From China’s Leaders, Intimations of Mortality

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A typical scene along the banks of the Yangtze River as China's growth engine redlines. (Photo by eutrophication&hypoxia/Flickr)

Which prominent American government official said the following this week?

  • “The conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today.”
  • “The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the worsening environment have become grave impediments to the nation’s economic and social development.”
  • “We must not any longer sacrifice the environment for the sake of rapid growth and reckless roll-outs, as that would result in unsustainable growth featuring industrial overcapacity and intensive resource consumption.” Continue reading →

Digression: A Modest Budget Proposal

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If simplistic nostrums can save our government, why not the American family too?

From the new christian scientists now ascendant in the politics of America (well, they have been ascendant most of the time since 1980, but are currently enjoying a new iteration as tea partiers) comes a new theory of government. Just as the Bible is literally true in every respect, and humans co-existed with dinosaurs, and there are no such things as evolution, or human-caused climate change, or an end to oil, now comes another self-evident principle to guide our nation. (Self-evident because outside the statement itself, there is no existing evidence or even indication of its truth.) Continue reading →

Keeping Tabs

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How many times have we been right? Stand by.... (Photo by Jerkert Gwapo/Flickr)

Can we talk? About whether this website is an outpost of wild-eyed eco-extremism, cherry-picking alarmist half-truths from the web to scare the unsophisticated? That sort of thing. If we could just take a look at the recent record:

In December of last year (“Food Fights Coming Soon“) and in January of this year (“The People, Sir, are a Great Beast“), we wrote about the imminent threat of popular uprisings because of food shortages. Tunisia’s dictator fell (“unexpectedly,” by all accounts) two weeks after the second piece was published, and Egypt’s after that, as the wave of risings rolled on toward Libya, Yemen, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. But wait, there’s more. Continue reading →

A Tale of Two Meetings

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US Capitol dome

As night gathers in Washngton, the Capitol dome shines a beacon of total ignorance over the nation. (Photo by David Iliff/wikimedia)

In the past week, two organizations convened in Washington DC to discuss their view of the world. One, comprising some of the world’s most knowledgeable scientists, was the American Association for the Advancement of Science, holding its annual meeting. The other, made up of some of the world’s most powerful politicians, was the US Congress, assembled. They seemed to be discussing two widely separated, and wildly different, planets. Continue reading →

Fuel Cell Offers to Save World: World Says No Thanks

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Each Bloom box shown provides 100 kw cheap, clean energy for CalTech. Other clients include eBay, Google and Coke.

One year ago, the venerable televison news program 60 Minutes broke a blockbuster story that (as The Daily Impact observed at the time — Hope Springs: Can a Fuel Cell Save Us?) made even energy pessimists feel a pang of hope. (Okay, 60 Minutes didn’t exactly break the story, but they did introduce it for the first time to a mass audience.) Bloom Energy of Sunnyvale, California had brought to market a reliable, efficient, clean and relatively cheap fuel cell that was scalable from a coffee-can-sized power source for a home to a greyhound-bus-sized industrial plant. Continue reading →

Peak Phosphorous: Worse than Peak Oil?

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Whether in a farm pond like this, or the Gulf of Mexico, algae blooms stimulated by wasted fertilizer are deadly to marine life. Fortunately, or unfortunately, we're running out of fertilizer.

Here’s the bottom line, obvious to all but the most arithmetically challenged: when you base an entire civilization on the rapid consumption of a limited resource, you guarantee the collapse of that civilization on the day the resource is exhausted. But the ride to that final day is not a smooth one; you also guarantee that chaos will ensue from the time that there is not enough left of the depleted resource to meet all demands. Running completely out of water is a shared disaster, but when there’s enough water for some but not all, choosing the “some” gets ugly, real fast. It has gradually dawned on a growing number of people that this is the bottom line for oil, but it is not yet widely accepted that the same bottom line, with the same potential for destruction, exists for a number of other substances, especially phosphorous. Continue reading →

WikiPeak Oil: Now Do You Believe It?

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"Got oil?" "Not so much any more. You?"

M. King Hubbert started predicting the inevitable arrival of peak oil in 1950. In the ensuing 60 years, a steadily growing band of geologists, other scientists, and people who grasp the essentials of arithmetic have been warning strenously that peak oil is both inevitable and imminent. If they are right, its arrival will have consequences for the world that will rank somewhere between catastrophic and apocalyptic; yet, in the developed countries (and by developed, we mean oil-dependent) virtually no one in a position to do anything about it mentions the prospect, let alone taking it seriously. Now, powerful confirmation of peak oil has turned up in WikiLeaks. It’s where we learned, for example, that Prince Charles is not as well respected as Queen Elizabeth. So now do you believe? Continue reading →

Forecast: Hard Rain Gonna Fall

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Food rioters face police in Algeria. This is a weather-related event.

“What are you so worried about?” goes the old comedy routine. “My future.” “What makes you so worried about your future?” “My past.” On this basis alone — what has happened in our world in the past few months — we should be very worried about our future. It does not matter if you are one of the 37 people remaining on the planet who do not “believe” in climate change, evolution or gravity (if you are in that select group, by the way, congratulations on your new Congressional committee chairmanship). If artillery shells are exploding in rapid succession, ever closer, you might want to take cover; we can discuss later whether you believe in high explosives. Continue reading →

Reflection: Word Pollution Rots Brains

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A word cloud (the more often used, the larger) generated from a speech by Governor Bobby Jindal in 2009. (Photo by Jason-Morrison/Flickr)

While the problems caused by industrial-scale pollution of air, water and land rise inexorably to nostril level, any and all efforts to deal with them are hampered by the deliberate release of toxic words into our language. Like poisons and endocrine-disruptors, toxic words cloud our intentions, weaken our will and muddle our efforts. If we can’t talk clearly about where we want to go and why, we can’t get there. Continue reading →

Has the Great Unraveling Begun?

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Do the throngs in the streets of Cairo have anything to teach the passers-by in the streets of America? You bet they do. (Photo by Essam Sharaf/Flickr)

Being paranoid doesn’t mean that people aren’t out to get you. Nor does it mean that you’re ready for it when they do. We who expect the crash of the global industrial system, who believe it has already (in slow motion) begun, need to be alert for the moment when the slow irreparable lean turns into the catastrophic free fall. That is when incomplete preparations for the aftermath become exactly the same as no preparations at all. Has that moment come for us, via Egypt? Continue reading →