Today, people are drawing so much water from below that they are adding enough of it to the oceans […] to account for about 25 percent of the annual sea level rise across the planet
[…]
Soaring global groundwater depletion bodes a potential disaster for an increasingly globalized agricultural system, says Marc Bierkens of Utrecht University […] If you let the population grow by extending the irrigated areas using groundwater that is not being recharged, then you will run into a wall at a certain point in time, and you will have hunger and social unrest to go with it," Bierkens warns. “That is something that you can see coming for miles.” (American Geophysical Union.)
“Is ‘Peak Oil’ Behind Us?”
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/is-peak-oil-behind-us/
“The I.E.A.’s stance that 2006 will be the year global supplies of conventional oil reached their ultimate peak is a more pessimistic take than its previous assessments. In 2008, the organization projected that conventional oil production would continue to slowly climb for several more decades.”
I think this should have made front page news around the world. Peak Oilers had said IEA put out silly numbers and they still say these numbers betray an overly optimistic outlook.
I don’t know where these two fit into perspective, but they do indicate to me civilization may very well not move West one last time.
Eerie Chinese Ghost Cities
http://www.infowars.com/eerie-chinese-ghost-cities/
“The truth of this situation is that these new cities and developments are money pits. Even though the properties sit completely vacant and ready to be lived in, occupation is not fiscally possible because they are in fact still born cities; created without the possibility of sustaining themselves. And so a bubble in the economy is formed.”
China sees inflation jump to 5.1%, a 28-month high
Certainly eats into the Chinese economy’s 10% growth, a number the other story adds some qualifications to.
Struck me today, if indeed collapse comes in my lifetime, I’ll experience exactly the same strong feelings people have felt several times before during the previous collapses over thousands of years. Kind of put in perspective a brief feeling that reminded me of standing on the Titanic the moment it starts to lean unnaturally and the band keeps playing.
Arab protests/revolutions have made it into the mainstream news recently. Food prices made the talking points of every protest, along with joblessness. (My uneducated theory goes the Mayan elite intensified temple building just before collapse to give the unemployed mobs jobs.) Video from Cairo of protesters beating back police on an apparently important bridge:
http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-546039
One report said Mubarak left the country already, and the army took over from the police but hasn’t enforced the curfew. The government turned off 90% of Egypt’s internet to make organizing protests more difficult but that doesn’t seem to have stopped much.
On the other end of the spectrum, Sterling Allan, editor of FreeEnergyNews.com, seems to have taken up the position of top researcher for another Dues Ex Machina to keep Civilization growing [temporarily] after Peak Oil. This article claims cold fusion energy generation has worked and will go widespread within a couple years. Now that really causes grief to me!
http://www.activistpost.com/2011/01/cold-fusion-energy-heating-up-prepping.html
As “Limits to Growth” points out, if energy limitations relax, pollution, water levels, arable land or other factors can lead to a harder collapse.
Kinda doesn’t matter how fast it comes for me; it’s not fast enough.
You know, the “green” car proponents are always talking some technology that makes things “ooo green, my favorite color! And so efficient!” and such, always touting higher mpg as this stupendous thing.
What they always, always either forget or neglect to mention is the fact that the car, no matter the technology created to use for fuel, always uses more to manufacture in the first place than it will ever consume in its foreseeable life.
It’s not the mpg that matters, its the materials. How much oil was used to mine the raw materials? How much to transport the ore to the furnace? How much to smelt them? How much to do the actual build? How much is used in the form of plastics? How much in the nylon and polyester? How much in the transport to the dealer? I’d venture a guess that all that will far outweigh however much you spend going to the grocery store that 6000 times the car might be subject to before you junk it.
Peak is past; lets just hope I can get out of Florida and into an area I know before I have to trade my car for a pair of shoes!
–GC
Group warns EPA ready to increase radioactive release guidelines
The EPA wants to dramatically reduce their standards for “safe” levels of radiation in food and water. No one would know about that ahead of time if not for an NGO using Freedom of Information Act.
Personal opinion: Too conveniently right as concern about radiation from Japan rises. Read this yesterday, and it just really hit me it sounds like actions elites usually take way past the Point of Diminishing Returns, on a complex society’s downside of its growth curve. Covering up facts hoping growth will return - I would do that rather than deliver the truth too in their position.
Forgot the key information that elevates this EPA change from disgusting Nuclear Energy Industry/Political corruption, to Collapse News, in my mind:
“Under long-established EPA policy, in conformity with long-accepted international standards on “acceptable†amounts of radiation these proposed changes would increase the permissible amounts of radiation to levels where 25% of those exposed to these “new acceptable levels†would develop cancer based on the EPA’s own numbers.”
http://www.collapsenet.com/free-resources/collapsenet-public-access/item/723-fallout
I have a hard time imagining how 75% no-cancer can get an “ok” from our environmental watchdog.
Edit: what I mean to say: imagining the EPA saying “only a quarter of people will develop cancer is OK with us” sounds incredible. That doesn’t sound like the situation is OK at all. I can’t imagine a stable (or growing) society saying a place is OK if only 1/4 of its inhabitants develop cancer from eating food, drinking water and breathing air there. But I can imagine a collapsing society trying to save administrative costs by trying to change that behind people’s backs, and can imagine an angry populous.
Update:
EU Secretly Authorizes Emergency Order Allowing Large Increase of Radiation in Food
This excerpt from a Mike Rivero adds that Canada just decided to stop testing food for radiation. He suggests these sudden decreases in official fear of radiation imply lack of safe food, and so occur to protect the elite from food riots.
http://geraldcelentechannel.blogspot.com/2011/04/mike-rivero-radioactive-sushi-from.html?m=1
I dunno… I kind of think of the elite as those who see what’s eventually coming and prepare for it. After all, it’s them who will survive it. That counts as elite in my book.
I have another disease of civ. It’s called “procrastination” and it’s screwing up my search for Florida coral to knap. Me, prepared? Pff. Me, elite? hahahaha. Just another unworthy, unwashed civ, lol.
My dad brought up another point I only barely thought about. After the collapse, wildlife populations will take a hit of almost extinction proportions from people trying to put food in their babies’ bellies. He told me a story he’d read about a guy who turned to the local deer for meat during the depression of the 1930’s. He’d said at the very beginning and just before it happened, he only had to go about 5 miles from home to get enough to keep fresh meat on the table. 2 months in, however, he had to go 20 miles out.
That was in the 30’s, when the population was easily less than a quarter of what it is now. My dad figured that the only reliable source of meat for a couple of months after a catastrophic collapse would be “long pig,” otherwise known as “soylent green.” That itself would only be reliable for a couple of months and then they’d all starve to death. I suppose that’s alright, I’d never eat it anyway with all the preservatives and growth hormones and garbage they pump it full of.
So pull out those local plant manuals and study up.
And get far, far away from the meltdown zones. Upwind, upwater.
Third World America 2011: Forget “Fast Tracking to Anarchy” We’ve Arrived
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janet-tavakoli/third-world-america-2011_b_873200.html
"This year, all hell has broken loose in downtown Chicago. Years of under-hiring have resulted in a police force that is unprepared for wildings and gang violence. Moreover, concealed carry in Chicago is illegal, unless one follows the Constitution.
“Tourists and residents have been attacked by mobs of youths on buses, on beaches, on bicycle paths, near the shops of the Magnificent Mile, and outside their homes. Mobs of shoplifters plagued “Mug Mile” stores. The irony is that these disenfranchised youths are turning to crime – and if justice is done, prison sentences --a gainst innocent targets. Their focus is misdirected. Participating in a peaceful five million man march – a true show of force and power – against elected culprits in Washington would get them better results for lasting change.”
Bank of England governor fears crisis is ‘worst ever’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15210112
“This is the most serious financial crisis we’ve seen at least since the 1930s, if not ever,” he said.
Saudis See No Reason to Raise Oil Output Capacity
Then of course, Occupy Wall Street has politicians saying they sympathize with it - some of the same politicians these protesters want out. Sounds like Mubarak and Ben Ali with attempt #1 at a compromise.
BTW, GC, you mention the quick dissapearance of deer in the Great Depression. I’ve also heard that. The Greenland Norse starved to death surrounded by fish they apparently wouldn’t eat because of a cultural food taboo. Western culture has two food taboos almost all people will certainly choose to die before eating, though considered by food in other cultures all around the world: 1. Wild foods (e.g. acorns, maple seeds, pine nuts, pine bark, nettles, hopniss/ground nut) and 2. Land shrimp (many many anthropods are safe to eat and nutritious if cooked). In Florida, if you can work on whittling away your cultural food taboo at the latter, you very well probably have nothing to worry about far as calories go, lol
http://www.hollowtop.com/finl_html/finl.html Pretty much the only two potential trump cards I can think of. And if you have your calories ok, responding effectively to every other challenge in a collapse has that much more free mental space to problem solve.
Ok Italy’s borrowing costs finally hit 7% interest loans, the number for the other Piigs that required Euro Loans. The US stock market went down 3% yesterday in reponse, pretty bad, but not a crash. This Euro thing is taking forever - the fundamentals as I understand it require that bail outs only delay the inevitable and leave fewer resources to deal with that inevitable. But Will To Denial has stayed strong, I guess.
Jim Rogers, probably one of the top 5 famous investors, made a strong comment about the new 7% threshold for Italy’s government’s borrowing:
100% Chance of Crisis, Worse Than 2008: Jim Rogers
http://m.cnbc.com/us_news/45219555/1?refresh=true
Talking with a rewilder friend today, he pointed out Occupy Wall Street may mean people in the Denial stage of the Stages of Accepting Loss may have finally started shifting to the Anger stage. Looks like this could start showing up more generally as Italy’s financial facts make denial harder. BTW, the next stage is Bargaining, and possibly the cold fusion guys indicate how that stage will look when people realize anger hasn’t worked.
Btw, not sure where to put this about food in a collapse: in our conversation today, he also pointed out (in my words) we have a leg up in terms of food. This because we’ve passed the point of expecting a government truck to deliver food in all crises. We still have a learning curve to obtaining 100% necessery nutrition independently of the system, but have already passed the steepest part of that learning curve: accepting obtaining food independently as necessary. And anything more than the wild food basics we already know, we can afford to learn as we go, and simply improves our standard of living.
I might have more pessimistic tendencies, lol, want to feel more sure I can support myself before I feel hungry and don’t know if I can, but he may have a good perspective on the size of that learning curve.
Perspective and attitude is 90% of it, IMO.
- Green Cars Fail to Deliver
http://www.abqjournal.com/main/2011/12/10/news/green-cars-fail-to-deliver.html
Can’t read it online, but saw it on front page of Albuquerque Journal. Basically every company keeps running into problems: venture capital firms won’t fund them, demand has been lower than expected, etc. People who put their faith in Civ continuing forever because of technology will have to ignore this news, and most of them will.
- US Troops surround Syria on the eve of invasion?
http://rt.com/usa/news/us-nato-syria-edmonds-709/
"A former official from within the ranks of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is reporting that US and NATO forces have landed outside of Syria and are training militants to overthrow the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
"Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, formerly a translator with the FBI, wrote over the weekend that American soldiers are among the NATO troops that have mysteriously and suddenly landed on the Jordanian and Syrian border. According to her, several sources internationally have confirmed the news, although the US media has been instructed to temporarily censor itself from reporting the news.
“Additionally, Edmonds says that American and NATO forces are training Turkish troops as well, to possibly launch a strike from the north of Syria.”
My comment: with all the alliances drawn up - Syria and Iran, Syria and Russia, Iran and China and Russia, China and Pakistan - interfering in a Syrian civil war looks a lot like pre WW1. And with drone-hacking capabilities, there is now a pretext to use waves of drafted footsoldiers who might otherwise react to collapse with resisting their elite.
- Obama administration backs bill authorizing indefinite military detention of US citizens
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28219
"The Obama administration declared Wednesday afternoon that it was abandoning its nominal threat to veto a military authorization bill that explicitly authorizes the indefinite military detention of anyone the federal government declares to be a terrorist or supporter, including US citizens.
“The final passage of the bill is now virtually assured by the end of the week. It marks a new stage in the collapse of the most basic democratic rights in the United States and the erection of the framework of a military-police state.”
"The bill would allow for the open-ended detention of anyone caught up in the “war on terror,†without trial or charges, including US citizens. This is the first explicit legislation to effectively abolish habeas corpus (the right to challenge unlawful detentions) and the constitutional rights to a fair trial (the Sixth Amendment) and due process (the Fifth Amendment).
“Another provision requires that such individuals be taken into military custody, with an exception for US citizens. The military seizure of US citizens is left to the discretion of the executive branch. This means the effective abolition of the Posse Comitatus Act, which has restricted use of the military for domestic policing for more than a century.”
“The entire “debate†within the political establishment over the NDAA testifies to the collapse of any commitment to democratic rights within the American ruling class.”
:’( :’(
Anyone else watching this Ebola thing?
The situation in Liberia is pretty scary. I was reading about the people of the West Point neighborhood being barricaded in, and I wondered if that could ever happen here in the U.S. I doubt that ebola would break out here, but if there was another outbreak, like a really bad strain of flu?
Yeah, the more I look into outbreaks, the more certain I am that they will be coming here as collapse intensifies.
My worst fear is a pandemic. Not because of the pathogen itself, that can be treated, but because of the toxic mandatory treatments that can damage the body for life. Rather be shot by their guns than their needles.