Consumerism

At the Denver ASPO conference, I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Albert Bartlett. Afterward, Dr. Bartlett e-mailed me some material he had written over the years. The "Laws of Sustainability" were included in this material. They are part of Al Bartlett's contribution to the anthology The Future of Sustainability by Marco Keiner, published in 2006.

As a high-school teacher, I wanted to give my thoroughly-industrial, suburban-NJ students a more detailed peek at their upcoming post-industrial future. I felt the need to challenge their prevailing mindsets regarding our resource-depletion predicament: the “shorter showers & change the light-bulbs” crowd, the “engineers will surely come to our rescue” folks, and the “problem? -- what problem?” people. This essay and the before/after comparison chart that follows are part of my ongoing (unsanctioned) attempts at doing so.

-I'm Too Sexy for This Footprint: Eco-Designers Take on Fashion's Carbon Footprint
-French make cars from flax
-Farmers Arrested Planting Hemp On DEA Headquarters Lawn (Video)

-Wall Street's Naked Swindle
-Where Will the Jobs Come From?
-New School of Thought Brings Energy to 'the Dismal Science'
-The greatest theft in American history
-Are You Ready for the Next Crisis?
-Revolutionizing Economic Thought

Even as we've been going through years of hand-wringing about security of supply, and about how Russia was an unreliable gas supplier, it comes out the European gas buyers are themselves increasingly refusing to pay the price that underpins the security of their Russian supplies, and are breaking their contractual obligations towards Gazprom, making Europe, erm, a less reliable customer...

The scene in the White House these days must be a sort of Opera Bouffe, in which an earnest and rather grave young man moves from one roomful of lesser officials to another in which all agree to pretend that they have prevented the nation from falling into something they call "the abyss." At the end of Act I, a young deputy FDIC commissioner in the Little Mary Sunshine mold gets down on one knee, belts out a show-stopper about the glories of a bright and shining "tomorrow," and the audience goes out for intermission to discover that the city has been burning down around the theater all night.

The American economy has reached a dangerous new phase. We are now in the “recovery” period, but what kind of rebound will we have? In No L, Professor James Hamilton (along with Paul Krugman) takes note of some positive news from the Fed.

Yesterday was World Food Day, and the media dutifully paid a tiny bit of attention to the 1 billion plus people who suffer from chronic hunger. All the usual problems were trotted out, including multiple quotations in many media from the Australian National Science Director Megan Clark’s observation that to feed a growing population, we will have to produce more food in the next 50 years than we have in all of human history.

-A tale of how it turned out right
-Investor alarm as Finance Minister blasts corporate Japan's ethics
-Memo to Investigators: Dig Deep
-A year after the crunch, it's boom time again for bankers
-Public Health Before Wall Street Wealth
-Stiglitz and Sen's Manifesto on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress
-The sound of one bank not banking

A weekly round-up including:
- Prices and production
- China

Evolution demands short-term thinking focused on individual survival. Most attempts to overcome our evolutionarily hardwired absorption with self are selected against. The Overman is dead, killed by a high-fat diet and unwillingness to exercise. Reflexively, we follow him into the grave.

I have found an identity. Is that really such a big deal? The thing is, I didn’t realize I was missing one. There are so many things I could call myself: a human, male, a father, a husband, a writer, a thinker, a gardener, a campaigner... so many things that I feel pretty comfortable with, yet until a couple of weeks ago I didn’t realize there was something missing; something that yawned inside me, empty and lacking substance.

Just over one year after it became impossible to deny that the financial crisis that had started in 2006/2007 was a major, systemic event, it is rather depressing to see that nothing has really changed and, to the contrary, if anything has, it is for the worse.

When I started participating in peak oil and climate change discussions in 2003, let’s just say that the whole thing was much more of a boy’s club than it is now (and in some measure it still is). And one of the laments I most often heard was “we men would be glad to change our lives, but our wives won’t let us – they still want all the trappings of affluence.” Or “No woman will date a man who just wants to farm and grow food.” Whenever I heard these claims, I would laugh and think about how much some women I knew were struggling to get their husbands to give up their creature comforts.