Explore Posterous

We've come to the end of our ability in this world to increase energy inputs to the global economy.  The routine "growth" in industrial activity and production that has been the basis of our financial arrangements for 200-odd years is no longer possible.  Offsetting this decline in oil energy "input" with "alt.energy" is a dangerous fantasy because it distracts us from the urgent task of making new arrangements for trade, food production, et cetera - the very things that would provide jobs and social roles for our citizens in the future.

     We are seeing a comprehensive failure of leadership in every sector and every level of American life - in politics, business, banking, education, news media, medicine, and the clergy. All are determined to pretend that we can somehow continue the habits and behaviors of the pre peak oil era. They are all unwilling to face reality, and are all engaged in mutually supporting each other's dangerous fantasies.

     If we don't attend to the transformation of American life by downscaling our activities and changing the way they are carried out, and re-localizing them, we will see our society disintegrate - and I use the word "dis-integrate" with purposeful precision. Everything will come apart - our political arrangements, our households, our health and well-being.

James Howard Kunstler on how we've reached the end of growth, and why the politicians are still singing from the old outdated hymn sheet: "a campaign to sustain the unsustainable" and economic "recovery". It's a US-focused piece (as usual from Kunstler), but the critique applies with equal force to the UK's current political trajectory -- and probably to the majority of the developed world.

As concerns grew that a fledgling economic rally stimulated by rock-bottom global interest rates might have run its course, the price of crude oil fell by almost $2 a barrel and speculators shunned riskier markets in emerging countries. Banks were the hardest hit stock market sector, and shares in HSBC and Standard Chartered – which are exposed to a property crash in Dubai – fell heavily.

The chancellor said in heated Commons exchanges that the UK would return to growth at the turn of the year after its weakest performance in the postwar ear, but analysts said the problems in Dubai increased the risks of a double-dip recession in 2010.

"The crisis in Dubai has brought up speculation about how many more skeletons might be left in the cupboard," said Richard McGuire, a strategist at Royal Bank of Canada in London.

As Dubai's years of extravagance come crashing to an abrupt end, the UK and other Western nations stubbornly continue to talk of growth returning before the year is out. It really does seem that those in power have a one-track mind - there is only one solution to the problem caused by excessive growth, and that is more growth...

Perhaps when Copenhagen fails, it will help us to accept that our visions of the future are also skewed by false hope. The mainstream narrative on climate change decrees that if we can get the urgent political agreements in place, and produce enough turbines and electric cars quickly enough, we can "stabilise the climate" and carry on as before. It is a narrative built on an outdated faith in our reach and our technology, and it is rubbing up hard against the buffers of ecological reality.

We have pushed back the forests, denuded the oceans, exhausted the soil, tipped other species into extinction, expanded our population to the point where we can barely feed ourselves, and changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere. There is no quick fix for this, and possibly no fix at all. Our systems are not designed for it. An economy predicated on constant growth cannot be the engine of a change that urgently demands less of it. Democracies predicated on giving their consumer citizens what they want are unable to tell them what they cannot have. And the psychology of a culture that reacts in horror to any pothole on the road to utopia is not well placed to take a different path.

Paul Kingsnorth (of Dark Mountain fame) says "stuff it", eloquently.

An awesome visualisation that appeals to the history/anthropology nerds out there. The circles are directly proportional to the size of each empire, tracking data from 1800 to the present day. As the empires lose states, they break away in a lava-lamp-esque fashion. Thoroughly recommend a ganders (or "look" to you non-British out there)...

Originally sited on Mondeguinho and BoingBoing

Capitalism was able to prolong its existence by subjecting the former communist territories to the process of transforming the real world, nature and working people, into means for capital accumulation. Yet the crises of finance, economy, energy, limited raw materials, food and social security, climate, pollution, extinction of species and so on show clearly that the time for quantitative growth in a limited earth and, therefore, for capitalism, is running out. This system needs growth because by definition capital is property which goes beyond satisfying the needs of the owners to be invested for the accumulation of more property, measured in monetary terms. It will implode as did socialism because it destroys the sources of its own wealth. This will not be changed by governments, kidnapped by capital power, in hectic activism trying to repair the system by socialising the losses of the capital owners who had privatised the profits. This political response to the crisis only serve to postpone the urgently needed general conversion from a destructive paradigm to a life-giving civilisation while the crises with their dramatic ecological and social effects are accelerating.

Some thoughts on the forthcoming death of capitalism seen through the lens of the East German revolution in 1989.