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.
READ MORE
Addiction
to growth hasn't worked. The rich just
get richer, while the rest of us get poorer.
Not to mention the abject poverty of the majority of the world's people,
living outside the golden net of Western power. We've paved over the best farm lands, and we're still not happy.
Tim
Jackson says we can remove the cancer of growth, and still survive with a new
idea of what prosperity really is. He's
one of the brightest of the new economists, and a top level advisor to the
British government. Jackson's thick
report to the UK, full of econo-talk, has been boiled down into a new book for
the rest of us, called "Prosperity Without Growth" We're lucky to get him on the phone, for an
interview from Britain.
Then,
breaking the mold, we'll head into the swamp of despair, hopefully with a
nervous laugh or two.
Let's
start with Tim Jackson.
[Jackson
interview]
My thanks
to Earthscan books for making Tim Jackson available. Even Jackson admits the challenges of major change seem so
impossible, it's tempting to run for the hills. Find a link to that amateur video of Tim Jackson's book launch in
London, here.
This week
I also chatted with Dave Cohen, an energy writer who thinks it's all downhill
from here. You can
listen in.
Dave and
I don't agree about everything. At
times Cohen's been so concerned about a coming energy collapse, he's called for
offshore drilling and even more nuclear power plants. That's not my view at all.
Yet Cohen
seems dead on when it comes to the paralysis of big governments, and big
populations. James Howard Kunstler, has
pointed to the same thing. In his
weekly Monday morning
diatribe of November 9th, Kunstler writes:
"In
[the book] The Long Emergency (2005, Atlantic Monthly Press), I said that we
ought to expect the federal government to become increasingly impotent and
ineffectual - that this would be a hallmark of the times. In fact, I said that any enterprise
organized at the colossal scale would function poorly in years ahead, whether
it was a government, a state university, a national chain retail company, or a
giant Midwestern farm. It is
characteristic of the compressive contraction our society faces that giant hyper
complex systems will wobble and fail. We should expect this.....”
Our
recent Ecoshock speaker
Professor Bill Rees agreed, suggesting that cities are the place where
survival changes will happen, rather than malfunctioning national
governments. He sees the development of
city states sited in bioregions.
Scientific American magazine has an article
out November 11th, titled "Can Local Governments Solve Global
Warming?" Find that link in my
blog.
But for
many, including fans of Derrick Jensen
, Cormac McCarthy's doomer book "The Road", and John Michael Greer, the
self-styled "Arch druid"
- the end of civilization is approaching, and
that may be a good thing. Check out dieoff.org for a sample of the desirable
darkness.
SHORT
CANADA? IS A REAL ESTATE CRASH COMING
TO CANADA?
Oohh, and
I promised a kick in the pants for Canadians smugly watching the economic
demise south of the border. Blogger
Mish Shedlock has collected a bunch of figures showing Canadian
real estate poised for an American-style collapse. Actually, he's quoting from Jonathan Tonge's
entry in the America Canada
Blog.
Right
now, real estate prices and sales in Canada are hitting another all-time high
bubble. In Vancouver, the average
detached home costs over 800,000 dollars.
No hope my kids can buy a house.
It's $600,000 in Toronto.
Almost
every home mortgage in Canada is backed by an arm of the Canadian government,
called the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the CMHC. So if the market crashes, the Canadian
tax payer is on the hook, just like their American cousins under Fannie
Mae, Freddie Mac, and their ilk.
Canadians
firmly believe their banks are better, and their mortgages are sound as the
beaver. Mish Shedlock points out that
big American companies like GE Capital wrote a slew of shaky mortgages, all
guaranteed by the government Crown Corporation. Even AIG managed to lobby their way into the same 0 Percent down,
adjustable rate, 40 year mortgages for Canadians - that helped the U.S. market
crash.
Oh yes,
Canada, you're set to go underwater as well.
Of course that's all in the past, isn't it. Nope. I'm still seeing
ads for mortgages with 3.5 % down. As
Shedlock notes, once you figure in various grants and costs, it still works out
to a 100% mortgage for Canadians. “No
equity” lives and breathes.
One blog
commenter points out its far cheaper to rent in Canada, than to buy
anything. And as the market soars into
unreality, Canada's manufacturing industry is melting away. Government revenues are dropping like a
stone, just like American cities and states.
The slashing is about to begin, the jobless are up... does this sound
familiar? Maybe the smug Canadians
should be stashing cash and long-term food.
Some
Canadian companies are doing well. The
tar sands giants are selling themselves to foreign companies, from China and
Korea. The former Bronfman colossus,
once called Edper but now renamed Brookfield Asset Management and Brookfield
Properties, under new ownership, has
just purchased over a billion dollars worth of Australia's Babcock and
Brown. That's the company controlling
Dalrymple Bay Coal Terminal - one of the biggest coal exporters to China and
points East. Way to go Canada! Now you've got a stake in the other biggest
carbon polluter on the planet, Australia's coal industry!
The
Australians themselves seem oblivious to wrecking their own environment, as
they sweat out another
record-breaking heat wave. This
past winter down-under was a real hottie, and now Spring turns out to be sweaty
as the coming Summer, along with the usual drought, fire risk down South, and
floods in the North country. Climate
problem? What climate problem? We've got to keep shipping out the coal! The
Aussies have a profitable climate denial industry as well.
The
English speaking world is basically energy insane.
Nobody is immune to the fossil disease, no matter how green the
talk. The realities of Peak Oil eat
away at the suburbanites and the financial capitals.
Bleakers
like Richard Heinberg, or maybe "realists" is a better word, are
facing up to the possibility there is no good way out, other than blackout or
die off.
Heinberg
is bringing out a new book with author Jerry Mander. It's called "Searching for a Miracle: "Net Energy"
and the Fate of Industrial Societies."
Here is a
short burst from Heinberg's
November 2009 Museletter, quote:
"A
more comprehensive statement of our choice might be this:
·
Dead
planet and dead economy (if insufficient effort is mustered toward reducing
carbon emissions, population, and consumption)
* vs. crippled planet (so much climate
change, and so many species extinctions are already in the pipeline and cannot
now be averted, that a healthy planet is just no longer a real possibility, for
at least the next many decades) and sharply downsized economy (if we do reduce
carbon emissions, population, and consumption, that will constitute a form of
economic contraction that will mean the end of prosperity as we have come to
think of it).
That,
friends, is a dilemma. Yes, the second option is still mightily preferable, as
it is our only realistic survival option; but it's a very tough sell for policy
makers at every level, and for the general public as well."
To
address the least damaging options from this ugly dilemma, Heinberg is part of
a team of people re-vamping the Post
Carbon Institute with a star-studded cast of experts in the many fields
needed to asses and address our situation.
Watch those developments at postcarbon.org, and try Richard Heinberg's
regular email blog, called The
Museletter.
The world
leaders agree they can do nothing about climate change in Copenhagen this
December. Finally an agreement on
climate. We'll "extend and
pretend" as Dave Cohen says.
Personally,
I can't give up. My own life has been
so rich, I must give back. And my
children expect something better than a well documented funeral speech. We're full circle back to Tim Jackson. He says that impossibility is a logic that
we can break. To stop trying, is not an
option.
Coming
up: the angry generation, inheriting the mess we've left. Young people have been punked.
I'm Alex
Smith, for Radio Ecoshock.