"The day that a financial system would be disrupted, nothing happens physically.
So I think if we drop our energy consumption quite a bit, nothing has to change other than our supply chains and the way that goods and medicine and water and sanitation and all that get to the cities and towns and states."
There simply is no credible evidence to support such an outrageous assertion.
Quite the opposite is true which is an essential premise of the Peak Oil theory. Energy production ceases to grow -> growth based economy ceases to grow -> economy dies -> people die. "Nothing happens"?
We don’t need more denial. We don’t need more dreams of solutions to this global human dillemma. We could use some mitigation efforts, but that’s the one thing we will not be getting from the centers of power. Mitigation will come only on individual bases as personal efforts.
This interview is a prime example of the high-quality content that makes CM.com so invaluable.
Having said that Toktomi may have a point in pointing out that NH is being a little disingenuous in claiming
"The day that a financial system would be disrupted, nothing happens physically."
That the overall messages in the interview evoke a hostile emotional response in some is hardly surprising. David Roberts writing in Grist recently "about why conservative white men (CWM) are so loathe to accept climate change" quotes Dan Kahan of Yale:
"...people seek to deflect threats to indentities they hold, and roles they occupy, by virture of contested cultural norms."
A great interview with Nate Hagens.I was glad to see him favouring the deflation scenario. How there could be any other outcome in a world struggling under the burden of an astonishing $250 trillion of future claims boggles me. For there to be inflation, that figure would have to be significantly increased. Talk about pushing on a string. The general public is over debt and is desperately saving to cut their debt. Inflation cannot happen in these circunstances.
I really liked the fact that he put money and financials firmly in their place as tertiary capital and something “that will have to disappear as the main cultural objective”. Towards the end of the interview, Chris brought in the far more interesting topics of redundancy and resilience. I think there is little that can be done to avoid the consequences of this debt/energy binge. Indulging in political finger pointing and blame laying is less than useless. What has happened and is still to happen is a consequence of being human. We are brilliant but we are also greedy and prefer what is in front of us to anything over the horizon. When we discover our error, we panic. Same old story. Lets get over it and recognize that we are capable of doing things better. We could try looking at the way things work in the natural world for a start. The natural world has enormous resilience because of the huge inbuilt redundancy. Terribly “inefficient” but there would be no evolution if nature was efficient because there would be precious little diversity from which to choose. There are backups everywhere – like several million sperm per ejaculation when only one is required to do the job! But nothing is wasted because it all goes back into the re-cycling melting pot. That is not how business is run today. Fewer and fewer corporations have cornered more and more of the world’s production lines in one corner of the world – in China mainly. In cultural product, the west has swamped the rest of the world with a way of life that, for all it’s bland mediocrity, is designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator and so is as dangerous as it is seductive. Whether it be McDonalds, the product of Hollywood or even Apple, the trend is always towards sameness and less real choice. Sure, sameness has it’s advantages – without the success of the Microsoft operating system we may not have the incredible digital computer web world that we have today. In a sense , though, MSDOS was the modern equivalent of two steel rails while the world wide web has unleashed something akin to that which the base acid pairs in the DNA chain have donefor the natural world.
I think, in the end, we get what we deserve and I am hopeful that we will emerge, from whatever befalls us, both stronger and better able to live within our means.