Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
You can watch the fires break out and spread only for so long before you, too, are involved.
The Daily Impact has been a quiet place lately, and I will tell you why: words fail me. The scale of the global crash now enveloping us, and the fecklessness of the leaders pretending to protect and defend us, exceed the vocabulary of this wretched scribe. If one manages, however briefly, to comprehend the enormity of the multiple disasters bearing down on us, then one accidentally sees part of a presidential-candidate debate and has to pick up pieces of one’s skull all over the room again.
How bad it is in the United States:
- One verse that has been sung for years now by the “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” Chorus is that we are converting to a service economy, in which half of us will serve meals, keep house and otherwise cater to the other half, and that will work fine. But now — just now — the malaise that has been eating at all the other economic enterprises of the country has attacked the restaurant industry. “If services stumble too,” observes a writer on David Stockman’s website, “there truly is nothing left.”
- Another verse from the aforementioned Chorus: We may not make much anymore, but we sure move stuff around, and that employs a lot of people and keeps the economy chugging along. Not so much anymore. “The Transportation Recession Spreads,” says Wolf Richter of WolfStreet, with the subhead “Hope came unglued all over again.” Orders for new 18-wheeler trucks have been falling since September of 2015, because of declining freight volumes, and after a slight recovery in December (hence the hope), plummeted nearly 50% (year-to-year) in January. Rail freight is experiencing a similar, vertigo-inducing slump.
- American jobs of all kinds are being vaporized at a rate not seen since the Great Recession got traction in 2009. Just in January, layoffs quadrupled. See this partial list of job cuts so far this year, and an assessment of the mass layoffs just ahead. Every month the government issues, and the “Happy” Chorus extols, monthly reports lauding robust job-creation and the continued low (seasonally adjusted, statistically weighted, seasoned-to-taste) unemployment rate, while ignoring the gut-wrenching disappearance of hundreds of thousands of people from the job market. These people, six million or so of them now, are not unemployed. They are vanished.
- The U.S. oil industry, which was promoting itself just a few months ago as the progenitor of a new American Revolution, of a return to American energy independence, and on, and on — is a smoking ruin. Shale drillers are in the process of reporting losses of about $15 billion for 2015; reductions of 25 per cent and more in their balance sheets because of devalued oil; and levels of debt that forced 42 oil companies into bankruptcy last year and will drive under many more than that this year. Nor is the carnage limited to the shale patch; from Exxon down, Big Oil is experiencing shrinking profits, tumbling stock prices and credit ratings.
As glum as the situation and the prospects are nationally, they are even worse abroad — for China, Russia, Brazil, Venezuela, Canada and much of Europe and Asia. (Please, valued commenters, find me a country that is doing well, with rising employment and wages, a stable currency, manageable debt, decent health care and security for its citizens. Let’s write about it and then move there. Assuming it’s on this planet.)
Failing that, as I survey the tides of misery rising everywhere, the Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding everywhere, the hopes and dreams and people dying everywhere — words fail me.
All of this confirms me once again as an Age Optimist — a person who, despite everything, maintains a sunny unshaken faith that before these events play themselves out, he will be dead.
Adding to the transportation stats, the Baltic Dry Index is at its lowest level EVER, at 297. That is down from an all time high of 11,793 in 2008 and ordinary rates around 2000 to 4000 for this century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Dry_Index
Oh yeah, Mr. Lewis – do tell. This is what collapse looks like, but the privileged will be the last to acknowledge it because it isn’t effecting them too terribly as yet (but it will, since they have the most to lose).
We’re mere witnesses to (and eventually the principal actors in) this slow motion train wreck, which includes economic, social, and environmental collapse (but will expand to everything humanity used to consider “reality” which will all change to something unrecognizable in too short a period of time to adapt to and lead us into the uncharted waters of EXTINCTION due to loss of habitat).
The environmental collapse is assured due to the on-going twin polar ice melt scenarios we’re experiencing, the resultant sea level change (both rise and fall in different places around the globe) that accompanies it, but also the slow down of the AMOC which will effect global weather patterns. This is turn causes places that once had huge ice sheets compressing the underlying bedrock to rebound causing an uptick in earthquakes and volcanic activity. It’s getting steadily hotter (three in a row now, hottest years ever) making it harder to grow food, drying things out, and causing social disruption as a result.
Meanwhile the oceans are dying, as are pollinators, birds and bats. Fukushima and now Porter Ranch continue to adversely affect the environment, enormous old dams are falling apart and are in need of long-neglected maintenance at JUST the time that the money is disappearing for these kinds of projects. When the trucks stop running, we’re about 3 weeks from complete collapse and when the electrical grid goes down for good we’ll know that “it’s over.”
Enjoy the ride down and out – remember, there’s no prepping for extinction (survivors are only prolonging the inevitable as the horrors mount exponentially).
What. You mean a doubling of the national debt and everything else Obamanomics has not worked. I’m shocked. Simply shocked I tell you. But some are obstinate, there are people and companies trudging forward , persevering and profiting in spite of all of this mess. These are the real heroes of the economy. Those that can change and adapt and thrive in spite of these conditions. The orgs and companies financially sound enough to come out stronger when pricing may move back in their favor. While some sectors may be doomed, some others may be ready to bloom. Let’s focus on them.
Are you serious? Send me some of what you’re smokin’!
At least when Trump becomes POTUS the collapse should come swiftly. That being done, there’s nothing left to do but renaissance. Of course, I’ll be two generations dead by the time we begin to rise from ruin, but there’s a tiny degree of comfort in it.
The faster we go down the more for the raccoons. Or turtles.
Thanks Tom for your eagerly awaited missive.
I just wish we didn’t have to wait so long between each commentary!
Follow WTI live here!
What a shit show!
It’s on like donkey kong!!
http://www.cx-portal.com/wti/oil_en.html
No preparation by “officials”.
Panic in the “industries”.
Real solutions ignored.
Hideously stupid people following vapid politicians.
It cannot get better, it can only crash and burn. All that remains is to observe the order of it all.
Life will never return to where it is now, but it won’t go extinct, either. In a few hundred years when our descendants are speaking an as of yet uninvented language, they will recall this time in story and myth. No one will be able to understand the primitive idiocy of their ancestors, although they will try.
Don’t bet on it Mike.
Biodiversity Loss and the Doomsday Clock: An Invisible Disaster Almost No One is Talking About
As horrific as a nuclear war anywhere in the world would be, climate change is a much more urgent and fundamental problem.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/02/10/biodiversity-loss-and-doomsday-clock-invisible-disaster-almost-no-one-talking-about
[take home quote, but you should read the article]
“If the environment implodes under the weight of civilization, then civilization itself is doomed.”
[hat tip apneaman]
Tom,
My certainty that life, and dare I say complex life forms such as humans will continue, is derived from a very personal observation of the conditions of existence.
I am aware of the Guy McPherson phenomenon, and his off grid experiment, yet he misses some fundamental conditions. Ultimately, his Kafkaesque vision is alluring to those who fancy themselves as the interpreters and evaluators of the human experiment, yet this self appointed position is arrived at without any track record of success.
This is not to say that all is just sixes and sevens either. The willful and reckless trashing of our life support systems will have a direct and uncompromising effect into the future.
I think it was Dr. Todd who has implemented his “living machines”. Although I personally hate this term, he shows clearly just how resilient life really is, and how fast our living planet can cleanse even the worst toxins, once the relentless assault ceases.
Let’s face it, industrial society’s pipe dream is over. Only the hangover remains. How we view this has a lot to do with what we make of it.