DOUBT IS OUR PRODUCT - the blog

NOTES AND LINKS FOR THIS WEEK'S SHOW:

Why do media run "scandals" about climate science? They get full page ads from car and oil companies, and they don't give a damn about our future. It's all in the latest ratings, the quarterly profit statements.

But why do we accept it? You know why... today, there's a good chance you got in your car, turned on a coal-fired light bulb, ate an agro-business meal. We want to believe we are not guilty of polluting the atmosphere.

Some people need to believe that so badly, they are ready to shoot the messengers. Literally. Our climate scientists.

And this anger (at unemployment, declining health care, degraded nature, who knows what all) - is developing from a cult of the few, into a mass movement. The madness of crowds, as we head into the greenhouse world.

That is what this Radio Ecoshock program is all about.

CLIVE HAMILTON

We go to Australia, to talk with Clive Hamilton. He's a Professor of Public Ethics, supported by Australian National University, and the University of Melbourne. Clive is lighting up the media, with a fantastic new series on climate denial. Plus his controversial new book "Requiem for a Species, Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change."

His previous books include Affluenza, Growth Fetish, Scorcher, and Silencing Dissent.

I've been reading about harassment and death threats to climate scientists, most recently in an excellent 5 part series by Clive Hamilton. The most recent installment, published in Scientific American, has the sub-head "Researchers must purge e-mail in-boxes daily of threatening correspondence, simply part of the job of being a climate scientist."

Clive Hamilton is a Professor of Public Ethics, supported by Australian National University and the University of Melbourne. Previously, he founded and ran a progressive think tank called the Australia Institute.

His five part series includes:

February 22, 2010: Bullying, lies and the rise of right-wing climate denial
February 23rd: Who is orchestrating the cyber-bullying?
February 24th: Think tanks, oil money and black ops
February 25th: Manufacturing a scientific scandal
February 26th: Who's defending science?

- all published on the ABC National web site.

I wouldn't have believed the death threats and low blows, if I hadn't heard Stephen Schneider's own story. If I hadn't talked with other climate scientists who say the same.

As we heard from Clive Hamilton, the world's best climate scientists, and green activists, are under attack.
Now we'll hear directly from one of them.

STEPHEN SCHNEIDER

Stephen H. Schneider is Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University. He's a Senior Fellow in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Schneider has advised the federal government during the Nixon, Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations. He is one of America's pre-eminent climate scientists, one of the driving forces behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

We'll hear an exclusive interview with Stanford's famous climate scientist, Stephen H. Schneider. His latest book has been frozen out by major media. His teaching has been harried by attacks from climate deniers. Schneider talks candidly about death threats, and attempts by some in Congress to charge him as a criminal. Shades of Joe McCarthy, as humanity reacts to the bad news - with more madness.

The interview comes in a telephone conversation between Professor Schneider, and one of the few independent environmental journalists left on the planet - Stephen Leahy of IPS, independent press service. Dr. Schneider opens up with news of his alleged crimes against the nation.

[Schneider-Leahy interview]

That was Stanford's Stephen H. Schneider talking with Stephen Leahy. Find links to Schneider's web page in my Radio Ecoshock blog entry dated March 11th. And you'll find links to Stephen Leahy's IPS article "Violent Backlash Against Climate Scientists," as published on the Tierramérica network, hundreds of papers, on March 8th.

Canadian climate scientist and IPCC contributor Dr. Andrew Weaver told Leahy "'We're in a bizarre time, powered by greed and fear. The general public is more confused than ever,' 'And good scientists are saying to themselves, 'Why would I want to participate in the IPCC?'

The newspaper world is falling into bankruptcy, due to debt-laden mergers and acquisitions, competition from free information on the Internet, and a generational move from print to audio and video. Hordes of good reporters have lost their jobs - and would you believe it, newspapers tend to let environment reporters go first. Are they protecting their big-business advertisers? Of course not. It's just co-incidence.

You can help. Stephen Leahy may be the new model - a journalist who works directly for his or her readers. Stephen is off on a whirl-wind tour on three continents, covering conferences ranging from forestry to the oceans. He is your reporter - but Stephen needs help to keep going. Please visit his web page at stephenleahy.net, where you can "Adopt An Environmental Journalist" with a small donation by PayPal. Steve has two kids to feed, and we need to keep him going. Do it.

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This is the last gasp of the fossil fuel age. The men who make billions every quarter, the longer they can stall, are buying whoever they can in the media, the blogosphere, and the houses of government.

And this is all tied into a long-standing conspiracy that goes deeper than mere money. It finds a home in Libertarians and ideologues who fear big government, or hate it.

A recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center says disgruntled Americans are being whipped up by well-known media figures like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Somehow, in muddled minds, the science of climate change has been deftly attached to 911, unemployment, and the new extreme "patriot" groups. That report is called "Rage on the Right."

The militias, and the haters are back. They fly planes into the IRS, or attack the Pentagon single-handedly. Both Leahy and Schneider worry it's just a matter of time before a climate scientist is shot as well. I hope they are wrong - but just imagine the coming madness of crowds after a series of strange climatic events. After a heat wave kills thousands, after a mega-storm wipes out another city. After the crops fail, again. Our picture of society may fall off the wall, as anger takes over.

NANCY ORESKES: MERCHANTS OF DOUBT

We'll go now to a real conspiracy. Three scientists who frightened the world, who morphed from cold-warriors to anti-environmentalism. The founders of the current climate denialism. The institute they founded, named after World War Two warrior general George C. Marshall - took tobacco money, and then oil money, to stop government action, to endanger millions of lives, and future generations.

We'll get the story from the author of a new book "Merchants Of Doubt, How a Handful of Scientists Obscure the Truth About Climate Change". Naomi Oreskes is Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. She spoke at the University of Rhode Island, on March 2nd, 2010.

You'll hear 15 minutes from that speech. Find the whole thing on the climate 2010 page or our web site, ecoshock.org.

1 hour speech as mp3, CD Quality 56 MB (recommended, only mediocre audio quality)

Or Lo-Fi 14 MB(for telephone or slow download locations).

[Oreskes clip]

That was Naomi Oreskes, on a tour for her new book "Merchants Of Doubt, How a Handful of Scientists Obscure the Truth About Climate Change". The recording comes from the Vetlesen Lecture series, at the University of Rhode Island, March 2nd, 2010.

I remember battling Frederick Seitz back in the early 1990's, on a whole series of environmental fronts. If there was an evil chemical needing regulation, something killing off people or the biosphere, Seitz and his industry backers were against taking any action.

Now the three old men have finally almost faded off the horizon, but their George C. Marshall Institute was taken over by the American Petroleum lobby. The web site exxonsecrets.org lists grants by the Exxon Mobil oil company to the Marshall Institute totaling $840,000 since 1998. The Institute funded and published a who's who of climate deniers, including the late Sallie Baliunas, Frederick Seitz, Patrick Michaels, Stephen McIntyre, Ross McKitrick, and Richard Lindzen. The tiny crowd who continue to mislead the public about climate science, while whipping up anti-government feelings.

According to Wiki, the executive director of the George Marshall Institute helped develop the doubter's strategy for the American Petroleum Institute. Wiki continues, quote:

"The institute's CEO William O'Keefe, formerly an executive at the American Petroleum Institute and chairman of the Global Climate Coalition, is a registered lobbyist for Exxon Mobil."

So there is the real conspiracy - not by climate scientists to take over the world -but by industry hacks and cold warrior ideologues - to keep us upset and stupid, while the world burns. Beware the doubters and deniers.

But that was history. Now, in 2010, the anti-science belief system sprouted by three American scientists, has grown into a cult for now, and threatens to become a popular movement.

Nature - and physics - don't care what you believe. What is coming will come.

I'm Alex Smith. As always, I appreciate you taking time to listen to Radio Ecoshock. Write me any time, radio at ecoshock.org.

Opening music from Thamnos. Great new duo from Germany and England. Green aware. Check out their sample audio and video.

Songs: In the Year 2525, two versions: the original #1 hit from 1969 by Zager & Evans, album Exordium & Terminus, RCA End version from Venice Beat, featuring Tess Timony, released 2005.

EXPECTING COLLAPSE

Collapse is the new in thing. Columnists in collapsing newspapers write about it. Historians tell us it's coming. Prominent economists predict it. We all expect it.

What is collapse? Definitions vary from uncontrollable downturns, all the way to great culls in our population.

Lets start gently, with mild-mannered professor Dennis Meadows, one of the original authors to "The Limits to Growth". Here is a clip from a film prepared September 2009 for leaders and billionaires at Davos, Switzerland:

"The Danger of Collapse

Technically speaking "collapse" is a process where things go down, out of control. For example, if a building collapses, it falls down not under the control of anybody. Societal collapse is for the key indicators of our society--material standards of living, peace, trust in the government, and other things, to fall, without control.

Collapse is Near

The situation for us is kind of like living in a city which has earthquakes, let's say Tokyo or San Francisco. I can tell my friend in San Francisco that with 100% probability there is going to be another really big earthquake in San Francisco-absolutely, no uncertainty about it. But when, that is the question. And how big? These are really important questions. We don't have any idea when. It could be tomorrow; it could be thirty years from now. The same thing with collapse. I know that the current growth in population and in material use cannot continue--absolutely, with 100% probability, that it is going to stop. When? How? How seriously? We have no scientific way to make predictions."

[end of Meadows transcript]

Fine. It's like a building in Chile, if you expect it and prepare for collapse, or a concrete pancake in Haiti, if you don't. Next week we'll look at a more dangerous definition of collapse.

In this program, we'll hear two of the most prominent voices. Dumb media calls them "collapsniks". I have much more respect. Dmitry Orlov keeps piercing the veil with his insights, gained partly from his bridging the gap between the former Soviet Union, and the increasingly dysfunctional United States.

John Michael Greer has moved from the edge of mysticism, into a thought leader for alternative culture. You won't find either one on your father's radio stations. This is Radio Ecoshock.

[Dmitry Orlov interview, 25 minutes, available separately as an mp3 on our Peak Oil page]

Many people take their lead on collapse from the work of Joseph Tainter, the Head of the Department of Environment and Society at Utah State University. His book "The Collapse of Complex Societies" was published in 1988. Tainter looks at past civilizations, from the Maya to the Romans, to see they fell down. To quote from Wikipedia:

"Tainter argues that societies collapse when their investments in social complexity reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. He recognizes collapse when a society rapidly sheds a significant portion of its complexity."

Let's hear a short clip from Joseph Tainter, found at archeologychannel.org

[Tainter reading]

"Modern society, doom-sayers tell us, may be destroyed by pollution, over-population, global warming, energy shortages, or collision with an asteroid.

Economists argue the opposite: that as long as we remain entrepreneurial, we can overcome all challenges. Most of us hope the economists are right, but wish we could understand better why societies succeed or fail.

Societies regularly face wars, catastrophes, changes in climate, and economic distress. We respond to problems today much as people did before, and from these commonalities we can learn about collapse, resiliency and sustainability.

An illuminating collapse was that of the Western Roman Empire in the Fifth century A.D. The Romans found conquest highly profitable at first, as they seized the accumulated wealth of the Mediterranean lands. But for a one-time infusion of wealth, Rome took on responsibilities to administer and defend the empire. These responsibilities lasted centuries, and had to be paid from yearly agricultural production.

When there were extraordinary expenses, usually during wars, the government often found itself short of money. The usual strategy was to stretch the currency by adding copper. This was inflationary, and by the middle of the Third century A.D., the empire was bankrupt. The government would not even accept its own coins for payment of taxes.

In the half century from 235 to 284, the empire nearly came to an end. There were foreign and civil wars, almost without interruption. Cities were sacked and provinces devastated. In the late Third and early Fourth centuries A.D., the emperors Diocletian and Constantine responded by designing a government that was larger, more complex, more highly organized, and much more costly. They doubled the size of the army at great expense. To pay for this, peasants were taxed so heavily that they abandoned lands and could not replenish the population.

In the late Fourth century, the Barbarians forced their way into the Western empire. They overthrew the last Emperor in Italy in 476 A.D.

I call this 'the Roman model' of problem solving. The Romans responded to challenges by increasing the size and complexity of their government and army, at great expense. Fiscal weakness, and exploitation of the population undermined the effort, and made collapse inevitable.

The Eastern Roman Empire survived the Fifth century crisis. We know it today as the Byzantine Empire. It was constantly at war, and in the early Seventh century, a twenty six year war with Persia left both sides exhausted. Arab armies seized the wealthiest parts of the Byzantine realm, and destroyed the Persian Empire entirely.

Soon the Arabs were attacking Constantinople itself, the Byzantine capital. Yet the Byzantines made a remarkable recovery. They settled their professional army of farmlands across the Empire. Soldiers now provided most of their own sustenance, and the government paid them a much lower salary.

Byzantine government and society simplified also. Cities contracted to fortified hill-tops. The economy became organized around self-sufficient manors. Literacy declined.

The simplification rejuvenated Byzantium, which not only halted the Arab advance, but eventually doubled the size of the Empire. Unlike the Romans, who met challenges by increasing the complexity and costliness, the Byzantines show us what may be history's only example of a large complex society systematically simplifying. I label this 'the Byzantine model.'"

[end quote from Professor Joseph Tainter, University of Utah.]

Personally, I find Tainter's explanations a bit too business-oriented, a little too convenient for slashing employees and government help. And our understanding of collapse has come a long way from 1988, when his seminal book came out, I'm sure he would agree. Now that we're closer to it, some of the dirt has been wiped off the lens. But Joseph Tainter continues to be a great source for those interested in collapse.

When Radio Ecoshock continues, we'll go further, with the Arch druid, John Michael Greer. Stay tuned, while you can.

[interview with John Michael Greer, available as a separate interview on our Peak Oil page]

In 2005, John Michael Greer published a scholarly paper titled "How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse."

Greer finds Tainter's explanations lack some positive feed-back loops, the self-reinforcing drivers of decline emerging from things like limited resources, and failing biosphere. In the later stages of a civilization, most of the capital is converted into waste. Can anyone spell junk bonds or credit default swaps?

There has certainly been a downturn in media expectations. After the year of green shoots and drum beats of recovery, there are a slew of experts gently warning we're still in the crapper. You may feel a little pain.

From the OECD economists, to J.P. Morgan, capital experts see another slide coming. Investigations into Goldman Sachs' padding the books of entire nations, like Greece, Italy and more... are leaking out the awful truth. We fixed nothing in the banking system or our economy, and we've faked our way through another year.

Recalling the models from history, as presented by Joseph Tainter, we find that collapse isn't all bad for everyone. For those toiling under the yoke of impossible imperialism, it is a relief when the war economy ends. For those eating industrial agro-garbage, real grown food tastes sweet and good again. The cynicism of our present failures morphs into new beliefs, as the old is cleaned away.

The wild Germans and Celts longed for the Fall of Rome, though they kept using some of their technologies and symbols. In Byzantium, simplification and self-sufficiency led to centuries more civilization.

I'm also reminded of Roberto Vacca's 1973 book, "The Coming Dark Age". As a computer architect, Vacca predicted modern complexity would over-reach, and fall apart. The dreaded system break down.

A version of that book, updated by the author in the year 2000, is now free on the Net.

Back in the '70's, Vacca couldn't foresee how much computers would help humans organize beyond their individual capabilities. Once we survived the urge for atomic self-annihilation, we got another thirty years out of computer assisted living. Until Windows and the mega-servers hit the virus they can't swallow. Or the power goes out in a mega storm. Richard Heinberg warns most or our ready-to-click knowledge could disappear in a day, without the machines.

Meanwhile, you can feed your worries with the new article coming out this week in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs. The Harvard historian Niall Ferguson calls it, "Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos." See what I mean? Everybody's on to it.

Find an accessible, shorter version of Niall Ferguson's warning here in the L.A. Times, the article titled: "America, the Fragile Empire."

We don't know where collapse is taking us, or when. Only that it's coming. Get more in next week's Radio Ecoshock on-going coverage. As Niall Ferguson writes, we may not have time to figure out the theory, if collapse comes quickly, and without warning.

I'm Alex Smith. Find lots more free audio, at our web site, ecoshock.org Thank you for listening.

Program Notes:
Our background music is "Open Up You Eyes" by Awake. The band dedicated another song, "Industrial Cemeteries" to our guest, John Michael Greer. The album is "Dark Matter".

You also heard the bull-horn overlay from London, England found in this You tube montage titled "Everything Is OK"

UNCIVILIZED

Coming up on Radio Ecoshock - hot from Copenhagen, American energy - and the destruction of Africa. Two continents adrift in hard choices. We know climate change is upon us. It's just a matter of how fast, and how bad. The struggle stretches from Washington to Denmark to Kenya, where the President's family live, among the growing millions of climate refugees.

Stick around, in our second half hour, we're off to Copenhagen, with voices you've never heard from the mainstream media. What Obama can do - no matter what watered down roadblocks Congress puts in the way. And why the fragile culture of Africa will boil away, with just 2 degrees of global temperature rise. Guess what! People there are not willing to die for our energy economy. From out of the darkness, Radio Ecoshock, with a digest of the best of independent radio coming from the Copenhagen convention center - courtesy of Phil England of climateradio.org.

Radio Ecoshock Show "Uncivilized" 1 hour CD quality (55 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)



But we open with the question: when does doubt become realism?

"...civilization as we have known it, is coming to an end; brought down by a rapidly changing climate, a cancerous economic system, and the ongoing mass destruction of the non-human world."

That's the starting point for our next guest, Paul Kingsnorth, a founder of The Dark Mountain Project. Paul is a well-educated, well-published environmentalist in England. He's been arrested at a protest, helped edit the Ecologist magazine, and Greenpeace publications. He appears regularly in British newspapers, radio, and television.

ALEX SMITH: Let's start with current events: was there ever any hope that climate change could be stopped, by our current political leaders, at Copenhagen?

PAUL KINGSNORTH: I don't think so, no, not at all. The conclusion was pretty foregone from the beginning. I think that the ways we look at climate change are probably the wrong ways.

If we look at climate change as a "problem" that we can solve within a certain amount of time, if we can just get the technology right, and if we can get the political will, and if we can build a big mass movement of people.

I don't think that's really what it is. I think climate change is almost an existential problem for us. It's a predicament we have to live with, rather than a problem we have to solve.

And I think the root of that is the fact that we treat climate change as if it's something that's external. It's a sort of problem we've created that we can solve with human genius. But climate change is our society, climate change is who we are.

Climate change is our computers, our televisions. It's our flights. And we're all complicit in it, those of us living in the rich world.

And the system that the political leaders who gathered in Copenhagen have to promote, because it's what their voters want them to promote, and it's what global corporations and the global economy wants them to promote, is the system that creates climate change.

So it's almost impossible to believe, I think, that they can turn around and suddenly flick a switch and turn it off again.

And I think we're having real trouble understanding that. I think that applies to environmentalists as well as the public as a whole. We still see climate change as a kind of challenge that we can tackle with the old fashioned methods of protesting, and marching, and letter writing, and campaigning. And I don't think it's responding to that at all.

ALEX: One thing brought home to me, by the alleged "leak" of the Danish text, - we in the West are committed to the expediency of atmospheric imperialism. We'll keep polluting, even if we lose whole countries and continents in the less developed world. Am I being pessimistic, or realistic?

PAUL KINGSNORTH: This is one of the things the Dark Mountain Project was set up: to try to distinguish between pessimism and realism.

I think that the whole of the environmental movement, in which I've been involved for a long time, is built on this edifice of hope. And hope can be a very good thing. But if it's false hope, it's a very dangerous thing.

And we've almost come to believe that anything's possible if we just hope for it enough. And I think we need to take a cold, and a hard, and a realistic look at the way the world is, and the way that human society is. And the way that human society is rubbing up against the ecological reality.

It's all very well, taking to the streets to kind of urge our leaders to act at Copenhagen. But our leaders are running this enormous machine, and this machine IS about cannibalizing resources from the rest of the world. It's about keeping the consumer economy going. You can't just turn that around, however much mass action you have.

And the problem is with climate change, is that actually you're never going to get millions of people on the streets to campaign against climate change. Because they'll be campaigning against their own way of life. They'll be campaigning against their own comfort, in the West at least.

And so we're all complicit in that system. The voters are complicit, the corporations are complicit, the politicians are complicit. We might want to stop climate change, but actually I don't think that we can, at least within the time scale that's apparently available to us.

I think we need to be honest about that. Because only when we're honest about that, can we start to think about what we do next....

Hear this interview with Paul Kingsnorth. (27 min, 6 MB)

Find out more about The Dark Mountain Project

or Paul Kingsnorth

COPENHAGEN: AMERICA VS. AFRICA

There is no single story coming out of the Copenhagen climate talks in December 09. There are hundreds. Today we'll cover the struggle of two continents: North America, the great wealthy polluter, and Africa, the poorest victim of global climate change.



We'll do it as only radio can. On a shoestring, a band of radio activists found the voices we never hear in mainstream media. They broadcast it daily to London, to Resonance FM, and to the States through Democracy Now! You'll hear Amy Goodman, Phil England, and Frederika Whitehead, plus audio from 350.org. More importantly, you'll get first hand the voices of the dispossessed, the representatives of Africa.

In spite of my years of studying climate change, my many interviews with top climate scientists, I never understood until now the real impact of climate disruption on Africa. Where hundreds of millions depend upon simple rain-fed agriculture, the rains are not coming, or flood everything out when they do. Wealth measured in cattle is now mile upon mile of skulls strewn across the widest part of the continent. Lake Chad, Africa's largest lake, has almost disappeared, drying out into a few marshes. Even farming rich South Africa is drying out, with worse to come in the next decades. We all need to wake up and listen to the distress calls from Africa.

Here is a map of some climate change impacts on Africa.

Meanwhile, the oil empire of America is trying to decide what to do. We'll begin there, with a quick news bite from Amy Goodman, an interview with Cassie Siegel on the legal moves, and then Naomi Klein on Obama's damage.

Does America have to gut the Clean Air Act to make new climate legislation? Hear Phil England of climateradio.org with Cassie Siegel, of the Center for Biological Diversity....

Incredibly, in oil-dependent Nigeria, there has been a major conference calling for a halt to further oil exploration. Leave it in the soil, to develop a real economy, and to save the climate of Africa. Listen to Phil England of climateradio with Nnimmo Bassey, head of Friends of the Earth, Nigeria.

But African representatives at Copenhagen were aggrieved and angry to discover their Danish hosts colluded with the biggest countries to write a polluters treaty, called the Danish Accord. We play a clip from the spontaneous protest that broke out in the main conference hall. It's heart-breaking - a deal that condemns millions of Africans to drought, more diseases, and heat deaths.

And it all links back to the United States, historically the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. We wrap up with a passionate letter to Obama, written by the African delegates. Really, it's a letter to Americans as they decide about their energy future - and the right to go on polluting the atmosphere.

Listen to this digest of alternative radio. (29 min 30 sec, 7 MB)
http://www.ecoshock.org/downloads/climate09/ES_Copenhagen_Digest_1_LoFi.mp3

It's official, this past decade was the warmest ever recorded. Doubt and despair, as the world hurtles into more decades of climate change.

Alex Smith

The Economy: Dinosaurs Will Die

Welcome to Radio Ecoshock. This week's program is about schizophrenia: the state of hoping the system will crash before it kills the planet, while counting on all the usual creature comforts of home, jobs, and a well-stocked supermarket.

Yes, I know the Western world is hanging in suspension. We're waiting for the shopping to resume, for the economy to rebound, for the good life to return. Most politicians and the mainstream press promise that it will all go back to the normal process of chewing up and spitting out the last of the planet's goodness.

Meanwhile we go to movies like 2012, slurping up scenes of the destruction of everything. Part of our secret selves hopes it all goes down in flames, or floods. Even while we worry about our children having a decent life. You see how it goes?

I know you are worried about the economy. Maybe even your own job or home is at risk. Despite the propaganda, we'd be crazy not to worry about it. I've been told the general formula for every speech and radio program goes as follows: we paint the grim picture, but always, always end on a positive note. Give humans solutions, or they'll just go numb and do nothing.

Sorry. This week we violate the rules. Lately Radio Ecoshock has run a series about greening our cities. A couple of listeners have written back, saying cities can never be sustainable, as Derrick Jensen says. Have I fallen into the camp of false good cheer?

We'll start out with one of the most promising solutions I've heard about lately - a dream of new economics coming from a British government advisor, Professor Tim Jackson. He's got a new book out "Prosperity Without Growth".

Then we'll head into more pessimistic territory with Dave Cohen, an analyst for ASPO, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas. Having written the American Empire is now obviously in decline, Cohen asks "Now What?" We talk more about the economic crisis, Wall Street bull (and bears) - and the energy crisis.

Along with James Howard Kuntsler, and our recent guest Richard Heinberg, Cohen says normal consumption is never coming back. We might as well prepare ourselves for very hard times.

We'll trash smug Canadians a bit, since real estate north of the border is just as stupidly over-leveraged as the American market. Then we'll notice Australia melting in the heat, while they push even more coal. A big Canadian company has just bought into the dirty Aussie coal market. Aren't we proud?

In the end, I wonder, is hope just getting in the way of dealing with the limits of reality?

This show is peppered with audio clips, including shorties from Max Keiser, Jeff Buckley's song "The Sky Is A Landfill", Bob Holman's "We Are the Dinosaur", and of course ending with the show title "Dinosaurs Will Die" from NOFX. We open with "Times Is Hard" by Loudon Wainwright III.

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