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Topic: Lifeboat Time
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| UGoGirl | Posted – 11/30/2007 10:06:49 AM | show profile This blog really spoke to me. The evidence of our sinking ship is so clear and compelling... so many of us see this now, it seems that the time is short for our country as a whole to keep its blinders on. On another note, can I please take over the name bleak spouse...!!! **** One of the more notable news stories of the last week concerned the fate of M/S Explorer, a cruise ship built for polar seas that turned out to be not quite up to the rigors of the job. ...I thought of that story this morning while surveying the latest round of debates about peak oil, global warming, the imploding debt bubble, and half a dozen other symptoms of the unfolding crisis of industrial society now under way. By this point there are few metaphors for crisis more hackneyed than the fatal conjunction of ship and iceberg, but the comparison retains its usefulness ...when the hull?s pierced and water?s rising belowdecks, the window of opportunity for effective action is brief, and if the water can?t be stopped very soon, it?s lifeboat time. By almost any imaginable standard, that time has arrived for the industrial world. ...As depletion of existing oil fields accelerates, the struggle to prop up the current production plateau promises to become a losing battle against geological reality. Meanwhile the carbon dioxide generated by the 84 million barrels a day we?re currently pumping and burning, along with equally unimaginable volumes of coal and natural gas, drives changes in climate that only a handful of oil company flacks and free-market fundamentalists still insist aren?t happening. ...In related news, Atlanta may just be on the verge of edging out New Orleans as the poster child for climate catastrophe. Unless the crippling years-long drought over the southeast United States gives way to heavy rains very soon, Atlanta will run completely out of drinking water sometime in the new year. The city government has had to explain to worried citizens that they are out of options, and there aren?t enough tanker trucks in all of Dixie to meet the daily water needs of a big city. ...As Macchiavelli commented in a different context, though, people care more about their finances than their lives, ... For those of my readers who haven?t been keeping score, banks and financial firms around the world spent most of the last decade handing out mortgages to anybody with a pulse, packaging up the right to profit from those mortgages into what may just be the most misnamed ?securities? in the history of financial markets, and selling them to investors around the world. On this noticeably unsteady foundation rose the biggest speculative bubble in recorded history, ... All this hallucinated wealth, though, depended on the theory that people with no income, job, or assets could and would pay their mortgage bills on time, and when this didn?t happen, the whole tower of cards began coming apart. ...Connect the dots and the picture that emerges will be familiar to those of my readers who have taken the time to struggle through the academic prose of How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse. ... ? the second wave of crisis in the decline and fall of the industrial world may be breaking over our heads right now.... http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2007/11/lifeboat-time.html |
