Privatisation & globalisation

Amid today's varying attempts to imagine a postpetroleum America, one very likely equivalent has received little attention -- the impoverished, dysfunctional nations of the contemporary Third World. Maybe it's time to consider the possibility.

The role of corporate influence in maintaining an increasingly dysfunctional status quo has been much discussed in peak oil circles, and various remedies proposed. The irony here is that effective remedies for the antisocial behavior of corporations are ready to hand, if we make a collective choice to use them -- and that choice may be made sooner than many people currently expect.

"as mankind proceeded to get bigger and bigger we silently crossed a threshold"

Not deterred by the international financial crisis which became widespread in 2008 or by the many recessionary patterns that grip most country economies, financial engineers are massing in København to prepare for the next wave. This one is about the commercial opportunities which renewable energy technologies, country climate funds and sectoral mitigation programmes promise to contain.

We cannot be lulled into a false sense of security: though oil prices have declined from their historic highs, there is little doubt that peak oil is real. A 2008 research project completed at Washington University in St. Louis found strong evidence in support of the theory. Please feel free to circulate this academic document as a primer on peak oil.

One of the most rarely used resources for relocalization projects is the fact that our species has been this way before -- the twilight years of many other civilizations featured the breakup of centralized economic arrangements and the rise of a new localism. Can insights from past examples offer us guidance in the present case?

-Obama and Hu aim to agree greenhouse gas targets
-China's empty city
-China's Blunt Talk for Obama
-Market cornered for rare minerals
-Chinese credit card debt mounts

The claim that market forces will inevitably take care of energy shortfalls due to peak oil is common enough these days. Unfortunately for such optimistic notions, there's reason to think that in an environment of economic contraction caused by geological limits to energy, market forces may well push money away from any investments that could help the situation.

The world’s first peak-oil recession has come to a close, according to third-quarter numbers invented by the federal government. Apparently dumping trillions of dollars onto big banks, insurance companies, and automobile manufacturers interrupted the plummeting descent of American Empire. The stock markets skyrocketed expectedly. Predictably, so did the commodities markets.

Passing the world oil peak has had, and doubtless will continue to have, relatively little impact on the long-term price of gasoline. The economic implications of getting through the first half of the Oil Age have been much more significant, a trend that seems likely to continue until the collapse is complete.

Through September 2009, the government of India has issued a variety of statements designed to quell India's long-lived China bogey. It has done so to contain what it calls panic and scare-mongering about alleged incursions over the India-China border by units of the People's Liberation Army. The 'incidents' (as the Indian media like to call the events) have all occurred over India's north-western border with China, in the mountainous Jammu and Kashmir state.

-China Moves to Retaliate Against U.S. Tire Tariff
-Priceless: How The Federal Reserve Bought The Economics Profession
-Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession
-Keynes: the return of the Master

it's the end of the world as we know it (...and I feel fine) (1)

Probably few saw this meltdown coming. We have come to view human progress as a given, and an ever growing economy and living standard as an entitlement.

Iraq: Warily Moving Ahead on Oil Contracts
The Dirty War Against Clean Coal
A Flower Grows in West Africa

Someday, someone is going to ask me what happened to the United States - wasn’t it once one of the biggest economies in the world? I’ve already got my answer ready - we sold ourselves to other countries for flat-screened tvs and other plastic toys. And weirdest of all, for a long time, we actually thought we got the better of the deal.