If you are under fifty you have benefited from a long period of “price stability.” Since the stagflation of the 1970's we have experienced low single digit inflation as normal. For large parts of our population this is the way things have always been and, by extension, the way it always will be. Experience governs our view of the world, from our sense of morality to our sense of cultural propriety. Along with the stories we have heard from our parents and grandparents; it also is the toolbox for the management of our personal finances and home. As a culture, however, we have discounted the value of the stories of our elders and, as a result, our toolbox is limited. It is not too late, however, to listen to those stories and learn from them.

The experience of relative price stability has led to an assumption of further stability. Money may still “burn a hole in our pocket” but this springs from a desire to consume; not an evaluation of the possibility that the dollar will be wort...

[ Continued ]

My attitude toward the fast crash v slow decline debate has always been that one should not bet on the apocalypse but it is good to be insured against it. What this means in terms of preparations is that I have sought to prepare to be permanently poor in a world with decreasing amounts of resources and increasingly local. While I am not preparing for the current state to the fall of the grid overnight, I do try to insure against it. It is realatively cheap to make sure one has a couple of years of calories on hand. An alternative source for clean drinking water is useful regardless of how the future plays out. I can keep my house warm better with electricity; but we will be just fine without. I do not expect the apocalypse but I do keep in my car all that I would need to hike home (in any season) in case of an EMP attack.

With that disclaimer, I feel that we must be prepared to live in a world where I need to motor to work and to town in a world where we are increasingly poor. A...

[ Continued ]

London School of Economic Lecture on the politics of peak oil (and climate change)

The Government of Uncertainty: how to follow the politics of oil
Speaker: Professor Tim Mitchell
Chair: Dr Sam Ashenden
This event was recorded on 15 October 2009 in Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
This lecture explores the politics of oil and how we can seek to understand it, at a time when uncertainty is presenting new challenges to the claims of objective knowledge. Tim Mitchell is professor of Arab studies at Columbia University, New York. Sam Ashenden is managing editor of Economy and Society and senior lecturer in Sociology, Birkbeck College.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/podcasts/publicLecturesAndEvents.htm

I have only listened to the first 30 minutes of this...

[ Continued ]

Last month I tapped a co-worker on the shoulder and she spun around and proceeded to chew me out and threaten me. A friend who I generally thought of as fairly leveled headed is starting to talk about the violent overthrow of the government. A rather non-threatening drunk woman in the E.R. is told to comply or she will be mopping up urine with her hair by a health care professional. An overweight, 50+ urbanite with joint problems and addiction prone spouse that has never grown a vegetable in her life and does not know the difference between alternating and direct current sits down to tell me how she and her husband are considering moving to the North Shore of Lake Superior. They want to buy a farm and grow all of their own food in a green house to be heated all winter long with a windmill. We are getting to the point of the economic/energy collapse where people are starting to get funny; and we should only expect it to get worse.

When I was fourteen I took a water rescue course and...

[ Continued ]

Norman E. Borlaug was, on many accounts, a great man. Intelligent, innovative, studious and, perhaps most importantly, driven by a noble desire: a desire to reduce human suffering caused by hunger.

When Dr. Borlaug entered his professional life in 1941 physical scarcity was the driving factor of human hunger in the world. Citizens of India, Pakistan, China and many other nations faced the real and abiding risk of famine and starvation with every harvest. Even this is an understatement since many of these citizens, even in the years of a good harvest, remained dependent upon humanitarian imports of foreign grain. Utilizing the then newly developed herbicides and pesticides Dr. Borlaug helped breed improved strains of wheat that turned these perennially hungry nations into reliable food exporters.

In the face of criticism from environmentalists...

[ Continued ]