Sunday, August 17, 2014

I'd be happier if I didn't write this stuff!

Thus happiness depends, as Nature shows,
Less on exterior things than most suppose.

                  --William Cowper


Here's what a new study said on the matter:
























Steve said...

Great post, Kurt.
While I studied archaeology/anthropology throughout university and became aware of the rise and fall of civlisations throughout prehistory, it wasn't until Dec. 2010 when I viewed the documentary Collapse with the late Michael Ruppert that it hit me that we are also on course for such a demise (perhaps it had something to do with becoming an educator, getting married, having children, being caught up in 'the thrum of daily life' and believing 'this time is different').
Since that 'enlightenment' I have been on a personal journey of discovery that has mirrored Kubler-Ross's model of emotional stages dealing with impending death (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). I have to admit that I'm not convinced we can halt the momentum of the various systems that are contributing to our predicaments, let alone reach some kind of sustainable balance and such a perspective is extremely depressing and overwhelming at times (not to mention how it impacts my interpretation of the world and the stress it has created with my ever-optimistic spouse).
My focus has been on the education of friends/family and trying in some small way to prepare for an uncertain future for my children (both late teens who don't fully understand my 'obsession').
All this being said, I prefer to look at the world 'realistically' rather than thru rose-coloured glasses. There are many narratives circulating as to the foundation of the various crises sweeping the globe the past fifty years or so, but Peak Oil and its unintended consequences on everything else seems to make the most sense.
Love reading your posts, so keep up the great work!!

DaShui said...

I vote for taking the pursuit of happiness out of the d o I .

Mark Sebela said...

I think ignorance is overrated and it is obviously not working.

70 MILLION Americans are on mind-altering drugs:

John Clark said...

70 million Americans on mind altering drugs...and even they aren't whacked enough that you can sell more than a small fraction om the idea that ignorance of resource economics means...peak oil!! Run for the hills!

St. Roy said...

Kurt: My wife says, "You would be happier if you didn't read this stuff".

Anonymous said...

Kurt - I suspect that expecting to be happier if we didn't focus on the predicament and its resolution is only a case of the grass looking greener beyond the fence. Trying to ignore what we know, and the burgeoning signs all around us, sounds like a recipe for serious mental over-pressure.

The core of the worry is in my view the lack of commensurate action on climate, despite massively ample evidence of the existential threat to global society. We are told from all sides that this is the fossil lobby's influence, but I've yet to see the evidence.

To take the US case, its fossil lobby generates just ~8% of GDP but corporations across the rest of the economy, with rising threats to their profits and no inherent loyalty to fossil fuels, don't begin to counter the propaganda. On any other such threat to profits they'd be hammering down the White House door.

Meanwhile the POTUS, elected on a strident climate action ticket, has done sweet FA of any significance in over five years. In fact his record is of serial obstructions, including:
- adopting Cheney's reneging on the legal UNFCCC 1990 emissions baseline and also on Kyoto,
- crashing the Copenhagen summit,
- sabotaging the senate climate bill (see Ryan Liza's forensic New Yorker article "As the world burns")
- having the big NGOs instructed to campaign on 'Clean Energy' not Climate,
- blocking the EPA from meeting its legal duty to regulate CO2,
-setting a derisory 3.5% CO2 cut off 1990 by 2020 (hyped as 17% off 2005) as the US 'Cancun pledge',
- having the UN climate treaty declared as "unnecessary & undoable" by his chief negotiator,
- excluding the highly potent wedge-issue of climate from his re-election campaign,
-and, when the EPA was facing a suit, having it spend over a year drafting regs on coal-power that won't even meet the 'pledge'.

Given the scale of the threat of loss and damage, whatever motivates the corporations and government's inaction has to be of paramount importance. To identify the objective, it is worth noting that it was Cheney who launched the 'brinkmanship of inaction' against China, and that the US has massively superior food production per capita compared to China.

If the policy of inaction is maintained, then we can expect increasing regional crop failures that will at some point coincide to give the onset of serial global crop failures. At or before that point crop failures and food shortages in China, leading to mounting civil unrest and regime change, would put an end to China's bid for global economic dominance - This would serve the US paramount bipartisan policy priority since WW2 of maintaining global dominance, on which the profits of the full range of its corporations depend.

Having the benefit of a global digital public information system (of which Goebels could only dream) Washington's diversion of blame for the inaction onto the ultra thick-skinned fossil lobby is a quite predictable tactic. Had we assumed that the US would take action against its Chinese rival with the same reckless M.A.D. threat level it showed against the USSR's bid for dominance, the policy of a 'brinkmanship of inaction' could easily have been foreseen.

Returning to the article's focus, this analysis gives reason for far better confidence of a successful resolution of AGW - The POTUS is responsible for a policy that is so grossly immoral and illegal in intent that it is wholly inadmissible. Even the beginnings of its exposure globally, and particularly to the US public, means that it has to be binned and replaced with a demonstrable will to negotiate a commensurate global climate treaty.