’s all about sadism and that is all about evil.

They will never stop demanding more and more. That is why we either change to an egalitarian society or we perish.

Do your part. Call BS anytime the attempt ot justify all this monstrous behavior with profit requirements is brought up.

If there was a shred of truth in that argument, the industrial revolution would have undermined the malthusian mindset, rather than reinforcing it.

[agelbert]

This is the great evil of elitism in action as it works diligently to destroy egalitarianism and any effort to provide a decent lifestylre to the 99%.

Way back in the 1860’s this mindset was getting reinforced by banking interests even as the industrial revolution showed a glimmer of hope for the elimination of slavery as a ‘needed’ economic tool. In lieu of celebrating the prospect of improved living conditions for the masses, the elitist bankers and industrialists pushed, with the avid cooperation of Calvinists in church pulpits all over America the following meme:
“The people must always be kept in poverty in order that they may remain obedient.” Calvin

[agelbert]

NASA may be ‘dead’ but the Google billionaires are now investing in an
asteroid mining venture.

It’s a total waste of money from my point of view but that isn’t going to stop the rich predators from ‘doing what they do’.

[agelbert]

Well and truly said. The irony of all this for the ‘too clever by a half’ elite neanderthals is that they think this witches brew of poisons from pollution and empty nutrion designed to kill off the bulk of other humans while the profits keep rolling in won’t destroy them as well.

They just do not get the fact that our problem is realy lack of ethics, not lack of resources or improper tax structures.

Our present clusterf**k is the result of the celebration of unbridled predation with a total rejection of moral considerations in technology and innovation as well as social engineering.

The ‘elite’ are more afflicted by this condition than the masses they are killing slowly. They aren’t simply carriers of the disease; they simply are the main cancer cells that will, of course, die when the ‘body’ they prey on (the biosphere and the earth’s natural resources) dies.

[agelbert]

“At first, many astronomers thought that Sag DEG had already reached an advanced state of destruction, so that a large part of its original matter was already mixed with that of the Milky Way. However, Sag DEG still has coherence as a dispersed elongated ellipse, and appears to move in a roughly polar orbit around the Milky Way as close as 50,000 light-years from the galactic core. Although it may have begun as a ball of stars before falling towards the Milky Way, Sag DEG is now being torn apart by immense tidal forces over hundreds of millions of years. Numerical simulations suggest that stars ripped out from the dwarf would be spread out in a long stellar stream along its path, which were subsequently detected.

However, some astronomers contend that Sag DEG has been in orbit around the Milky Way for some billions of years, and has already orbited it approximately ten times. Its ability to retain some coherence despite such strains would indicate an unusually high concentration of dark matter within that galaxy.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_Dwarf_Elliptical_Galaxy

[agelbert]

If you want to really have some fun with anyone doubting our rather precarious existence in one of the 4 main arms of our galactic disk, mention the dwarf galaxy that intersects with ours to rip away or destroy whole stars and associated planets continuously according to astronomers. It’s called Sagittarius and it snakes around our disk at a 90 degree angle. The last time it was smaking our arm of the galaxy was about about 440 million years ago. It takes almost exactly that long for our arm of the galaxy to spin around to get smacked by the dwarf star ripper. We are due.

Don’t take my word for it. Research and you’ll see that the Sagittarius snake just goes loop de loop through the galactac plain wreaking absolute havoc.

[agelbert]

Ethical behavior in regard to other earthlings of all species isn’t optional, regardless of what economists, physicists or worshippers of unbridled predation believe.

We rediscover ethics or we die out, PERIOD.

[agelbert]

A low impact woodland home
https://www.simondale.net/house/index.htm

Also, please consider geothermal. Don’t be scared off by people telling you how expensive it is to dig the trenches and lay the loops. Why? Because you do it by HAND. it doesn’t matter if it takes you all summer. So what? Geothermal is impervious to anything but a severe earthquake and even then it has to be the kind that slides some terrain one way and another level another way (extremely rare).
With geothermal you can keep the temperature quite comfortable without the high expense of maintaining a ‘tight’ house. Remember that extremely well insulated houses can cause health problems under certain circumstances (some insulation and building materials can emit harmful vapors – also ANY mold development from added moisture can accelerate rapidly because moisture gets trapped in highly insulated material).

Geothermal allows for more normal air exchange. Humans developed in loosely insulated shelters, not hermetically sealed boxes.

[agelbert]

This trend is pretty big.

[HOVENSA Announces Closure of St. Croix Refinery

Company to Work Closely with the U.S. Virgin Islands Government to Ease Transition

ST. CROIX, U.S. Virgin Islands Jan. 18, 2012 — HOVENSA L.L.C. announced today that it will commence shutdown of its refinery on St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. Following the shutdown, the complex will operate as an oil storage terminal.

Losses at the HOVENSA refinery have totaled $1.3 billion in the past three years alone and were projected to continue. These losses have been caused primarily by weakness in demand for refined petroleum products due to the global economic slowdown and the addition of new refining capacity in emerging markets. In the past three years, these factors have caused the closure of approximately 18 refineries in the United States and Europe with capacity totaling more than 2 million barrels of oil per day. In addition, the low price of natural gas in the United States has put HOVENSA, an oil-fueled refinery, at a competitive disadvantage. ]
https://www.hovensa.com/

These ecosphere destroying corporate monsters with the earthquake inducing and land despoiling fracking have actually (and definitely not deliberately) done some good if they can cause refineries to close. I know of a Gulf refinery where the pay was extra because people working in a certain vicinity of the cracking towers would definitely get bone cancer.
I hope the cheap chinese PV cells energy bonanza destroys the natural gas land poisoning as well.

[Author]

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