Thanks for the tip Squarooticus. I’ll be sure to check that out. Just an aside, Mrs. Ryan my high school math teacher always called 'em "Squroots" instead of square roots. Had to laugh when I saw your handle. Parabola also fell in the tomato / tomáto catagory – paraBOla as in Ebola or parabulah.Cheers! Jo
A little off topic, but it sure looks like the drop in US treasury yields is accelerating this morning. A direct effect of European chaos or is more involved?
http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates-bonds/government-bonds/us/
Interesting interview, but I was disturbed by Mr Randers calling for increased government authority to "solve" environmental problems, and pointing to China as an example. I have noticed that ardent environmentalists often discount, or dont even consider, the value of individual liberty and freedom and place too much faith in the benevolence of large bureaucracy. It is a very materialist frame of mind with little concern for the spirit.
If given a choice, many people would sacrifice some comfort and safety to remain free. The optimal balance between individual liberty and collective problem solving is a question that I think often about.
Mr. Randers was sure to provoke an interesting discussion in his calls for government responses as the key to our various predicaments.
I am somewhat agnostic. I know some individuals that I trust less than certain governments and certain governments I trust far less than any individual. Governments are just collections of people. So are corporations, scout troops, churches and little league teams. Some function at very high levels, others are disfunctional. It all depends.
His point, to whihc I am sympathetic, seemed to be that there are certain looming conditions which are well beyond the power of the individual to address and that this leaves a coordinated response, one that is rooted in what is best vs. what is most profitable, as the most likely to succeed given the constraints and timeline of this particular story we are all in.
I happen to think that a national energy policy is desperately needed and, no, I don’t think that the ‘free market’ is up to the task. Left to its own devices the free market will do what it does best and that is to maximize profits which translates into deplete our resources as rapidly as possible.
Take natural gas. Already there are four permits in the hopper seeking to build LNG export terminals because, as the story goes, we are awash in gas. Best to ship it off to Asia where a much better price awaits than to let it sit in the ground for our eventual domestic use. This makes perfect money sense but not a lick of energy sense.
For starters 25% of the embodied energy in a cubic foot of natural gas is spent to drive the liquification process so that is 25% of its embodied ‘work’ that is used to cool it down right off the top. That energy is gone, never to be used for anything else.
Next, all of the hard data analyses all suggest that the shale gas story has been rather badly hyped and that we have a lot less of it than has been tossed about lately. Perhaps only 50% as much if you are taken by Berman and Pittinger’s 2011 study. There we find the age-old story that free enterprise is rewarded for overstating their assets is a definite possibility and it might be nice to have a solid, funded, neutral set of eyes all over that data because so many critical decisions rest on its accuracy.
Where the free market would seek to exploit the natgas resource as fast as possible and play fast and loose with the base data, I would strongly prefer a 30 year mster plan for where our country wishes to be with respect to energy mix and infrastructure and how much natgas we need domestically to acheive that vision.
Instead, my prediction is that at some point in the not too distant future we will find ourselves disappointed by both the price and availability of natgas as well as our failure to use it to build something durable and useful.
So this is an area where I simply cannot see private industry leading the way because the debt-based dollar system does not reward or encourage such behavior on the part of individuals or corporations. We need a benevolent national response of some sort.
Now…just how likely that is to be realized…that’s another matter.
[quote=cmartenson]Where the free market would seek to exploit the natgas resource as fast as possible and play fast and loose with the base data, I would strongly prefer a 30 year mster plan for where our country wishes to be with respect to energy mix and infrastructure and how much natgas we need domestically to acheive that vision.
[/quote]
Herein lies the problem We are bereft of both leadership and the planning provided by such leadership. The Chinese have 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100 year plans. The US reacts to yesterday.
I don’t think it’s so much that our governmental structure stops us from making proper decisions, rather our governmental structure distorts the reality of our resource constrained world.
I think this is a perfect example of the distortions caused by government at work, primarily via the manipulation of the currency. Perhaps it’s not the "free market" acting in this case. Could it be cheap money available that is distorting the true cost of this behavior? Could it be the continual lies from our government about the 200 years of natural gas available? How about the subsidies supporting drilling, oil use, etc?
Chris how is this not a deflection from the real problem? You say "because the debt-based dollar system does not reward or encourage such behavior" but then instead of saying, let’s solve that problem you advocate giving more power to those that have caused the problem??? I don’t understand how you can actually think that any "benevolent national response" is remotely possible?
While Mr. Randers thinks more controlling government is the way to solve the problem, I would say why could you possibly think that given the way government has handled it so far? Government has encouraged massive consumption over savings via low interest loans, pension promises (why save when the government will take care of you)…
Government causes all kinds of distortions, just look at the building of the Interstate highway system. Some people point out how would smaller governments and individuals build that? The answer is they probably wouldn’t and we would have much less sprawl. How about all the government water projects to deliver water to the deserts? How many people would be living in unsustainable areas without government spending billions to distort reality?
I firmly believe the only solution is much smaller and localized government. Only when we have a sound method to measure of the value of resources and can see the true limited nature of them will we begin to make changes.
So Chis, I have to disagree, the longer we have large centralized government making plans, the farther we overshoot until forced to change. I’m not sure how you can advocate community, self-reliance, etc and then say we need a national energy policy? The only way a large central government will solve the problem will be through the reduction of population, and yes, governments have proven they are quite good at that!
There is the arrogance in progressive thought that they "know better". It’s that progressive way of thinking that has led us to the world we live in now with a out of control monetary system, economies on the brink of disaster, and humanitarian crisis due to the propagation of the view that governments will take care of us because the "smart" people are making the decisions.
I have much more faith that people when given the right information, have a proper perspective on the value of resources, and understand they must be responsible for their actions, will make the right choices on a large distributed basis. Chris, I think the work you and others have done to point out the situation is far more important than anything a large government can accomplish. What we need is honesty from leaders about the situation so everyone can make better decisions - not just the smart people!
rhare - excellent post.
When one begins examining the "unintended consequences" of government intervention in the free market (although we haven’t had a truly free market in at least 100 years), one usually begins to advocate for less government.
Besides the list of great examples you gave of negative effects of bigger government, possibly the most invasive and most damaging are crony capitalism, corporate welfare, and corporatocracy.
History tells us that the larger goverment becomes, the more power over our lives corporations have.
Corporations are now writing the laws to maximize their profits, fleece the taxpayers and main street, and set up regulatory hurdles to put the mom and pop businesses out of business.
I’m especially surprised and disappointed Dr. Martenson has officially advocated a central government approach to U.S. energy policy.
As he is no doubt aware, the U.S. has already tried and failed in this in creating the Department of Energy in '77 with the mission of reducing dependence on foreign oil. The DOE now has a $26B budget with the result of a greater dependence on foreign oil now than in '77.
On the plus side, the lobbyists, bureacrats, and corporations are doing quite well with that $26B a year, helping to acheive D.C.'s personal income rise, the greatest of any region in the U.S.
Throughout history, the negative unintended consequences of government intervention in free enterprise have outweighed any "improvement by government" 
, in any industry, including energy.
Arundhati;What an honor to have such a distinguished author as yourself join our ranks! You brought me out from trolling the last few years to chime in. When I first found Chris’s site like 4 or 5 years ago, I got lots of gold, food stock, a gun, 2 bee hives, some chickens etc. Since then obviously the world has held together. My plan B has not been deployed yet, but I do love the bees and chickens, and I made some good money on gold!
This slow collapse may go on for the rest of our lifetimes, who can say? We are but cells in Kahil Gibrans Super Organism (SO), thinking the ‘brain’ aka Government is in control when in fact there is no one home. Current neuroscience shows ‘free will’ is largely an illusion, collectively the SO may have more degrees of freedom, but the price we ‘cells’ in the SO pay for the ‘degrees of FREEDOM’ is the exact opposite - complete and utter bondage. Scratch an itch and 50,000 individual cells slough off your skin. Apoptosis is ready to kill any rebel cell. In a holographic universe these systems from our body to our global society are strikingly similar.
Embracing the paradox always seems the best route, so here perhaps, slavery is freedom. Cells are slaves to the SO, but collectively they all get not only better survival odds, but the SO has more degrees of freedom!
So I can see why modern medicine and food production, both rather unhealthy to say the least, are here. Because they work best - its quality or quantity. And in this Malthusian world, quantity is what genes measure success by. So we have ‘Over 50 Billion Served’ by Soylent Green because it works! (Not for me mind you, being a raw, grass fed beef, paleo, organic fan myself!)
Everything is happening exactly as it should, and if you and Chris save(change) the world, thats because that was exactly whats supposed to happen! I for one hope you do. Its all predetermined, yet this rule is subject to change!
I for one have found the discovery that "I am in this world, not of it…" for real, as the most life changing experience ever. Now I know there is nothing to worry about in this matrix.
Like the Marine doing 6 tours without ever a clue to reality, or the tourists, I too live in a surreal world here in the US, sheltered from the thousands of Indian farmers committing suicide over Monanto sponsored eco-terrorism, amongst other tragic realities the world over. The list goes on and on. But one could argue, the tourist, the Marine - that IS their reality. Until it changes.
Collapse, or breakdown - is also a breakthrough and I for one will try to enjoy surfing the Zeitgeist as we Paradigm Shift! As EO WIlson says "Progress happens funeral by funeral" - kids born into a collapsed society will, I think, assume this is the norm, and the typical human spirit kicks in and life goes on…
I love your writings by the way! Keep up the good work!
I worry about confirmational bias. Reality has a habit of not being linear. Black and white swans everywhere.
Our models are made by a self-referential Left brain which is incapable of considering issues that are not in it’s model.
Ideally we should not post anything that does not have anything new to say.
This discussion exemplifies the human condition with regard to the failed concept of the need for big government. It was exemplified most succinctly by a neighbor when I was living in a small town in central Russia several years ago. Many times over tea or vodka he would overrule my protestations about the gathering power of Putin, saying in his simple English "Russia is a big country, it needs…must have STRONG leader, only problem is…we get bad leaders!"
As Chris said: " Governments are just collections of people. So are corporations, scout troops, churches and little league teams. Some function at very high levels, others are disfunctional. It all depends."
My sentiments, exactly, but what that implies to me is that we can accomplish the same productive organization in different ways, that don’t require theft and force. That to be most effective and responsive these organizations usually should be smaller and more local is the knowledge ignored. And most importantly the attempts to be effective, responsive, productive, ect. must be allowed to fail if they are not! Just as banks can achieve efficiencies of scale by growing ,we have seen that other costs of that distance from their origin can be high as well and, from my perspective, it is the leverage of individual decision making that provides the most systemic vulnerability but the power of size (usually in cahoots with government) often prevents appropriate and more timely failure.
If banks or other organizations are too big to fail, dangerous to the wider society because of the potential damage from bad decisions, how much greater is the danger from the way bigger organization, the government, whose most magnified use of leveraged power is ultimately portrayed in the symbolic red button of nuclear destruction available to one single individual.
No thanks. I’ll take my chances in the trenches of a messy ecological stew of competing individuals and organizations seeking their successful niche. I believe in much of the 3Es foundational assumptions of this site and should this organization incorporate, buy up natgas sites to sit on for later use or deploy for investing in future alternatives I’d love to buy shares!
In the menatime I hold that the power and influence of governmental organizations should be inversely proportional to their size and scope, just the opposite of present day tendencies.
Does the "free market" really work? Let’s look at the world’s ocean’s and major predator fish populations. Seems there’s a Tragedy of the Commons, isn’t it?
Now, should we just auction off sections f the world’s oceans like we would sections of land? Not sure if that would really work, would it? One common industry pattern is consolidation until a cartel or oligopoly emerges. The other pattern is fish migrating between different areas of the world’s oceans, thus removing incentives for responsible management for the long-term. Unless of course someone wants to wrap a net around all of their territory, to prevent anyone else from ever getting any fish.
I hear in Texas the water rights are based on "right to capture". It doesn’t matter if someone else was farming downstream near a river that used to flow. Oh, what’s it called? The Rio Grande? I guess that’s when the property owner downstream might decide to start walking up the dry riverbed with a loaded gun, only held back by the fact that the property owner upstream can call in the sheriff to protect his property rights. Right?
Here’s an interesting thought. A lot of free market advocates insist we just need government to protect people from being killed, and to enforce property laws and contracts. Nothing else.
Well, if we don’t need to regulate products because people will just naturally avoid companies that produce bad products that make them sick or kill them… Then why bother enforcing contracts at all? If people will naturally avoid making contracts with those who don’t have a good history of honoring contracts…
So regulation or "free" market, it really is a matter of degree, isn’t it? Some people want only for the law to protect their property. Others want the law to protect sellers from putting out produce laden with pesticides. Yet others want the law to allow them to sell produce laden with pesticides AND without warning labels - that’s called corporations controlling government.
There are good reasons where people argue for government regulations, and there are good reasons where people argue for free markets. Both can solve problems just as both can cause problems and end in disaster. The trick is to find the right balance.
I think in some cases, more regulation (of the right kind) would be good. In some cases, less (of the right kind) would be better. I tend to agree with Dr. Martenson on his agnostic view.
Poet
Poet -You’ll be amazed to find out free market, capitalist solutions to over-fishing are what is saving the world’s fisheries now, one by one.
The tragedy of the commons that had existed was the result of no single fisherman having private property rights to a fishery, and thus led to fishing as many fish as possible, wherever they were, leading to bigger and bigger ships, reckless multispecies netting practices, etc. There was no incentive to preserve a fishery for the long term.
Now, across the world, private property based catch shares are being used by fishermen. These market based, trasferrable shares give the fishermen incentives to preserve a fishery for the long term. Fish populations are being stabilized and increased, and fishermen have returned to stable year around fishing, continually bringing fresh fish to market, with higher prices for local fishermen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_fishing_quota
Pollution is still, by far, the largest threat to the world’s fisheries.
As we know, water and air pollution has been legalized by the federal government/EPA. Citizens, in most cases, are not allowed to sue large corporations over having their private property polluted by those companies. Indeed, our government, with the American courts, have made the deliberate decision to allow property rights to be violated by industrial pollution.
Today like the FDA, the EPA is the victim of the revolving door with Monsanto, etc. And so, this bigger federal government has laws written for them by big corporations.
When free market forces of defined personal property, and the ability of individuals for who’s rights have been infringed to file lawsuits, are applied, corporations can be sued by private parties, without an intervening (protective) 3rd party, and behavior changing financial penalties are inflicted on the polluting party.
I agree with much of your sentiments but urge you to question your assumptions. Typically when we want to fix these types of wrongs we think there ought-a-be a law/regulation/oversight board etc. It is that these imply the full force and monolithic structure of government that provides the unintended consequences, gaming the system, cure is worse than the disease, how do we get rid of this overbearing bureaucracy types of outcomes. I encourage our culture to evolve past that need, to deconstruct large government structures (let Quebec leave Canada but only if it lets parts stay or leave it) but build cooperative organizations for oversight (multi county homeless help centers, consumer reports type transparency for working conditions/pay rather than OSHA). There would be many ongoing challenges developing workable organizational solutions but they coould stay at more local and relevant scales and have shorter lifespans allowing for faster turnover and improvement.
By sticking to big government solutions we condemn ourselves to serving the beast as it inevitably grows (demanding our income to fund it), needs more and more power to be "effective" (spending/GDP, military interventions, spy on citizens to protect them, etc), and comes eventually to its end very badly in war, systemic collapse, or revolution. I would prefer small, ongoing versions of this natural process where smaller, more local, organizations fail piecemeal over time like the ecological process of a complex rainforest, the bacterial population in a gut or a scoop of soil in your backyard.
What if, by whatever system of tax allocation we have, 1% of the bill was voluntary and could be withdrawn (or not) from a specific part of the budget (military, post office, a certain subsidy, etc.), and it was increased by 1% every year for 100 yrs! Which parts would wither and die first and be replaced effectively in the private sector (fedex/UPS) and which would live on, supported by contributions and kept in check by continueing alternative suggestions. I’d love to see it play out.
Hi Thc0655You are right. From time to time nations or peoples have looked to authoritarian governments (or unelected bureacrats or technocrats) to lead them to utopia. The results have all been disastrous in the medium term. In fact, such a trend to authoritarian regimes might, by leading to war, be the final nail in the coffin of humanity. The out look is pretty grim if the choice is muddling to disaster or being ordered to catastrophe.
Our only hope is that the ordinary person inthe street will rapidly evolve to reject being persistently misled. Given that rationality is unpalatable it is very difficult to accept but many ordinary people are, surely deeply concerned but lack disinterested leadership - which is difficult in a democracy and, in time, impossible in a dictatorship.
[quote=Paranoid][quote=Arundhati Roy]
To quote Antonio Gramsci:
"We can see that in putting the question "what is man?" what we mean is: what can man become? That is, can man dominate his own destiny; can he "make himself," can he create his own life? We maintain, therefore, that man is a process and, more exactly, the process of his actions.If you think about it, the question itself "what is man?" is not an abstract or "objective" question. It is born of our reflection about ourselves and about others, and we want to know, in relation to what we have thought and seen, what we are and what we can become; whether we really are, and if so, to what extent, "makers of our own selves," of our life, and of our destiny. And we want to know this "today," in the given conditions of today, the conditions of our daily life, not of any life or any man."
I find its more profitable if society is steered away from looking down at the abyss. Presently, most of us work; drive our cars, eat our "three-thousand mile caesar salad" in our cosy suburban concrete cul-de-sac’.
We think it’s a choice through ‘free will’.
Telling us otherwise hasn’t worked so far in the 40 years since Limits To Growth, even if there have been a few benchmarks since.
If we don’t know now, we will do, but not in the way we envision, since we aren’t equipped with the experience, coddled in a life of unparalleled expansion and unlimited resource - why should we change our ways?
And media isn’t going to help. That’s been done, with the odd leak of reality before the ‘free press’ closes ranks. Its back to business as usual - "shop-shop-shop" - keep the economy from crashing.
Out in the sunshine today I counted seventeen women at a different stage of pregnancy in a world adding 90+ million new mouths to feed each year on dwindling resource - I’m sure none of them feel any real pain to change yet -
Are they paying attention?
Where I live it’s tourist thick seven months, filled with families who saved fifty weeks of the year to get two weeks to blow it all and start all over again -
Are they paying attention?
I’ve a neighbor who’s been to Afghanistan six times as a foot soldier since 2005. In seven years he’s never thought to question why, reading one unrelated book in his entire life. He has a daughter under four and a wife who "does nails" -
Are they paying attention?
See, that’s what they want to do. They’ll never know the full story, and there’s so much comfort they take in that. People are brainwashed by fiction. They think they know stuff, when really, all the fictional stuff they do know is an immunization against reality. It makes them know things they don’t know. Enables them to have a kind of superficial quasi sophistication and cynicism - which is just a thin layer beyond which they’re not really cynical at all.
I just went to Chris’s You Tube site and note all his video have recieved more than five million views. Its not bad for four years work, here’s a hat tip for trying.
Lets hope there comes a time soon when he gets an audience that big in one evening - an evening when 17 babies deliver before term, seven months worth of tourists stay home and make a "no dig" permaculture fresh veggie patch, my neighbor starts quoting chomsky and his wife thinks one single solitary critical thought
Yeah, and pigs might fly
[/quote]
Arundhati;
What an honor to have such a distinguished author as yourself join our ranks! You brought me out from trolling the last few years to chime in. When I first found Chris’s site like 4 or 5 years ago, I got lots of gold, food stock, a gun, 2 bee hives, some chickens etc. Since then obviously the world has held together. My plan B has not been deployed yet, but I do love the bees and chickens, and I made some good money on gold!
This slow collapse may go on for the rest of our lifetimes, who can say? We are but cells in Kahil Gibrans Super Organism (SO), thinking the ‘brain’ aka Government is in control when in fact there is no one home. Current neuroscience shows ‘free will’ is largely an illusion, collectively the SO may have more degrees of freedom, but the price we ‘cells’ in the SO pay for the ‘degrees of FREEDOM’ is the exact opposite - complete and utter bondage. Scratch an itch and 50,000 individual cells slough off your skin. Apoptosis is ready to kill any rebel cell. In a holographic universe these systems from our body to our global society are strikingly similar.
Embracing the paradox always seems the best route, so here perhaps, slavery is freedom. Cells are slaves to the SO, but collectively they all get not only better survival odds, but the SO has more degrees of freedom!
So I can see why modern medicine and food production, both rather unhealthy to say the least, are here. Because they work best - its quality or quantity. And in this Malthusian world, quantity is what genes measure success by. So we have ‘Over 50 Billion Served’ by Soylent Green because it works! (Not for me mind you, being a raw, grass fed beef, paleo, organic fan myself!)
Everything is happening exactly as it should, and if you and Chris save(change) the world, thats because that was exactly whats supposed to happen! I for one hope you do. Its all predetermined, yet this rule is subject to change!
I for one have found the discovery that "I am in this world, not of it…" for real, as the most life changing experience ever. Now I know there is nothing to worry about in this matrix.
Like the Marine doing 6 tours without ever a clue to reality, or the tourists, I too live in a surreal world here in the US, sheltered from the thousands of Indian farmers committing suicide over Monanto sponsored eco-terrorism, amongst other tragic realities the world over. The list goes on and on. But one could argue, the tourist, the Marine - that IS their reality. Until it changes.
Collapse, or breakdown - is also a breakthrough and I for one will try to enjoy surfing the Zeitgeist as we Paradigm Shift! As EO WIlson says "Progress happens funeral by funeral" - kids born into a collapsed society will, I think, assume this is the norm, and the typical human spirit kicks in and life goes on…
I love your writings by the way! Keep up the good work!
[/quote]
Hello Paranoid,
Jorgen Randers is a joy. If only he gains the public distinction he deserved forty years ago.
But it was one of the other authors of Limits to Growth I relate most. Dennis L. Meadows began his public speaking from a naïve belief that simple truths - the viceral nature of our world - would be enough to trade our present trajectory for a clearer one with better tools to the task.
It is a pity that those tools have been picked over cleanly - turned inside-out through motive driven profiteers financing ‘credible’ institutions - spun into a yarn, veneered, sweetened with saccharin, and fed to a public without suspecting they now have a taste for cannibalism.
When the world view of India is colored as though Gross National Product is a means to secure a proof against poverty - where 98% earn little more than 20 rupees a day - against the global industry of finance that secures poverty in perpetuity over resource rich nations as a proven motive of loan payments spiralling interest bearing debt without end. There again, where the media wheels churn out a flip-side of reality - removing the motivation of millions to act against the perpetuity of a lie - you and I have to ask ourselves regularly, "what is my purpose?" for fear we’ll simply forget for the barrage of proflicate sabotage of our senses.
No, I am not Arundhati Roy. I sense I am made of a stuff that has been hollowed out more easily than she, but even in the attempt, I honor her for the depth of her courage, and for that, I carry her name.
To those reading this who have never heard of her, here’s an interview with the highly respected journalist Jeremy Paxman from last year
Maybe works fine in Norway, I don't know what gave Mr.Randers impression that [big] governments are benevolent and progressive… History seems to indicate just the opposite.
We can only hope, I guess