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01/08/2016

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Jim

First off, glad it's worked out on the heat. Secondly, I'll bite on the last part of your post.

I think a lot of people concerned about these issues struggle with them on a continuous basis. The trends in the environment, government, and the economy all seem to point one way, and the issues get internalized into a giant, "What do I do about it?"

There's great pressure on each of us to find a valve to release this pressure. Most people find it in denial, diversion, or simple ignorance, but another group finds it in future prediction. The uncertainty of the future is frightening, but forming a conviction about the future helps to create order out of disorder and control out of the lack of it. It's a method to give oneself both psychological respite and a plan of action. (The plan of action can take many shapes, but we can all guess what they are.) That respite and plan often hardens into conviction, which the person will then defend, obviating rationality for personal protection. This conviction can also lead one into the path of others with a similar conviction, and the defensive shell becomes more resilient with the added social factors.

It'd be best for each of us to realize that these pressures exist and do influence our thinking. Very, very few do realize it.

We can identify and analyze trends, and some amazing work on that front is done here. On other sites, I do think there's merit to declining net energy as a general principle to help describe SOME (but not all, as if it's the grand unifying theory that explains everything) of what we are facing, but the tendency to make this principle more concrete than it is by adding timelines and exact dimensions is far more likely to be a psychological response than it is to be accurate.

Tverberg basically takes declining net energy as a grand unifying theory, then stirs in debt collapse as the trigger for a sudden, rather than prolonged, (synonym for fall). (At first it was peak oil, of course, but her latest cry is that we lack enough storage capacity and this will be the trigger for the debt default. Why one wouldn't do a double-take on that is concerning, but....)

We don't know the exact dimensions of the future. We could have a widespread market panic. It could trigger major debt defaults in both the private and public sectors. It could happen next week, it could happen next year, it could happen in 2026, it might not happen in many of our lifetimes. We don't know, although a great many trends point to a significant probability of it happening at some point.

But here's something than can be taken to the bank (excuse the play on words) if it does happen - there will be a response to it. Anyone who has been where Dave was last week knows that humans won't sit back in misery while the power is out and just say, oh, that's it, now we (synonym for fall). The elite won't do that, government won't do that, the people won't do that. We'll accept some sheety deals to "fix" it, like we did with Wall Street a few years ago, and potentially much worse, as Germany did less than a century ago.

Money is an illusion. It can be destroyed, but it can also be rebuilt, and it has been rebuilt over and over and over again. There are more tangible things in our economy - labor, technology, and resources - and these will not go away with any market crash. Humans will re-constitute money systems to rework their flows, even if it means ignoring money itself.

Here's my prognostication, for what it's worth: what we are most likely to get is the worst of all worlds - an economy which sputters and stumbles, only to be rebuilt and then fall apart again, with people increasingly desperate for answers and increasingly seeking out destructive solutions in governments, and all the while, we eat away at the biosphere and at our species (and all the other species) future chances for health and happiness. This will almost certainly take many generations to play out, but the exact details are unknown to any of us.

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