To The Ends of The Earth :: Peak Oil Documentary

To the Ends of the Earth - Individual license from David Lavallee on Vimeo.

(Individual license -- watch at home or own your own with a friend.)

The rise of extreme energy, the end of economic growth, a new way forward

Narrated by Emma Thompson, this award winning documentary looks at where we are going to find our oil and gas today- to the ends of the earth. It chronicles the rise of extreme energy and finds us at a civilizational crossroads.

DOC LA Film Festival- Best Environmental Film 2016

Milan International Film Festival- Special Jury Mention 2017

Planet in Focus Film Festival (Toronto) 2016

Doc website: http://endsofearthfilm.com/



THE ISSUE
“That’s an incredibly important milestone, in terms of the human race”. David Hughes, film subject, describes the turning point we are now facing, as evidenced by the rise of extreme energy.

A few statistics underline this point: 85% of all the energy we use is hydrocarbons, oil, gas and coal; 99% of all the labour done in society is done by fossil fuels (Tulett Prebon, Energy, Finance and the End of Growth)

Clearly this is an important resource for our global economy, but is it perhaps declining rapidly in quality?

What follows here are more in-depth explorations of the ideas presented in the film, along with research links for you to find out more.



THE FILM’S INTRODUCTION
In 2010, the International Energy Agency (IEA), in its World Energy Outlook, announced that 2006 was the global peak of conventional crude oil production. In other words, we would never produce more crude oil then we had in 2006. This seismic pronouncement, however, did not spark panic in global financial markets, as it was couched in language that made it appear as though nothing would really change. "Liquid fuels production would increase until 2030," it said, "as long as huge investments in infrastructure are made." It made no mention of where the money for these ever increasing investments would come from.

An example of the global peak of conventional crude oil production is the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia. This is the largest oil field in the world, a field that has been feeding North American gas tanks since the 1950s. Today, the field needs to have sea water injected into it, an "enhanced recovery" method that indicates the field has not much more of its easy flowing crude oil to give to us (12 paragraphs down). The largest oilfields in the world were all discovered between 1930 and 1960, and if we make such discoveries today (such as the recent Petrobras find off the coast of Brazil) they are in remote, inaccessible and therefore hugely expensive locations.

No matter, governments and corporations tell us, we have huge amounts of "unconventional" resources available to us. Geologists like to use the metaphor of the "resource pyramid". At the top of the pyramid are free flowing conventional sources of oil and gas, such as North Sea Brent crude of today, and West Texas Intermediate crude of yesteryear. The top of the pyramid is narrow, and as such there are not a lot of these types of crude available to us. As we travel down the pyramid we have far greater resources available to us, but can these resources be extracted at a cost that is not too great — either to the economy or the environment? Are the energy returns of these new unconventional fuels great enough to fuel our society?

What are the economic implications of declining energy returns? Are the technologies being proposed really the game changers that industry is claiming them to be?

Is this the dawn of new era? Are we witnessing the rise of extreme energy?



THE ARCTIC — UNDER THE ICE AT THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the region above the arctic circle holds 90 billion bb of oil. This represents about 3 years global oil supply only.

There are costs to wildlife and subsistence hunters that live in the area. Seismic testing for oil is damaging the marine environment.

The multinational oil giant Shell is quite familiar with the rigours of Arctic drilling. On New Year’s Eve, 2012, a tow line connecting the tow ship Aiviq to Shell’s prize drill ship the Kulluk snapped in a violent storm near Kodiak, AK. The Coast Guard stepped in to rescue the 18 souls on board, and Shell’s drilling program in the Arctic was set back as they announced withdrawal of their plans to drill in 2014. Meanwhile the Kulluk ended up in a scrapyard in Singapore. Billions of dollars spent, and not a drop of oil yet recovered from the Chuckchi Sea.



FEEDING THE BEAST
Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania on August 27th, 1859, and the petroleum age was born. Ironically, the investors funding his project had grown impatient, and they decided to cancel the operation, sending a letter to Drake instructing him to pull up stakes and move on. He didn't receive the letter until after he had struck oil, and thus the beginning of the petroleum age was not delayed.

In our modern times, a historical event of an arguably similar magnitude has passed by with little discussion about the societal implications. It’s 2003 and American bombs are raining down on Baghdad. The price of oil begins to climb. The US Energy Administration (3rd paragraph) decides to reclassify Tar Sands Bitumen, a massive petroleum resource in Northern Alberta, as "recoverable" barrels of "oil", whereas previously they were considered unrecoverable. The sky-high price of oil now justifies huge capital investments in this backwater project, and soon all the oil majors have bought up leases in the Tar Sands. By 2006 the industry is producing 1.5 million barrels a day, and they rename the resource "oilsands" to give it the ring of something familiar to us (bitumen is a hydrocarbon cousin of oil). As Baghdad burns, Calgary booms. Is it the birth of a new energy age?

A key difference between this resource and conventional oil is the amount of energy it takes to produce it. Researcher Ben Parfitt has investigated this in detail in his report “Fracking up British Columbia”. A dam called the Site C Dam is proposed to meet burgeoning power needs in B.C. The official story is this power is needed for homes, and given the diffuse nature of the energy grid (the power can go anywhere in North America) this is likely partly true. But Parfitt claims “the drive to increase hydro power is coming from industry” — industries such as the shale gas industry which produces gas from hydraulic fracturing, an energy and water intensive process that has risen up to replace conventional gas drilling in Canada.

David Hughes, a researcher who worked with Natural Resources Canada for numerous years, states that his research shows that Canada peaked in conventional natural gas in 2006, and is now down 20% from the peak already. The only way to get large amounts of gas today is to frack. The shale gas industry projects an 8 fold increase in their power demands (Parfitt, p. 27). Where they will get the power from to do this is unclear, as Site C is only a proposal at this stage and 3 Site Cs would be needed to accomplish this desired increase.

There are many environmental issues associated with both the Site C dam and shale gas operations fed by this dam. The dam itself will flood 7,841 acres of prime farmland, leaving people like Ken and Arlene Boon, farmers, and Gwen Johanssen, mayor of Hudson’s Hope, high and dry (they will lose their land). Shale gas, for its part, requires massive amounts of water; up to 600 olympic swimming pools of water are used at some sites. Lana Lowe, lands director at Fort Nelson First Nation, found her favorite fishing spot, Two Island Lake, drawn down by 15 cms as a result of one of the world’s largest single frack jobs.

Robert Howarth from Cornell University conducted a study on the carbon intensity of fracking operations and found this to be a form of extraction that makes gas as carbon intensive as coal. This is due to “substantive methane emissions”. (Howarth, Robert and Santor, Renee and Ingraffea, Anthony. “Methane and the greenhouse gas footprint of natural gas from shale formations.” Climate Change Letters. March 13, 2011.)

Parfitt states in his report that 55% of the fracked gas now goes to the Tar Sands — “dirty gas to make dirty oil” he says. When considering the environmental and economic impact of a dam (or several eventually), and the energy required to make fracked gas and pipe it to the Tar Sands a province away, we begin to realize that we are “feeding a beast”.



THE END OF GROWTH
With all the energy inputs required to feed such a beast, we need to ask ourselves questions about the energy returns and economic implications of declining energy returns. “The footprint of oil is in 90% of all goods we consume — therefore the current narrative that energy doesn’t matter (it is considered an outlier in mainstream economics) is ridiculous.”(Heinberg, Richard: The End of Growth: Adapting to our New Economic Reality, 2011) I interviewed Richard in Napa Valley, CA.

This does not manifest itself as “running out of oil”, but rather running out of oil that’s affordable enough for our economy to bear its cost.
Charles Hall, professor of Environmental Science at the University of Syracuse, NY (interviewed in Denver, CO., October, 2013), states that conventional crude oil and gas reserves have given us energy returns that are so good that it has enabled us to not even make energy part of our conversation anymore. Hall is the founder of the concept of Energy Return on Investment (EROI) which is a measure of how much energy it takes to make energy. His research has shown that in the 1930s the energy returns were so good that one barrel of oil energy equivalent gave us a hundred barrels of oil in return — an excellent ratio that allowed for the exponential growth of our society. Today, we chug by on returns as low as 2 to 1 (in certain steaming projects in Alberta’s Tar Sands; the mining projects have better returns of 5 to 1). Hall estimates that energy returns of 15 to 1 are the minimum necessary for modern industrialized society. The following gives the ratios for the different fuels examined in this film, as well as for renewable energy sources:

Tar Sands Bitumen (the steam assisted projects, as opposed to mining — recent research from the University of Calgary shows that some the steam-assisted projects featured in the film (Wallace King portion) are actually energy negative. (Gates, I.D. and Larter, S. Energy Efficiency and Emissions Intensity of SAGD. Fuel, 115:706-713, 2014. )
Shale gas (such as the Horne River Basin) — 10 to 1 (though depletion rates of wells are very fast, up to 60% after three years).
Oil shale (i.e. kerogen, the “rock that burns”) — Unknown, but thought to be 1 to 1 or energy negative
Wind Energy — 15 to 1
What is the impact of all this economically? Many authors have written about a “net energy cliff” — the point at which the energy returns are too low to power our society and economy in its current form. This does not manifest itself as “running out of oil”, but rather running out of oil that’s affordable enough for our economy to bear its cost.

Dr. Tim Morgan, former head of global research for the risk analyzing brokerage firm Tullett-Prebon examines in his report “Perfect Storm — Energy, Finance and the End of Growth” what he calls “the headwinds” of our globalized economy. They are as follows:

Crushing debt that all industrialized countries are now bearing: economies thus become dependent on debt fueled consumption, and any reversal in debt availability is bound to unwind the largely illusory “growth” created by debt fueled consumer spending. Mistaking debt fuelled economic expansion for real growth and governments spend accordingly (p. 24). In other words, spending money we simply don’t have both at a personal and national level.
Massaging of economic data to the point where economic trends are obscured — lack of regulatory oversight to hold corporations and individuals accountable.
Fallout from the biggest debt bubble in history — 2008 global meltdown — the effects of which are still being felt today.
And of course, the most permanent and unavoidable of all: The approach of an energy returns cliff edge.
As concerns the net energy cliff, how can it be that with so many resources available to us, and energy companies and governments claiming that we have 500 years of resources available to us, how can it be that there is a problem of any kind?

Jeremy Rifkin, who was not featured in the film but could well have been, talks about the “Zero Margin Cost” society.



UTAH OIL SHALE — THE ROCK THAT BURNS
“Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

David Hughes uses the analogy of the “tap vs. the tank”. The “tank” is the resource itself, which is absolutely huge. The oil shale in Colorado for example is actually three times the size of the Tar Sands of northern Alberta, which is considered the second largest deposit of petroleum in the world. The “tap” however is what that resource has to come out of — in other words how we need to deliver it to society — and the tap itself is tiny. And our economy can only bear a certain price of extraction: if the price goes too high, the economy contracts; if it stays high, the economy collapses eventually. With no alternatives available to us, no magic bullet waiting to save us, we face a forced human renaissance.

The Ute Nation, the tribe which the state of Utah gets its name from, were the first to discover the properties of oil shale. They observed when making campfires near this type of rock, that it would occasionally catch fire, and they called it “the rock that burns”. It is a form of "oil" called kerogen, a waxy substance that is a geological precursor to oil. Extracting the hydrocarbon from the rock requires mining it first and then inputting massive amounts of energy and water to refine it into something that is normally used as a low-grade bunker fuel. The energy returns have never been calculated, but they are thought to be 1:1 or perhaps even negative. It is, in short, the worst form of oil in the world.

This has not stopped companies like Enefit and Red Leaf Resources, as well as oil giants like Exxon Mobil from making huge plans to develop this resource. The Green River formation is the largest reserve of oil shale in the world, but it is unfortunately also located in the second most arid state in the US, Utah. A US government website touts the resource enthusiastically: “A moderate estimate of 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from oil shale in the Green River Formation is three times greater than the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. Present U.S. demand for petroleum products is about 20 million barrels per day. If (my emphasis) oil shale could be used to meet a quarter of that demand, the estimated 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from the Green River Formation would last for more than 400 years.” (Source) While the government enthuses about the potential jobs, revenue and energy, it neglects to mention that the all time production record for oil shale was only 18, 400 barrels a day (Hughes, David, “Drill, Baby Drill”, 2010), a far cry from the 20 million barrels needed to meet US demand per day. Oil shale is only economically justifiable when the oil price is very high, and paradoxically, when the oil price is high it kills demand for oil, so it is hard to imagine a time that oil shale might be profitable. To this day it is still uncertain whether or not oil shale can be done profitably, and certainly not at a worldwide scale.



NUKES FOR OIL
Unconventional oil, due to the difficulty of extraction, is essentially a cannibal of other energy sources.

In an internal document marked “restricted” which I have obtained, the corporation SNC LAVALIN outlines the prospect for nuclear energy as a replacement to natural gas as a feedstock to make Tar Sands oil. Comparing it to the US push to put a man on the moon in the 1960s, it lays out a bold plan to inject massive amounts of capital investments to deploy nuclear energy in the service of making oil.

It sets as a timeline a requirement of 15 years' lead time to fully deploy nuclear power in the Tar Sands. It also describes in detail problems associated with nuclear energy. Some of these problems are well known and yet represent relatively unlikely outcomes: the risk of nuclear meltdown (which has happened only three times in history), terrorism threats, etc…. However, another key concern less well known, the use of massive amounts of water to cool the plants, puts yet another straw into already tapped rivers and lakes in Alberta. It also creates nuclear waste to add to Tar Sands waste. Furthermore, mining uranium and shipping it to the Tar Sands in order to provide it as an energy source to make oil lowers the energy returns (Nuclear = 10:1 EROI) even further, as well as putting the oilsands industry at risk of commodity price shocks from another industry: the report notes the tenfold increase in the price of uranium over a seven year period (due to scarcity of uranium). It’s not just peak oil right now — it’s peak everything. A solution to this problem would be to reconfigure the economy in order to use energy for its original intended purpose, not sacrifice declining uranium and natural gas stocks to make Tar Sands oil at a huge energy loss.



A NEW WAY FORWARD
Realizing that oil is declining in quality rapidly may lead some people to want to double down — “Drill, Baby Drill” is the familiar chorus of the ignorant. Or perhaps we should just switch to renewables. Well yes, but with wind energy at 15 to 1 it’s only just powerful enough to maintain a globalized society — if we had all the infrastructure in place. It may take up to 30 years to build a world free of fossil energy — we don’t have that kind of time. The solution exists in voluntarily shrinking our world, localizing economies and removing fossil fuel energy from food production wherever possible.



STOPPING THE MADNESS — SOLUTIONS
Albert Einstein once said that you can solve a problem using the same kind of thinking that created the problem in the first place. A new paradigm is required.

A Just Transition sees the people employed in new, profitable industries that create far more jobs and are far more democratic than the oil industry ever was.
Enter the Transition Movement. First conceived of by Rob Hopkins (whom I have interviewed for this film, though later cut) in Totnes, England. It is a movement which specifically is built around the twin threats of climate change and peak oil, and seeks ways to build resilience into localized societies. “Resllience is the new sustainability,” Richard Heinberg said in an interview I conducted with him. Resilience is defined as creating the building blocks of society locally, with small community governance, and being completely unaffected by what is happening at the national or international level. If global food stocks are cut back severely due to natural gas shortages — not a problem, we have put in place community-based permaculture systems and are feeding ourselves independently. The Transition Town idea was developed in Kinsale, Northern Ireland, in 2005 by Hopkins, a permaculture teacher. He instigated a community-designed "Energy Descent Action Plan" which set out practical steps that might be taken by Kinsale to reduce its carbon emissions and prepare for a post-cheap-oil future – in terms of creating transitions to more sustainable socio-technical systems and infrastructures. In practice this translates as “build[ing] the town's resilience, that is, its ability to withstand shocks from the outside, through being more self reliant in areas such as food, energy, health care, jobs and economics” (Transition Town Totnes, 2008). The movement’s rationale is:

“Climate change makes this carbon reduction transition essential; Peak oil makes it inevitable; Transition initiatives make it feasible, viable and attractive (as far we can tell so far...)” (Transition Towns Wiki, 2009). Moving from concept to application, Hopkins outlines the four key assumptions of the movement:

"that life with dramatically lower energy consumption is inevitable, and that it’s better to plan for it than to be taken by surprise;
"that our settlements and communities presently lack the resilience to enable them to weather the severe energy shocks that will accompany peak oil;
"that we have to act collectively, and we have to act now;
"that by unleashing the collective genius of those around us to creatively and proactively plan our energy descent, we can build ways of living that are more connected, more enriching and that recognize the biological limits of our planet."
Thus, Transition is an empowering way forward for building the new society we will have no choice but to build in short order.

A really useful movement/idea that has come out of this dying fossil fuel age is the idea of a Just Transition. Simply put, if we are to intentionally collapse an entire oil and gas industry because of the dangers to humanity, then we need to be accountable to the human assets of these industries. A Just Transition sees the people employed in new, profitable industries that create far more jobs and are far more democratic than the oil industry ever was.

Naomi Klein, featured in this film, cites research from the CCPA that states that a given amount of capital investment in renewable energy will create 7 times more jobs than the fossil fuel industry.

A really coherent policy document addressing all the challenges, one which has attracted a great deal of controversy in Canada, is the Leap Manifesto.

Similar to this are the ideas of Degrowth. Wikipedia defines it as follows:

Degrowth (in French: décroissance,[1] in Spanish: decrecimiento, in Italian: decrescita, in Catalan: decreixement), is a political, economic, and social movement based on ecological economics, anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist ideas.[2] It is also considered an essential economic strategy responding to the limits-to-growth dilemma (see The Path to Degrowth in Overdeveloped Countries and Post growth). Degrowth thinkers and activists advocate for the downscaling of production and consumption — the contraction of economies — arguing that overconsumption lies at the root of long term environmental issues and social inequalities. Key to the concept of degrowth is that reducing consumption does not require individual martyring or a decrease in well-being.[3] Rather, "degrowthists" aim to maximize happiness and well-being through non-consumptive means — sharing work, consuming less, while devoting more time to art, music, family, culture and community.

In her film Life After Growth (2010), Degrowth theorist and filmmaker Claudia Medina speaks to the ideas of this movement. Her short film is an excellent exploration into the Degrowth world.

To grow or not to grow — that is the question. Though it’s not much of a question since growth comes from fossil fuels and they are too poor quality to allow us to grow any more.

So… where do we go from here?

For those seeking more detail on the Paris Climate Accord

Click on the blue Facebook logo in the upper right-hand corner and then go to the comments for more information...

For those seeking more detail on the Paris Accord and climate disruption...

Sources: The data and scenarios are from...

Posted by Alex Tango Fuego on Friday, June 2, 2017

Sickcare/ObamaCare is fundamentally broken at every level

From Zero Hedge

Longtime correspondent Ishabaka (an M.D. with 30+ years experience in primary care and as an emergency room physician) responded to this article with an insider's account of what happens when greed and cartels take over healthcare. After reading What's wrong with American hospitals?, a scathing deconstruction of for-profit healthcare, Ishabaka submitted this commentary:

I could have told you what was wrong with our hospital system by 1989 - nobody would listen to me back then.

Up til the '70's, almost all hospitals in the United States were not for profit COMMUNITY HOSPITALS. They were LOCAL. The Board of Directors was made up of some senior doctors, maybe the head nurse, and various other prominent local businessmen and professionals. Others (mostly Catholic), were run as non-profits by religious orders. A very few, mostly very small hospitals were for profit, usually owned by a group of doctors, or even one doctor.

The mission of these community hospitals was to provide for the LOCAL COMMUNITY - one and all. Payment was various - private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, self pay - and the idea was to collect just enough money to keep the hospital going, and provide care for the poor who had no money to pay. If your grandma got bad care - you could go - in person - to the local, say, banker, on the Board of Directors, and tell him - and he would CARE.

THIS SYSTEM WORKED, and kept costs DOWN. Remember, the hospital just needed enough money to stay in the black. Often local wealthy people would will money to the hospital in which they had been cared for.

In the '80's - there was the arrival of the for-profit cartels - and I use the world cartels specifically - these were run by people with the sociopathic Goldman Sachs type mentality - their sole goal was to acquire huge sums of money for themselves, their hospital directors, and their SHAREHOLDERS. They used a typical sneaky technique - they'd come into town, and tell the locals they could run the hospital much cheaper, because of their economy of scale. People believed this, and the cartels bought out most of the community hospitals.

I worked at one such for-profit hospital and had a 21-year old indigent man come in who'd been struck by a car while walking, and was rapidly bleeding to death. The hospital administrator refused to open the operating room, even though I had a surgeon right there, willing and able to operate for free to save this young man's life. The surgeon threw a fit, and he was a big wheel at the hospital and the administrator backed down - otherwise I firmly believe the young man would have died. This was LEGAL back then, before the EMTLA law was passed because similar abuses were rampant NATIONWIDE.

Around this time, the administrators of the remaining community hospitals found out the administrators of the for-profit hospitals were making tens of times their salaries - and bonuses based on profits - and started demanding similar salaries and bonuses based on PROFITS - a contradiction of the old concept of community hospitals (the article does touch on this).

How do you increase hospital profits? Number one - avoid any care for the poor you can weasel out of. Number two - cut staff to the bone and beyond (one of hospital's biggest expenses). Most American hospitals now have UNSAFE nurse to patient ratios because of this.

As far as patient care goes, nurses are the most important people in hospitals. I know of one lady who DIED while in a monitored bed, and wasn't found dead until several hours later due to the criminally low nursing staff ratio in a hospital I worked in. I HAD complained about the dearth of nurses, and was threatened with the loss of my job. Another side effect of this is, nursing in hospitals has become unbearable for nurses who really cared about their patients - many good hospital nurses have left hospital work for other fields. The results are appalling.

I saved the life of a patient an unqualified, under-educated nurse gave the wrong medicine to - a medicine that IMMEDIATELY MAKES YOU STOP BREATHING, because it was cheaper for the hospital to hire her than a knowledgeable and experienced nurse. The medicine is pancuronium bromide, if you want to Google it. The nurse didn't know one of the effects was cessation of breathing - this is Pharmacology for Nurses 101, this drug is used all day long in every operating room in America (where doctors WANT patients under anesthesia to stop breathing, and put them on breathing machines during the surgery - which is very safe if done correctly).

I could go on and on. Simple things, like the instruments you use to suture cuts - community hospitals used to buy Swiss or German made ones that were of the finest quality, sterilize and re-use them over and over. This changed to disposable instruments that sometimes literally fell apart in my hands. Bandage tape that didn't stick, instead of quality Johnson and Johnson tape - anything to save a buck.

It is not getting better, it is getting worse. The nurses I know tell me hospitals are cutting staff even MORE now in preparation for Obamacare.

I will end with a story that illustrates the difference between Old School and New School hospital administrators.

I had the pleasure of working five years in a real community hospital. One of the senior administrators (R.I.P.) was a gentleman who'd made his fortune in the grocery business. In his late 80's, he would arrive at the emergency department entrance every morning between seven and eight am, and proceed to walk throughout the hospital. He would ask various and sundry staff how they were getting along - everyone from janitors to senior physicians. If something was amiss - HE RECTIFIED THE SITUATION. Tragically, this hospital was bought out, and is now part of a chain.

I had the displeasure of working in a "community" (really for-profit) hospital with a middle aged administrator who NEVER set foot outside his office or conference rooms - he NEVER appeared in the (very large and busy) emergency department once. This was in the early 90's, and one year it was revealed that his compensation was $600,000 - and a brand new Lexus as a "performance bonus". He was on the golf course by three pm every single day. That was the hospital where the woman who was being "monitored" (alarms and all that) was found very cold and dead after a delay of who knows how many hours.

Thank you, Ishabaka, for telling it like it really is. Needless to say, ObamaCare (the Orwellian-named Affordable Care Act--ACA) purposefully ignores everything that is fundamentally broken with U.S. sickcare and extends the soaring-cost cartel system, essentially promising to stripmine the taxpayers of however many trillions of dollars are needed to generate outsized profits for the cartels.

Only those with no exposure to the real costs of ObamaCare approve of the current sickcare system. Government employees who have no idea how much their coverage costs, well-paid shills and toadies like Paul Krugman, academics with tenure and lifetime healthcare coverage--all these people swallow the fraud whole and declare it delicious.

Only those of us who are paying the real, unsubsidized cost know how unsustainable the system is, and only those inside the machine know how broken it is at every level. Greed + cartels = Sickcare/ObamaCare. Love your servitude, baby--it's affordable, really, really, really it is.

Bill Moyers on why the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement is death for democracy by Gaius Publias

Hola y'all. Happy New Year, I suppose. Hell, it's already the eleventh and I haven't even sat down to reflect, nor to project. I've been busy of late, and trying to keep my nose above water, without much luck. We shall see. We shall see what this new year holds.

Anyway, here's a topic that I haven't been paying enough attention to - but my gut tells me there's some sleight of hand at work.

Bill Moyers on why the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement is death for democracy
Reposted from AmericaBlog - original article here
11/5/2013 10:05am by Gaius Publius 55 Comments

Many of you know I’ve been covering TPP (the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement) for a while now — for example, here. Obama and the rest of the neoliberal (“free-trade”) Democrats are dying to implement it, and the Republican servants of the same fine CEOs are not far behind.

But the TPP is complicated — at least in appearances — and the public is having a hard time bottom-lining it, in between taking kids to soccer and paying bills in the evening. By comparison, characterizing Keystone is easy — “Want to drink goo from your faucet and watch the earth cook? Support Keystone.”

It’s not really hard to understand TPP though, once you see the pattern — TPP puts the ruling class (and the corporations they control) in charge of most aspects of our economic and regulatory life. It rewrites the laws of every nation that signs it, all to increase the wealth of our pathological betters. We just need more people saying that.

Now comes Bill Moyers with an excellent, listenable primer on what TPP is and why it spells death to democracy (literally) and breathes even more life into the predator 1% of the 1%.

Governments involved with our betters in implementing the TPP "corporate-rule" agreement

Governments involved with our betters in implementing the TPP “corporate-rule” agreement. These are the perps.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to Moyers’ great introduction, then to the discussion with Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism and Dean Baker of CEPR. This is one of the best ways to come up to speed on TPP I’ve found — very tight, very clear:

Yves Smith and Dean Baker on Secrets in Trade from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

From the video’s introduction at Vimeo:

A US-led trade deal is currently being negotiated that could increase the price of prescription drugs, weaken financial regulations and even allow partner countries to challenge American laws. But few know its substance.

The pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), is deliberately shrouded in secrecy, a trade deal powerful people, including President Obama, don’t want you to know about. Over 130 Members of Congress have asked the White House for more transparency about the negotiations and were essentially told to go fly a kite. While most of us are in the dark about the contents of the deal, which Obama aims to seal by year end, corporate lobbyists are in the know about what it contains.

And some vigilant independent watchdogs are tracking the negotiations with sources they trust, including Dean Baker and Yves Smith, who join Moyers & Company this week. Both have written extensively about the TPP and tell Bill the pact actually has very little to do with free trade.

Instead, says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “This really is a deal that’s being negotiated by corporations for corporations and any benefit it provides to the bulk of the population of this country will be purely incidental.” Yves Smith, an investment banking expert who runs the Naked Capitalism blog adds: “There would be no reason to keep it so secret if it was in the interest of the public.”

Suitable for sharing with your friends and online associates. Seriously; help to make TPP a household name ahead of the Senate hearings on it and the Fast-Track legislation that will introduce it.

We’ll be following this closely as well. At some point soon, we’ll all need concerted and raucous citizen opposition. As Moyers and company show, this is as big a deal as stopping Big Carbon in its tracks. If we don’t prevent this, TPP will rewrite constitutions across the globe, including here at home.

And believe me, our poor Constitution has taken on a lot of rewriting lately. Save the Constitution. Help kill the TPP “corporate-rule” agreement. (More information here.)

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius

Victoria Grant, age 12, on our fraudulent banking system

Yes, she is talking specifically about Canada's banking system and the complicit Canadian Government, but this is true for the good 'ol US of A.

And this, on North Dakota's State owned "socialist" bank...what Victoria is talking about as an alternative, which is actually in practice...

The fundamental truth is that the banks, and our government are all stealing from us, and stealing from future generations. One day soon, we will all wake up and put a stop to this.


From RT: (which includes an interview the Victoria and her mother...)

June 2012

Economists around the world are struggling to break free of the clutches of the financial crisis but a Canadian girl explains exactly what needs to be done.

Victoria Grant, 12, became an overnight Internet sensation after a video of her slamming Canada’s banks and the government for robbing the people, went viral.

“What I’ve discovered is that banks and the government have colluded to financially enslave the people of Canada,” she said at Pubic Banking Institute conference in Philadelphia.

In her interview with RT, the child economist expressed her concern that the Canadian government has been borrowing money from private banks and putting the people into debt. “And they are not doing anything about this. So they are just standing by and watching the private banks make us pay compounded interest.”

“It has become painfully obvious even for me, a 12-year-old Canadian, that we are being defrauded and robbed by the banking system and a complicit government,” Victoria stated in her speech at the conference.

Until the 1970s, the Canadian government borrowed money directly from the Bank of Canada. But in recent decades, it has been borrowing from private banks instead which results in the government paying extra in interest rates to cover private banks’ profit margins.

The prodigy’s solution to her country’s financial problems is that the government “should stop borrowing from private banks and start borrowing from the Bank of Canada with little to no interest.”

“The people will then pay fair taxes to repay the Bank of Canada. This tax money would in turn get injected back into our economic infrastructure and the debt would be wiped out. Canadians will again prosper with real money as the foundation of our economic structure,” she said.

Victoria’s mother, Marcia Grant, principal at the Resurrection Christian Academy, told RT that her daughter becoming an Internet sensation is “quite exciting.” “We never knew when this project started what would happen with this. It’s exciting that we get people talking and doing their own research. Whether they agree or disagree, they are at least listening and exploring.”

I AM [the documentary]

Official Site: http://iamthedoc.com/

Link to BUY the DVD: http://www.amazon.com/I-AM-Tom-Shadyac/dp/B005U0ZP46





From the official site:

I AM is an utterly engaging and entertaining non-fiction film that poses two practical and provocative questions: what’s wrong with our world, and what can we do to make it better? The filmmaker behind the inquiry is Tom Shadyac, one of Hollywood’s leading comedy practitioners and the creative force behind such blockbusters as “Ace Ventura,” “Liar Liar,” “The Nutty Professor,” and “Bruce Almighty.” However, in I AM, Shadyac steps in front of the camera to recount what happened to him after a cycling accident left him incapacitated, possibly for good. Though he ultimately recovered, he emerged with a new sense of purpose, determined to share his own awakening to his prior life of excess and greed, and to investigate how he as an individual, and we as a race, could improve the way we live and walk in the world.

Armed with nothing but his innate curiosity and a small crew to film his adventures, Shadyac set out on a twenty-first century quest for enlightenment. Meeting with a variety of thinkers and doers–remarkable men and women from the worlds of science, philosophy, academia, and faith–including such luminaries as David Suzuki, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Lynne McTaggart, Ray Anderson, John Francis, Coleman Barks, and Marc Ian Barasch – Shadyac appears on-screen as character, commentator, guide, and even, at times, guinea pig. An irrepressible “Everyman” who asks tough questions, but offers no easy answers, he takes the audience to places it has never been before, and presents even familiar phenomena in completely new and different ways. The result is a fresh, energetic, and life-affirming film that challenges our preconceptions about human behavior while simultaneously celebrating the indomitable human spirit.

The pursuit of truth has been a lifelong passion for Shadyac. “As early as I can remember I simply wanted to know what was true,” he recalls, “and somehow I perceived at a very early age that what I was being taught was not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” He humorously describes himself as “questioning and searching and stumbling and fumbling toward the light.” The “truth” may have been elusive, but success wasn’t. Shadyac’s films grossed nearly two billion dollars and afforded him the glamorous and extravagent A-List lifestyle of the Hollywood blockbuster filmmaker. Yet Shadyac found that more – in his case, a 17,000-square foot art-filled mansion, exotic antiques, and private jets — was definitely less. “What I discovered, when I began to look deeply, was that the world I was living in was a lie,” he explains. “Much to my surprise, the accumulation of material wealth was a neutral phenomenon, neither good or bad, and certainly did not buy happiness.” Gradually, with much consideration and contemplation, he changed his lifestyle. He sold his house, moved to a mobile home community, and started life—a simpler and more responsible life – anew.

But, at this critical juncture, Shadyac suffered an injury that changed everything. “In 2007, I got into a bike accident which left me with Post Concussion Syndrome, a condition where the symptoms of the original concussion don’t go away.” These symptoms include intense and painful reactions to light and sound, severe mood swings, and a constant ringing sound in the head. Shadyac tried every manner of treatment, traditional and alternative, but nothing worked. He suffered months of isolation and pain, and finally reached a point where he welcomed death as a release. “I simply didn’t think I was going to make it,” he admits.

But, as Shadyac wisely points out, “Death can be a very powerful motivator.” Confronting his own mortality, he asked himself, “If this is it for me – if I really am going to die – what do I want to say before I go? What will be my last testament?” It was Shadyac’s modern day dark night of soul and out of it, I AM was born. Thankfully, almost miraculously, his PCS symptoms began to recede, allowing him to travel and use his movie-making skills to explore the philosophical questions that inhabited him, and to communicate his findings in a lively, humorous, intellectually-challenging, and emotionally-charged film.

But this would not be a high-octane Hollywood production. The director whose last film had a crew of 400, assembled a streamlined crew of four, and set out to find, and film, the thinkers who had helped to change his life, and to seek a better understanding of the world, its inhabitants, their past, and their future. Thus, Shadyac interviews scientists, psychologists, artists, environmentalists, authors, activists, philosophers, entrepreneurs, and others in his quest for truth. Bishop Desmond Tutu, Dr. Noam Chomsky, historian Dr. Howard Zinn, physicist Lynne McTaggart, and poet Coleman Banks are some of the subjects who engage in fascinating dialogue with Shadyac.

Shadyac was very specific about what he was after, wanting I AM to identify the underlying cause of the world’s ills – “I didn’t want to hear the usual answers, like war, hunger, poverty, the environmental crisis, or even greed,” he explains. “These are not the problems, they are the symptoms of a larger endemic problem. In I AM, I wanted to talk about the root cause of the ills of the world, because if there is a common cause, and we can talk about it, air it out in a public forum, then we have a chance to solve it.”

Ironically, in the process of trying to figure out what’s wrong with the world, Shadyac discovered there’s more right than he ever imagined. He learned that the heart, not the brain, may be man’s primary organ of intelligence, and that human consciousness and emotions can actually affect the physical world, a point Shadyac makes with great humor by demonstrating the impact of his feelings on a bowl of yogurt. And, as Shadyac’s own story illustrates, money is not a pathway to happiness. In fact, he even learns that in some native cultures, gross materialism is equated with insanity.

Shadyac also discovers that, contrary to conventional thinking, cooperation and not competition, may be nature’s most fundamental operating principle. Thus, I AM shows consensus decision-making is the norm amongst many species, from insects and birds to deer and primates. The film further discovers that humans actually function better and remain healthier when expressing positive emotions, such as love, care, compassion, and gratitude, versus their negative counterparts, anxiety, frustration, anger and fear. Charles Darwin may be best known for popularizing the notion that nature is red in tooth and claw, but, as Shadyac points out, he used the word love 95 times in The Descent of Man, while his most famous phrase,survival of the fittest, appears only twice.

“It was a revelation to me that for tens of thousands of years, indigenous cultures taught a very different story about our inherent goodness,” Shadyac marvels. “Now, following this ancient wisdom, science is discovering a plethora of evidence about our hardwiring for connection and compassion, from the Vagus Nerve which releases oxytocin at simply witnessing a compassionate act, to the Mirror Neuron which causes us to literally feel another person’s pain. Darwin himself, who was misunderstood to believe exclusively in our competitiveness, actually noted that humankind’s real power comes in their ability to perform complex tasks together, to sympathize and cooperate.”

Shadyac’s enthusiastic depiction of the brighter side of human nature and reality, itself, is what distinguishes I AM from so many well-intentioned, yet ultimately pessimistic, non-fiction films. And while he does explore what’s wrong with the world, the film’s overwhelming emphasis is focused on what we can do to make it better. Watching I AM is ultimately, for many, a transformative experience, yet Shadyac is reluctant to give specific steps for viewers who have been energized by the film. “What can I do?” “I get asked that a lot,” he says. “But the solution begins with a deeper transformation that must occur in each of us. I AM isn’t as much about what you can do, as who you can be. And from that transformation of being, action will naturally follow.”

Shadyac’s transformation remains in process. He still lives simply, is back on his bicycle, riding to work, and teaching at a local college, another venue for sharing his life-affirming discoveries. Reflecting Shadyac’s philosophy is the economic structure of the film’s release; all proceeds from I AM will go to The Foundation for I AM, a non-profit established by Shadyac to fund various worthy causes and to educate the next generation about the issues and challenges explored in the film. When he directs another Hollywood movie, the bulk of his usual eight-figure fee will be deposited into a charitable account, as well. “St. Augustine said, ‘Determine what God has given you, and take from it what you need; the remainder is needed by others.’ That’s my philosophy in a nutshell,” Shadyac says, “Or as Gandhi put it, ‘Live simply, so others may simply live.’”

Shadyac’s enthusiasm and optimism are contagious. Whether conducting an interview with an intellectual giant, or offering himself as a flawed character in the narrative of the film, Shadyac is an engaging and persuasive guide as we experience the remarkable journey that is I AM. With great wit, warmth, curiosity, and masterful storytelling skills, he reveals what science now tells us is one of the principal truths of the universe, a message that is as simple as it is significant: We are all connected – connected to each other and to everything around us. “My hope is that I AM is a window into Truth, a glimpse into the miracle, the mystery and magic of who we really are, and of the basic nature of the connection and unity of all things. In a way,” says Shadyac, a seasoned Hollywood professional who has retained his unerring eye for a great story, “I think of I AM as the ultimate reality show.”

Written & Directed by: Tom Shadyac
Producer: Dagan Handy

Editor: Jennifer Abbott

Co-Producer: Jacquelyn Zampella

Associate Producer :: Nicole Pritchett

Director of Photography: Roko Belic
Executive Producers: Jennifer Abbott, Jonathan Watson
Media and PR Coordinator: Harold Mintz
Graphic Designers: Yusuke Nagano, Barry Thompson
Release Dates: March 11, 2011 – Los Angeles, March 18, 2011 – New York
Running Time: 80 minutes
Rating: Not rated

The Big Fix :: It Breaks My Heart

"We're no better than a third-world country." "The Gulf of Mexico is the toilet for the entire country." This breaks my heart. It breaks my heart that it happened in the first place. That all of the environmental disasters that have happened, happened in the first place. That it continues to happen. And it continues to be covered up, with our Federal Government and its "bought" regulators complicit in the cover ups. It breaks my heart that we are all complicit in all of these acts. We are complicit in that we look the other way, and go about our business as if nothing is wrong.

It breaks my heart.

http://www.thebigfixmovie.com/

http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the_big_fix_2012/

Here's the link to Jeff Goodell's piece in Rolling Stone Magazine titled "The Poisoning".

Matthew Simmons, outspoken critic of BP, Founder and Chairman of The Ocean Energy Institute, "drowns" in his hot tub - read more here.

Everything We Tell Ourselves About America and the World Is Wrong

I haven't written a "Happy New Year" post in a couplafew years. Life trumps blog.

There are lots and lots of positive affirmations and New Year's Resolutions being posted on Facebook. Things like "Lose 10 lbs" and "Read more/watch less television", although noble goals, don't seem to cut it these days. I'm seeing (or is it "feeling") more of a spiritual/energetic bent to folks' "Think and so shall ye be" thoughts.

Peace, love, understanding, forgiveness, tolerance, cooperation, humility, compassion. Perhaps it's a reaction to the vociferous invective that was being bandied about in our political world for the past year. That *is* being bandied about. The election and two years of ancillary malarkey, the dysfunction of Congress and tonight's Fiscal Cliff "resolution" (don't get me started). Perhaps it's a natural state of human coping with regard to the Red Hook tragedy, the death of the New Delhi gang rape victim, the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

I think people, myself included, are wanting to go beyond losing weight and eating better and doing more yoga. Wanting, needing, to go beyond being more spiritual this year than last year. Beyond "You make me want to be a better man." I would like to believe that more and more people are feeling dissatisfied with the status quo. The status quo of the myth of perpetual growth. The status quo of the American Dream. The status quo of a capitalist economic system that is not only not good for our Mother Earth, but not good for humanity.

We know something's not exactly right in the world. We feel it in our bones. Something about our chi is just not lining up. We know something needs to be done. We know we the people need to do something more than has been done to date. We know we as individuals need to do less worrying and talking and bitching and moaning about the problems that are before us. I ran across a good quote the other day. "Worry is using the power of your imagination to create something you don't want."

I don't consider myself a worrier. I would say I'm more of a machinator. Or perhaps a cognitator. Machinating and cognitating "in my spare time while I'm resting" knowing that we have to do something about it all. Knowing that there has to be a solution. Knowing that the Serenity Prayer's "To accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference..." just somehow doesn't cut it. For me, that is.

Because, you see, pretty much *everything* has to change. Not just in America the land of the free and the home of the beige. We, we the people, have created a raft of problems and issues across the planet with our way of life and our apathy and our complacency. Luxury and comfort make us lazy. Football and HoneyBooBoo make us lazy. Cabela's and Nordstrom make us lazy. Substitute Dollar General and WalMart if you please. WalMart is bad for the planet. HoneyBooBoo is bad for humanity.

We are blind to it. We are lazy to it. We are apathetic and complacent. Luxuriating in the meadow, under the wispy Jerusalem Thorn tree swaying in the gentle breeze, laid back in our comfy lavender colored plastic Adirondack chairs made in China from plastic pellets manufactured from hydrocarbons sucked from Mother Earth beneath the Saudi Arabian desert. Or the Sahara Desert. Or the Venezuelan rainforest. Or natural gas liquids fracked from the shales outside of Goldsmith, Texas, on the fringe of the Chihuahua Desert, pumped via pipeline to Houston, to be refined and plasticized and pelletized, then shipped to China (via the Panama Canal) to be formed into my comfy albeit structurally under-designed for my pre-New Year's resolution weight, then shipped back across the magnificent deep blue Pacific Ocean to Los Angeles, then by rail headed east, then by tractor-trailer from some freight depot to my local Cragg's "DoItBest" handy homeowner wannabe rancher store. $19.95. Plus tax. We've got about a dozen of them - half of them broken (by me sitting in them, or more accurately from me getting up out of them - craaack!) retired behind the pole barn.

Talk about a guilt trip. I think I'm sorry now that I ran with that thread of thought. But I digress.

I'm all about the power of positive thinking, positive affirmations, positive vibes. Positively. There is definitely something at work in visualizing and manifesting one's reality. "Something at work" is an understatement. That "something" that enables a new reality to be manifested is a power to be reckoned with. A fundamental truth of the Universe not to be ignored. Think Deepak Chopra's "a thought is a physical thing that exists in the Universe..." Think of the docu-drama "What The Bleep?".

What about collectively visualizing and manifesting a new reality? Collectively for the collective. Concomitantly, hand-in-hand, with mutuality, not just for the individual, or a group of individuals, or an individual country, but for all of humanity and our fellow critters on the planet. Collectively, for the Universe.

We have an opportunity before us to think and dream and shape and mold a new world for ourselves, our children, our great-great-great-great-great grandchildren. Five greats hence. My fifth great-grandfather fought at The Battle of the Alamo in 1836. One hundred seventy seven years. Seven generations. What those men did, the few that survived, and those who gave their lives, no doubt helped shape the future. My present. Maybe. Kindasorta. You get my drift. I hope.

We have the smarts, the knowledge, the "knowing vs. knowledge", the ability, the drive, the spirit, and the tools to do it. Picks and shovels and hands and strong backs and brains and brawn and imagination. Google and Facebook and Twitter. All the tools and knowledge and knowing to get done what needs to be done.

Do the right thing and do the thing right, as I like to say.

Perhaps it's the spirituality that's missing these days. Missing from these past many years. Perhaps we got sidetracked in our comfort. Sidetracked by the illusion that we could all live like Kings and Queens. Or rather the delusion.

Perhaps that's why we're seeing more affirmations and resolutions and revolutions of awareness and presence and spirituality and collaboration and community and unity.

We have a Renaissance level opportunity before us to manifest a new and sustainable reality for ourselves. An economy and a way of life that sustains not only the planet and her delicately balanced systems, but one that sustains humanity and the soul of humanity. To create a world/way of life that moves away from an "Industrial Growth Society" and toward a "Life Sustaining Civilization" - quoting Joanna Macy.

A Renaissance level opportunity in that it will take not just years, nor decades, but centuries to bring ourselves away from the brink, and move towards sustainability.

But we have to roll up our sleeves and get to work. Chin up, gaze to the horizon. For our great-great-great-great-great grandchildren.

Happy New Year, ya'll.

Sidenote: I had intended to just post the article that follows. A little something that I ran across that struck a chord on this New Year's Day. I wanted to just post the article and include some sort of happy new year comment. I had intended to be brief, but that obviously didn't work out. I'm glad I finally took the time to write this. It's been on my mind for some time now. Extemporaneous and "free written", not outlined nor well-thought-out nor edited. Saying most of what I want to say on the subject of positive thinking/manifestation vs. bitching and moaning and getting pissed off as an effective motivational/educational/informational tool vs. getting off my/our collective asses and really, truly getting to work. Meditating on a rock in the woods and thinking happy thoughts isn't the answer. But it's a start, and it's definitely part of the solution.




AlterNet / By Charles Eisenstein
Everything We Tell Ourselves About America and the World Is Wrong
Why we need a new story that gives meaning to the world.
December 29, 2012

Charles Eisenstein is an essayist and author of the books Sacred Economics and The Ascent of Humanity. He is a contributor to Shareable, where this article first appeared.

Every culture has a Story of the People to give meaning to the world. Part conscious and part unconscious, it consists of a matrix of agreements, narratives, and symbols that tell us why we are here, where we are headed, what is important, and even what is real. I think we are entering a new phase in the dissolution of our Story of the People, and therefore, with some lag time, of the edifice of civilization built on top of it.

Sometimes I feel intense nostalgia for the cultural mythology of my youth, a world in which there was nothing wrong with soda pop, in which the Superbowl was important, in which the world’s greatest democracy was bringing democracy to the world, in which science was going to make life better and better. Life made sense. If you worked hard you could get good grades, get into a good college, go to grad school or follow some other professional path, and you would be happy. With a few unfortunate exceptions, you would be successful if you obeyed the rules of our society: if you followed the latest medical advice, kept informed by reading the New York Times, and stayed away from Bad Things like drugs. Sure there were problems, but the scientists and experts were working hard to fix them. Soon a new medical advance, a new law, a new educational technique, would propel the onward improvement of life. My childhood perceptions were part of this Story of the People, in which humanity was destined to create a perfect world through science, reason, and technology, to conquer nature, transcend our animal origins, and engineer a rational society.

From my vantage point, the basic premises of this story seemed unquestionable. After all, it seemed to be working in my world. Looking back, I realize that this was a bubble world built atop massive human suffering and environmental degradation, but at the time one could live within that bubble without need of much self-deception. The story that surrounded us was robust. It easily kept anomalous data points on the margins.

Since my childhood in the 1970s, that story has eroded at an accelerating rate. More and more people in the West no longer believe that civilization is fundamentally on the right track. Even those who don’t yet question its basic premises in any explicit way seem to have grown weary of it. A layer of cynicism, a hipster self-awareness has muted our earnestness. What was once so real, say a plank in a party platform, today is seen through several levels of “meta” filters to parse it in terms of image and message. We are like children who have grown out of a story that once enthralled us, aware now that it is only a story.

At the same time, a series of new data points has disrupted the story from the outside. The harnessing of fossil fuels, the miracle of chemicals to transform agriculture, the methods of social engineering and political science to create a more rational and just society – each has fallen far short of its promise, and brought unanticipated consequences that threaten civilization. We just cannot believe anymore that the scientists have everything well in hand. Nor can we believe that the onward march of reason will bring on social utopia.

Today we cannot ignore the intensifying degradation of the biosphere, the malaise of the economic system, the decline in health, or the persistence and indeed growth of global poverty and inequality. We once thought economists would fix poverty, political scientists would fix social injustice, chemists and biologists would fix environmental problems, the power of reason would prevail and we would adopt sane policies. I remember looking at maps of rain forest decline in National Geographic in the early 1980s and feeling both alarm and relief – relief because at least the scientists and everyone who reads National Geographic is aware of the problem now, so something surely will be done.

Nothing was done. Rainforest decline accelerated, along with nearly every other environmental threat that we knew about in 1980. Our Story of the People trundled forward under the momentum of centuries, but with each passing decade the hollowing-out of its core, that started perhaps with the industrial-scale slaughter of World War One, extended further. When I was a child, our system of ideology and mass media still protected that story, but in the last thirty years the incursions of reality have punctured its protective shell and have ruptured its essential infrastructure. We no longer believe our storytellers, our elites. We don’t believe the politicians, we don’t believe the doctors, we don’t believe the professors, we don’t believe the bankers, we don’t believe the technologists. All of them imply that everything is under control, and we know that it is not. We have lost the vision of the future we once had; most people have no vision of the future at all. This is new for our society. Fifty or a hundred years ago, most people agreed on the general outlines of the future. We thought we knew where society was going. Even the Marxists and the capitalists agreed on its basic outlines: a paradise of mechanized leisure and scientifically engineered social harmony, with spirituality either abolished entirely or relegated to a materially inconsequential corner of life that happened mostly on Sundays. Of course there were dissenters from this vision, but this was the general consensus.

When a story nears its end it goes through death throes, an exaggerated semblance of life. So today we see domination, conquest, violence, and separation take on absurd extremes that hold a mirror up to what was once hidden and diffuse. The year 2012 ended with just such a potent story-disrupting event: the Sandy Hook massacre. Even realizing that far more, equally innocent, children have been killed in the last few years by, say, U.S. drone strikes, it really got under my skin. No one was immune. I think that is because its utter senselessness penetrated every defense mechanism we have to maintain the fiction that the world is basically OK. Unlike 9/11 or Oklahoma City, and certainly unlike the horrors that go on around the world, there was no convenient narrative to divert the raw pain of what happened. We cannot help but map those murdered innocents onto the young faces we know, and the anguish of their parents onto ourselves. At the base of our Story of the People is separation, of humanity from nature, of me from you, of each from all, and this event united everyone, of whatever culture, nationality, or political persuasion. For a moment, we all felt the exact same thing. For at least a moment, I am sure, most people were in touch with the simplicity of what is important; I am sure many people had that fleeting feeling, “It doesn’t have to be that difficult, if only we could remember what is so obvious now, that love is all there is.” We humans have made such a mess of things, forgetting love. It is the same realization we have when a loved one is going through the dying process, and we think, “Ah, how precious this person is – why couldn’t I see that? Why couldn’t I appreciate all those moments we had together? All the arguments and grudges seem so tiny now.”

Following that moment, of course, people hurried to make sense of the event, subsuming it within a narrative about gun control, mental health, or the security of school buildings. Maybe I am imagining things, but I don’t think anyone really believes deep down that these responses touch the heart of the matter. Gun culture, we know, is a symptom of something deeper, and the violence that finds expression through guns would, even in their absence, come out in some other way. Mental illness too is a problem so vast that it is essentially unsolvable in our current system; it too comes from a deeper source. As for school security, a Chinese saying describes all the measures proposed: they stop the gentleman but not the villain.

No one would say that Sandy Hook was more horrible than the Holocaust, the Stalinist purges, or the imperialistic wars of the 20th century and 21st, but it was less comprehensible. Try as we might, we cannot fit it into our Story of the World. It is the anomalous data point that unravels the entire narrative – the world no longer makes sense. We struggle to explain what it means, but no explanation suffices. We may go on pretending that normal is still normal, but this is one of a series of “end time” events that is dismantling our culture’s mythology.

The evident futility of the responses that we are capable of imagining also points to this deep ideological breakdown. The responses are all about more control. Yet control, as we may or may not realize, is a key thread of the old story of humanity rising above nature, imposing technology and reason on the wild world and the uncivilized human. All around us, we see our efforts at control backfiring: wars to fight terrorism breed terrorism, herbicides breed superweeds, antibiotics breed superbugs, psychiatric medications lead to explosive outbursts of violence.

Looking back on the community schools a couple generations past, where children and parents could walk in and out of any door, can we say that the inexorable trend toward fortress schools in a fortress state is something anyone would have chosen? The world was supposed to be getting better. We were supposed to be becoming wealthier, more enlightened. Society was supposed to be advancing. Here I am in America, the most “advanced” nation on Earth, yet even as our financial wealth has doubled and doubled again in fifty years, we have lost wealth of a more basic form; for example, the social capital of feeling safe, feeling at home where we live. Is more security the best we can aspire to? What about a society where safety does not equal security? What about a world where no human being wields an assault rifle? What about a world where we mostly know the faces and stories of the people around us? What about a world where we know that our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people? We need a Story of the People that includes all of those things – and that doesn’t feel like a fantasy.

Various visionary thinkers have offered versions of such a story, but none of them has yet become a true Story of the People, a widely accepted set of agreements and narratives that gives meaning to the world and coordinates human activity towards its fulfillment. We are not quite ready for such a story yet, because the old one, though in tatters, still has large swaths of its fabric intact. And even when these unravel, we still must traverse the space between stories, a kind of nakedness. In the turbulent times ahead our familiar ways of acting, thinking, and being will no longer make sense. We won’t know what is happening, what it all means, and, sometimes, even what is real. Some people have entered that time already.

I wish I could tell you that I am ready for a new Story of the People, but even though I am among its many weavers, I cannot yet fully inhabit the new vestments. In other words, describing the world that could be, something inside me doubts, rejects, and underneath the doubt is a hurting thing. The breakdown of the old story is kind of a healing process, that uncovers the old wounds hidden under its fabric and exposes them to the healing light of awareness. I am sure many people reading this have gone through such a time, when the cloaking illusions fell away: all the old justifications, rationalizations, all the old stories. Events like Sandy Hook help to initiate the very same process on a collective level. So also the superstorms, the economic crisis, political meltdowns… in one way or another, the obsolescence of our old mythos is laid bare.

We do not have a new story yet. Each of us is aware of some of its threads, for example in most of the things we call alternative, holistic, or ecological today. Here and there we see patterns, designs, emerging parts of the fabric. But the new mythos has not yet emerged. We will abide for a time in the space between stories. Those of you who have been through it on a personal level know that it is a very precious – some might say sacred – time. Then we are in touch with the real. Each disaster lays bare the real underneath our stories. The terror of a child, the grief of a mother, the honesty of not knowing why. In such moments we discover our humanity. We come to each other’s aid, human to human. We take care of each other. That’s what keeps happening every time there is a calamity, before the beliefs, the ideologies, the politics take over again. Events like Sandy Hook, for at least a moment, cut through all that down to the basic human being. In such times, we learn who we really are.

How can we prepare? We cannot prepare. But we are being prepared.

Charles Eisenstein is an essayist and author of the books Sacred Economics and The Ascent of Humanity. He is a contributor to Shareable, where this article first appeared.

On Sunday :: Mother Earth. Worth Dying For?

Minds.com Free & Open Source Social Video Revolution

Bruder, können sie ersparen 22 Gigawatt solarenergie?

I saw this up on Facebook a bit ago. The math didn't sit well with me after a lil' bit 'o pre-coffee sluggish brain cypherin'.

So y'all who know me know what I had to do. Break out the spreadsheet and get to Google'in. Here's what I came up with in response/commentary:

Solar power to nuclear power is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Posts like this are good – necessary to get the information out there to fuel the global paradigm shift to sustainable energy sources. We need more and more of this in the U.S. where the shift has barely begun. We are way behind other countries who are not under the grips of the petrochemicalmilitaryindustrialcomplex/lobby. Way behind.

But these posts/memes are not good when they mis-inform, even if unintentionally. Inaccurate information/math doesn’t help the sustainable energy cause. Don’t even get me started on the topic of intentional/willful disinformation. But I don’t think that’s what we’re seeing here.

Let’s do the 8th Grade math (don’t get me started on the American educational system – let’s say it’s 8th grade math everywhere else in the world – in the U.S. it’s college level math)…grin…

Taking Germany’s nine (9) nuclear power plants at a combined rated capacity of 12,696MW, extrapolating that to twenty (20) plants, yields a capacity of 28,213MW. That converts to 28.21GigaWatts. With an average capacity factor of 70% for nuclear power, we arrive at 173,000GWh (Gigawatt-Hours).

For a total rated capacity of 22GW “Solar”, using a capacity factor of 15% (which is being really generous with the German sunshine – Arizona is 19% - John Wind is correct at about 9% capacity factor) – the simple math gives us 28,908GWh.

20 Nuclear Plants = 173,000GWh

22GW of Solar = 28,908GWh

In this example, the solar values equal 17% of the nuclear values.
So, every 6.58GW of installed solar replaces the output of one (1) average nuclear power plant.

The reason for this is that nukes run almost 100% of the time (downtime for maintenance, repairs, changing fuel rods, decreased demand, etc.) and solar only “runs” when the sun is shining.

To replace twenty (20) nuclear power plants, it would take 131.66GW of installed solar capacity.

Germany’s goal is to have 66GW of installed solar capacity by 2030, which is admirable. It is the right thing to do. But it is not enough.

Germany is currently purchasing electricity from nuclear plants located just outside of their borders, and increasing their coal-fired electricity output to replace the electricity from the eight (8) nuclear plants they shut down in 2011 after the Fukushima disaster.

Adding electricity generating capacity from solar, wind and other renewable sources is the right thing to do.

But it is not everything. It is not the end of the game. It does not get us to where we need to be, energy-wise, nor lifestyle-wise.

The one thing that everyone is not figuring into all of this – is that we ALL need to begin changing our lifestyles to BEGIN USING LESS ENERGY. Using less energy tomorrow than we are today. And even less next year than this year. And less, and less and less.

There is a myth prevailing that we can get all of our energy needs from solar, wind, and other renewables. We can, but not at our current rates of energy consumption. The entire planet will have to drastically reduce its energy needs. And “drastically” is an understatement.

And, indeed, Louis Cruz, Jr. is correct. The photo is of the PS10 Concentrating Solar Facility in Andalucia, Spain.

P.S. None of this analysis deals with the fact that solar only supplies power to the grid during the sunshiney daylight hours – unless we start talking battery storage for every PV array – then the math and economics and environmental benefits get much more complicated.

On a very related subject, check out a prior post of mine...

http://alextangofuego.blogspot.com/2009/11/brother-can-you-spare-22-terawatts.html

Won't Back Down