The last open thread got stale, so here's another one.
To jumpstart the conversation, I see that Bill McBride (formerly Calculated Risk) believes The Future Is Still Bright! He's talking about the American economy.
Early this year I wrote The Future's so Bright ....
In that post I outlined why I was becoming more optimistic,
even though there might be too much deficit reduction in 2013. As I
noted, "ex-austerity, we'd probably be looking at a decent year" in
2013. And of course - looking forward - Congress remains the key downside risk to the U.S. economy...
And then Bill, who has never seen government economic data he didn't believe no questions asked, goes through a bunch a charts, each of which is pretty damn depressing if you really look at it, but in doing so confirms once again that delusional Optimism is innate and thus incurable.
Omitting crucial data is one way to keep your head firmly planted up your ass, so Bill makes sure to leave out charts which might make him look like the hopeless fool that he is.
Bill also "forgot" to note that new median household income data indicates that the American Dream is deader than a doornail. In 2013 GDP terms, in the 2nd quarter "real Gross Domestic Product rose at a 1.7 percent annual rate, up from a 1.1 percent rate in the first quarter." Whoop-de-doo!
For those of you who are interested in understanding confirmation bias, Bill provides a textbook example. Reality having been stood on its head, Bill finishes with a flourish.
Last year, I said that looking forward, [that] I was the most optimistic since the '90s. And things are only getting better. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades (links to video below).
Things are only getting better...
I mean, it's impossible to even satirize this horseshit anymore. Still, Clarke and Dawes are still trying (funny).
Here's a new open thread cleverly disguised as post.
NEW — oceans stuff. First up, krill populations in the Southern Ocean.
Atkinson and his three co-authors had conducted the most comprehensive
study yet of krill abundance and distribution in the Southern Ocean,
gathering data from all the net samples they could find over the
previous 80 years, a total of 12,000 summer net-hauls.
This database
showed that the southwest Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean—the
narrow, productive stretch between the Antarctic Peninsula and South
Africa—contained more than half the krill in the Southern Ocean.
[The study] also
indicated that krill stocks in this crucial sector had declined by 80
percent in the previous 30 years.
Jesus Fucking Christ!
Below, the future of the oceans, discussed by scientists from the California Academy of Sciences.
Near-total despair, quickly followed by delusional optimism
Sylvia Earle talks about the future of the oceans. She's not a happy camper.
This video has basically the first "structure" as the one directly above (despair => optimism), but Sylvia Earle is much more cautious in expressing her hopes.
FYI, Elon revealed his hyperloop design on Monday, which Those Who Know What They Are Talking About called completely impractical. Score another publicity victory for The Musker!
Euan Mearns, who I knew from my TOD and ASPO-USA days, pounded some nails into the peak oil coffin. That takes some courage doing that at The Oil Drum where the diehards live.
But then again, Euan believes that data and their reasonable interpretation matter, but various Doomers, including Chris Martenson, Jim Kunstler, Guy MacPherson, Dimitri Orlov, Richard Heinberg and their fellow-travelers, do not care about crude oil production data & trends, especially in so far as the principals make a living from sticking to the peak oil story.
Whatever ... does each new day on Planet Stupid feel like Groundhog Day to you? The same bullshit day after day?
If so, you need to do something about that if you want to enjoy the ride among the Hominidae. You want to fit in, right? You're stuck on Planet Stupid, and there's nowhere else for you to go.
Make the most of a bad situation by turning your brain to mush. Rid yourself of that pesky and completely useless consciousness of yours by reading stories at the following internet tabloids—
The Daily Beast and its subsidiary Buzzfeed
Yahoo Finance's The Daily Ticker
Salon
The Business Insider
The Atlantic and its subsidiary The Atlantic Wire
Slate
National Public Radio (of course)
The Huffington Post (goes without saying)
or just watch lots and lots of TV
That short list should get you started. Post additional suggestions here. In no time, your brain will cease to function and you will fit right in.
I'm feeling chatty and bored today, so here's a small post for your consideration.
In this first article, the Wall Street Journal cites a study by the investment firm Bridgewater Associates LP which claims that the advanced (OECD nations, the U.S., Europe, Japan, etc.) are contributing more to global GDP growth than the "emerging" markets (non-OECD, China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc.).
Here's the graph.
That story made me wonder about global primary energy demand, which is a proxy for GDP growth. Necessarily, global GDP growth should not be occurring (in inflation-adjusted dollars) if primary energy consumption (in BTUs, petajoules, whatever) is not also increasing.
Unless some very astonishing, quite unbelievable gains in energy efficiency have been achieved by the advanced economies in the last few years—that story is also remarkable bullshit—we are forced to conclude that the OECD has pulled off a miracle that nobody, including any physical scientist you care to name, would have guessed possible.
Although global primary energy consumption has been rising along with global GDP, are we supposed to believe that the dominant OECD subgroup is an exception to formerly unbreakable laws of physics?
I guess so, and that's certainly good news for all of us. It's a great day for the Earth's biosphere and humans in particular—we have finally defied the laws of thermodynamics.
The advanced economies grow, but their primary energy consumption contracts!
(See here if you need a quick overview of thermodynamics, but see my Tim Garrett posts for the details.)
The current global economy (measured by GDP) according to Bridgewater Associates now totals $74 trillion.
However, with this astonishing breakthrough in the advanced economies, we can now envision a future global economy many, many times larger in which primary energy consumption has fallen to nearly zero!
And won't that future Utopia be something to behold?
It will be what humans always seek but have never found until now, which is the Ultimate Free Lunch
In a disappointing but not
wholly unexpected twist, Elon Musk has admitted that his Hyperloop — a
proposed mode of transport that will get passengers from LA to San
Francisco in 30 minutes, traveling close to the speed of sound — is
“extremely speculative.”
Furthermore, Musk also says that he doesn’t
intend to build the Hyperloop himself — rather, he will publicly share
his plans on August 12, and then let other people build it.
During a Tesla Motors investor call yesterday,
Musk said, ”I think I shot myself in the foot by ever mentioning the
Hyperloop. I’m too strung out.” Here, of course, he’s referring to the
fact that he’s already the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and is understandably too busy to build a multi-billion-dollar
transport link. Musk did say, however, that if no progress has been made
by other people/companies in the next few years, he might try to “make
it happen.”
Is Elon the biggest, most grandiose, self-promoting asshole of all time?
If not, he's certainly right up there. And this story has gotten almost no press coverage (see here).
The main theme of his book involves putting concrete economic (monetary) values on ecosystem services. In this way Tony hopes to convince humans to stop destroying the biosphere. For example, see my post What Is The Economic Value Of Healthy Oceans?
Tony gave a Ted Talk of course, something I will never be given the opportunity to do [video below].
I transcribed Juniper's Obligatory Hope speech at the end (starts at the 15:54 mark).
[Our challenge is to see that] the economy is not something which owns ecology, but to see the economy as it truly is, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of ecology and the natural environment.
That obviously is a huge [monkey] wrench [in human thinking], and I think most politicians in this country find it very hard to see what is really quite an obvious set of connections, but I do believe there is a great deal of Hope for us in being able top navigate the tricky ecological crunches which lie ahead of us, not least because there is now so much understanding and so much information out there about the dynamic relationship between ecology and economics, and the extent to which we can now start putting numbers on one to inform the other.
I have spent much of my professional career campaigning for nature because nature is worth protecting for its own sake. It has intrinsic values that go beyond any kind of instrumental values we might place upon it. It does need protecting for its own sake. But I'm also convinced that the new research that's coming out now demonstrating the economic value of nature is absolutely vital for us to put into the mainstream debates.
[ my note: What debates? I dont' see any debates about making human economic systems subservient to Nature. ]
And I don't see that as an alternative to us taking a moral stance, or saying that nature has values that go beyond the prices we can put upon it. I think these two things need to go hand-in-hand. We need to re-build our connections with nature, we need to have a spiritual education in this country and elsewhere indeed to put us back inside the natural world. But we also need to be building a different economic system and I think that economic system will not only come from the provision of good numbers, and putting good arguments together, but it will also come from the different kind of relationships we all have with nature, that profound re-connnection.
If I had one priority that I would put at the top of the national curriculum today, for ministers to thinking about in terms of how we rebuild our society, it would be to [make] natural history [compulsory in education programs for young people], to learn about birdsong, to learn about the names of trees, to be able to identify butterflies, and to see humans in the natural world in their correct place, in the center of it, and not outside it.
Tony says there is now so much understanding and so much
information out there about the dynamic relationship between ecology and
economics. He believes that if that understanding and information is presented to politicians and the general public, and nature studies are included in school curriculums, there is hope that Homo sapiens will do the right thing.
That was a common theme on DOTE, the relationship between economic systems and the biosphere. I am very knowledgeable about that dynamic relationship, on both sides. I wrote literally hundreds of posts which dealt with that relationship, or touched upon it.
My experience of trying to get that information across to a general audience was in the main dismal, an appalling failure. Outside of a handful of people, humans generally had no interest in the subject. No interest.
By and large it seems that humans are entirely consumed by anthropocentric concerns, for example (to pick just one) whether there will be enough crude oil in the future to power their personal transportation, and what the cost to them of refined products made from that oil will be.
Typically, in my experience, if you tell a human that Nature has intrinsic value, they will stare at you in much the same way as a deer in the headlights (right after they ask you what "intrinsic" means).
So I would like to lodge a protest. To whom do I submit it?
Apparently there is no one to take my complaint, and that speaks directly to the problem.
I will not be invited to give a Ted Talk because I believe there is no hope whatsoever that humans will re-connect with the natural world in a meaningful way as Tony wants them to do. That's not who humans are, nor is it the sort of thing humans can do.
If you listen to the interview Diane Rehm does with Juniper, you will notice that he remembers to say several times during the broadcast—not just once, or twice—that his book "is an optimistic one." I don't know whether Tony is fully aware of the rules governing what is acceptable to humans and what goes on beyond the bounds of propriety, but he makes sure to follow those rules: you can not take pessimistic (realistic) position about how humans behave (and have behaved in the past) if you want them to listen to you now (or you want to get a book published, etc.).
A new re-connection with the natural world lies completely outside the human purview. Aside from my observations of the human-created world, my experience of writing DOTE, and the reception to it, tells me that is so.
