What condition your condition is in

Three ways to understand what condition our condition is in.

Poetic:
In theory they were sound on Expectation,
Had there been situations to be in;
Unluckily they were their situation
W.H. Auden, The Quest


Brilliantly Scientific (from the Oil Drum), excerpted:
In my opinion, the true liquidity problem worldwide is not a lack
of available cash, but declining net oil export capacity. The central
banks can inject all of the financial liquidity into the system that
they want to, but they cannot create BTU's of energy.


Peak Oil and Peak Export scenarios inevitably mean economic
contractions, especially in the US, where the majority of Americans
live off the discretionary income of other Americans. In my opinion,
we are in the early stages of a profound transformation of the US
economy--from one focused on meeting wants to one focused on meeting
needs, where people are once again going to have to become producers
and providers of essential goods and services. The problem is that the
myth of the possibility an infinite rate of increase in the
consumption of a finite energy resource base is going take a long time
to kill.


One thing that I am pretty sure of is that it will be better to be
a net energy and/or food producer rather than a net energy and food
consumer. -excepted from this article - Resurgence of Risk -the Oildrum,
by Jeffrey J. Brown


A third way to understand our condition.

Credit is money that is available to loan to business, you and me. A loan is made from a person or a group to another person or a group in order to allow the creation of something important for the community. People with fixed assets, a rancher in the early west perhaps, needed a feed mill built but the cows wouldn't go to market until fall. He hired a bunch of guys to build it, from the local community usually, but they needed to eat too, so he gave them IOUs in his ranch name, and because he was big ranch, people accepted the IOUs as money. Thus they traded their labor for future payment, and the general store accepted the IOUs for the workers and that is how little banks in the west began.


These loans built granaries, wagons, roads, irrigation, schools, everything that was too big to pay out of pocket. The society benefited from every loan, and the people, ranchers, merchants, laborers all got a tremendous benefit. All of them got the flour mills, blacksmiths, granaries, roads, schools, and barber shops. The profit to the community was the construction of the needed infrastructure. Life was better for all. Profit on money was not the motive, building against entropy was the motive.

Compare that to loans/credit today. Borrowing money against a credit card so that you can go to Cancun, Mexico might be fun for you, but nothing is created. Your promise to pay it back creates the money itself in our system, and your promise is loaned out to others, ten times for every dollar that you owe. Still most often nothing is created of use to the society. So how come we can create money, and fuel the planes fly to Cancun? Who or what is paying for that power to fly the plane, to grow the food, to service your credit card loan?
The oil and natural gas in the earth are paying for it.

Energy. Almost free energy, stored sunlight, liquid gold, Texas Tea - OIL, Natural Gas, Coal. Now oil is more than half gone. The light crude, much more gone than that. We're pumping pretty shitty stuff now. We're injecting nitrogen, hot water, steam, drilling horizontally, and getting oil flavored water in biggest Saudi fields. The last half of oil is much harder to get and not very good stuff. But we can use it. We can't find enough to replace what we are already short. We have a lot left, but our demand for Cancun on the credit card, for every human in developing economies that wants the same middle class life of a wizard - converting stored petrochemicals to money want the lifestyle that you have lived. We don't have enough oil left, and it took extremely unusual conditions to make the oil we have. Most of it was 120 million to 80 million years old. The earth gave us a gift of what appeared to be boundless energy.


So back to how we got here. Oil is a huge part, greed and blindness in the name of profit is another. Just a question to ask yourself, just because we are such and easily confused animals. Did you really think, I mean, by what natural mechanism did you think that the house you owned for the last ten years actually was getting to be worth more and more gold, oil, energy, food? How was it getting bigger, more? Everything in our world obeys the same law of energy - entropy - unless you squeeze in more energy, things go DOWN, get smaller, break, decompose, shift to lower energy states. Your cup of coffee cools off. Have you ever seen it get hotter without adding energy? So what the fuck we we thinking when already built, already decaying houses started to go up in valuation? We didn't think. We just wanted all that money (oil energy). We all wanted to be rich, and re-mortgaging your house, buying a house with nothing down was a path to that humvee, that trip to Cabo, Europe.


The answer is simple, it is not a market question for economists who think only within the bounds of a system that believes that the free energy is forever. The increasing value of your house, which you refinanced was based on pumping out 120 million years of oil from the earth, and based on that energy, loans were made, thus money created, and made available to you so that you could spend it on a new DVD player and wide screen TV, and an IPOD, and twenty cell phones.


All this credit, mortgage seconds, using the fraudulent creation of rising home values has now come home to roost. Not much was added to the infrastructure of sustainable agriculture, home power, clean water, better schools. We have pumped and used over one half of all that beautiful almost free energy, that wonderful sweet Texas tea on schlock that didn't make us so happy anyway. We bought plastic boats and plastic cars. All of which made a quick trip to the landfill, ocean or streams as soon as it broke or no longer pleased us. Broken toys fill landfills and float in a Texas sized island of plastic six pack tops in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.


So when you are discussing the elections, investments, and wondering who is going to "fix" the energy problem, you are sustaining the very illusion that is literally killing us, killing the planet and your children's children's future. Simple enough.


Learn to do something and teach your children so they can have a life. Stop being simple bovine consumers hoping you'll die before it really gets bad, before the bounty runs out. Where the fuck are your guts? Please don't talk to me about Federal elections or comparison shopping for more electronic drek. We could be using what is left of the oil and coal and natural gas to slowly build what the rancher wanted built, a better life of value. We don't have great answers yet, and we have 4.6 billion too many people, too many than the earth can sustain, only the oil made it possible to have so many of us. Oil equals food, less oil, less food, less food . . .

Many people do understand all this. A very tiny fraction accept the consequences of what we have done, and understand the challenges of decreasing energy. People have been talking about the transition to a lower energy future, and the die off (always hushed about that - mustn't scare the sheeple), but the majority of the public really doesn't give a fuck what happens as long as they have and keep and can add to their comfort, material wealth and ability to do whatever they want, whenever they want it.

Of those that have seen the ship of our Empire headed towards these rocks have written, cajoled and entreated. But now most of these planners, military, government, emergency workers, post carbon groups and communities are saying less and less to the mass of the public. It is clear that the public of the Empire is lost in itself, at least many believe so, so your TV and radio will tell you only what you already know, what you want to hear, and about new things to buy, even as the structure of the Empire, the financial structure of the Empire built on ever expanding nearly free energy, collapses.

If you have chosen to look away all this time, to be part of the dreamers and sheep, then you have not read this far in my blog this morning anyway, you turned away yet again. I'm so sorry, but there are too many of us to save. There is no fix in progress, no governemtn intervention. There are just too many of us, and we don't want to hear.

That is the condition our condition is in.