The state of affairs around Energy issues couldn’t be more mental than right now.  We are in the middle of a transition from Bush to Obama. We are also in an economic transition that could very well change the entire future of the planet for decades to come. A Russian engineer posted a rather lengthy presentation called the five stages of collapse. If you have the time check it out.  Here  are the five main areas from the presentation:

• Financial collapse
• Commercial collapse
• Political collapse
• Social collapse
• Cultural collapse

This all seems a bit extreme right? I sure hope so. Note that they are all taking place at the same time, with the more devastating impacts of each level following one after the other.

The various stages of collapse are happening around the world or have done so in the past. Rome didn’t collapse in a day, some might suggest that it is still doing so today.  But Its important to to point out that such a collapse took place not only in post Soviet Russia but also in Cuba.  After the Soviet collapse the new Russian government and the US secretly agreed to a complete blockade on all oil shipments to Cuba.  That blockade resulted in a 90% GDP collapse of Cuba in just 2 years almost sending it back into the dark ages. A similar blockade against North Korea has resulted in years of starvation there. Both societies have suffered severe economic and financial collapses but are still functioning today.

Both of these centrally planned societies have survived, but in very different ways.  What happens if the US collapses any further? I don’t think anyone in their right mind would want to contemplate what would happen.  Rather than dwell on this rather dark, if not taboo subject, I will refer you to the wikipedia page that presents a coherent overview of the subject and then get on with the real subject of this article.

This is a moment in time where new ideas are considered, or at least the point in time where real alternatives have a chance to present themselves.

Sadly, we have all been caught up in one of the biggest Pavlovian experiments in history over the last 8 years with the latest dramatic act being the biggest. Should we ignore the U6 unemployment rate (12.5%) or the lower U3, it can only represent a moment in time where we get together or fail.

This is a call for anyone who cares to call for serious townhall forums on energy issues and the dangers that lie ahead.Personally, I rather doubt that people are up to the challenge. But there can be no greater failure for us at this point not to take this challenge on and make every attempt call for the kind of changes needed to survive the dangers ahead.

Will we carry out the kind of  experiments that China or even FDR attempted in the past or will we look for models that can help us step into the future?  Some times, all that is needed is a minor adjustment or new technology to come along that can help. But I don’t think this is the case this time.

During the 1992 Rio global conference on the environment over half of the world’s Nobel laureates signed onto a document warning the world that it had 20 years to act on the confluence of energy and population issues facing all of us. The US ignored that call and in fact moved in the exact opposite direction towards an ever greater dependence on non-renewable energy sources via the dramatic shift towards ever larger gas guzzling cars. Today we are watching the collapse of both the airline and car industries as well as the country’s largest economic sector, banking, due to the last thirty years of deregulation and greed.

Most of the country, led by the corporate media is in denial if not worse.  Will we be seeing tent cities for middle class americans? We already are.  What steps will we be seeing or not in the next weeks and months will tell us a lot more.  Everybody is expecting some kind of leadership process from Washington that will help reverse the bloodletting. Yet, as we all know, the GOP and those who brought us this nightmare are still in control of the Supreme Court as well as having enough votes to stop almost everything Obama proposes in congress.

The democratic left has been calling for investigations and prosecutions of wrongdoing from the top down.  Bush and his cronies have flaunted the constitution, international treaties and sold the good will of the country down the tube. As was warned, Obama’s change machine was hardly different from the Clinton version in 1992.  He used the left to build up the grassroots and then has moved to the right to fill his cabinet.  Please, don’t expect more than a few drops of blood. No this isn’t Bush. But he’s no Jimmy Carter on foreign policy or FDR for local policy.

There are truly monumental issues that this president confronts. But there is no doubt that the toughest problem facing this country today is the corruption of our political process by money and the corporate media. There is no current way to counter the massive media except through grassroots online action.  This link is to an excellent (short) presentation on the biggest catch 22 problem – Congress.

Congressional reform means political finance reform, which means corporate media must be forced to drop its control over this country’s political process, via attack ads and the way it covers election cycles.   This excellent article documents the fact that the media covered the entire election cycle using a 7th grade level of english.  Combine that with their 8 second soundbyte and nearly 80% of the adult public, you have a perfect propaganda storm. Let’s call it the real life Matrix.  Over 80% of the country has no college education and has been manipulated by the media into the current mindset of how issues are discussed. This is changing, thanks to the Internet, but most the public, especially older Americans are completely brainwashed as to how they trust TV news programming. Even amongst media activists, its is almost impossible to get anyone to look squarely at the fragile nature of a culture that relies on completley ideological process that is incapable of stepping outside of the journalistic norms.  Information overload has become such a huge disease of the mind that only a handful have challenged.  There are no models anywhere that can address the growing problem of how to deal with news content.  More and more people are being forced into title skimming or worse, TV filtered content.  When will somebody wake up to realize that there there are more than 10 top news stories a day, let alone 10,000!  Unless this growing crisis of news is confronted, there will come a moment when there are no journalists left except TV. The warnings are already here with Australia’s campaign to filter the web.  Its just a matter of time before the very tools that broke us from the elite structure are reimposed on the internet.  Canada is the next country where planned filtering is expected to show up.  Wath out folks!

A growing number of young people are dropping out the propaganda machine, but media has painted the country into a center right box that has trapped a substantial segment of this country’s high school or below into thinking that Obama is a marxist or that environmentalists are out to destroy the country. The dualistic tactics of the media and pulpit have left the country to the theives and spinmeisters.

The propaganda has been going on for so long that few dare challenge the corporate media today or have the strategy on how to do so.  The former Bill Moyer’s from the Clamshell Alliance spent years investigating this and developed a Movement Action Plan as well as day long workshops to help activists get a better understanding of how to take advantage of the corporate media and its machine.  Few if any “Activists” have ever been given a sense of just what it takes to stay afloat in the world today.  The online community can’t replace the needed human communities that can only take place face to face.  A minor phrase in an email can set off fighting that never stops that would have easily have been dealt with when people are face to face. Who is to say your best online allie isn’t a spy or somebody just pulling your chain unless you have met them and get to know them in the real world!

Population — Energy and the Economy

 

 There isn’t a person out there who hasn’t been listening to the coming train that doesn’t know that we are looking at some kind of major new push on energy issues. But will it come with the bigger push to reform Detroit and the oil companies? We heard calls for the oil industry to bail out Detroit. We’ve even heard every other line out there as to the divisive state of affairs that the auto industry has played up.

The Obama Transition Team has set up a public discourse process to meet with groups. Not a single group has come forward to present a document on the nuclear fission fuel cycle or reactors. Note that the industry has all of their players lined up including the usual spin tactics. Check out the industry front group “Consumer Energy Alliance”  below.  Its an example of how lined up the energy industry is and ready to fight any changes Obama might want to make.

Here is a list of the Energy Presentations so far as of December 15th: (Note all are PDF files)

The Clean Energy Group: Our Pro-nuclear folks at work
Western Governors’ Association: Our mining lobby at work
American Petroleum Institute
Consumer Energy Alliance: The energy industry in drag!
Composites for Renewable Energy
New Mexico Sierra Club: Fossil fuel plant
One Sky: Climate Change
Travel Industry Association: Climate Change
Transition to Green: Sustainability presentation
Dan Kammen: Plug-in Hybrid Vehicles
Dan Kammen: Call for Clean Energy
Renewable Fuels Association: Biofuels
National Congress of American Indians

The real issues are clear.  The world is facing a population problem that has placed enormous pressure on the planet’s resources.  At present there is no attempt to address this issue whatsoever.

The economic crisis facing the west is real. There isn’t one in a thousand westerners alive today that could survive a full 5 stage collapse as identified above.  The US society is not only financially bankrupt, its entire leadership is morally bankrupt. The ponzi scheme is rapidly unwinding. The full effects of the collapse will take years to hit.  For example, the housing collapse is expected to be 4x’s worse than it was in 2008, meaning far more people being forced out of their homes.  Throwing unbacked money and the scoundrels who caused this will only make our money worth less. Other countries worldwide are looking for ways to get out from the US being the global echange medium.

The militants of the world see the world in terms of wars at this point and project global destabilization based on the have and havenots of energy.  The US is quickly becoming a havenot. The world’s largest consumer of energy has long run out of money and is using military agenda’s to keep the rest of the world in line.

The dramatic drop in oil has been the only thing keeping the world from going down the tube.  The pressures on oil prices are expected to come back though.  What will that mean as the unemployment lines fill?

Can Obama carry out the kind of national model that will put a solar system on every housetop?  Will they be able to remove the devastating co2 producing chemicals currently being used to make the shift viable?  We all need to be calling for the dramatic shift towards micropower sollutions.  That take us away from fossil fuels. But to do this will require one of the biggest political battles in history.

The corporate media isn’t interested nor is the entire energy industry interested in such a shift.  Moving everything to electricity means pulling back from over 80% of all energy resources currently being used.  We have an immense financial empire set up to make loans on cars or homes, but litterally nothing in sight for energy independence or micropower.

Twenty years ago the tech industry was caught up in the micro-computer revolution.  The same dramatic shift could be made into energy independence if the right steps were taken. But there isn’t a single major institutional industry out there willing to do it outside of the wind, solar and conservation communities.

The electric utility industry is already freaked out as the public is cutting back on its usage.  Are they ready to let go of their vicious control over energy policy? Of course not.  These are the ultimate drug dealers in this society.  We are all gonna stay free (addicted) to their agenda until they are taken out behind the woodpile and whooped.

The whooping should include a huge public dose of censored history of how these companies destroyed the public power issue in this country after the death of FDR.  There isn’t a single corporate soldier today who dares divulge the vicious red baiting tactics that made the biggest public power projects that brought most of the country into the 20th century, into missing pieces of our past.  Those huge dams and power projects that gave lights to our rural areas were federal programs that helped put millions to work not to mention gave them electricity.  The private industry has done everything in its power to kill any awareness of how the CVP, TVA, BPA or REI came to be or why.

If we aren’t carefull we’ll end up with an AT&T of electric companies that has now accountability or regulatory authority.  Private control has nothing to do with democratic institutions.  BEWARE folks.

But yo! Nobody trusts big government unless you have the power to be bailed out or have the elite’s get out of jail card.  So just as microcomputer freed us from IBM, (Big Brother and the Holding Company) the micropower movement should be the means to fuel a new financial bubble. But one that also frees consumers from both big government and big corporate agendas.

Last time around it was large centralized energy projects that helped bring the country into the 20th century. This time, it should be building to building micropower technology that brings us into the 21st century.  Rather than just making loans to big corporations its about time that government got into the business of making loans to us little folks so that we can get free of the energy dealers.

Watch out folks.  There are real pitfalls to using Hybrid cars. Toyota can no longer keep up with the demand for Prius’ because of immense size of the battery packs.

The real car of for the near future is a compressed air car that doesn’t require large batteries and gets over 100 MPG.  Here’s the link to more about the car.

But that is only the beginning. The cost of oil byproducts will bankrupt the human race if it continues to rely on concrete and asphalt products to drive private vehicles.  The cost of maintaining roads will soon be out of reach.  Nearly 50% of all urban areas in the world are now covered with concrete or asphault.

In 1975 the US energy authorities claimed that we had 450 years of coal in the ground. In just 30 years we used up over 200 years of coal!  Why? because we have been using more and more of it each year, not to mention the quality of it continues to go down. We will all soon lose those 700 slaves (what we get from oil) to be forced to use poorer grades of more polluting energy sources unless we consider redesigning our communities so that we live near our work. Right now 70% of fuel consumption goes for commuting.  The Hamster needs to wake up and get out of its running wheel. The car may have freed us once upon a time. Today it is threatening to bankrupt the entire human race not to mention destroy it with pollution.