triple trouble

TRIPLE TROUBLE

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If an EMP device was suddenly triggered, or a comet suddenly hit us, or Yellowstone suddenly blew up, or if a Muslim dude ( I view the unholy war against the infidel dogs massively overblown by our government, used to benefit itself by shatting on the Constitution openly and with a huge “awe-shucks” grin as they not so secretly plot to kill my writing business by suspending the First Amendment about any time now, but I mostly use the threat sarcastically ) went all jihad with a tac-nuke in DC, why then everything would be all hunky dory and peachy keen for us survivalists. The massive debts we incurred buying mountain farmland and cases of 308 ammo and dozens of semi-autos would be instantly wiped out and the minion armies of evil directed by our socialist masters would be impotent from lack of transportation. We would become masters of our immediate domain. Hooray! Happy times are here again as we slay zombies, impress the chicks and become glorious leaders of our tri-states area. If only we were going to be so lucky. Because that ain’t what is going to happen. What is already happening, and what will continue to happen with worse and worse feedback loops are the terrible trio of economic collapse, peak oil energy decline and weather weirdness.

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I hesitate to label our changing weather as Global Warming. If Al “I invented the Internet” Gore says something, it must be a damn lie. If he told me, Jim, you REALLY love your penis more than anything else, I would have to take a few moments to seriously consider whether or not if in fact I hated the little bastard for ruining my life. Despite the fact that we’ve been best buddies since puberty, just because Al said this was true would make me question that fact. Is the Little Brain actual an evil genius out to mislead and waylay me? Of course he isn’t. But I’d at least think about for a time. But despite Evil Al the fat hypocritical whore calling for global warming, obviously something is happening out there, if only the end to a four or five generational long perfectly benign global weather period. Which in itself was abnormal. Screwy weather is natures norm, so this whole hoopla over man made carbon emission might just be a silly attempt to explain why Mother Nature turn feral on us. I’ll tell you one thing, scientific consensus means diddly squat to me. Just because 99% of scientist agree on anthropologic global warming doesn’t make it true. They also had a consensus on the earth being flat and bleeding out patients.

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So, call it sun spot increases or just a return to normal, or even a warming preceding an ice age ( the “overwhelming consensus” in the 1970’s was a return to an ice age ), it is basically Not Normal Weather. Or, to assign a cool and nifty acronym to it, one that is more descriptive than Global Warming, is Glacier Retreat with Flash Flooding. Or, GRiFFin. But unlike a mythical Griffin, our GRiFFin has been documented and proven time and time again. Now, the nifty thing about a proven weather phenomenon, verses a hypothetical consensus driven propaganda theory such as Global Warming, is that you can point all day long to actual instances that everyone agrees meets the criteria of NOT being dependent on a federal grant to prove. And it is much easier to project the consequences into the future. GRiFFin’s future is easy. Mass starvation meets continuing population increases to equal die-off. The Sierra and Rocky mountains in our neck of the woods, and the Himalayan mountains in Asia are already seeing glacial retreats ( there are well documented retreats in South America also, but they will effect far less folks ). Now combine this with flash flooding as the weather basically gives you rain instead of snow and ice. Almost all the globes food production is already being effected.

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Peak Oil is another term you have to step around lightly because so many folks react adversely to it. It upsets their world/political/economic paradigm, so that should be expected ( the fact that I’m constantly taken by surprise by it tells me how insular and divorced from the main teeming mass of group think I am ). So rather than scream and run amok and yell that the sky is indeed falling, we gently sprinkle a smidge of sugar on it to make it much more palatable for the common palate. What we are experiencing now, globally, is a plateau of global oil production with a slight decline most likely already occurring ( you need a bit longer to see if it is more than a fluctuation in the plateau ). But that is not the important thing. The main thing is that we long ago passed the peak of Affordable and Easy oil. Even if the global production falls as slow and easy as did the US domestic lower 48 over thirty years, which may be the case, or we could see a more dramatic fall, it doesn’t matter. Because our entire global economy was built on Cheap And Accessible Oil. Not just any old oil. But oil that spilled out of the ground under its own pressure, as easy as the Beverly Hillbillies bubbling crude released from its boggy home by a fifty caliber black powder slug. The US defeated all global rivals for world domination with massive ore reserves freed by a proverbial sea of light sweet crude from Texas. We couldn’t have done it with ethanol from corn, or tar sands from Dakota or Alberta or deep water wells from the Gulf Of Mexico or sour oil pumped long distances over Artic tundra. The kind of oil substitutes we are using now are returning only five to twenty times the energy we are using to extract them. In World War Two, we were using oil that returned one hundred times, in a few cases up to two hundred times, the energy used. It is the difference between financial investments that give you a nickel back on your investment yearly, or two dollars.

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Peak Oil occurred five or six years ago, not in the decrease in the amount of oil but in the rapid substitution for real oil with crappy substitutes. Lower grades of coal, turning one half our corn into fuel ( with horrid extraction costs and a ten percent decline in BTU’s per gallon ), poisoning our underground aquifers to fracture the remaining natural gas out of old fields. We are essentially arresting the rapid decline in supply ( primarily here in the US, since we used so much of the globes supply we are the first party to see a decline in imported supply, the low hanging fruit in the orchard of decreases ) by using what is left that shares the transportation and supply infrastructure. We have NO energy surplus to build a new infrastructure of any kind, so only those carbon supplies that use what is already in place get a place at our energy menu. Which is why, despite really bad energy returns of energy used for extraction, we use ethanol and tar sands. They are liquid and can be used by our transportation fleet. We are eliminating the infrastructure cost which translates to an artificial boost in energy return.

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Yet on the other side of the coin, that weakened energy return does have a cost economically. Only a continued energy supply growth runs our economy. Look at the disruption caused by the 1970’s oil embargoes. We lost under five percent of our energy supply due to import disruptions, and look at the economic hell we went through. Today, we’ve lost TWENTY percent of our imports, and all the corn crop, Alberta tar sands and Dakota frac oil combined replace only a fraction of that loss. I’d wager we are, in net energy supply, over the five percent of the 70’s. And there is no increased energy supply to save us this time, as the Alaskan and North Sea oil did in the eighties ( as much as I loved and adored Ronald Reagan, the last great president, you have to acknowledge that only deficit spending and the oil supply surge made his term in office an economic miracle instead of a horror sequel of the Carter years ).

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Growth in energy no longer is possible to give us growth in the economy, so we’ve reverted to inflation to give the illusion of growth, kicking the can down the road for a bit longer ( if Obammy doesn’t turn out to be the final captain of the Titanic, I pity the poor bastard stupid enough to run for the presidency next time ). We are experiencing as bad as 40% inflation a year, although most is going to “save” the global banking system so domestically we see less in the way of price increases. Call it around ten or fifteen percent inflation. Which is translating into about one percent growth. Artificial growth, but the best we can do to keep the wheels on this derelict cart. That is as good as it is getting and it can only get worse. The economic decline is something we are all witnessing and needs little elaboration. Everything is working less and less well, and much more effort is going into less and less return. And, joy oh joy, we don’t know when the whole thing tumbles over the cliff/waterfall.

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Now, when you have less energy to grow the economy, and the growth based economy starts to fall apart, you can’t mitigate the effects of weather related events. Katrina was NOT simply a case of incompetence. If that was the case, the city would have been rebuilt by now, under a new president that everybody is so wonderfully giddy over. Why? Because he is a show dog. He puts a good face on things. Just as New Orleans put on a happy face for the tourists. The bulldozed piles of former slum housing is still sitting in moldy heaps. But the tourists only come to the sections of the city that had a new face of sheetrock and paint slapped on. It looks rebuilt, so it must be. Our president looks confident and looks like he has the answers, so it must be true. We are so adamant that we will refuse all proof of empire collapse that we have become a nation of form over function. We have built a movie set western cowboy town with nice looking building facades with no real structures behind them. And we glory in the illusion. The dead soil is pumped full of petroleum fertilizer and nutrient dead plants supposedly bloom, so all is well. The water we pump from the poisoned aquifer with dwindling supplies of low energy coal completes the illusion of plenty.

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These trends feed on themselves. Less energy goes into saving our food, less energy goes into finding more energy, less money is running the system as it desperately needs more just to maintain the structure already in place. We are successfully slowing the rate of collapse, but it surges forward regardless of our efforts. Forget system survival. Do not waste a second of your time or a single calorie of your efforts trying to save the system. Do not think for a second that your paper wealth in a bank will survive, that your job will last much longer, that your garden or farm won’t be impacted by weather related events, that your river fed by mountain ice won’t slow to a trickle. Just save yourself. Wheat crops are already failing everywhere. Use the last of your inflating money to buy grain while we have some kind of surplus here in this country. While the trains are still running and credit is still being given to businesses to conduct trade. The same with basic supplies such as ammunition. Surplus supplies for 1/100th of one percent of people that constitute serious preppers does not mean that it will be available after the next crisis brought on by crop failures, further energy declines or the next banking crisis. It is a no lose proposition, as supplies will only increase in price ( if available at all ) due to inflation and supply contraction. As oil supplies shrink and the price increases due to that and money creation, less is available for irrigation and transport and extracting ore and processing it. Time is short for prepping. One day I’ll be “off the air” due to government controls on speech, and by then you’ll have zero options on prepping. I can only tell you so many times. Systematic failures feeding on themselves. This is our present and our future.
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