Some article in the Wall Street Journal spreads its cornucopian spewage across the webosphere:

Well … without calling any names … the ‘five technologies are …

– Space- based solar power … didn’t this get laughed out of here a few months ago?

– Batteries,

– more Batteries,

– carbon batteries, and …

– ‘let’s let the world’s humanity starve while we have cheap fuel for the cars, the lovable, fabulous, wonderful cars, without which our lives have no meaning’.

Cheap fuel for the cars is the fantasy, the five technologies are complete idiocy. The world will dissolve into warfare before the ‘sacrifice food for cars’ paradigm takes hold.

Whaddya expect from the Wall Street Journal? You go to McDonalds and you expect hamburgers, go to WSJ and get tripe.

Meanwhile: Vanek- Smith’s article, An Oil Supply Crunch May Be Coming”:

Taylor: Basically the evidence says that we are very close to a sort of maximum output of available oil onto the market. And that this has extremely big geopolitical consequences, and governments have neither acknowledged this, and neither have they seemingly put together any kind of policies that would seek to move us away from the potential crunch of having insufficient oil coming onto the market.

Good grief! What market has Rip Van Winkle been paying attention to? Certainly not the petro market. Availability peaked ten years ago. It’s been ‘downhill’ ever since! Even @ 1998’s $10 a barrel the world was in shortage! Yes! With five billion humanoids living @ less than middle class lifestyles and with credit a- plenty, the shortage of sub- $3 oil and the industrial means to leverage it consigned these hapless and witless idiots to a non- future before they even were aware that they had lost the opportunity!

The relationship again is 5 billion hungry nincompoops versus (relatively) cheap $10 oil. It was really too expensive. The poorish of the world could not afford it. This is when it was cheaper than at any time since 1946!

You’ll notice that the current price of $80 a barrel is right in line with both the trend and EIA speculation. None of this pricing business is rocket science.

Economists suck at relationships. Some do alright; James Hamilton and Brad DeLong do well with price structures, Krugman does a bad job brilliantly as he endlessly and marvelously spams for more and more free government money to fatcat bankers.

The rest simply don’t get it, they are lost, they are completely submerged without self- knowledge in assumptions that a child could overthrow, the largest being that conditions last year or five years or ten years ago were the best case.

… That credit and energy supplies were optimal because the markets were pricing the goods (ralatively) cheaply … or cheaply compared to what they might have been … or because the production market could be serviced, that the market conditions therefore could not be improved upon.

All- in- all, a gigantic rationalization … The assumption is completely false; there has been a long- term energy shortage, we cannot know what we would have done with (much) more energy being available, more energy than we possibly could access.

Don’t you get it? It’s not what the economy DID, but what finance’s ‘credit department’ said it could have done!!! We’ve never lived up to ‘cheap money’s’ expectations!

What wiil our (collective) mothers think?

The economists’ assumptions limit the idea of ‘markets’ to America and Canada and a few of those ‘Frenchy’ Euro- countries w/ their own (limited) imagination- demands and aspirations. Believe it or not, we needed six or eight or fifteen extra Saudi Arabias ten years ago. We need twenty- five or so now. It’s not enough to supply ‘We’ the wonderful, special, gifted creative us, the end of evolution us. NO!, its for the starving and car- less masses in Peru, Haiti, Belize, Guinea- Bissau, Cote- d’ Ivoire, Yemen, etc. They deserve as many tract houses, TV’s, fridges and A/C’s as we do and if you don’t belive me, there are plenty of Kalashnikovs and RPG’s that say otherwise.

Nature has never cooperated and the hubristic idiots who call themselves economists and policy makers have made webs of lies and deceits that have calcified over the decades into a belief system that is more Orwellian than either Orwell or Kafka could have possibly imagined.

Is it gonna work out for all of us? Whaddyu think?

Here’s John- Michael Greer, who I (used to) admire:

Modern industrial civilization is simply a form of technic society that gets its nonfood energy from fossil fuels and maximizes production of goods and services in the usual R-selected way at the cost of vast inefficiency. At the other end of the spectrum is the climax community, the ecotechnic society, which gets its nonfood energy from renewable sources and maximizes the efficiency of its energy and resource use in the usual K-selected way at the cost of more restricted access to goods and services.

Uh .. JM … What the fuck are you talking about???

Obviously, there is no ‘ecotechnic’ society otherwise it would be describable in simple English. After all, us morons are supposed to be in it … make it up, right?

I can describe a future in simple English:

… People make things by hand in workshops and factories in small quantities @ extreme quality, there is a high level of art and craftsmanship with the best of the best equal to the masters of the past of Greece or Rome or renaissance Europe or China at its height and cities and towns are a delight to visit or live in, people live simply and nature predominates. There is no nano- medico- psuedo- foodo- technology. In fact, technology is actively suppressed.

It’s simple, easy, it works because it has and can be a default if we don’t nuke or broil ourselves into oblivion first. Excuse me, could you please pass the wine? How about some bread and olive oil? Don’t miss the paintings, they could be Caravaggio … but were really by some dude down the street …

That’s (the simple) life, no?