Cars and More Cars …

 

Progress is always cars, more and more cars.

It was a bit shocking to discover John Mauldin does not have a Wikipedia page. Wikipedia pages are the measure of how important individuals and events are in the general scheme of things. Not being on Wikipedia is a bit like being a medieval serf. Gerald Celente and Jeremy Grantham have pages as do Root Boy Slim and Ed Gein. I almost feel sorry for Mauldin because he’s a nobody.

Economic Undertow likewise lacks the all-defining Wikipedia page, but this makes sense. The distance between the cheerleading, relentlessly propagandistic Mauldin and the dour Undertow couldn’t be greater. Mauldin has made a career in marketing, telling everyone within hailing distance we are living in the best of all possible worlds because of technology, that this- or that clever gadget is going to undo the damage we have done to ourselves with all of our other clever gadgets. Stingy Undertow makes a career telling everyone within reach how Mauldin and his ilk are wrong, that the sorts of items Mauldin pitches are actively making everything worse, that given enough Mauldins- and gadgets we will arrive at worst, a literal hellscape nobody in their right mind will wish to inhabit.

Yet Mauldins are multiplying like Mickey Mouse’s broomstick helpers in Fantasia. Time marches on, the shadows lengthen across our endeavors requiring an ever-more insistent chorus of straw man arguments, comforting lies and circular reasoning from fresher, younger voices. ‘Gadget spam’ becomes more persuasive coming from young and glamorous shills for young and glamorous Silicon Valley entrepreneurs … whose job isn’t limited to siphoning as much credit as possible in the shortest amount of time but to Saving the World.

The siphoning occurs when entrepreneurs offer narrative myths as collateral for financing which is diverted to the greatest degree into their own pockets. The gadgets are props.which tend to refer to older, well-established narratives that have become familiar by way of repetition. One reason for the “stagnation of physical technology” is that actual products are secondary to the myth-narrative marketing processes which offers immediate returns.

Saving the World is a standardized myth alongside the science fiction-y ‘city of the future’, a pastiche of memetic clichés retrieved from the waste-basket of Roaring Twenties pop culture:

We all know what the future looks like because we saw it in one of Dad’s old comic books. It ‘s the ideal of urban colonialism: goofy towers and gated neighborhoods for the rich, slums or sidewalk sleeping space for the non-rich. (Graphic from Arconic via InHabitat)

Why I’m So Excited About Solar and Batteries

Atoms technologies might bring back fast productivity growth (They won’t)

By Noah Smith

In the 70s, innovation shifted toward information technology. What had seemed like a constant march toward faster transportation and more useful appliances broke down. When technologists grouse about flying cars or writers ask where our hoverboards are, they’re really talking about the stagnation in physical technology, and the shift in innovation from “atoms” to “bits”. Instead of the Jetsons future, we got the cyberpunk future.

Why did that happen? One potential answer is “regulation”. But while building codes undoubtedly kept us from building as many gleaming Jetsons towers as we might have liked, regulation wasn’t powerful enough to stop us from sprawling out into the exurbs or doubling floor space per person. And the productivity slowdown was global; other countries got bullet trains, but they didn’t get flying cars or robot housekeepers.

‘The Jetsons’ was a cartoon TV show from the early 1960s. ‘Cyberpunk’ is a derivative of 1950s and 60s New Wave science fiction. Our future turns out to be our past, our works are monuments to nostalgia. “Regulation” is a straw man. The practical reasons for  ‘post-modernistic’ urban schemes as well as exurban sprawl is the  spacial requirements of the automobile industry. We don’t have hoverboards or robot housekeepers — or bullet trains for that matter — because we lack the physical, temporal and financial resources to have these things plus a billion cars at the same time. We made the fool’s choice, at every opportunity we’ve chosen cars. We are now living the consequences, one of which is systemic bankruptcy. Empty narratives and Ponzi schemes are all we can afford:

Noah: And there’s no end in sight to this revolution. New fundamental advances like solid state lithium-ion batteries and next-generation solar cells seem within reach, which will kick off another virtuous cycle of deployment, learning curves, and cost decreases.

John: I have written for years that Peak Oil is nonsense. Longtime readers know that I’m a believer in ever-accelerating technological transformation, but I have to admit I did not see the exponential transformation of the drilling business as it is currently unfolding. The changes are truly breathtaking and have gone largely unnoticed.

There was no end in sight for the hydraulic fracturing revolution, last season’s magic trick aimed at ushering an extended period of practically unlimited, low-cost energy and fast productivity growth. Something happened on the way to the orgy: a lot of oil and natural gas was extracted from 2 million wells largely in the US, but … The country is still reliant on fuel imports, the promised GDP growth never materialized and the fracking enterprise itself has been unable to generate a profit. Since 2009, prices for crude oil and gas have remained stubbornly below the level needed to meet the actual top line money-costs of the fracking process. This left frackers dependent on their own lenders compared to the conventional oil giants such as Exxon and Saudi Aramco who rely on the borrowing capacity of their customers. As loans dried up, the fracking industry flat-lined leaving  hundreds of bankruptcies and questions about whether fracking can ever be a going concern.

Meanwhile, the industry’s non-money costs continue to compound: extreme depletion rates of fracked plays, accelerated resource depletion generally (including climate change), opportunity- and time related costs, high well decommissioning costs x millions of wells; excess water use, aquifer contamination, excess methane- and other toxic gas emissions, wasteful flaring, soil erosion, damage to the landscape and other infrastructure, loss of goodwill, public- and political opposition, regulation, lawsuits and injunctions, etc. All of these costs were intended to be catapulted into the distant future (or ignored). Fracking does access otherwise useless reserves as intended  but the aggregate costs threaten to undermine the solvency of the entire petroleum industry, hastening its ruin and making economy-killing fuel shortages a matter of decades if not years.

The battery industry is faced with a similar array of costs plus its own, such as the expense to dispose of depleted batteries. Like other science fiction-y gadgets of our post-growth era, batteries are a complex, high-technology substitute for relatively simple existing system. A Tesla Model S lithium battery pack stores 100+ KwH of power, the Toyota Camry’s 15.8 gallon gasoline tank stores 532.5 KwH equivalent: the Toyota won’t brick if the tank runs dry. At issue is the low energy density for batteries relative to the higher density of liquid fuel. This factors to GDP growth as returns on the energy dense liquid fuels have been faltering for some time. It is difficult to see how substituting low density batteries will accomplish anything but to kill off growth entirely.

Noah does not have a Wikipedia page, either, but he does lead a platoon of straw men:

We Will Not Ban Cars

Electric vehicles are crucial for fighting climate change

By Noah Smith

I must also sadly point out that the anti-car rhetoric now proliferating among certain circles is overdone. For example, writing in the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo, citing many of the problems I describe above, dismisses the idea that electric vehicles should be our main tool for decarbonizing transportation. And my friend Darrell Owens, who is one of the activists I respect most, has similar thoughts.

Meanwhile, “ban cars” has become a Twitter slogan, and the notion that electric cars are overrated as a tool for fighting climate change has become commonplace in the world of op-eds.

Anyone who has been to Japan knows that their entire urban model is based around trains. Instead of talking about what street a shop or restaurant is on, Japanese people will tell you what train station it’s near. When you search for an apartment in Japan, “distance from train station” is one of the major variables you put in.

And yet despite building their entire country around trains, Japanese people also own quite a lot of cars!

‘Banning cars’ is a straw man, so is the notion that any second-guessing car hegemony in New York Times or on Twitter is meaningful. Moral objections to the car enterprise and its destructiveness will certainly gain force but not now. Opposition to cars generally is microscopic when held next to the gigantic marketing efforts and structural subsidies of- and for car makers and their dependencies. Japanese car use is a straw man insisting there are but two choices, buying slightly fewer cars or buying more of them. So is the notion electric vehicles are crucial for fighting climate change; this is an unprovable assertion from another straw man. What is provable by way of coronavirus is driving less reduces vehicle emissions overall and lowers fuel consumption. It follows zero cars means reductions far below those levels across the entire auto- related industry ambit.

Noah is right, we won’t ban cars, instead, we will do whatever we can to keep them including shoveling our economies, our planetary life support system and ultimately ourselves into the fire. Auto use has become so integral to human life anything other than its continuation is unthinkable, even in 3d world countries. Cars have become the axle around which the modern world spins; the largest single industry, the great consumer of fuel and other resources, Our kitchens have migrated 15 miles from the bathrooms; we’re stuck. Meanwhile, we are confronting peak oil related fuel shortages and disruptions due to carbon emissions that are an existential challenge to the car enterprise. This is in addition to long-rationalized external costs; mass highway deaths, air– and water pollution, non-climate resource constraints, the undermining /slash/ overthrowing of decision making institutions and credit dependence.

An actual emergency would require something other than marketing gestures, Experience shows societies will do what they need to when conditions warrant. The only question is whether our current state of decline requires something other than trivial adjustments at the margins. Noah and John Mauldin want to sell more cars. Undertow knows we have no choice but to get rid of them before they get rid of themselves and take us with them. At some point our pointless, non-remunerative ‘investment’ in auto use will be undone by force of events. The  American way of waste has run aground on the rock of its own costs. Pressing onward with more extreme and expensive gambits won’t lead the way to Japan but to Venezuela or Syria or worst.

What you done for your car, today? We can’t know the future but the present offers clues: a relentless and violent deterioration of the human condition around the world. Syrian government armor prowls the ruins of Homs in 2013. By 2016 the Syrian army had been largely destroyed by Islamic militants. Unknown photographer

Beginning in the 1960s, US oil reserves began to decline and the country found it necessary to import fuel, Dependence increased on external sources such as Mexico, Canada and Middle East countries. The 1973 oil shock followed by the 1980 Iran-Iraq war stunned an American economy that had become dependent on car manufacturing and development. Depletion — a scale related real cost — had not been expected to emerge until the far distant future. Innovators in the 60s and 70s could not imagine a technology that could displace gas and oil  and they still can’t. That’s why the focus is on batteries, a technology from the 19th century!

There were frantic attempts to cope, everything but conservation and abandoning the car-based lifestyle. There was wage arbitrage, the offshoring of US jobs — more jobs were shipped out than would have been lost if the car industry had shut down — the opening borders to millions of undocumented workers, deregulation of finance and industry, neoliberalism generally. There was union busting, bubble economies, China opening, the jettisoning Bretton-Woods international monetary regime for the Plaza Accord depreciation of the dollar, the rise of the euro and the EU, the Carter Doctrine, the emergence- then dominion of central banks, decades of futile, ruinous US wars. All of these were intended as hedges against real fuel price increases and declining energy returns on our (massively expanding) car investment. Comes now ‘New, Improved’ battery cars, full of spammy sound and fury: another miserable hedge.

The idea that electric cars will break our trajectory of decline is the face of experience is either dumb or purposefully, misleading. Cars cannot earn, driving the car does not pay for it. Driving is a distraction, a form of entertainment, cars are status symbols by intention. Driving cannot pay for the rest of the enormous car ecosystem; what pays is debt, in in increasingly astronomical amounts. Greater numbers of more complex and costly vehicles equals more debt. Nobody can say when the regime breaks down but when it happens it will be too late to do much (or anything) about it.

What does this mean for our children? The alarms from those who interest themselves in longer-term outcomes are sobering. The debts — both the money kind and the environmental variety will be repaid one way or the other. An unlivable planet; for what? A goddamned car?

Smith, Mauldin and the rest appear not understand how industrial economies work.  Processes are singular, uni-directional, constrained by thermodynamics and capital (resource) availability. No power of will can outmaneuver entropy which is a law unto itself. The so-called visionaries of the comic book world made believe that it is possible to cheat physics by simply inventing claims then pressing them home against third parties. The third parties are us, there is no one else. At some point there becomes an excess of claims: third parties are too poor, the debt collector is at the door, capital is out of reach, society itself is bankrupt.

 

37 thoughts on “Cars and More Cars …

  1. Ken Barrows

    What is productivity? In the mind of the techno-utopian, it’s to get rid of labor as fast as possible, replacing it with energy. There is an assumption of infinite surplus energy, so there is no problem created from reliance on the machines.

    If there is not infinite surplus energy, however, then it’s quite important to examine whether replacing labor with energy is worth the trouble. Noah and John, I am quite sure, envision today’s agriculture continuing decades from now, animal and otherwise. Yet, if surplus energy is limited, agriculture will do us in, along with the cars,

  2. sp gp

    Steve, you are behind the times and it shows. I’m not saying you are wrong, just that you are old and on your way out (ouch!).

    There is of course not infinite gasoline for everyone, but tremendous gains have been made in cars. They are much more efficient, safe, and reliable than before. A car is just a tool, a means to a particular end. Very few younger people even buy or use the gas guzzlers that you have in your 1970s imagination.

    Are you saying that my car is bad, but the rich should be able to jet around the world? My car is bad, but those guys shooting up Asian massage parlors in Atlanta and grocery stores in Boulder are oh so decent and good men, if just they walk and bike around?

    The emphasis on cars as the root of all evil doesn’t make any sense. And it blinds you to other real evils in the world: finance being one of them, the military industiral complex being the other. These things do not exist because of cars, Steve. They exist for their own enrichment and power.

    1. reante

      sp gp,

      show some respect and common decency. show character. not respecting your betters is one way of expressing the root of all human evil. when a few human cultures began to bend nature to its will they explicitly and knowingly did so at the expense of their human and non-human neighbors – their betters.

      what particular end does your car serve, sp gp? what’s your excuse?

      I have been working towards deindustrializing for a decade now. my philosophy and personal commitment to myself is to only commit industrial actions in order to not have to commit them in the future. it’s pretty austere philosophy but given the starting point (the opposite of turnkey, amish farmland) and end goal of the homestead, it’s a long haul and a heavily industrialized one. for example, our homestead had no use for Doug fir but we have mixed Doug fir forestland I’m converting 12 acres of it by myself, to maple coppicewood mixed pasture. I still have 250-300 cords of firewood I need to sell and if I’m going to get it moved before the logs begin to so get soft around the edge I really need a solid 4×4 1-ton dump truck. it’s a monster investment for a school bus driver and firewood cutter, and a monster, period, for an animist, but nevertheless such a purchase fits the philosophy because to not get those logs into peoples’ wood stoves would be a gross failure to take responsibility for the homestead, the downed trees, and the philosophy. it’s steep, fairly remote ground and hauling the wood out by tractor to where the old 2wd 1-ton flatbed (no dump) can get to is way too inefficient to the point where it risks not getting done before too much rots on me. I can handle some rot because I can use that for some terraced orchard hugelculture beds (neighbor has a bulldozer) on one of the slopes that would be better suited for that than grazing, but more rot than I need will be a waste.

      It may seem like I’m in a industrial hole and digging deeper. if it does then I’m telling you from down in this hole that it’s my only way out because there ain’t no turning my back on life and all tunnels should have at least two holes and I do believe I see the light at the end of the tunnel about 5 years away when we can begin to get away from the 8 internal combustion engines we currently own.

      do the means justify the ends? not for the faint of heart. that’s for sure. learned that the hard way. when the courageous seminole were finally backed into a corner by the cheating europeans they raised up wild boar piglets as their own so as to herd them which obviously as animists was something that they previously for their whole history of existence prided themselves on not doing. such is life dislocation when up against a hegemonic war of attrition; the circumstances of no folk are purposely made to be chronically very, very far from optimal.

      sp gp imo you are overdue in saying something constructive around here. you’ve been pissing and moaning for a few threads now and haven’t contributed anything of substance. two of steve’s main themes are the rotten banking system and the rotten MIC so when you act like he doesn’t address those issues just because they don’t include the JQ, then it means you are no longer thinking clearly. I had to get over that and maybe it’s time you did too. Ultimately the JQ is a cultural question and the J don’t mean shit because pretty much everyone is essentially part of that culture now because that culture determines the rules of the game. it’s called industrialism, and it revolves around the internal combustion engine.

      what do you stand for sp gp? if your car ain’t a tool for moving you away from industrialism, however indirectly so that may seem at times, then imo you’re just part of the problem and you can’t say shit about shit to anyone because you’re just pissing into the wind.

  3. Ken Barrows

    In the USA, about 90% of adults own a car. The premise is that in not too many years many adults will have to give up the car. Now say climate change isn’t an issue (okay), but we’ll still need a lot of surplus energy to feed a couple of hundred million vehicles each year. I’d further argue that you’d need a lot of oil, electric vehicles notwithstanding. After all, any car has a lot of plastic used in its manufacture to raise mileage standards, needs roads on which to travel, and demands bridges to cross.

    We can give up the cars–and a lot of other things–to fashion a post-car society or pitch a fit and go down with the ship. It’s a clear choice. Why not start with passenger cars? It’s an easy first step compared to some of the others.

  4. reante

    Why not start with most things you need a car FOR?

    Oh wait they’ve already started doing that.

    Seems to me all methods will be indirect methods, otherwise a mass fit will be pitched because everything is so purposely politicized. There will be no elected government coming clean about peak oil replete with profuse apologies and excellent 5 year plans that earnestly strive to apply energy conservation as equitably as possible. That might as well be impossible. A military coup would have to set the stage for coming clean about peak oil seeing as how the military does a good job pretending to be nonpolitical.

  5. MarkW

    Great to see you writing again Steve. An intriguing paper. Relish the way you Quoted and then go to your comments.

    A few years back I delighted in your videos with that Alaskan character RE I think.

    Yes, how much I love my car. Alas, we will have to forego our cars and just about everything else. The time draws near. Courage and strength! We look to the strong ones who have gone before us and faced the end with Valour

  6. reante

    Even if there was infinite surplus energy that infinite surplus energy would do us in, too, and might not take much longer to do it that the looming collapse of the resource base. For but one example look at what the scientists are saying about the statistical infertility and decreased penis size of the male-ish side of the homo industrialis species being born today. They say the primary cause is the pthalate, an synthetic oil derivative which, being a confirmed oestrogenic, undoubtedly has a role to play but naturally the predicament is well endowed and runs deeper than just that and is multifarious. I recall scientists recently projected that if we stay the technotopian course then by 2047 male-ish technotopians will be largely sterile for what that’s worth but it doesn’t look rosy regarding bottom-line Productivity either way. They run from work because real work is uphill of them. Running from real work: it’s all downhill from there.

    The further from real work you run the more industrial society rewards you with money. Every country boy or blue collar guy tells you this implicitly when they grab a hold of a fat government contract job on prevailing wages and sheepishly talk of how they get paid more to do less. The real men won’t work those contracts. If they’re really good at what they do they might even get paid more than by milking the government fat but by god whoever’s paying them will get an honest day’s work.

  7. reante

    I do declare that the scientific american article takes it out of conspiracy theory territory.

    https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/we-have-no-reason-to-believe-5g-is-safe/

    march 2021, brazil, covid hysteria:

    https://www.rcrwireless.com/20201231/5g/tim-offer-5g-via-dss-tech-12-brazilian-cities-march-2021

    it’s the terrain. it’s only ever the terrain. if you look, all animal disease experimentation in laboratories is Terrain-based experimentation. they say they do infectious disease experimentation but they actually don’t because the infectious agent is never properly isolated because they can’t be.

  8. Being Frank

    In the 1960s I worked out that on an average week I was doing 500 ft.lb. of physical work but my lifestyle needed around about 8×10^9 ft.lb. of work to support it. Well, you all know where the extra 7,999,999,500 ft.lb. came from.
    Methinks the full impact of our predicament is best illustrated by just a few numbers such as these. All the blog posts in the world won’t make a jot of difference, you grock this stuff, or you don’t.
    Illich, back then, said it looked like the ICE was turning human beings into human doings. I’d say the transformation is now complete here in the west, not too easy to see unless you have travelled a bit.

  9. reante

    Nice Frank, back to Illich again.

    Illich, Ellen. If we revere Illich we should be very careful about cherrypicking Illich.

    Illich’s ‘Medical Nemesis: the Expropriation of Health’ is all about industrial iatrogenesis, which is the so-called doctors of germ theory making people sick. Illich was a man of the Terrain. Of course he was. He would have jumped all over this fake pandemic.

    One of the sections in ‘Medical Nemesis’ is titled Cultural Iatrogenesis. That’s EXACTLY what this whole global ‘coronavirus’ deal is – cultural iatrogenesis.

    “We cannot fully understand contemporary social organisation unless we see in it a multi-faceted exorcism of all forms of evil death. Our major institutions constitute a gigantic defence programme waged on behalf of “humanity” against all those people who can be associated with what is currently conceived of as death-dealing social injustice. Not only medical agencies, but welfare, international relief, and development programmes are enlisted in this struggle. Ideological bureaucracies of all colours join the crusade. Even war has been used to justify the defeat of those who are blamed for wanton tolerance of sickness and death. Producing “natural death” for all men is at the point of becoming an ultimate justification for social control. Under the influence of medical rituals contemporary death is again the rationale for a witch-hunt.”

    -illich

    we can all see the hunting party amassing against the unvaccinated.

    1. Being Frank

      I’ve had over 50 years to mull over how “they” would bring all this to an end. In material terms, I appear very successful and folk often ask me what work I do for a living and I have always replied I have never done a stroke of work my whole life as it has all been done by ff. I always invite them to consider that they might have done no work either. This is that place where some school-boy Physics crashes into the ego!!
      If I have had 50 years to think about this, they have had at least 50 years to plan this bad flu thing. I wonder what they have planned next for all the human doings, who of course must do what they are told.
      Is it really going to turn into a cull of all the sheep? With just folks like you and me left? Just the human beings?
      Not sure how I feel about that. It would take a bit of getting used to.

      1. Being Frank

        The fact that I was only providing 0.00000625% of the work I needed to support my self is of course occult knowledge i.e. hidden knowledge. People who use words all the time such as Kunstler and our host have really zero understanding of the extraordinary predicament we are in. It is completely hidden from them and from the vast majority of folk around the world. They can’t do the maths and have no idea of what a ft.lb. is anyway. Back in 2019, we were on the point of the whole silliness of the last 70 years being exposed when along came this flu thing and now we are heading to international feudalism.
        Anyway Chin Up!

  10. vegeholic

    Steve,
    Thanks for the stimulating and provocative essay. Always great to get your thoughts.

  11. reante

    Right on, Frank. And being a human being in a world of doing sometimes looks like a lot of doing if you’re doing your way back to being. And when people comment on my doing similar to you I usually always say i’m just cheating with power equipment.

    Sometimes it seems like the cull has already happened. All that’s left is the doing of it. You cull the being and culling the doing takes care of itself.

    I’m not suggesting that a majority of the unvaccinated represent fully-formed human beings (or that I myself do) but it’s also no secret to the livestock man that when he sees that his time and resources will be stretched thin from here on out he will have to begin breeding back his charges for hardiness and self-reliance rather than for productivity because his costs associated with maintaining his surpluses of stock have come to exceed the value of the surplus itself. Steve’s First Law. Natural law.

  12. sp gp

    Reante, you will pry my car away from my cold, dead hands. I will drive my car until I die. Yes, I’m fully aware of both peak oil and all of the costs of running a car, including environmental costs..

  13. reante

    As an animist, sp gp, I recognize their draw. Steel is real. As Alan Watts said, some things are more natural than others. They may not be horses with metaconsciousness but they do have rock-consciousness by virtue of the fact that after humans fashion them from the earth they continue to hold their animated space in the universe, against entropy, which is the definition of being alive. Life after all is just coalescent energy plus that which animates it. I pat my trusty old girl on the back after a good haul. You bet I do. I care about her. You can hear her coming with her unmuffled 350 and muncie 465. These beings engender our loyalties maybe I’ll forgo the 4×4 and invest in gravel instead even though I hate roads and like them to green over and feed the sheep. She’s the bride of frankenstein, less natural than some other lives but alive nonetheless, and she runs on ancient sunlight so I do get the primal appeal but the fact remains that carz are a product of human self-loathing. Allowing yourself to know that to be true is half the battle.

  14. Bachs_bitch

    Cars are the symptom, transportation is the problem, capitalist imperialism since the 1500s is the cause. The tropical regions of the world are far more productive both in terns of agriculture and mineral resources than the cold regions ever were or can hope to be within any realistic future timeframe. The ‘shithole countries’ or conversely the ‘poor oppressed masses who need us to teach them about democracy and development’ [depending on where you stand within the western political milieu] are where the vast majority of the real wealth of our world has always resided.

    Why did European capitalists embark upon risk-laden and perilous journeys halfway round the world to trade with and later drain resources from these countries? It’s easy to figure out why: look at a random product from a supermarket, list its ingredients and find out where those ingredients come from and why. Once you’ve done that, identify how those products came to be located at that supermarket. Hint: they didn’t arrive there on a hoverboard, or a car.

    I’ve said this before on this blog, but it bears repeating. The human race is more than capable of sustaining itself at its current population. It can not, however, sustain the parasitic and exploitation fuelled lives, lifestyles and jobs of western populations (excluding illegal immigrants and other such minorities), or more generally of the middle and upper classes worldwide. If/when the dispossessed start calling the shots as they did in China in 1949 and Russia in 1917, the cars will start to go along with much else. And that will happen not because the dispossessed are virtuous, but because it is in their lived, material interest to get rid of those things.

    Excerpt from Emperor Qianlong’s letter to George III following the first British envoy to China:
    Hitherto, all European nations, including your own country’s barbarian merchants, have carried on their trade with our Celestial Empire at Canton. Such has been the procedure for many years, although our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce. But as the tea, silk and porcelain which the Celestial Empire produces, are absolute necessities to European nations and to yourselves, we have permitted, as a signal mark of favour, that foreign hongs [merchant firms] should be established at Canton, so that your wants might be supplied and your country thus participate in our beneficence.

  15. reante

    Bb if you’re only interested in going back 500 years you’re probably not going to be able to do a good job of making blanket declarations about the human race and human sustainability. Are you?

    Grooming may or may not be a suitable place to start, then progressing to language, and on to Dunbar’s Number, and indigenous infanticide, war, chiefdoms, hegemony, agriculture, hydraulic societies, pre-states, pristine states, states, civilizations, cars.

    You’re correct cars are a symptom, but transportation is not the cause. And your tropical theory of productivity has no basis in ecology. Productivity is purely a cultural construct.

    1. Bachs_bitch

      Agriculture is not unsustainable per se, at least within a reasonable timeframe. The necessity to transport commodities from global south to north, most or all of which the latter is unable to produce sufficiently or at all yet vitally depends upon, defines the capitalist and later industrialist eras. Private transport is the oversized carbuncle embossed in the economy’s life blood – freight transport. Without the oil demand created by personal cars, there wouldn’t be an oil industry as we know it.

      Any geologist will tell you that the tropics have higher cropping intensity and output per hectare, caeteris paribus, than colder climates. US agriculture is among the most inefficient in the world, rivalled only by Europe, Japan and South Korea. The ‘free market’ and ‘individualism’ loving Trump voters are recipients of the largest agro subsidies in the world, amounting to 50 to 70 percent of the value of their produce in some years. And the energy balance ratio of western agriculture is increasing at an alarming rate over time.

      You may choose to define productivity however you like, that doesn’t affect geographical reality.

  16. reante

    The only baseline geographical reality of the tropics is that they receive more solar radiation on an annualized basis than higher latitudes. If you knew anything about agriculture you’d know that that doesn’t mean a thing until you get into the mid-50s latitudes.

    The number of hectares on the planet isn’t the problem.

    1. Bachs_bitch

      Internet-assembled factoids and word-assemblages derived therefrom tend to discourage productive debate.

      Yes the tropics receive more solar radiation – the source of all life and most forms of exploitable energy on earth – and rainfall per hectare and the ground isn’t frozen or under snow for nearly half the year. In the US wheat sown in Sep-Oct takes ~9 months to mature, ie Jun-Jul of the next year. Wheat sown in Apr-May will take 5-6 months to mature ie Sep-Oct of the same year. No amount of fossil fuel inputs can overcome the limitation of 1 crop per year in cold-temperate climates. By contrast tropical countries like India and China produce 2 to 3 and often even 4 crops per year depending on region, while maintaining a significantly higher energy balance ratio.

      Modern western living standards aren’t ‘advanced’, they are blatantly and obviously parasitic, leeching off the resources of the global south to sustain themselves, whilst ruining the planet’s ability to support human life in general.

  17. reante

    the only thing I’ve trundled off to the search engine for during this conversation is the deciphering of Latin for which english would have been more appropriate thank you very much. I live at the 45th parallel and I know what’s above me and generally what grows there.

    the reason I often respond to you with some distaste is because I find it distasteful when ivory tower reformists like yourself act like realists down in the trenches like myself have lost all allegiance to life, when in fact it is you who displays zero FEEL for Life with a capital L. if you display no feel for life it can only be because you don’t know about life. you only know about YOUR separate-self life with a little l.

    because you don’t have the faintest idea WHAT IT IS while you operate mental drones YOU assembled from eco-pulp fiction that rain bureaucratic green think down over the global peoplefarm as if life is a video game.

    four crops a year means four times the chemical fertilizers and four times the herbicides. four crops a year is a fucking assembly line factory that CANNOT exist under ‘sustainable’ farming practices. If you knew ANYTHING about biology (Life) you would know that.

    you’re obviously talking about artificial wetland rice. rice, an extremely low-grade fuel for humans, is THE reason that most of china’s rivers no longer reach the ocean. but you’re okay with that because you believe in hydraulic society. because that suits your supremacist lifestyle. rice paddies are manufactured ANAEROBIC ecologies. they are the stupidest form of plant farming possible, and I don’t exaggerate. yes, the vaunted, oh so bucolic lol, terraces of china are completely devoid of organic matter because the anaerobes in those fucking fake swamps eat it up and convert it into methane and release it into the atmosphere lol.

    get a fucking life Bb so you don’t have go out purchase your hateful beliefs man and catwalk them here.

    1. Bachs_bitch

      @Reante, firstly you started this ‘debate’ with me so don’t pretend otherwise. Secondly this is probably my last and only response to you because, well, look at yourself. And I’m reluctant to write even this one but am doing so in the knowledge that calmer or even saner people than you occasionally read this blog.

      I’m not a reformist. All the solutions to industrial civilisation’s problems, or the aftermath of those problems, are quite radical. There are left and right variants and while I do personally and culturally favour the left version I also know that in an actual crisis situation my material interests would likely align with whoever can preserve as much as possible the lifestyle and privileges I currently enjoy.

      Within the current system my food, job, property and lifestyle – and likewise yours – come out of the mouths of malnourished and dispossessed third-world petty producers. In a post-industrialist or semi-post-industrial system, exploitation would be more direct and more local than at present. Also people like you would most likely be the object of such exploitation because the western bourgeoisie are making it clear they do not, and can not, redistribute the drain of third world wealth to their home populations. The ‘white working class’ had a historical role – supporting the global genocide/plunder campaigns of their ruling classes – and they served it admirably. Nowadays, they’re dead weight in the eyes of those same rulers. Don’t be sad, it’s just the American way. Just because the not-so-distant future shall consign you from the ‘giving’ end of it to the ‘receiving’, doesn’t mean it’s not a good system at its core.

      Anyway, at present, you’re certainly not a ‘realist down in the trenches’. You’re in the same broad class of privileged humans as I, leeching off the blood and sweat and lands of the vast majority of our own species. Do not tempt fate by selling our privilege so short, especially in doomy gloomy times like these when it could all go away sooner than either of us expect *crosses heart*.

      The rest of your post is literally a mental breakdown so the less said about it the better. Good luck, seriously.

  18. reante

    Thanks for opening up Bb. Whatever your ‘clinical’ psychological problems may be, you appear to me to be a functional psychopath at the very least, which confirms my earlier suspicion that you have zero feel for life. You’re a real piece of work and a good reminder that we’ll be coming across your cold, calculating type as collapse progresses. I wholeheartedly recommend to you the GAPS diet as a first step, but I expect that you don’t see the need. Its a mineral-rich diet. Perhaps you might pay someone to beat the shit out of you, a shock load to help yourself break loose from the iron grip of your loneliness.

    I never said nor pretended that you started this ‘debate.’ when I mentioned responding to you with distaste it was regarding our interactions in general and I am well aware that I have a hard-on for your elitism. in my mind this place deserves better. so I call you out on your elitism and back it up with argumentation. you have never once done likewise to any of my material, you just dismiss it in one way or another with increasingly mean-spirited logical fallacies, presumably because you can’t back up your positions with what thinking skills you do have.

    FTR I’ll review the my ‘mental breakdown’ for your shrunken head.

    wetland rice was the dominant human fuel in growing out the Chinese socioeconomic breed of homo industrialis to its current population. all fresh water use in china is controlled by, and expressly for, the Chinese breed (downstream consumption by other countries notwithstanding). Therefore wetland rice is the single biggest material reason why most chinese rivers appear to no longer reach the ocean. This claim about dried rivers is as I recall based on a comparison of chinese government reports from the early seventies and from the past decade which show that more than half of chinese navigable root rivers (tributaries) have dried up at some point (or been subsumed) before they reach the sea. Naturally the Chinese government claims that the old report was inaccurate.

    as to the biology of chinese wetland rice commodity farming that I detailed, that’s simple fact, however obscure it may seem to those who haven’t studied soil biology. obviously I was loose in my treatment of fake fertilizer and herbicide application rates, which are not necessarily one-to-one by volume relative to the number of crops but you get the idea.

  19. reante

    There can be no waves crashing without an undertow. Thanks Ken for the updated undertow! The undertow is morphing into a drawdown. Look at those numbers! It’s very exciting. Out go the boats but whence comes the fourth wave that will make the plandemic look like a staycation all depends on the drawdown.

  20. reante

    I’m well aware that the zerohedge online community is not what it used to be. And that there is a conservative bias, on balance, with the pseudonymous durdens.

    Anybody else here still visit it daily for its news feed? Any of you noticed an amping up of that conservative bias to almost ‘liberal’ levels, shall we say lol? As if they made a new, bad hire or promotion, or the top dog came down with tha Rona? Because the editorializing of current events — the take — was always decently neutral, I thought, even if consistently negative as is our take.

    Or maybe timing is everything and it was an intelligence outfit all along?

    1. reante

      I say this regarding the change in tone of just the past week, and mostly regarding the nascent race war here in the US. ZH has made more than one inaccurate, politicized characterization of unambiguous video footages, and that seems out of character to me. And the rhetoric has ratcheted up. I suppose it could also just be them getting a bit carried away emotionally with the sea change.

  21. ellenanderson

    Hi all,
    I put some literary suggestions up on the recommendations page.
    This is such a great post, Steve. I just re-read it. I don’t know how many people are catching on but people like Jeff Gibbs and Derrick Jensen are beginning to pull together facts that will really help local activists organize against the techno-fixer-optimists. Here is a link to a “Letter to Greta Thunberg” by Katie Singer. I think if you copy the below into your browser you will find it.
    Letter #12 How we manufacture silicon: computers’ crucial ingredient not found in nature. https://dgrnewsservice.org/civilization/ecocide/climate-change/letter-12-how-we-manufacture-silicon-computers-crucial-ingredient-not-found-in-nature/?utm_source=DGR+News+Service&utm_campaign=25434e57d8-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_51489b99cd-25434e57d8-450936161

  22. reante

    right on, ellen. reading through that material about silicon manufacturing is a reminder of just how amazingly good scientific materialism is at selfishly steamrolling over elemental life consciousness. Because it don’t move to the blind eye it don’t matter because it’s MINE NOW.

    Well, I’m a steamroller, baby
    I’m bound to roll all over you
    Yes, I’m a steamroller, baby
    I’m bound to roll all over you
    I’m gonna inject your soul with some sweet rock ‘n roll
    And shoot you full of rhythm and blues

    Well, I’m a cement mixer
    A churning urn of burning funk
    Yes, I’m a cement mixer for you, baby
    A churning urn of burning funk
    Well, I’m a demolition derby
    A hefty hunk of steaming junk

    Now, I’m a napalm bomb, baby
    Just guaranteed to blow your mind
    Yeah, I’m a napalm bomb for you, baby
    Guaranteed to blow your mind
    And if I can’t have your love for my own
    Sweet child, won’t be nothing left behind
    It seems how lately, baby
    I’m a steamroller for you baby Greta.

    Here’s a relevant excerpt from Letter #12:

    “What would our world look like if farmers grew more wheat and rice than manufacturers make transistors? Instead of a laptop, could we issue every student a raised bed with nutrient-dense soil, insulating covers and a manual for growing vegetables?”

    It’s relevant because it needs hammering on. Contemporary wheat and rice commodity crops are cheap, low-grade annual food concentrates for human livestock. When eaten, they are jevons paradox at work. They directly contradict Katie’s commentary about human overpopulation in her preceding paragraph. This is because she is stuck in the non-ecological world of alt-Left vegemetarian Politics. Her left politics may be marginally more sensical than Greta’s fake mainstream-Left politics, but they are no more ecological because they aren’t logical with regard to ecology. The definition of ecology is ecosystem knowledge, and knowledge can only ever be holistic.

    “Issuing every student with a raised bed with nutrient-dense soil”: nutrient-dense soil only exists for the human separate-self that concerns itself only with what the human can get out of the deal. There ARE no nutrients in soil. There is just life. There is no nutrient in the soil that enters the plant and then enters the human. Life –ecology–doesn’t work that way. That’s a materialist conception borne of the Fertilizer Age. Ecology shows us that in fact it works the other way around, so to speak – not from the ground-up but from the inside-out; from the sun and the rock.

    There are nutrient-dense foods and there are fertile soils. There are no nutrient-dense soils. There’s Life density. There’s density of life-shaping consciousness which increases as we go up the ‘food-chain.’ The higher up we go, the more Life density, the more evolved are the species (the consciousnesses), the more — by extension — is the nutrition.

    Annual vegetable beds are juvenile ecosystems when it comes to life density. They are at the beginning of the agricultural cycle of ecological succession. In order to be maintain an annual vegetable bed the human has to impose major restrictions on Life in order to arrest the Life development of the vegetable bed ecosystem; doing-so by definition results in arrested development of Life density which is what we colloquially refer to as nutritional density. Annuals are biological weeds that nature designed to live in low fertility soils, so that medium fertility soils may come about in order for perrenial plants with greater life densities to live. No matter how much organic matter and intensive management practices may be integrated into a vegetable bed, the life/nutrient density is still juvenile in density however maximized that juvenility may be via good breeding and management practices. We can compost tea and protozoa soup our beds all we want, and do a fantastic job of gardening but we are still operating in the sphere of juvenile nutrition. Juvenile nutrition provides us many nutritional benefits to be sure but does not properly feed our mature meatbag consciousness that evolved beyond the annual stage of succession billions of years ago.

    The sun warms the rock. The rock is the sand, the silt, the clay, the loam perhaps, that has been eroded by the water and the air and the sun and the time, which live. Bacteria and fungi, mainly, feed on the rock; therefore the sun and the rock are the nutrients. The protozoa feed on the bacteria and fungi and shit out plant-biovailable minerals so that the plant can be born. The plant is born and during it’s vegetative phase gives more than half of its gift from the sun to the bacteria and fungi, by pumping sugars and starches from its roots — organic matter — so that they can multiply and hence feed the protozoa who feed the plants.

    If the kids are to learn about life they should garden in the ground and not on raised thrones of beds, and they should start with plain old dirt.

    What Kidz need most is to learn how to live from scratch. To start from scratch. From the beginning, and just keep on moving don’t stop. So that they can see that arc of life bends towards perennial systems, and for healthy humans in particular the arc of life has always bent towards savannah ecosystems and shoreline ecosystems.

  23. reante

    As for derrick jensen I have mixed feelings. Like me he’s anti-civ and he didn’t fall into the vegan mindtrap. I fell into that trap in my 20s and came out of it with hypothyroidism (from malnutrition) which is a family weakness. I recently healed from it, with diet, no longer need to take pills or eat sheep and goats thyroids. Ate myself into and then out of a deep family pattern. Derrick recognizes that plants are no less sentient than animals, they’re just less densely sentient. Unfortunately derrick has a bleeding heart and also likes to sit in his ivory tower with his gifts as a wordsmith and encourage young people to risk imprisonment with pointless direct action. He kicked me off his FB page a couple years ago for taking him to task on that. Got kicked off CJ Hopkins’s page for taking him to task for doing the same regarding the anti-lockdown movement. Nothing worse than a middle-aged man subconsciously alleviating his feelings of impotency by pushing others towards a meat grinder in order to try and clog it up just because he isn’t able to flip the switch or pull the plug.

  24. reante

    Found my way this morning, via Pepe’s lastest article at The Saker, to a long essay from April 2020 that is a must read IMO and relates further to our resident nobody, Being Frank, having brought up Illich again. This essay by a friend of Illich’s details Illich’s realization in his later years that the cultural iatrogenesis he discussed in ‘Medical Nemesis’ had devolved much, much further, by the 1990s, into a full-blown Matrix reality, and to his utter horror. Illich was a man who grew like a tree. He grew until he died.

    “In his late writings Illich introduced, but never really developed, a concept that he called “epistemic sentimentality” – not a catchy phrase, admittedly, but one that I think sheds on light on what is currently going on. His argument, in brief, was that we live in a world of “fictitious substances” and “management-bred phantoms” – any number of nebulous goods from institutionally-defined education to the “pathogenic pursuit of health” could serve as examples – and that in this “semantic desert full of muddled echoes” we need “some prestigious fetish” to serve as a “Linus blanket.” In the essay I’ve been quoting “Life” is his primary example. “Epistemic sentimentality” attaches itself to Life, and Life becomes the banner under which projects of social control and technological overreach acquire warmth and lustre. Illich calls this epistemic sentimentality because it involves constructed objects of knowledge that are then naturalized under the kindly aegis of the “prestigious fetish.” In the present case we are frantically saving lives and protecting our health care system.”

    The essay:

    https://www.quodlibet.it/david-cayley-questions-about-the-current-pandemic-from-the-point

    And the constructed object naturalized under the kindly aegis:

    https://www.bitchute.com/video/THJw9B5EMvkk/

  25. new paradigm

    Hello Steve, I am always glad / eager / fascinated, to read your writing and your commentary. My sincere thanks to you, cheers and best regards to you. Let’s keep moving forward, best we can.

  26. Bill Sodomsky

    Hi Steve,
    To quote a phrase of yours that never left my mind, “Conservation By Other Means,” I find it strange that you have not written more of late, on what now appears to be the full onset of Energy Deflation.
    I would be surprised if I was the only one curious now as to your thoughts on this very important matter. The repo market seizure, the draconian measures implemented to strangle the economy and the implosion of the oil industry, in particular the fracking stunt, are far too coincidental for my liking.
    Something ominous lurks beneath the surface and in my opinion, it’s the effects of Energy Deflation.
    Your thoughts???

    1. steve from virginia Post author

      Hi Bill,

      Briefly, the US establishment has been repeating the Japanese strategy of the 1970s and ’80s: inflating asset price bubbles in real estate and shares. The idea was rising prices of finance assets would outrun the price of imported energy. Ironically. the US embarked on the same endeavor not long after the Japanese: our first bubble was in real estate during the so-called ‘Reagan Revolution’.

      How it all worked in Japan can be found here: “The Bubble Economy of Japan.”

      In 1990 – 92 the bubbles popped and Japan fell into deflation that has not quit. Because Japan is a specialty exporter of high-quality goods such as optics, machine tools, specialty metals and electronics, they obtain enough forex to continue to run their finance schemes. Like the US, EU and a few others, japan is also a credit provider, the yen is a reserve currency, Japan is not forced to borrow from its neighbors like China.

      Abenomics was the attempt to restart the bubble machine with the BoJ buying every kind of asset (particularly Japanese government bonds). This didn’t accomplish much, there was a modest uptick in output, Japan’s GDP has been essentially flat since the mid-90s.

      I expect the massive US ‘Everything Bubble’ to pop as fuel prices have right now reached a critical level. I haven’t seen the latest FOMC minutes but I would be surprised if the Fed Board of Governors did not discuss fuel price.

      The deflation mechanism is rising (fuel) prices accompanied by rising interest rates that have knock-on effects across finance. Far from being able to endure 5% longer term interest rates, a 2% on the 10 year is probably enough to torpedo Wall Street and its jungle gym of interconnected derivative Ponzi schemes. After all, if the way to allocate fuel is by rationing credit the outcome of the regime is inevitably a credit shortage. If 2% can’t ration credit, then 3% will. Of course, a credit shortage is ipso facto deflationary.

      A lot of the price inflation now is Covid related: short supplies and transport bottlenecks of various goods along with price gouging by well positioned monopolies. Interest rates at the long end are rising. Firms are under stress (see ‘Archegos’ and ‘Ark Innovation ETF’). The Fed is still buying billions of dollars worth of bonds every month. ‘It’ is happening: just what- and when is unclear.

  27. Ken Barrows

    The EIA reports that U.S. oil production is 10.9 or 11.0 million barrels per day — week after week. Lazy data gathering or do companies invest enough to keep production steady?

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