Smarter than the average yeast?

Greetings 

Dave Roberts has an interesting piece.  On a number of issues - GDP versus GPI,  wealth and happiness, and finally - our biological desire to use it all up.   Like any parasite, we must be careful not to kill the host.   Parasites that break that law, don't last very long, evolutionary scale.

Dave wonders:

"I’ll admit to being somewhat schizophrenic on this question. I’m very much attracted to the notion of boundless ingenuity. But the raw truth is that we are not, in fact, looking ahead, anticipating problems, and innovating solutions — not on a broad scale. We are not taking the kind of drastic action necessary to shift to long-term sustainability. In fact, it’s proving difficult for us even to talk about it sensibly or govern in the right direction"

Paul Chafurka who also blogs on the topic of Limits To growth comes to a similar fork in the road. (see below)

As a result, I don’t think humanity in general will put any kind of sustainability practices in place until long after they are actually needed (i.e. after population and consumption rates have begun to crash).  I don’t think it is possible for a group as large as 7 billion people to agree that such proactive measures are necessary.  We are as blind to the need for limits as a fish is to water and for similar reasons. After the crisis has incontrovertibly begun we’ll do all kinds of things, but by then we will be hampered by the climate crisis and by severe shortages of both resources and the technology needed to use them.

Is humanity smarter than a protozoan?

By David Roberts

So, how’s humanity doing?

Good question. One way of answering is to look at global per-capita GDP — that is, the average amount of economic activity per person in the world. From that perspective, humanity is kicking ass:

Wikipedia

Click to embiggen.

We’re getting richer!

Here’s the thing, though: While GDP has come to serve as a stand-in for human welfare, it was not originally developed for that purpose. What’s more, it kind of sucks for that purpose. Objections to GDP as a measure of human welfare are as old as GDP itself; I’ve written about them before. It doesn’t distinguish between welfare-enhancing economic activity and the welfare-degrading kind. It doesn’t value natural capital. It doesn’t incorporate life satisfaction or economic inequality. And so on. Any true measure of human welfare should be far more nuanced.

So what to use instead? One alternative measure is the Genuine Progress Indicator, or GPI, an attempt to combine personal consumption expenditures (what GDP captures) with a few dozen other positive and negative indicators, including crime, pollution, inequality, the loss of ecosystem services, the value of domestic labor, self-reported happiness, and so forth.

(There is a long, involved, and contentious literature on GPI and other alternative metrics. Needless to say, no aggregate measure of welfare is precise; all reflect their own contestable assumptions; all have their shortcomings. But it seems to me that almost any of them, including GPI, are preferable to simple GDP, which after all includes contestable assumptions of its own.)

In a new paper in the journal Ecological Economics, a team of researchers attempts something novel: to aggregate all the available GPI data in various countries into a global per-capita GPI.

Their top-line finding is pretty astonishing: Global per-capita GPI peaked in 1978 and has declined since. Put another way: Some time around 1978, the rise in aggregate global economic activity ceased enhancing global economic welfare — GDP and GPI parted ways.

Ecological Economics

Click to embiggen.

Why do they split? The critical difference between the two is that GPI incorporates the spending down of natural capital as an economic cost — it’s no coincidence, the authors note, that 1978 is also about when “global Ecological Footprint exceeded global Biocapacity” for the first time.

What’s more, the researchers found that GDP/capita and GPI/capita rose together until the former hit about $7,000; at that point, GPI stops rising alongside it:

Ecological Economics

Click to embiggen.

It’s important to be careful with conclusions here. It’s not necessarily that making more money than $7,000 makes people less happy. I know I’d be happier with $700,000 than $7,000. Rather, at that level of global economic growth, the cumulative cost of negative indicators like lost natural capital, inequality, and pollution start to cancel out the welfare gains of growth.

Just as a thought experiment, let’s say we capped global per-capita GDP at $7,000 (none of us reading this would like that much, I suspect) and total global GDP at its current level, $67 trillion. How many people could the earth support at that level? “No more than 9.6 billion” (for reference, we are at 7.1 billion, headed to 9.6 billion by 2050, so it’ll be a tight fit). The authors note, rather wryly I thought, that to reach this exalted state, “variations in income would need to exist between and within nations, however these disparities should be much smaller than they are today.” Yes. Much.

This is the radically egalitarian message of this kind of research: maximizing global economic welfare from this point forward will involve more redistribution than growth. The simple, headlong, unequal growth on the 20th century is no longer working.

Of course each country has it’s own GDP/GPI story to tell. There’s lots of good stuff in the paper about individual countries, and also how GPI stacks up against other indicators like ecological footprint, the Human Development Index, life satisfaction, the Gini coefficient, and so on. Dig in if you like that kind of stuff.

——

By way of discussion, it’s worth noting that this paper’s results tack somewhat against a good bit of current research showing that the correlation between rising income and rising happiness holds pretty much forever, though it loses strength higher up. This is the new hip stance in these matters: “Yes, money really can buy happiness.” (Or put another way: that there may be no Easterlin Paradox.)

What explains the disparity? Can we increase our welfare by growing more, or can’t we? Again, I think the key difference is that GPI is scoring the loss of natural capital as a cost. As the authors put it:

Economic activity, it should be recognized, is undertaken to generate a level of economic welfare greater than what can be provided by natural capital alone. For the GPI to properly reflect this reality, it is necessary to subtract the permanentloss of natural capital services.

This explains the apparent contradiction. As finite resources are consumed, the welfare (and happiness) of current people rises, while the natural capital necessary to sustain economic activity declines. GDP will only pick up on the former; GPI incorporates the latter.

It ends up, as so many things do, coming down to how much value one places on the welfare of future generations. Is the “humanity” whose welfare we are attempting to maximize currently alive humans, or the species in its whole great arc on this planet?

To some folks, the unsustainability of running faster and faster through finite resources seems self-evident. Others, however, hate this sort of thinking. They believe that market forces will push human beings to discover new or more sustainable natural resources, or squeeze more out of current ones (as we are doing now with oil). They believe that economic growth, not necessarily defined as material throughput but simply as increases in welfare brought about by mutual trade, has no limit because human ingenuity has no limit. There is no petri dish for humanity — or rather, there’s no reason our petri dish can’t go on expanding, forever. Man Will Overcome.

The way I think about the question is: Are we a biological species or an economic species? Set aside an hour or two some day and read Charles C. Mann’s magnificent “State of the Species.” It frames the question in the clearest possible terms.

It would be no surprise at all for a biological species to expand its population into overshoot, destroy its habitat, and go extinct. It’s what you would expect of an organism with few competitors. Mann discusses the work of scientist Georgii Gause, working in the 1920s. Gause’s original experiment was simple but brilliant: five test tubes, each with a few drops of broth, each containing five single-celled protozoans of a single species. After a week’s observations, here’s what he found:

What Gause saw in his test tubes is often depicted in a graph, time on the horizontal axis, the number of protozoa on the vertical. The line on the graph is a distorted bell curve, with its left side twisted and stretched into a kind of flattened S. At first the number of protozoans grows slowly, and the graph line slowly ascends to the right. But then the line hits an inflection point, and suddenly rockets upward—a frenzy of exponential growth. [See: global GDP graph at the top of this post.] The mad rise continues until the organism begins to run out of food, at which point there is a second inflection point, and the growth curve levels off again as bacteria begin to die. Eventually the line descends, and the population falls toward zero.

In nature, as Darwin so perspicaciously noted, natural selection keeps this process in check. Organisms have competitors and limited ecosystems. But in a petri dish or test tube, free of competitors, a species will race to the limit and shoot past it. It is the nature of life, to propagate itself. Mann writes:

By luck or superior adaptation, a few species manage to escape their limits, at least for a while. Nature’s success stories, they are like Gause’s protozoans; the world is their petri dish. Their populations grow exponentially; they take over large areas, overwhelming their environment as if no force opposed them. Then they annihilate themselves, drowning in their own wastes or starving from lack of food.

In short, a biological species as dominant as ours, largely free of competitors and still with large stocks of natural capital to burn through, should be expected to hit limits and suffer catastrophes. And it won’t be pretty:

If we follow Gause’s pattern, growth will continue at a delirious speed until we hit the second inflection point. At that time we will have exhausted the resources of the global petri dish, or effectively made the atmosphere toxic with our carbon-dioxide waste, or both. After that, human life will be, briefly, a Hobbesian nightmare, the living overwhelmed by the dead. When the king falls, so do his minions; it is possible that our fall might also take down most mammals and many plants. Possibly sooner, quite likely later, in this scenario, the earth will again be a choir of bacteria, fungi, and insects, as it has been through most of its history.

Whee!

However. If we are an economic species — a welfare-maximizing species, a rational species — we will look ahead, anticipate problems, and innovate solutions. We will decouple economic growth from material throughput and grow without limit, eventually into space, bounded only by our own imaginations. “To seek out new life and new civilizations / To boldly go where no man has gone before.”

So which is it, collapse or transcendence? Kunstler or Kurzweil?

I’ll admit to being somewhat schizophrenic on this question. I’m very much attracted to the notion of boundless ingenuity. But the raw truth is that we are not, in fact, looking ahead, anticipating problems, and innovating solutions — not on a broad scale. We are not taking the kind of drastic action necessary to shift to long-term sustainability. In fact, it’s proving difficult for us even to talk about it sensibly or govern in the right direction. Mann again:

Not only is the task daunting, it’s strange. In the name of nature, we are asking human beings to do something deeply unnatural, something no other species has ever done or could ever do: constrain its own growth (at least in some ways). Zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, brown tree snakes in Guam, water hyacinth in African rivers, gypsy moths in the northeastern U.S., rabbits in Australia, Burmese pythons in Florida—all these successful species have overrun their environments, heedlessly wiping out other creatures. Like Gause’s protozoans, they are racing to find the edges of their petri dish. Not one has voluntarily turned back. Now we are asking Homo sapiens to fence itself in.

What a peculiar thing to ask! Economists like to talk about the “discount rate,” which is their term for preferring a bird in hand today over two in the bush tomorrow. The term sums up part of our human nature as well. Evolving in small, constantly moving bands, we are as hard-wired to focus on the immediate and local over the long-term and faraway as we are to prefer parklike savannas to deep dark forests. Thus, we care more about the broken stoplight up the street today than conditions next year in Croatia, Cambodia, or the Congo. Rightly so, evolutionists point out: Americans are far more likely to be killed at that stoplight today than in the Congo next year. Yet here we are asking governments to focus on potential planetary boundaries that may not be reached for decades. Given the discount rate, nothing could be more understandable than the U.S. Congress’s failure to grapple with, say, climate change. From this perspective, is there any reason to imagine that Homo sapiens, unlike mussels, snakes, and moths, can exempt itself from the natural fate of all successful species?

In his conclusion, Mann compares what’s necessary to a species-wide form of what the Japanese call hara hachi bu: “belly 80 percent full.” The brain receives the body’s signal of satiety long after it is sent; during its transmission, we eat to excess. So the way to stay healthy, to eat the appropriate amount, is to stop eating before feeling entirely full. One way of looking at these new results on GPI is that they are an early indicator: we are hara hachi bu. We have enough, if we would share it more equitably. But GDP shows that we’re still eating furiously.

Can a successful species stop before it is stuffed and sick? It’s never been done before, but humans have done lots of things that have never been done before. Maybe human intellect and imagination are something truly new in the world. After all, concludes Mann …

… it is terrible to suppose that we could get so many other things right and get this one wrong. To have the imagination to see our potential end, but not have the imagination to avoid it. To send humankind to the moon but fail to pay attention to the earth. To have the potential but to be unable to use it—to be, in the end, no different from the protozoa in the petri dish.

Many of us who have been paying attention to the state of the world over the last half century have now begun to realize with growing horror that the progressive deterioration we have been tracking shows no signs of resolution   In fact, to some of us it looks as though there is no way to resolve this deepening crisis. The end of the track is in sight. The planetary factory is in flames, and all the exit doors are barred.

Proposed technical solutions are utterly inadequate to the scale of the problem.  Many ideas like geoengineering will simply make matters worse.  There is no political constituency for degrowth – none at all.  There is precious little political support for even putting a light foot on the brake.  This road to Hell has been paved with the very best of intentions – giving our children a better life stands near the top of the list – but here we are nonetheless. The climate is signalling that our future may be a little warmer than we were expecting, once our seven-billion-passenger train passes those gates.

Now that the denouement is in sight, I’m setting aside the anger and outrage, the blame and shame, to focus my attention instead on why this outcome seems to have been utterly inevitable and unstoppable.

Why has this happened?  I don’t buy the traditional “broken morality” or “flawed genetics” arguments.  After all, our genetics seemed to be perfectly appropriate for a million years, and the elements of morality that some of us see as sub-optimal (the greed and shortsightedness) have been with us to varying degrees since before the days of Australopithecus. I don’t think it’s just a mistake on our part or a bug in the program – it appears to be a part of the program of life itself. It looks to me as though much deeper forces have been at work throughout human history, and have shaped this outcome.

The main difficulty I have with all the technical, political, economic and social reform proposals I've seen is that they run counter to some very deep-seated aspects of human behavior and decision-making.  Mainly, they assume that human intelligence and analytical ability control our behavior, and from what I've seen, that’s simply not true.  In fact it’s untrue to such an extent that I don’t even think it’s a “human” issue per se.

I have come to think that most of our collective choices and actions are shaped by physical forces so deep that they can’t even be called “genetic”.  I haven’t written anything definitive about this yet, but the conclusion I have come to in the last six months is that a physical principle called the "Maximum Entropy Production Principle”, which is closely related to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, actually underlies the structure of life itself.  Its operation has shaped the energy-seeking, replicative behavior of everything from bacteria to humans.  All our intelligence does is makes its operation more effective.

This principle is behind the appearance of life in the first place, has guided the development of genetic replication and natural selection, and has embedded itself in our behavior at the very deepest level. Like all life, our mandate is simple:  survive and reproduce so as to form a metastable dissipative structure.  All of human behavior and history has been oriented towards executing this mandate as effectively as possible.  This “survive and reproduce” program springs from a universal law of physics, much like gravity. As a result it even precedes genetics as a driver of human behavior.  And lest there be any lingering doubt about the connection to our current predicament, the survival imperative is what causes all living organisms to exhibit energy-seeking behavior.  Humans just do this better than any other organism in the history of the planet because of our intelligence.

In this context, the evolutionary fitness role of human intelligence is to act as a limit-removal mechanism, to circumvent any obstacles in the way of making make our growth in terms of energy use and reproduction more effective.  It’s why we are blind to the need for limits both as individuals (in general) and collectively as cultures.  We acknowledge limits only when they are so close as to present an immediate existential threat, as they were and are in hunter-gatherer societies. As a result we tend to make hard changes only in response to a crisis, not in advance of it.  Basically, the goal of life is to live rather than die, and to do this it must grow rather than shrink.  This imperative governs everything we think and do.

As a result, I don’t think humanity in general will put any kind of sustainability practices in place until long after they are actually needed (i.e. after population and consumption rates have begun to crash).  I don’t think it is possible for a group as large as 7 billion people to agree that such proactive measures are necessary.  We are as blind to the need for limits as a fish is to water and for similar reasons. After the crisis has incontrovertibly begun we’ll do all kinds of things, but by then we will be hampered by the climate crisis and by severe shortages of both resources and the technology needed to use them.

I have given up speculating on possible outcomes, because they are so inherently unpredictable, at least in detail.  But what I’m discovering about the way life works at a deep level makes me continually less optimistic.  I now think near-term human extinction (say within the next hundred years) has a significantly non-zero probability.

Our cybernetic civilization is approaching a "Kardashev Type 0/1 boundary" and I don’t think it's possible for us to make the jump to Type 1.  Like most other people, Kardashev misunderstood the underlying drivers of human behavior, assuming them to be a combination of ingenuity and free will.  We indeed have ingenuity, but only in the direction of growth (and damn the entropic consequences).  We can’t manage preemptive de-growth or even the application of the Precautionary Principle, because as a collective organism humanity doesn't actually have free will (despite what it feels like to us individual humans).  Instead we exhibit an emergent behavior that is entirely oriented towards growth.

I see no purpose in wasting further physical, financial or emotional energy on trying to avoid the inevitable. Given our situation and what I think is its root cause, I generally tell people who see the unfolding crisis and want to make changes in their lives simply to follow their hearts and their personal values.  I'm not exactly advising them to “Eat, drink and be merry”, though.  You might think of it more as, “Eat, drink and be mindful.”

Egyptian oil and bread

Greetings:

Here are a couple of articles about Egypt, and the challenges of running a country which used to  rely on oil exports to fund subsidies oil and bread for the local population, but which now does not has enough oil production to support any  export oil, or find other means to continue the subsidies.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/10110#more


The turmoil in the Middle East shows little sign of ending in the near future, and the potential lack of enough cheap fuel for the population is a warning that the levels of unrest may continue and even get worse. There is, however, some hope for enough local supply in the near term to help with some of the indigenous problems. Consider, for example, Egypt, which has the largest population of the countries in its immediate vicinity, a population that has grown 200% in the last 50 years.


Figure 1. Growth in Egyptian population (Trading Economics)

By last December Egypt was populated by some 83.66 million folk, with little sign of change in the growth rate. Over that time, energy demand has grown, while domestic supplies of fuel have not kept up.The most significant change, perhaps, is in oil consumption, with recent data, as previously noted, showing that the country has now switched to one that must import oil to meet demand.


Figure 2. Egyptian oil statistics (Energy Export Databrowser)

The EIA puts consumption at 811 kbd, set against a production of 555 kbd of petroleum products and, for natural gas, the country produced 2.1 bcf , which can be set against a consumption of 1.8 bcf, but the balance there also is trending downwards as recent levels of discovery and development have failed to match the increase in domestic demand.


Figure 3. Trends in Egyptian natural gas statistics (Energy Export Databrowser)

The developing need for oil imports is made more difficult by the subsidies that have become an accepted part of the Egyptian economy, including not only fuel, but also bread. Fuel subsidies are reported to be at around $17.4 billion and about a fifth of total state spending. Bread subsidies, though a similarly critical part of picture, run only at about 20% of the fuel cost. To help manage costs and encourage domestic production, the Morsi government had cut back on foreign purchases of wheat, but this has now been reversed with the take-over even as the new government works to transition away from the subsidy burden. With the change, foreign governments are now also more willing to provide fuel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will send around a million barrels of oil this month, and Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are promising more aid packages.

This may help with the short–term problem, which has too many political entanglements to allow any solid predictions for longer term help from outside the country, but there are potential sources of increasing domestic supplies from both the Western Desert and the Nile Delta itself.

Egypt has been supplying natural gas to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Israel through the Arab Gas Pipeline, with flow starting in Arish, and the leg to Ashkelon being underwater.


Figure 4. Route of the Arab Gas Pipeline with projected extensions (hydrocarbons technology)

Because of the connection to Israel, the pipeline has been the subject of a number of terrorist attacks (the latest a couple of weeks ago). However, these more often affect the flow of gas to Jordan, rather than to Israel, because of the pipeline locations, with the pipeline being vulnerable in the Sinai where it is flowing south to Taba. This problem has led Jordan to consider importing natural gas from Israel and the recently found offshore natural gas deposits being developed in that country. Flow from the Tamar field started on March 30th tapping into the estimated 8 Tcf therein, while flow from Leviathan is anticipated in 2016.

The possible presence of oil-bearing strata at a lower depth in the Levant Basin has led Noble to plan an offshore well to go down 31,200 ft to a potential field holding perhaps as much as 1.8 billion barrels of oil. However, Noble estimates the chance of success at 25%.

The recent success in finding these resources within the Levant Basin suggests that the potential for other discoveries in future years, with significant possible impacts on the local economies.


Figure 5. Location of some of the discoveries and developments in the Levant Basin (USGS)

The problems limiting future exploration in the region tie in with the conflicts and internal disruption that seems to spread to most of the countries in the above map. But in the more immediate short term, Egypt is reducing exports in order to meet the growth in domestic demand, while importing natural gas, currently as a gift, from Qatar.

In the longer term, as the Israeli fields come on line, it might be possible to change the direction of flow of the Arish-Ashkelon pipeline to carry Israeli gas into Egypt. There are thus potential technical solutions to getting fuel to Egypt to meet their growing need.

However,this does not address the underlying problem of how Egypt is going to be able to pay for that fuel (not to mention the bread). Even with a potential glut in global natural gas prices, without a stable economy Egypt is not going to be able to pay its import bill. This was evident towards the end of the Morsi government, when a lack of cash, or hard credit made it more difficult for the country to assure itself of enough imported oil to meet demand. The continued turmoil will keep away the tourists that could provide the economy with enough funds, while the lack of international recognition of the current regime is currently keeping the IMF from providing any help.

A couple of hundred years ago, deriding the people's need for bread reputedly led one ruling family to the guillotine. In the time since the people have also come to expect that they can also get fuel. Until both demands are satisfied it may be more likely than not that rule in Egypt will remain unstable, with the presence and influence of the competing mobs making rational decisions less achievable and the situation worse. (And they are also blowing up pipelines in Iraq.)

--------------------

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-19/egypt-s-future-crude-oil-import-requirements-for-3-population-scenarios


Egypt’s future crude oil import requirements for 3 population scenarios

by Matt Mushalik, originally published by Crude Oil Peak  | JUL 19, 2013

Egypt sits on a key strategic location between North Africa and the Middle East, where almost 4 mb/d of oil transit through the Sumed pipeline and the Suez canal.

Shipping firms brace for Suez disruption as Egypt turmoil mounts
http://www.voanews.com/content/shipping-firms-brace-for-suez-disruption-as-egypt-turmoil-mounts/1690698.html


http://www.sumed.org/docs/front.aspx

20 years after its oil peak this country is now embroiled in a serious energy crunch. Crude oil production will decline between 3 and 4 % pa while population may grow from 80 million to 100 million by 2030. It is in the world’s interest to make sure that Egypt does not descend into chaos which will impact not only on global oil markets but also on neighbouring countries. This will require to help Egypt with importing crude oil. Here are some simple calculations what kind of quantities would be involved:


In this graph we have plotted

3 population scenarios (LHS scale) for  3 different fertility levels from the UN Population Division

http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Excel-Data/population.htm

actual crude oil production (dark blue line, RHS scale)
crude oil production projection from Jean Laherrere (red line)
2012 production level (horizontal dashed line)

and calculated until 2050

Cumulative domestic production of 4.2 Gb
Crude imports to offset decline and maintain current levels: 3.7 Gb
Additional import requirements of 1.7 Gb for the lowest population scenario in order to keep current consumption levels
Further additional import requirements of 0.7 Gb each for the higher population projections

We translate this into daily oil requirements:

In the next years increasing quantities up to 200 kb/d by 2020 are needed.


This graph shows uneven distribution of population and crude oil production in Egypt and neighbouring countries between Libya in the West and Iran in the East. Egypt with the highest population is more vulnerable than Iran. Note that the total population of this group of countries is 266 million.


Oil production per capita is an important parameter for wealth creation.  The most populous countries Egypt and Iran are at the bottom of the scale. Yemen is the last in the list.

So where will the oil come from to help Egypt? This article gives us a foretaste of what is to come:

Egypt closer to sealing $1 billion Libya oil deal
27/6/2013

CAIRO — Egypt is inching closer to getting a letter of credit to back a $1-billion much-needed oil supply contract with Libya, but the deal still faces a stumbling block in Tripoli, which fears being dragged into Cairo’s economic woes, officials said.

State-owned Egyptian General Petroleum Corp. (EGPC) has asked the National Bank of Egypt for a $1 billion guarantee that will allow it to complete its side of the oil deal with Libya, a bank official said. However, the Libyan government has yet to decide that a letter of credit from that bank is strong enough to overcome the risk of any losses if EGPC is unable to pay for the oil, said a government official.

Failure to agree the deal would be a significant blow for Eqypt because it is seen as vital for easing the country’s fuel shortage. An even bigger oil supply deal with Iraq has faltered due to similar concerns over financial guarantees.

“We have asked EGPC to give us first a guarantee from the finance ministry before we study its request since its loans have exceeded 20% of our capital base, or about 22 billion Egyptian pounds ($3.13 billion),” Mahmoud Montaser, NBE’s corporate banking and syndicated loans senior group head told The Wall Street Journal

“We got the guarantee from the finance ministry and hopefully the letter of credit will be issued soon,” Montaser, who is also a board member of the state bank, said.

Egypt has been facing a diesel shortage since last year, leading to rising food costs, long queues at filling stations and electricity blackouts. Egyptians have also taken to the Internet and streets to protest daily power cuts that they say are getting more frequent and lasting longer.

Neighboring Libya, an OPEC member, had agreed in March to supply Egypt with up to 1 million barrels a month of crude oil, with a generous credit term of up to a year, which would help Egypt with both its fuel shortage and its cash flow problems.

Egypt has so far been unable to provide a guarantee for the payments to Libya, which is concerned about the political and economic turmoil in the country. Even with a letter of credit from the NBE, Libya is still reluctant to give a stamp of approval.

“The National Bank of Egypt. It’s not a triple A bank,” said a Libyan official familiar with the deal. This means that going through with the deal on that basis, “will require…guarantees from the central bank of Libya,” the official said.

The official said the Libyan Foreign Bank–in charge of providing a $1-billion credit line for the country’s National Oil Co.–was concerned that exposure to such large risks in the EGPC deal would impede its own financial flexibility, especially when it comes to issuing letters of credit to other commercial partners.

The Egyptian fuel crisis has compounded broader economic problems in the country, which in 2011 overthrew the government of President Hosni Mubarak in a popular uprising. Egypt’s current government, which is dominated by Islamist party the Muslim Brotherhood, is short of funds and has been negotiating a $4.8-billion loan with the IMF, which analysts and investors say is critical for the country. IMF officials left Cairo in April without agreeing on the terms of the loan.

Iraq has also offered 4 million barrels of oil a month to Egypt, with payment deferred for three months with no interest incurred. However, the country’s oil minister, Abdul Kareem Luaiby, said last month the deal will be completed only if the North Africa country provided a letter of credit “opened in internationally recognized banks prior to the supply, but Egypt has so far [been] unable to open such letter of credit.”

Egypt’s energy import needs are rising because of a drop in its own hydrocarbon production, stemming from a slowdown in exploration over several years of civil unrest. EGPC has also been paying hefty premiums to import fuel because of the weaker Egyptian pound. It is struggling to pay debts of about $5 billion to foreign energy companies, according to officials familiar with the situation.

http://www.worldoil.com/Egypt_closer_to_sealing_1-billion_Libya_oil_deal.html

Conclusion:
Whoever comes to power now faces the same situation. If the problem of fuel shortages in Egypt cannot be resolved by oil imports, violence may impact on other countries and there is the prospect of one the world’s chokepoints in serious danger. In the end there will be no other choice than OPEC supplying as much oil as is needed to keep Egypt going, on credit or at discounted rates. That oil of course will not be available to those who thought they can always buy oil for their pleasure.

Related posts:
4/7/2013 2/3 of Egypt’s oil is gone 20 years after its peak
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-11/2-3-of-egypt-s-oil-is-gone-20-years-after-its-peak

31/1/2011 Egypt – the convergence of oil decline, political and socio-economic crisis
http://crudeoilpeak.info/egypt-the-convergence-of-oil-decline-political-and-socio-economic-crisis

Am I in heaven or am I in Miami?

Greetings

   I just finished watching a great lecture by a fisheries biologist , Jeremy Jackson, given at the US Navel College in Newport RI.  The guy was great!  Of course he's won every medal in the book, published 150 papers and god knows how many books.  But the best part was that he was funny!   He reminded me of Christopher  Walken, kind had his sly smile,and sense of irony.  Of course the topic isn't funny, but the delivery helps. 

    check it out here

One thing he said was very telling.  He said he was rooting for the fish and the oysters, but he recognized that nobody else really cared.  But he could see that maybe tgere was a chance is people realized that by burning more carbon, humans would be hurting themselves, maybe then something would be done about climate change.   Then he showed the maps of sea level rises.  The maps of New York,  New Orleans and Miami.

  Rolling Stone has a new article on Why Miami Is Doomed.      Perhaps after people read it, they'll decide to save the humans, and the fish too!

Raised Beds

Greetings

    Here's a nice step by step approach to raised beds.  This year we are plagued by gophers, so I am wishing that I had  followed his advice and put in wire mesh at the bottom of my beds.

   So it goes.

    For you FYI, the peak prosperity site is beginning to broaden out to include  practical measures to help you simplify and weather the coming storms

 

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http://www.peakprosperity.com/wsidblog/82365/how-install-raised-garden-beds


How to Install Raised Garden Beds

A 1-manpower project
by Adam Taggart
Monday, July 15, 2013, 9:32 PM

If you've been intending to become a gardener but aren't quite sure yet how to get started, this how-to guide is for you.

It chronicles the steps that I successfully followed to put in my own garden this year, in my spare time, all while working hard on the Peak Prosperity business as well as traveling frequently for work. From start to finish, it was a 1-manpower project - showing that if I could get this done on my own given my crazy work schedule, most anyone can do this, too.

Hopefully this guide will give you the direction, inspiration, and confidence that you, too, can be tending your own well-constructed garden beds soon.

Plan Your Work

Site Selection

To thrive, garden plants need sun, water, and good soil. Taking the (short) time to identify a site that offers the best combination of all three will dramatically increase your odds of successfully growing food.

During the prime growing months (May-Sept in the Northern Hemisphere), inspect your property for sites that offer the most sun exposure throughout the day. From those options, look then at the sites with the best drainage.

Worry less about the soil conditions at first, because you can control that easier than the prior two variables by using raised garden beds. But by all means, if you have sites of equal sun/drainage rating but different soil quality, pick with the one with the better soil (most vegetables like a sandy loam consistency).

If you have more than 0.25 acre of land on your property, then another factor to consider is proximity. You'll be making a lot of trips to your garden over time, so picking a convenient spot relative to your house (your kitchen and tool storage area, in particular) will result in reduced schlepping, which your future self will be awfully appreciative of.

In my case, I selected a spot tucked into the corner of my yard nearest the kitchen door and tool shed. It's not the sunniest section of the property, but it still gets about 80% of the day's sunlight while being easy to access. Months later, I remain very happy that I made this trade-off.

Here's a picture of what the plot looked like before I started work on it:

Make Your Measurements

Measure twice, cut once, the wise carpenter advises. This applies just as well to gardeners.

Once you've determined where your garden is going to go, then it's time to start visualizing the specifics about what it's going to look like.

If you're going to be taking this on as a one-manpower job, like I did, it's better to start small. You can always expand upon your initial plot in future years.

In my case, the spot I selected provided enough space for a 22' x 17' garden footprint. In my opinion, that's plenty of room for a first-time gardener to handle.

With your footprint perimeter in mind, start brainstorming how to best use that space. How many beds can it accommodate? Do you want a few large beds, or many small ones? What do you want to grow? Where in the garden do you want to grow them?

Get some paper. Or use a whiteboard. Diagram it out.

Once you have something visualized, show it to other gardeners. Bring it down to your local nursery. Ask experienced folks for their opinion. You're sure to get some good feedback that will improve your plans.

Here's the rough sketch I made for my garden:

With your visual plans now in hand, head out to your plot with measuring tape, a ball of twine, and a handful of stakes. Begin by marking the perimeter of your garden, then progress inwards to mark exactly where the raised beds (and any other physical components) will be.

Below is a photo of where I decided two of my 6'x4' beds would go:

When you've outlined your garden, take a walk around it. Is there enough clearance? Squat down between the beds. Do you have enough room to maneuver comfortably?  Will you be able to reach across them from all angles? If not, move the stakes around until you're content with the results. This is by far the best time to make design changes. (It's a heck of a lot easier to move twine around than a box filled with 30 cubic feet of dirt!)

If you're going to be putting in an irrigation system, now is the time to give thought to where the hoses will run. Map out how the main hose will bring water from your main spigot to the garden, as well as where the daughter hoses will run to each raised bed.

For a garden this size, you don't need an irrigation system – you'll be able to water by hand with a standard garden hose, if that's your choice. But I highly recommend laying the piping for one, if you can, when you initially build out your garden. It's a lot easier to activate an installed system than it is to dig through a mature garden later to put one in.

Work Your Plan

Constructing Raised Beds

Now that you know where your raised beds will go, it's time to build them. Fortunately, this requires only the most basic of skills. So you carpentry novices (like me) can handle this just fine.

Get yourself enough 2"x6" boards to build the beds you'll need. Cut the wood to the length you'll need for each side of your bed frames, depending on how big you want your beds to be. I went with 4'x6' dimensions; most people prefer 4'x8'.

I highly recommend building double-height sides. That essentially means building two box frames and placing one on top of the other. In my first gardening foray a few years back, I only used single-height sides and found myself constantly weeding. With double-height sides this year, I've barely had to weed at all.

Use 1"x"1" stakes in the corners to add stability to your double-sided frames.

After your frames are built, you should cover the bottom with mesh wire to prevent burrowing rodents from attacking your plants from below. Out where I live, this is an absolute must; the gophers here are so bad that they drove away the initial Russian settlers back in the 1800s (and those Russians had a pretty high tolerance for hardship!).

I recommend using finer wire mesh (i.e., smaller holes) than standard chicken wire. The smaller the holes, the smaller the odds are that a critter can squeeze through them. Simply use a staple gun to attach the mesh to the frame – and voila! Your raised bed is ready for installation.

Installing Your Raised Beds

Carry your raised beds over to your garden site. (While I was able to do this myself, you'll find an extra pair of arms is very welcome for this quick task).

Before you lay the beds within the twine outlines you measured out earlier, remove the ground vegetation within the footprint first. A <hoe or the flat end of a pick work well for this (I used the latter):

With the vegetation gone, work with your shovel, etc., to make the ground within the footprint is as flat and level as possible – on both the length and width axes. Use a carpenters level (the ruler with the little air bubble within it) to help you with this, if you have one. If your garden is on a slope, one wall of the rectangular clearing you're making will likely be higher than the other. That's okay.

Now that you've stripped the ground vegetation and leveled the base, place your bed into the footprint you've created (again, a few minutes' assistance from a friend would really help here). Make sure it fits snugly within the footprint in the alignment you want, and use your pick or hoe to trim the side banks if need be to make the fit perfect. Confirm (with your carpenters level, if you have it) that the sides of the bed frame are indeed level. You may need to lift the frame up to add or remove dirt from underneath it to correct the pitch.

A successfully installed bed should look something like this:

Setting Up Drip Irrigation

As mentioned earlier, if you can lay in an irrigation system now, you'll save yourself a lot of time and heartache compared to installing one in the future.

For detailed guidance on how to do the installation, read the very good WSID post Installing a Drip Irrigation System. I must admit, I was a little daunted before tackling this task, as I'd never worked much before with water systems. The basics are so simple, though, that in almost no time I felt like an expert.

The key things to figure out at this time are

How water will get from your spigot to the garden
How water will get from the garden entry point to each of the beds (and anywhere else you may want it to go)
How water will flow within each of your beds

Here's a shot of how I laid things out for my garden:

They're not the best photos, but you'll see how I was laying down the hoses that would bring water to the beds, as well as a main hose for each bed, from which smaller drip lines will eventually extend (pictures of the finished system are further down in this article).

You'll find that working with the components of a drip irrigation system is sort of like working with Tinker Toys. You build it, decide you want to make some changes, quickly disassemble parts of it, and rebuild the way you want. Really, anyone can do it.

Filling Your Beds

Okay, now we get to start talking about dirt.

A principal benefit of raised beds is that they allow you to optimize your soil conditions. What makes great soil is a topic that requires a full What Should I Do? article all on its own. But the easy guidance I can provide here is just to head off to your local nursery, tell them what plants you want to grow, and let them guide you to the best soil options.

In my case, it was an artisan mix produced by a local soil and mulch producer. (I didn't really realize this kind of company existed, beforehand).

Be warned: Raised beds require a surprising amount of soil! My four 4'x6' beds needed 2 cubic yards of dirt. That may not sound like much, but it is.

I was able to save a TON on the cost of the soil by bagging it myself. It's a good thing for my wallet that I made that decision before realizing how much work it would be. On my first trip for soil, I was astounded by how much dirt I was going to have to bag when the front-end loader dumped its full bucket-load at my feet. But that astonishment quickly turned to disbelief when it returned to dump a second load.

For perspective, here's what the back of my Toyota Highlander looked like when I arrived home (and yes, the middle section and passenger seat were piled to the ceiling as well):

And that was just for 1 cubic yard...

Anyways, once you've got your soil home, start filling up your raised beds with it. One important thing to know is that your soil will settle over time, so add more than it looks like you need. Mound the excess dirt in the center of the beds.

Before planting anything, you'll want to wait 2 weeks for the soil level within the bed to lower as it settles. You can then spread the mound out evenly across the bed to raise the dirt line back up.

Congratulations, your raised beds are ready to go!

Fencing In Your Garden

After all this work, you definitely want to protect your investment.

Putting in a fence is highly recommended if you live in a location where deer, rabbits, chickens, dogs, or other garden menaces are a factor.

Again, if that sounds a little daunting, don't worry. The mechanics here are extremely simple.

Corner Posts

Your fence needs the greatest stability at its four corners, so this is where your effort will be most concentrated.

First, obtain your corner posts. For my garden, I went with four 8-foot redwood 4"x4"s, which I bought at the hardware store.

The twine you previously laid down for your garden borders should make it easy to see where the corners are. At each corner, dig a hole at least 12" deep; enough to hold the 4"x4" vertically upright with stability. If you have one, a post hole digger makes this job much easier and more efficient. You can usually pick up a used one for $10 or less at a good flea market or garage sale. (I did).

If your garden is on a slant, dig the holes on the higher end deeper – so that the tops of all of your corner posts are at the same elevation. Once they are, you're ready for the concrete.

You can buy quick-setting fence post concrete for a few dollars a sack at your local hardware store. It usually is a just-add-water mix and is simple to prepare -- just be ready to use it quickly, as it begins hardening fast.

But there's one last thing you should do before mixing your concrete: Near the top of each fence post, on two adjacent sides, hammer a nail halfway in on each side. From each nail, hang several feet of string with a weight tied to the end (like a large washer). These weighted strings will be your plumb lines, which you will use to ensure that the post is in perfect vertical alignment. If the plumb lines are touching the post or are angled away, gently move the top of the post until they both hang parallel to the post.

Okay, back to the concrete. Add your water and stir to prepare. Starting at one corner, remove the post, pour some concrete into the bottom of the hole, put the post back in, and then fill up the remaining space around the pole with concrete. Use your plumb lines to ensure that the pole is perfectly vertical. Stand there for several minutes while the concrete sets – you can leave once the pole doesn't shift at all when you let go of it.

Repeat for the other 3 corners.

The next step is to put up your fence wire between the poles. Before doing so, though, it's wise to create a trench several inches deep along the line where the wire will run, so your fence wire will ultimately extended into the ground to discourage hungry critters from digging under it. A miners pick, again, proves useful here.

With the trench completed, attach one end of your fence wire to a post with U-nails, which hammer into the wood pretty easily (this should be done at least one day after pouring the concrete, to make sure that the post is solidly fixed in place). Run the fence wire along the trench over to the next pole. Pull the wire as taut as possible (a friend's assistance comes in handy here) and affix to the new pole with U-nails, as before.

You probably will not be able to remove 100% of the slack in your fence wire line no matter how hard you tried. Not to worry. You'll shore up any slack with T-Posts.

Most hardware stores carry these, but you can usually find older ones on Craigslist that will fill the bill just fine. Place them at regular intervals (I used 2 per side in my 22'x17' garden), hammering them in to the ground by 12" or so. A post driver is perfect for driving them deep, if you have access to one.

Then tie the fence wire to the T-posts at several points using baling wire. Once done, your fence wall should be pretty straight and well-supported.

Here are some pictures of the fencing going up around my garden. Note that the further the fence extended, the more the chickens wanted to be inside the area I was enclosing to keep them out of!

The last photo is one of my daughter, Charlotte, and her chicken, Fuzzy. Poor Fuzzy was taken out for lunch by a coyote soon after, where she was the main dish :(

At this point, your garden beds should be "boxed in" by your fence. Just be sure you're on the outside!

Determine where you want the main door to your garden to be, and cut a temporary (or not) access entrance there in your fence wire. This worked so well for me that it's still the entrance I use now that my garden is finished: I just went on to create a "door" from additional fence wire, using carabiners as "hinges." Simple, yet very utilitarian.

Congratulations – your garden is now securely fenced! At this point, you're pretty much ready to start growing food.

I know, it seems like a lot of work to have done before a single seed has been planted. That's because farming, even backyard gardening, requires real effort! But it's some of the most rewarding effort you'll ever put in. When your first harvest arrives, the vegetables will taste incredibly wonderful, in no small part because you'll appreciate what it took to grow them.

Also, remember that this sweat work you're doing is an up-front investment. You'll be able to use these beds for years and years. Your future self will be very grateful for the effort your current self is putting in now.

Finishing Touches

If you planned for them, now is the time to put in any special features you want in your garden. For example, in mine, I installed:

a potato tower
a rain gutter for growing above-ground strawberries
a skinny 1'x15' raised bed for sunflowers and corn
5 Concord grape vines

You may want to try some of these, too, or you may have other ideas to explore. Be creative and inventive. My only advice is to keep it manageable. Remember that your main time and attention will be spent on the raised beds, so don't add too many distractions.

One other finishing touch I definitely recommend is to remove the rest of the ground vegetation between the beds in your garden. You don't want weeds and unwanted seeds finding their way into your beautiful beds.

Here's how my garden looked at this stage. Note the 4 drip lines extending down each bed.

Last, you should strongly consider laying mulch between your beds now that you've removed the ground cover. If you don't, you'll find that the weeds and grass grows back in faster than your vegetables. A good 3" layer of mulch made of weed-suppressing woods (your nursery can help you pick out the best options) will save you a lot of weeding, plus it makes the garden look substantially better, aesthetically. I was able to purchase all the mulch I needed for under $17 – an investment I'm so glad to have made.

The Payoff

With your garden beds in place, you're now able to grow a multitude of vegetables, herbs, and flowers throughout the year. Plus, you can help nurture local pollinators, make your property more visually pleasing, and provide yourself with healthy outdoor activity (exercise, emotionally-centering contemplative time, Vitamin D –the list is long...)

In my garden alone this year, I'm growing:

strawberries (2 varieties)
potatoes (5 varieties)
tomatoes (3 varieties)
onions (2 varieties)
peppers (4 varieties)
carrots (2 varieties)
cucumbers
bush beans
butternut squash
rainbow chard
watermelon
broccoli
kale
basil
cantaloupe melon
arugula
lettuce (5 varieties)
corn (3 varieties)
pumpkin
sunflowers
Concord grapes

And I'm certain a more creative gardener could squeeze even more diversity into this space.

Now in full bloom, the garden is looking great:

And I must admit, I experience no small satisfaction every time I look at it, knowing that this abundance came from my vision and sweat (though I also feel very humbled, too, knowing that this is a pretty small garden compared to those managed by many of Peak Prosperity's more seasoned gardeners!)

Hopefully this article has provided you with the clarity, confidence, and inspiration to do the same. If you decide to undertake putting in a garden, you won't regret it. But watch out – you might become more addicted than you intended!

Know that, at any time, you can tap the expertise of the hundreds of gardening enthusiasts inPeakProsperity.com's Agriculture & Permaculture Group when you're in need of guidance or support. It's a fantastically valuable resource, having that much experience at your fingertips, and it's completely free.

And if you do create your own raised bed garden, be sure to share photos of it in the Comments section below.

Good luck!

Justin Bieber pees in bucket

Greetings

      Yes, that little  scamp couldn't wait in line for the men's room.  And its pissing people off, including the folk in the custodian's union. .  

     Speaking of pissing people off, have you seen James Hansen's latest study?

The world is currently on course to exploit all its remaining fossil fuel resources, a prospect that would produce a "different, practically uninhabitable planet" by triggering a "low-end runaway greenhouse effect." This is the conclusion of a new scientific paper by Prof James Hansen, the former head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the world's best known climate scientist.

The paper due to be published later this month by Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A) focuses less on modelling than on empirical data about correlations between temperature, sea level and CO2 going back up to 66 million years.

Given that efforts to exploit available fossil fuels continue to accelerate, the paper's principal finding - that "conceivable levels of human-made climate forcing could yield the low-end runaway greenhouse effect" based on inducing "out-of-control amplifying feedbacks such as ice sheet disintegration and melting of methane hydrates" - is deeply worrying.

The paper projects that global average temperatures under such a scenario could eventually reach as high as between 16C and 25C over a number of centuries. Such temperatures "would eliminate grain production in almost all agricultural regions in the world", "diminish the stratospheric ozone layer", and "make much of the planet uninhabitable by humans."

Here is where someone could make a remark, which would be in poor tatse, about the  peeing in , and kicking of , buckets. But I will refrain.  

What is required , of course is to turn off the coal plants, but, unfortuantely we seem to be headed the other way.  Now that the price of nat gas has begun to rise, we see instead, more coal burning here in the US. see e.g.


Despite Dangers, U.S. Increases Dependence on Coal for Electricity

Conservatives opposed to President Barack Obama’s plan to have the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulate carbon emissions for power plants because the market for fossil fuels is already encouraging a switch from coal to natural gas will have to find a new argument, according to a recent report from theDepartment of Energy.



The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported last week that U.S. power plants in the past year have actually increased their use of coal while decreasing their use of natural gas, reversing a recent trend from gas to coal. Specifically, coal’s share of domestic power generation in the first quarter of 2013 averaged 39.5%, up 4.1% from 35.4% last year. The share for natural gas dropped 3.7%, from 29.5% to 25.8%. The agency also predicts that coal use will continue to grow, with 40.1% of electricity generated by coal through 2014, while natural gas use will fall to 27.3%.



Given the fact that power plants are the largest source of greenhouse gases, one unavoidable result of the shift is more greenhouse gas emissions. EIA projects that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels will grow by 2.4% this year and by 0.6% in 2014, after falling about 3.9% in 2012. Obama had ordered EPA to develop rules by 2014 to cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants even before issuance of the EIA report.



The reason for the shift, according to EIA, is simply that the price of gas rose while that of coal dropped. Many utility companies have technology allowing them to switch between coal and natural gas, and do so depending on which option is cheaper.



And thus exposing a key problem with relying on market activity to achieve social goals: in setting prices markets account only for those costs that are borne individually, but entirely ignore costs that are borne socially. In the case of electric utilities, the price of coal accounts for the costs associated with its extraction, processing and transportation, but excludes the cost of global warming it causes.



As James Bradbury of the World Resources Institute, told The Los Angeles Times, “Markets on their own may go in your direction for a period of time, but to ensure that we get reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in a significant, sustained way, you’re going to need government intervention.”

-Matt Bewig


http://peakoil.com/publicpolicy/despite-dangers-u-s-increases-dependence-on-coal-for-electricity

Post Peak Government

Greetings

              Crashwatcher (below)  takes a look at life after peak oil:  He wonders whether those of us who assume a "World Made By Hand" future may be a bit naive.  He suggest that the "powers that Be" are already setting up the framework for the next stage.  The next "9/11" moment comes, they'll be ready to implement it.  He calls this the "Turn key Tyranny" 

Often, those of us aware of peak oil and energyconsider, perhaps wishfully, the decent side of oil production curve as ushering in a return to an energy poorer, but simpler, more localized lifestyle, analogous to what existed in 18^th or 19^th century. 

Jim Kunstler’s  the World Made By Hand series of novels, the Archdruid’s green wizard project or the transition town movement are some examples that readily come to my mind. 

In the face of ongoing slow energy decent, however, we have continuing revelations about a global surveillance system that Snowden’s interview and document releases have shone a latest fresh light on.  

Dave Pollard   (below)  takes a look at Orlov's  5 Stages of Collapse.    He admits that his earlier views on the transition to a more sustainable society were somewhat naive:  

My hope was always that as the first three Stages of collapse played out, government would be mostly a passive and inept player, a victim rather than an actor. But if the ruling group installs worldwide the kinds of corporatist totalitarian regimes I describe above, I fear they may strenuously act to suppress or prevent many or all of the coping/resilience mechanisms we hope to employ (shown in the right-hand column of the table above) to reduce the suffering of collapse and start to transition to a much more modest post-civilization society. Specifically, they will work to obfuscate what is really happening in the world, thwart attempts to create self-sufficient local communities (free of the ruling group’s authority), and prevent us from creating a sustainable sharing economy, growing and gifting healthy, organic local food, living off-grid, living in “non-standard” housing, looking after our own health and education, and weaning ourselves off “employment”, money and socially- and ecologically-destructive goods. What we see as taking responsibility for our own well-being in the face of cascading crises, the ruling group will inevitably see as threatening all the levers of control of wealth and power they rely on keeping. 

And that the future will be somewhat more challenging

"So while we’re struggling to cope with a plethora of economic, energy and ecological crises — market and currency collapses, loss of our life’s savings, massive unemployment, deflation and hyperinflation, interest rate spikes and credit cutoffs, underwater mortgages, oil and water shortages and rationing, energy and food price spikes, blackouts and brownouts, pandemic diseases, droughts, famines, floods, fires, storms, massive influxes of refugees, collapsing bridges and other infrastructure failures, and the loss of essential services — we’re also going to be struggling against a ruling group that is using all the wealth and power at their disposal to prevent us from taking sensible, local, independent, personal and community-based steps to reduce the suffering all these crises will create. They will try with all their might to make independence from the crumbling systems they oversee, illegal, even seditious. While we’re studying up on coping and resilience, we’d better study up on how to deal with this additional challenge too." 

Turnkey Tyranny and Energy Decent

"The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in the media all of these disclosures. They'll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society. But they won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests."

"And the months ahead, the years ahead it's only going to get worse until eventually there will be a time where policies will change because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy. Even our agreements with other sovereign governments, we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather then a stipulation of law. And because of that a new leader will be elected, they'll find the switch, say that 'Because of the crisis, because of the dangers we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power.' And there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny."

Edward Snowden, theguardian interview video of Edward Snowden; 2013/jun/09and Interview Transcript

Often, those of us aware of peak oil and energyconsider, perhaps wishfully, the decent side of oil production curve as ushering in a return to an energy poorer, but simpler, more localized lifestyle, analogous to what existed in 18^th or 19^th century. 

Jim Kunstler’s  the World Made By Hand series of novels, the Archdruid’s green wizard project or the transition town movement are some examples that readily come to my mind. 

In the face of ongoing slow energy decent, however, we have continuing revelations about a global surveillance system that Snowden’s interview and document releases have shone a latest fresh light on.  

The Present State of the Police State

Perhaps you have been living on the dark-side of the moon, chained to a desk, or only watching mainstream media news, and so you have no idea of what I am talking about?  

Here’s an extended summary of some recommenced articles or podcasts showing the length and breath of the present global surveillance system. 

A good place to start is that June 9 2013 Guardian’s interview of Snowden, the Booz Allen Hamilton employee working as a contractor at an NSA installation in Hawaii, and, already referenced above:

NSA and intelligence community in general is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can by any means possible. It believes, on the grounds of sort of a self-certification, that they serve the national interest. Originally we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas.

Now increasingly we see that it's happening domestically and to do that they, the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that's the easiest, most efficient, and most valuable way to achieve these ends. So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting you're communications to do so."

Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But I sitting at my desk certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a Federal judge to even the President if I had a personal e-mail.

Also there is this June 7, 2013 Democracy Now interview of the Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, who with the aid of Laura Poitras, interviewed Edwards in Hong Kong:

There are top-secret NSA documents that very excitingly describe—excitedly describe, boast about even, how they have created this new program called the PRISM program that actually has been in existence since 2007, that enables them direct access into the servers of all of the major Internet companies which people around the world, hundreds of millions, use to communicate with one another. You mentioned all of those—all those names. And what makes it so extraordinary is that in 2008 the Congress enacted a new law that essentially said that except for conversations involving American citizens talking to one another on U.S. soil, the NSA no longer needs a warrant to grab, eavesdrop on, intercept whatever communications they want.

Those NSA documents released by Snowden correspond to a 41-page training presentation for senior intelligence analysts for the NSA or their contractors.  What was actually released by the Guardian and Washington Post on June 6 2013 were 4 of those 41 pages.  The released pages broadly outline how NSA’s (and apparently Britain’s GCHQ and other partners) access to the central servers of Internet companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc... enables, for the past several years, NSA’s access emails, documents, audio and video chats, photographs, documents and connection logs (i.e., metadata).   On June 29 2013, the Post released a few more slides, with redactions and annotations added, to protect the guilty, and to ease the public’s mind that total surveillance and the permanent storage of all of your personal communications isn’t that bad after all.

Lest you think that the surveillance state is somehow only limited to the USA’s traditional enemies, we have Snowden’s interview in the South China Morning Post revealing that the NSA’s tapping of communications to and from Hong Kong and mainland China for many year. 

And, we now also have this recent series of Spiegel articles from Laura Poitras et al., reporting on further information provided by Snowden:

Snowden's NSA documents contain more than one or two scandals. They are a kind of digital snapshot of the world's most powerful intelligence agency's work over a period of around a decade. SPIEGEL has seen and reviewed a series of documents from the archive.

The documents prove that Germany played a central role in the NSA's global surveillance network -- and how the Germans have also become targets of US attacks. Each month, the US intelligence service saves data from around half a billion communications connections from Germany.

No one is safe from this mass spying -- at least almost no one. Only one handpicked group of nations is excluded -- countries that the NSA has defined as close friends, or "2nd party," as one internal document indicates. They include theUK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. A document classified as "top secret" states that, "The NSA does NOT target its 2nd party partners, nor request that 2nd parties do anything that is inherently illegal for NSA to do."

from How the NSA Targets Germany and Europe

You should not be sanguine if your among the so-called handpicked excluded groups of UK,Australia, Canada and New Zealand. We already know that GCHQ is part of PRISM and theCanada’s CSEC is similarly conducting massive surveillance of its citizens.  I am sure that you find the analogous agencies in Australia and NZ. 

In fact, the US, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ, the five countries that are signatories to an agreement to share surveillance communications data, the so-called ECHELON system.  ECHELON was ostensibly intended to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Unionand its Eastern Bloc in the 1960s, but its scope has expanded far beyond that now.

As pointed out in the Spiegel articles, these agencies and others now share their gathered information to create a global matrix of “boundless surveillance:”

What is most important about the documents is that they reveal the possibility of the absolute surveillance of a country's people and foreign citizens without any kind of effective controls or supervision. Among the intelligence agencies in the Western world, there appears to be a division of duties and at times extensive cooperation. And it appears that the principle that foreign intelligence agencies do not monitor the citizens of their own country, or that they only do so on the basis of individual court decisions, is obsolete in this world of globalized communication and surveillance.Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency can spy on anyone but British nationals, the NSA can conduct surveillance on anyone but Americans, and Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency can spy on anyone but Germans. That's how a matrix is created of boundless surveillance in which each partner aids in a division of roles.

Lest you think that “boundless surveillance” only refers to the collection of metadata, let’s go to this June 17 2013 interview of Russ Tice at Boiling Frogs (from 8:00 to 11:00 minutes):

No one in the main stream press wants to ask this question: is the NSA collecting the content of phone calls and emails and Skype sessions and all these other communications, and storing them in-mass?   

And I saw a little over a month ago; I was watching CNN and there was, as a matter of fact, a fellow Marylander gal, Erin Burnet who was on and she had an FBI guy on there.  Tim Clemente I think his name was. And he came out and said that the FBI has the ability to go back in time and look at the content of communications. And this via an intelligence agency that deals with that deals with national security. 

Well, you know, that had my red flag go up, because back in the day when I talked with Keith Olbermann NSA did not have that capability, not because they didn’t want it, but because they didn’t have the processing capability and literally they didn’t have the electrons, the power, the infrastructure at Fort Meade to run that sort of thing. And they didn’t have the storage capability to store all that information. Imagine this conversation that we re having now and all the other conversations around domestically in this country.  That is a lot talking going on. So that is why they were being judicious about that and going after, back then, the metadata.  And that is what we know from Snowden’s initial release. 

So I contacted...this is over a month ago, I contacted one of my main sources at NSA, and we had a meeting .... He wasn’t quite sure if it was everything then, so we had to, he had to, do some investigating, .... I just got the confirmation this past Saturday, that yes, it is everything.

NSA is copying every domestic communication in this country, word-for-word content, in every phone conversation, like the one we are having now. Every email, everything.  They are collecting everything in bulk, and they are putting it in data bases. 

And, ultimately in that facility out there in Utah is already online.  And they haven’t even said that.  But they are putting stuff there now, even though they are supposedly not going to open that thing up until later on this fall.  That thing is sort of like the Death Star, in Star Wars.  They said it was only half-way done, or whatever, but it had the capability to blow up some other Alderaan or something. But that Death Star in Utah is already starting to function to store every communication in this country—word-for-word content.

Among other security positions, Tice was a former NSA intelligence analyst, who in 2005-06 blew the whistle on unlawful and unconstitutional wiretaps on American citizens and further raised public awareness of domestic spying via the ECHELON system.

By the way, you can find a transcript of that CNN interview of Clemente here, where Clemente said:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

Could it be that the FBI would not want to present this in court because they know it’s obtained illegally?

Lest you think that the NSA and its counter-parts in other countries are working alone, consider this, also from Poitras’s Spiegel article:

According to the documents seen by SPIEGEL, a particularly valuable partner is a company which is active in the US and has access to information that crisscrossesAmerica. At the same time, this company, by virtue of its contacts, offers "unique access to other telecoms and (Internet service providers)." The company is "aggressively involved in shaping traffic to run signals of interest past our monitors," according to a secret NSA document. The cooperation has existed since 1985, the documents say.

Apparently, it's not an isolated case, either. A further document clearly demonstrates the compliance of a number of different companies. There are "alliances with over 80 major global corporations supporting both missions," according to a paper that is marked top secret. In NSA jargon, "both missions" refers to defending networks in the US, on the one hand, and monitoring networks abroad, on the other. The companies involved include telecommunications firms, producers of network infrastructure, software companies and security firms.

The Official Response

Here’s a few more quotes from that Democracy Now interview of Greenwald, illustrating the USgovernment official’s responses to these leaks:

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, on Thursday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein told reporters in the Senate gallery that the government’s top-secret court order to obtain phone records on millions of Americans is, quote, "lawful."

....

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, the fact that something is lawful doesn’t mean that it isn’t dangerous or tyrannical or wrong. You can enact laws that endorse tyrannical behavior. And there’s no question, if you look at what the government has done, from the PATRIOT Act, the Protect America Act, the Military Commissions Act and the FISA Amendments Act, that’s exactly what the war on terror has been about.

But I would just defer to two senators who are her colleagues, who are named Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. They have—are good Democrats. They have spent two years now running around trying to get people to listen to them as they’ve been saying, "Look, what the Obama administration is doing in interpreting the PATRIOT Act is so radical and so distorted and warped that Americans will be stunned to learn" — that’s their words — "what is being done in the name of these legal theories, these secret legal theories, in terms of the powers the Obama administration has claimed for itself in how it can spy on Americans."

When the PATRIOT Act was enacted—and you can go back and look at the debates, as I’ve done this week—nobody thought, even opponents of the PATRIOT Act, that it would ever be used to enable the government to gather up everybody’s telephone records and communication records without regard to whether they’ve done anything wrong.

.....

AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, Glenn, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said he stood by what he told Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregonin March, when he said that the National Security Agency does "not wittingly" collect data on millions of Americans. Let’s go to that exchange.

....

GLENN GREENWALD: OK. So, we know that to be a lie, not a misleading statement, not something that was sort of parsed in a way that really was a little bit deceitful, but an outright lie. They collect—they collect data and records about the communications activities and other behavioral activities of millions of Americans all the time. That’s what that program is that we exposed on Wednesday. They go to the FISA court every three months, and they get an order compelling telephone companies to turn over the records, that he just denied they collect, with regard to the conversations of every single American who uses these companies to communicate with one another. The same is true for what they’re doing on the Internet with the PRISM program. The same is true for what the NSA does in all sorts of ways.

And let’s not forget this tidbit from the President:

BARACK OBAMA:  So point number one: if you’re a U.S. person then NSA is notlistening to your phone calls and it’s not targeting your e-mails unless it’s getting an individualized court order.  That’s the existing rule.

There are two programs that were revealed by Mr. Snowden -- allegedly, since there’s a criminal investigation taking place and that caused all the ruckus.  Program number one called the 2015 program.  What that does is it gets data from the service providers -- like a Verizon -- in bulk.  And basically you have call pairs.  You have my telephone number connecting with your telephone number.  There are no names, there’s no content in that database.  All it is, is the number pairs, when those calls took place, how long they took place.  So that database is sitting there.

Charlie Rose interview June 17, 2013

Obama is a sharp lawyer and politician, so you need to parse these statements very carefully and keep in might that this interview was shortly after Snowden’s initial disclosers which refer to the collection of metadata, and, about the same time as Russ Tice’s disclosure that all content is being recorded.  It is probably true that the NSA is not “listening in” on all phone calls or reading emails, in real time as they occur, without a court order—besides that would be the job of the FBI.  And, it is probably also true that your emails are specifically “targeted.” 

Rather, the NSA and its counterparts are recording all communications of everyone, metadata and content, for later analysis.  The Obama might be able to argue that therefore you are not being targeted.   But I would argue that this means that everyone is targeted.  And, the President Obama’s statement that there no names or content in any of the NSA’s databases is highly likely to be false.

Here’s some more of the US government’s response:  

"In response to your question about access to the guardian.co.uk website, the army is filtering some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks," said Gordon Van Vleet, a Netcom public affairs officer.

"The Department of Defense routinely takes preventative 'network hygiene' measures to mitigate unauthorized disclosures of classified information onto DoD unclassified networks."

The army stressed its actions were automatic and would not affect computers outside military facilities.

"The department does not determine what sites its personnel can choose to visit while on a DoD system, but instead relies on automated filters that restrict access based on content concerns or malware threats," said Van Vleet. "The DoD is also not going to block websites from the American public in general, and to do so would violate our highest-held principle of upholding and defending the constitution and respecting civil liberties and privacy."

Similar measures were taken by the army after the Guardian and other newspapers published leaked State Department cables obtained via WikiLeaks.

US army blocks access to Guardian website to preserve 'network hygiene'

“This is a theater-wide block,” reads a page that loads when troops in Afghanistanusing the Defense Department’s non-classified internet protocol (NIPR) network attempt to access the Guardian online.

“There are many reasons why this site might be blocked. It may be blocked for your protection, the protection of DoD assets or blocked based on Usfor-A [US forces command-Afghanistan] information systems security policy enclosure 18, Centcom regulation 25-206, joint ethics regulation (JER) 5500.7 or DAA directives,” the routed site reads.

Usfor-A is the US component to the Nato command in Afghanistan known as Isaf. It is unclear if the block on the Guardian’s website applies to non-American personnel in Afghanistan, but if they use the DoD’s networks to get online, non-American service members would not be able to access the Guardian website either.

US military blocks entire Guardian website for troops stationed abroad

I don’t find it very comforting that the decision to block the Guardian websites is being done by a computer automated filter instead of a human being.  I find it interesting that the Washington Post is apparently not blocked—perhaps because its content is already controlled by the DoD it real time? And, I wonder if Spiegel will get automatically blocked as well, in view of the series of articles by Laura Poitras et al., published a few days ago.  If they don’t perhaps because it was already vetted before release?

The present threat

The NSA and it foreign counterparts have created a communication time machine that will allow them to go back to trace and listen in conversations that occurred in the past.

The opportunities for present abuse are enormous. 

To give you some idea of what this could involve, here’s a Corbett Report interview of Sibel Edmonds discussing how in the past the FBI illegally acquires and stored permanently private information and uses this to gain leverage over politicians and judges: 

The people promoted in the White House or presented as viable candidates are hand selected by the establishment ... Republican and Democrats ... no matter how you pick its going to be our guy. That is the reality to the US’s election and presidency today and the same is true with the lower level House and Senate representatives. 

(from 20:00-21:00)

you use this information, when the time comes to protect the FBI, to protect the Justice Department. and protect whoever is the President.  The FBI servers the President and the President serves the establishment.  So basically you are protecting the establishment by using this information as blackmail method on these elected officials. 

(from 27:00-28:00)

the judges that were squeaky clean, the judge candidates, they were discarded immediately, and the ones, the federal court judge candidates, that had the highest number of irregularities whether there sexual orientation, sexual life or who they are calling if they cheated on their tax, if they hired a baby sitter who was not a US citizen, and illegal immigrant etc... Those were the ones that were selected as the most viable candidates.

(from 43:00-44:00)

I think that it is obvious that the NSA’s “communication time machine” can be used to similarly target virtually anyone in the future.  The communication history of politicians, judges, corporate executives, public officials, anyone, could be pulled up and reviewed to find something embarrassing that they might want to hide, and then, hold this information above them, to protect the establishment: the president the NSA, the FBI, CIA, DHS etc....  And, of course, this applies not only to individuals and establishment in the USA, but anyone, anywhere.    Anyone with access to this kind of information in their country can become a tyrant—a turn-key tyrant, as Snowden says.

The future threat

I don’t think that the NSA is listening in on all global communications in real time at present. 

Not because they don’t want to, but because they simply don’t have the resources to do so.  It’s the same resource problem that Tice discussed and why the NSA would initially focus on metadata.

At present, at some point, it may still take a human being to watch. listen and read the previously recorded communications, and use this to build a profile for an individual and for interactions between groups of individuals, that is, a social network profile, and then interpret the resulting profiles as triggering a national threat, or, not.   Well maybe just a threat to the establishment is sufficient to put you on a “person of interest” list.

Global spying programs such as Stellar Wind, are designed to take this profile building and analysis out of hand and minds of humans and automate in this using algorithms that can be programmed into the processors of NSA’s computers.  In a 2012 MIT talk, NSA whistleblower Willam Binney, discusses some of the details of such automated systems here, or, you can listen to it here. Binney’s efforts to bring the illegalities of these programs to the attention to the government, and the personal consequences to him, starts at about 55 min in this 29c3 talk.

When these programs are in place the NSA will have near-real time dynamic content reading, analysis and profiling of all global communications.   As Binney points out in his talks a computer program may target you as a “threat,” without any human intervention.

We are well on our way.

Energy decent to the recue?

I have long thought that energy decent will cause, or at least be concurrent, with economic decline, and, that economic decline will result is a great deal of political discord.  I see the protests and civil disobedience in Europe, Brazil the Middle East and Africa as on-going examples of this. 

If the hope is that such discord will cause changes within the establishment, then I think you can see what an uphill effort this will be.    

When the general public becomes too poor to own a computer, cell phone or have access to the internet, perhaps the scope of the global surveillance system will be reduced?  

Maybe. 

But, the government could simply introduce or expand the hand out of free cell phones to the poor, as presently done in Nigeria, California and elsewhere in the USA, as a means of maintaining the scope of the surveillance network.  

Could declining energy availability itself cut back the global surveillance network? 

Maybe, but, if it does, then this is going to take a long time, I think.

In his interview, Russ Tice mentioned the “Death Star” in Utah, which is actually referring to the NSA’s Date Center in Bluffdale Utah.  You can see this facility in Poitras’ documentary “The Program” and some of NSA whistleblower William Binney’s discussion of the Stellar wind programhere.

In The State of Surveillance, (54 min) Steve Gibson, mentions that the Bluffdale Data Center will use up to about 65 MW of power supplied from its own power relay station.  That number seems to be confirmed in this Salt Lake Tribune article. 

That’s enough to power a small town of 30,000-50,000 people, but certainly not enough to pose a problem for the establishment to deliver now or in the foreseeable future.  The natural-gas-firedLake Side power plant on the eastern shore of Utah Lake could supply 10 times this amount of power, for example.

And, it is safe to say that the power necessary to support and expand, this, and similar Data Centers throughout the world, will not be subject to financial sequestration or restrictions.  

I expect that this and other data centers would be last customers to be power-limited, even if this meant people in living in surrounding towns going without any power at all.  Of course, power blackouts or rolling black-outs in those towns will also limit the flow of communications data into the "Death Star".  To effectively survail everyone, everyone has to be on the power and telecommunications grid. 

The Future Police State

So what would a near-future state of the police state look like with energy decent? 

Here’s what Binney said when was asked where he sees all this going 5 years, 10 years, from now:

It is going to be a totalitarian state.  We will have an imperial President, a dictator.

Unless we do something. 

You know everybody in Congress stood up an took an oath to defend the constitution.  The are all violating that oath.  So every time you see one, you need to say what are you doing with this privacy stuff; you are violating your oath by supporting this kind of activity.

William Benney – The Government is Profiling You  (113 minutes)

How about a large percentage of the population living a 18^th or 19^th century energy poor lifestyle, but, with high-tech government-issued smart phones and free internet so that their thoughts and interactions can be tracked for threats?  Eventually, this stragety will be rendered increasingly ineffective at real time monitoring as the power grid becomes intermitant. 

How about a small percentage of the population living a energy-rich, networked, lifestyle, with total allegiance to maintaining the establishment.  Of course, this elite group would be under intense, automated, continuous monitoring.  If any of the elite were to publish something online that the NSA’s computer’s deem to threaten the establishment, well, these publications could simply be automatically blocked. 

Welcome to 1984.

-------------------

Will the Collapse of Civilization Begin With Global Corporatist Totalitarianism?

Filed under: Preparing for Civilization's End — Dave Pollard @ 21:48

STAGE	WHAT COLLAPSES	SIGNS OF COLLAPSE	E.G. OF CULTURE AT THIS STAGE	COPING/RESILIENCE MECHANISMS
1. Financial Collapse	banks, currencies, the value of savings & assets	bank failures/rescues, stock/housing market collapses	Iceland during 2008 crisis	eliminating and repudiating debts, using community currencies, let the banks fail
2. Commercial Collapse	credit availability, trade, businesses, tax revenues, industrial food & energy systems	corporations become criminal, rampant corruption, regulatory mechanisms fail, trade and supply chains seize up	Russia after collapse of USSR	building self-sufficient communities, local self-employment and essential supplies, creating a Gift/Sharing Economy
3. Political Collapse	law & order, regulatory enforcement, safety nets, power grid & other infrastructure (including health, education, water and emergency response systems and the Internet), nation states	citizen unrest, surveillance society, scapegoating, rise in totalitarian governments, war and despotism	Afghanistan & Pakistan	creating local, direct (non-representative) democratic or egalitarian anarchistic institutions
4.-5. Social Collapse and the Disintegration of Humanity	community: social institutions, trust, social cohesion, faith, cooperation; and then humanity, kindness and compassion	permanent refugee cultures, disintegration of health care and waste management, endemic diseases, alienation, anomie, inurement, fighting violence with violence, hero worship, personal disintegration	Ik tribe of E. Africa	few or none

I‘ve just finished reading Dmitry Orlov’s new book The Five Stages of Collapse. It made me realize that I have probably been making two fundamental errors in my thinking about how our civilization culture will collapse, and what we should do to become more resilient in the face of that collapse (taking steps like learning new personal and collective capacities, and re-learning how to create communities). My two errors were the failure to recognize:

1. The Need to Stop Collapse at Stage 3: I have been thinking that there is only one type of collapse, one ‘end game’, though there are many different scenarios about how it will play out. Dmitry’s book made me realize that while financial, commercial and political collapse are inevitable, social collapse is not. What’s more, if we are able to halt collapse at the end of the third (political) stage, before social collapse occurs, life after collapse could be quite bearable, and more healthy, joyful and sustainable than life in our current culture. But if we slide into social collapse, all bets are off — life for what’s left of humanity could be, well,inhuman. 
2. How the Corpocracy May Aggravate Collapse: I have been going on the assumption that, during the Long Emergency that will end in the collapse of civilization culture and, if we are diligent and lucky, a much smaller but better human presence on the planet, we will have to cope with a cascading series of economic, energy and ecological crises. But now I realize that the Corpocracy — the executives of the world’s most power nation-states and the world’s most powerful corporations — have seen the writing on the wall and are already starting to work together to prevent or at least “manage” (incompetently, because complex systems cannot be “managed”) the first three stages of collapse. Not to save their citizens and customers, mind you, but rather to save themselves. The result could well be near-global corporatist totalitarianism — the ruthless (political and economic) oppression of the majority in order to hoard resources and protect the interests of a powerful, coordinated minority. And perhaps this fourth type of crisis might be the one we have to deal with first. Perhaps, in fact, it’s already upon us and it took the likes of Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden to wake us up to it.

But let me take a step back and start with a brief overview of The Five Stages of Collapse. I’ve indicated the qualities of each of the five stages in the table above. While Dmitry calls the fifth stage “Cultural Collapse”, my sense is that all five stages are components of a cultural collapse (our now-global culture being ‘civilization’ culture), so I’ve taken the liberty of re-naming the fifth stage the Disintegration of Humanity stage, and grouped it with the fourth stage Social Collapse because I think they inevitably occur together in rapid succession. Dmitry says “it is probably worth everyone’s while to dig in their heels at Stage 3″, and that’s an understatement.

If you look at the Signs of Collapse in the table above, it is not hard to conclude that the first three stages — Financial, Commercial, and Political Collapse — are already upon us, and we just haven’t recognized them yet. And total system collapse can take a long time — decades in fact — and occur so gradually that we can’t see the forest (collapses) for the trees (constituent and precipitating crises).

Stage 1 Financial Collapse, he writes, is an inevitable consequence of usury — the lending of money at interest — though because our savings, government services, the food industry and international trade all depend on it, elimination of usury would be “an act of economic suicide for any Western nation”. Our globalized financial house of cards has a fatal design flaw. Dmitry explains:

Usury [is] best viewed as a form of systemic, institutionalized violence, … a form of extortion: whenever you have two groups, one that has all the money and another that has none but needs it to live, the former can extort payments from the latter for temporary use of the money… [But] lending at any rate of interest above zero eventually leads to a deflationary collapse followed by a quick but painful bout of hyperinflation… A national default is inevitable if a country’s sovereign debt is very high [often, in struggling nations, due to loans incurred by corrupt leaders who squirrel the money away in personal offshore banks] but its economy is dwindling… Forcing that country to pay a “risk premium” [high interest rate] brings the day of default that much closer [and brings] about the very thing it is supposed to mitigate against.

Once usury, and its consequence of spiralling, unrepayable debt levels, triggers financial collapse, this can in turn quickly lead to Stage 2 Commercial Collapse (due to lack of credit for commerce and the dependence on infinite amounts of cheap labour, cheap oil, cheap debt and growth) and hence to Stage 3 Political Collapse (due to plunging incomes and consequent plunging tax revenues). It’s never too early to prepare for this, he says, by building viable local communities based on “exclusive circles of trust” and “spontaneous local self-governance”, and shifting their economies from the usury-based global Industrial Growth economy model to a local Gift, Tribute and Barter economy model (tributes being payments based on allegiance, religion or tradition; barter would be done using personal transferrable chits backed by personal commodities and valuables, which, as explained in the book, is more flexible and value-sustaining than direct goods-for-goods trades).

Once Stage 3 Political Collapse has occurred, he says, there is no rebuilding the house of cards, no way to re-establish the unsustainable, complex hydrocarbon- and debt-powered financial and commercial systems that underpin today’s political and economic systems, systems which are in addition now massively dysfunctional due to what Dmitry describes as “the problem of excessive scale”.

Creating viable local communities, he says, with “social cohesion, a common sense of identity and compelling mutual interests, respect and trust”, is very difficult and in many areas may be impossible. A Gift, Tribute and Barter Economy depends on this, and is inherently exclusive. It eschews Trade (exchange of goods/services/money between disinterested strangers). It also eschews Charity (“a degenerate form of gift that cannot be reciprocated; a handout designed to please the benefactor”). Gifts will initially be based substantially on what is relatively abundant in the community — community labour (as in community work bees), community facilities (shared spaces like designated community kitchens and workshops), harvested food surpluses, and outgrown and surplus reusables — to the point they replace the Industrial models of work, rents and retailing entirely.

As Charles Eisenstein has said, as long as the Industrial Growth economy exists, we will have to live with one foot in it and the other in the Gift, Tribute and Barter economy (what is now increasingly being called the “Sharing Economy”). But Dmitry says we need to make the transition as quickly as possible and not “cling” to the old economy:

Gradually at first, but faster and faster, all economic relationships need to be deproletariatized and rehumanized — by dealing with people you actually know, face-to-face; by avoiding the use of money and documents while emphasizing [oral] agreements as a way of cultivating trust and knowing who [not to trust]; and by giving preference to [small, close circles of] family, friends and neighbours while [cutting] out everyone else.

The Mafia and other “organized criminal” groups, he asserts, are forms of alternative governance that emerge when the official governance bodies become dysfunctional (paralyzed by excessive size or excessive centralization, corrupt etc.)  As Stage 3 Political Collapse worsens, we need to see such emergent groups for what they are, and evolve community-based mechanisms for security that draw on their valuable characteristics while avoiding their abusive and non-egalitarian ones. Otherwise, he predicts, we’ll be plagued by thieves, extortionists and other criminals from outside our community who do not share our goals or values and seek only to exploit the Stage 3 power vacuum.

It was Dmitry’s chapter on Stage 3 Political Collapse that got me asking the question that is the title of this post. He writes:

The ultimate purpose of the nation-state is to maintain a political [and economic] system that can effect a perfect melding of industry, militarism and commerce; industry supports militarism by supplying it with weapons, militarism supports commerce by conquering new resources and markets, and commerce supports militarism by funding military spending.

It’s hard to read the litany of news of massive government surveillance, political and business corruption, violations of constitutional and international laws and human rights, trumped-up excuses for international “wars”, the use of torture, the cynical support of despots, the interment of whistle-blowers, the bailout and non-punishment of corporate criminals, the set-up and vilification of dissidents, and new laws and rulings that place the rights and privileges of corporations above those of citizens, and not get an uneasy sense that our political and economic leaders (rulers?) are fully aware of the state of Financial, Commercial and Political Collapse and its inevitable worsening, and are working furiously in their own interests, and against ours, to protect themselves from the effects of collapse while throwing us to the lions.

Corporatist Totalitarianism is the creation of a state that disenfranchises the majority and funnels all decision-making, wealth, power and security to an integrated Corporatist few. They do this ostensibly on the basis that this few know better than the masses how to deal with crises, but in fact they know there just isn’t enough of anything left to go around any more. So, like alphas in an overcrowded rat cage, they deem it appropriate to lie, mislead and deny, and to hoard everything they can steal for themselves and let the rest suffer and starve.

A Salon.com reporter recently quoted a Turkish professor of saying about Obama: “He talks like the head of the American Civil Liberties Union, but he acts like Dick Cheney.” Use of killer drones, force-feeding uncharged decade-long prisoners at Guantanamo, xenophobic border hysteria, lawless Grand Juries indefinitely incarcerating innocent people, the ruthless prosecution of Edward Snowden — these are the actions of right-wing extremism, and frighteningly comparable to the actions of leaders of nation-states just before democracy was replaced by brutal totalitarianism in the past around the world.

What exactly is “Global Corporatist Totalitarianism”? I would argue that it has these attributes:

• the collusion among ‘leaders’ of governments of affluent nations and large global corporations to establish “we know better than you” policies that subordinate the interests of the public to those of the ruling group, and the concentration of wealth and power in that group
• the suspension of all rights and freedoms in the interest of being able to maintain order no matter how bad things may get
• the abandonment by the public of belief in the viability of participative representative democracy, due to constant and egregious abuses of the process by all political parties (once all parties are either controlled or eliminated by the ruling group)
• the control and use of the media to misinform, oppress and terrify citizens to cow them into submission to the ruling group’s authority
• a total surveillance state including the suppression of all dissent (of speech and action) under the guise of fighting “terrorism”
• financial and military support of, and collusion with, despotic leaders in struggling nations, sufficient to allow continued theft and desolation of their land and resources, the wage enslavement of their citizens, their exploitation as consumers of the ruling group’s corporations’ products and its governments’ weapons, and the usurious “lending” of unrepayable and crushing debts to these nations, the proceeds of which are personally appropriated and offshored by the despots as the price of complicity with these atrocities
• the dismantling of all regulations, taxes and organized labour groups that inhibit the unrestricted accumulation of wealth by the ruling group
• the denigration of government as an appropriate agency for any purpose other than “security”, military and commercial imperialism, and fear-and-denial propaganda

If you’ve read The Shock Doctrine, you’ll recognize the growing presence of all of these attributes in our current political and economic systems.

How, while we’re working furiously to prepare ourselves for economic, energy and ecological collapse, do we begin to factor in the need to also prepare ourselves for what is essentially a corporatist coup, nation-state by nation-state, that deprives us of our rights to organize, to free speech, to freedom of association, and to dissent?

My hope was always that as the first three Stages of collapse played out, government would be mostly a passive and inept player, a victim rather than an actor. But if the ruling group installs worldwide the kinds of corporatist totalitarian regimes I describe above, I fear they may strenuously act to suppress or prevent many or all of the coping/resilience mechanisms we hope to employ (shown in the right-hand column of the table above) to reduce the suffering of collapse and start to transition to a much more modest post-civilization society. Specifically, they will work to obfuscate what is really happening in the world, thwart attempts to create self-sufficient local communities (free of the ruling group’s authority), and prevent us from creating a sustainable sharing economy, growing and gifting healthy, organic local food, living off-grid, living in “non-standard” housing, looking after our own health and education, and weaning ourselves off “employment”, money and socially- and ecologically-destructive goods. What we see as taking responsibility for our own well-being in the face of cascading crises, the ruling group will inevitably see as threatening all the levers of control of wealth and power they rely on keeping.

So while we’re struggling to cope with a plethora of economic, energy and ecological crises — market and currency collapses, loss of our life’s savings, massive unemployment, deflation and hyperinflation, interest rate spikes and credit cutoffs, underwater mortgages, oil and water shortages and rationing, energy and food price spikes, blackouts and brownouts, pandemic diseases, droughts, famines, floods, fires, storms, massive influxes of refugees, collapsing bridges and other infrastructure failures, and the loss of essential services — we’re also going to be struggling against a ruling group that is using all the wealth and power at their disposal to prevent us from taking sensible, local, independent, personal and community-based steps to reduce the suffering all these crises will create. They will try with all their might to make independence from the crumbling systems they oversee, illegal, even seditious. While we’re studying up on coping and resilience, we’d better study up on how to deal with this additional challenge too.

So what about trying to halt the collapse of civilization at Stage 3, after Financial, Commercial and Political Collapse, and before we decline into Social Collapse — the collapse of the very communities we need to create to cope effectively with the first three stages?

Dmitry offers up some ideas on how to cope with Stage 4 and 5 collapse, but they seem unconvincing. He argues that even in cultures that have collapsed utterly, it is possible to rebuild faith, and he suggests looking at religions that have successfully built a following in such cultures as possible models. I’m not persuaded. If the Ik people of East Africa he describes at the end of his book are indeed examples of such cultures, it is hard to imagine a way out, or a way forward; such cultures seem mercifully to be destined for extinction.

All the more reason why we have to work, starting now, to deploy the Stage 1, 2 and 3 coping and resilience mechanisms shown in the right column of the table above. We cannot afford to fail to halt the collapse at that stage, if we don’t want to exit the stage of existence on Earth as a species quickly and ignominiously. There is a huge amount of learning and practice to do, and, if and when we give up the folly of believing that Stage 3 collapse can be averted, we have time to do it, starting small, learning from our mistakes, communicating what works and what doesn’t with other communities preparing for collapse. We have lots to learn, too, from those in struggling nations and in impoverished slums and on the streets and on reservations, whose people have been, for the most part, living with cultural collapse all their lives, mostly at Stage 3.

Whether we will do these things, and whether the ruling group will be successful in preventing us from doing so, remains to be seen. It may be a battle fought and won or lost community by community in each nation-state. I expect we’ll be surprised at what emerges, and I believe the surprise will be pleasant, a Darwinian celebration.

After us, the dragons.