The One Way Forward | John Michael Greer

[Tace]

John Michael Greer

(Editor's note: John Michael Greer suggests in the following essay that it might be best for modern civilization to revert to an earlier technological form. He points to the technology of the 1950s as a possibility. One thing I question is the need to revert to people doing labor that has been replaced in modern times by machines. If necessary due to less available energy for building and operating machines, then it certainly is possible. Yet, I find nothing wrong with machines replacing human labor. To free people from labor is to enable them to do more creative and constructive things. Society is better for it.. --Francis Goodwin)

Jan. 28, 2015 (Archdruid Report) -- All things considered, 2015 just isn’t shaping up to be a good year for believers in business as usual.

Since last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report, the anti-austerity party Syriza has swept the Greek elections, to the enthusiastic cheers of similar parties all over Europe and the discomfiture of the Brussels hierarchy. The latter have no one to blame for this turn of events but themselves; for more than a decade now, EU policies have effectively put sheltering banks and bondholders from the healthy discipline of the market ahead of all other considerations, including the economic survival of entire nations. It should be no surprise to anyone that this wasn’t an approach with a long shelf life.

Meanwhile, the fracking bust continues unabated. The number of drilling rigs at work in American oilfields continues to drop vertically from week to week, layoffs in the nation’s various oil patches are picking up speed, and the price of oil remains down at levels that make further fracking a welcome mat for the local bankruptcy judge. Those media pundits who are still talking the fracking industry’s book keep insisting that the dropping price of oil proves that they were right and those dratted heretics who talk of peak oil must be wrong, but somehow those pundits never get around to explaining why iron ore, copper, and most other major commodities are dropping in price even faster than crude oil, nor why demand for petroleum products here in the United States has been declining steadily as well.

The fact of the matter is that an industrial economy built to run on cheap conventional oil can’t run on expensive oil for long without running itself into the ground. Since 2008, the world’s industrial nations have tried to make up the difference by flooding their economies with cheap credit, in the hope that this would somehow make up for the sharply increased amounts of real wealth that have had to be diverted from other purposes into the struggle to keep liquid fuels flowing at their peak levels. Now, though, the laws of economics have called their bluff; the wheels are coming off one national economy after another, and the price of oil (and all those other commodities) has dropped to levels that won’t cover the costs of fracked oil, tar sands, and the like, because all those frantic attempts to externalize the costs of energy production just meant that the whole global economy took the hit.

Now of course this isn’t how governments and the media are spinning the emerging crisis. For that matter, there’s no shortage of people outside the corridors of power, or for that matter of punditry, who ignore the general collapse of commodity prices, fixate on oil outside of the broader context of resource depletion in general, and insist that the change in the price of oil must be an act of economic warfare, or what have you. It’s a logic that readers of this blog will have seen deployed many times in the past: whatever happens, it must have been decided and carried out by human beings. An astonishing number of people these days seem unable to imagine the possibility that such wholly impersonal factors as the laws of economics, geology, and thermodynamics could make things happen all by themselves.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/the-one-way-forward-john-michael-greer

[Binkie The Clown]

1. I've followed his blog for years

He's one very level-headed dude. http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/

He's smart enough to realize that industrial civilization is not sustainable, and well enough acquainted with the history of past collapses to know that the decline and fall of civilization won't happen in a day, or a month, or even a single generation. Not one person witnessed the fall of the Roman Empire. It was only in retrospect, a few centuries after the fact, that it looked like a "collapse". A simple statement like "The barbarian tribes conquered the northern provinces" glosses over the fact that that conquest was spread out over a span of some forty years.

Greer calls it "fractal collapse", I've always called it "punctuated equilibrium", after Eldredge and Gould. Almost every day is exactly like the day before it, except when once in a great while, it isn't. Then some big crisis happens, followed the next day, or the next week by a return to stability at a new set point, or new normal. Then it's back to every day is exactly like the day before it.