My, this is depressing. The guy is sitting out earth day. But, I totally get his lament about ethanol and wonder why the goverment is not getting real here?

http://www.news.com/8301-10787_3-9925556-60.html

Is ANYONE aware of a good reason for ethanol?? Hmmm...

Black Hole Destroys the Universe?

Want interesting, here's one: http://techfreep.com/worlds-largest-supercollider-could-destroy-the-universe.htm

According to this, the new supercollider being put in place in Switzerland could produce a black hole that would eat the entire world, and perhaps even the universe! :-)

How's that for an EndGame...

Shell Oil weighs in?

Well, we've heard from Mr. Jensen, and now that my Ad-sense thinks I'm an energy nut I'm seeing all kinds of stuff. Most notably stuff from Shell Oil. They had a bunch of information about their scenario play, one of which is the SCRAMBLE scenario where we do a crappy job of dealing with energy, and the other called BLUEPRINTS which implies we do something reasonable. I have not read through it all yet, but I plan to and will make a post about it when I get the chance. In the meantime, this link is kind of interesting: http://realenergy.shell.com/?lang=en&page=homeFlash

More later...

Are we in the EndGame?

OK: Long time no blog... First let me say I'm going to pass on waxing too eloquent on this... I did some browsing around on this and found many eggheads far more intellectual than I on this one... (Disclaimer... I'm not some psuedo-liberal arrogant intellectual... I'm just a blue collar guy with a white collar job who likes to read and finds this stuff "interesting.") For example, this guy http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2006/08/10.html knows how to save the world... What can poor old me say to that! Hell, he actually digested all TWENTY premises!

Or maybe this guy (http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/engel08122006/) who is a TYPE A pessimist and thinks a few million, maybe even a few billion gotta die before humanity comes back into equilibrium with mother earth.

So what's my bottom line on all this... Mostly, its "but of course it about the oil" silly... I always find it amusing when my liberal friends tell me that the damn war is about oil like its not entirely obvious. Of course its about the oil, what the hell else is it about. And while I don't claim to have access to the numbers, its certainly my gut that the oil is running out and fast... I thought that BEFORE $4.00 a gallon gas, and I figure if our esteemed government isn't working on Plan B, then we are in a world of shit. But I also realize that whatever plan B is, it is not here now and unless we are willing to roll over and die we better be doing whatever we can to ensure that the places that are delivering up the oil aren't run by nut-jobs or people who would like to spit in our eye. You come into my house and try and turn out the lights and take all my food and leave me without the means to exist (or in a far worse state) then we have a problem. Whatever lunacy led us to put ourselves at the mercy of these people is almost irrelevant at this point, because put ourselves at their mercy we did. So we fight and we better hope we win, not retreat back with our tails between our legs. In the meantime, we better hope like heck that the Chinese and the Indians and whomever else is hostage to the oil addiction don't notice we are setting up camp because I suspect its going to get worse before it gets better...

Which then brings us to the end of civilization... I'm enough of an optimist to hope that science will come up with some reasonable solution to the energy problem, or we will figure out how to exist with a lot less of it, but if we aren't working on that problem right now, then we are deep kimshee... The alternative probably is the ENDGAME, but if anyone thinks that a bunch of pinko activists blowing up dams is going to bring that around in an orderly fashion while a few billion people disappear, then those guys got more problems than us industrialists... So while Derrick and crew are blowing stuff up and trying to figure out how to live on nuts and berries along with 250 million of their closest friends, I'm hoping there is SOMEONE in this crazy country looking into hydrogen fuel cells or better solar or something...

So to sum it up... Mr. Jensen clearly sees the problem... Civilization is killing the planet and its pretty obvious that the abundant and cheap energy that powers our economy and way of life is going to be in short supply, and if we don't have a plan B, we are in a "hurtin' status" ... War and chaos or rolling over to die will be our choices. While I like camping on occasion, I'm not sure there's enough "landbase" around to support us all going camping at once, so we better hope Mr. Jensen and his ilk are too pessimistic about this whole thing...

Oh well, I'm off to plant a garden in my tiny backyard... *sigh*

ENDGAME - so what's it about?

This book attempts to make the case that "civilization" as a concept is evil and unsustainable, and will ultimately destroy the planet and all the other "non-human" inhabitants along with our human selves... To make the case requires 20 (yes, twenty) premises... Anything that requires 20 anythings can never be easy to understand (or as my instructor informed our class when learning to disable the ejection seat in the F4-D Phantom, that anything that requires 10 safety pins can never REALLY be safe); but regardless, for this review, I'll boil them down to what appears to be the essential points:

• People need resources to survive (food, air, water, etc) and those things come from the environment you live in... The "land base"
• When you concentrate too many people into an area where they no longer can get their stuff from the environment they live in, they go abroad to get stuff, and they take it by force... Our ability to get resources depends on a willingness to use violence to get them
• Humans have some kind of growth death wish where if "you ain't growing, your dying" and they are consuming all available resources all over the planet and eventually we are going to overshoot our ability to continue to consume and then its really going to hit the fan...

Interspersed throughout is a bunch of stuff on how people are evil, "they" (note: "they" are generally assumed to be corporations and politicians as far as I can tell) are only interested in economics and increasing their own power and consumption, and so on and so on, and oh by the way, WON'T SOMEONE BLOW UP A DAMN DAM! I think Derrick is inclined to do it, but as he informs us, a) he doesn't really know how and b) he might get caught and thrown in the clink by the damn industrialists; so its kind of a non-starter for him...

He also has some folks he likes, including all manner of fishes and beasts, as well as "indigenous people" whom I presume are not like "normal" people in some important way that I've still not fathomed yet.

But anyway, he basically points out the obvious fact given current course and speed we are going not be able to "sustain" our current mode of living as it is powered by cheap and abundant fuels that are being drained from the planet at an alarming pace and in our quest to burn and destroy all the available fuel, we are laying waste to the planet, ourselves, and the non-human co-habitants that are along for the ride. He then spends the bulk of the book shooting down any alternative other than "taking down" civilization. He fully acknowledges that this also means having a few billion less people running around, and that's OK as given the lack of sustainability of the current models, its going to happen anyway. You want to get there the easy way or the hard way? And oh by the way, WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE BLOW UP A DAM!

Enough for now, you basically have the outline of the book above, and I must now go help my 16 year old daughter with her Chemistry so as she can get out of high school someday, and perhaps with enough sense to go out and help with this whole civilization thing...

ENDGAME... The Problem with Civilization

Before I start my stunningly critical analysis of this quite interesting book, a few pointers for those who might be interested in reading it themselves. The following link contains some marketing stuff on the book: http://www.endgamethebook.org/

For a guy who thinks that civilization is destroying the planet and that we all need to go back to subsistence farming and hunting/gathering, Derrick Jensen has quite the sophisticated marketing site, as well as a rather lengthy book containing, I'm sure you'll be shocked, paper. I do wonder if he knows where the paper got sourced, but it appears pretty conventional to me.

Anyway, I don't particularly want to reveal my biases just yet as despite the evident cynicism, I actually think this guy makes some rather interesting and important points. Points that cause one to ponder concepts like God and infinity and whether or not Toyotas really could have emerged from a giant explosion of all the material in the universe.

So if you don't decide to buy this book, stay tuned and I'll fill you in ...