i'm giving her all she's got, captain

I’M GIVING HER ALLS SHE’S GOT, CAPTAIN


Here at the USS American Empire, the oil furnaces are being fired at full capacity. Captain Bernenke is screaming down to the engine room to go full speed ahead and Engineer Obammy is replying with lilted and hard to understand speech that he’s giving her all she’s got. Bernenke is incapable of tearing out much hair from his head, but I’ll bet you dollars to donuts his beard is going to start looking a bit spotty here real soon. An occupational hazard of reading nearly anything and everything you can get your hands on about peak oil and resource collapse is that most of them follow the same formula of first soft selling the problem and then giving some hackneyed solution to it. Not only have I screamed and shouted at you that the so called solutions were an affront to human nature, not just needing to overcome greed and stupidity, but most of the time they also violate the laws of physics. Greer, who comes across as a pretty smart fellow ( and, hey, as much as I rag on the guy, I do buy every book not related to Druid stuff he puts out-I’ll violently disagree with him but still acknowledge he has something valuable to contribute as few others do ) still fails to spell out solutions to some pretty simple roadblocks we face. Such as, the solution is of course local organic farming, but how do we remove the millions of suburban homes off of former farmland so we can feed the millions in the city? The open spaces we have left all rely on pumping water. My simple point is that regardless of how good a solution is, it has to be practical.

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It is, pardon my being the uncouth savage that jumps up on to the table, whips out my junk and pisses into the punch bowl by bringing a bit of reality to the party, not good enough to whine that “well, at least I’m trying to come up with solutions instead of just showing the problems”. You must also bring practical solution to bear. I have a very easy solution. Shut the freak up and just worry about saving yourself. Most of the others are simply doomed. You can’t feed millions of people in New York or other urban areas without farming with petroleum. I don’t worry about coming up with solutions for everybody. It ain’t going to happen. There are too many lemmings to feed so just let them go off the cliff. We’ve already covered how business as usual is the norm right up to the crash. Those in charge won’t give up wealth and power which is tied up into how things are being done. Changing how they are done would impoverish the elite. Forget it happening. The other side of that coin is that, within that framework, our leaders are in fact furiously trying to bail out the Titanic. Sure, they’re using a gold plated cup instead of a galvanized bucket, but either way you simply don’t have the capacity to overcome the volume of water. You can only direct operations through the infrastructure you have, and ours is 100% petroleum based.

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Ethanol is a huge boondoggle. It gives up, at best if you reuse the leftover mash for animal feed, about a three fold energy increase ( that is overly optimistic, but let’s go with it ). The early oil rigs gave a 200 to 1 energy increase ( 200 times the energy needed to get it out ) just for comparison purposes. In return, half our corn crop is no longer used to feed people, to include all those angry Arabs that sit on top of the remaining middle east oil. And it’s not like we didn’t know what taking it off the market would accomplish, since we had a preview from the Mexican Tortilla Riots years back. Canadian tar sands are just a way to turn natural gas into auto fuel, and none to efficiently. Not much better than ethanol. But the reason these programs continue, if not also grow, is because they are the only two alternate energy sources that use the available infrastructure. It couldn’t be simpler. We can’t replace the car fleet we have, for lack of resources, with electric or compressed natural gas or whatever. We can’t replace all our gas stations with hydrogen fueling stations. You can’t wish the perfect solution into being without the resources ( hint, hint, Yuppie Survivalists ). Of course we have an enormous money creation program going on right now. Not because our bankers are ignorant to the fact that it will eventually crush the economy flatter than an anorexic model’s chest, but because it is their only way to replace China’s buying spree which is over and out done with. They don’t want our toxic debt and have pretty much dumped it over the last couple of years slowly but surely. You can’t tax the unemployed and you can’t sell toxic slop to others, so your only option is to print up more.

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Our brilliant boys at the head of the helm are doing all they can, with what little they have as realistic options, and it is only good enough to buy a bit more time. If you are wasting this time you are a Gott Damned Fool. Of the highest order. Do not confuse this breather as a sign we won’t collapse. And please don’t get confused by all the well intentioned idiots out there that preach unrealistic solutions. Here’s a good example. If only our half black hero on a white horse would “Manhattan Project” a bio-diesel program we could be energy independent in fifteen years. The same fuel that the military threw $500 a gallon at with marginal results. And a time frame ten years after our oil imports have ceased. And using what money exactly? And growing where, with what extra water? Perhaps we could use the 15% of our plutonium we mine ourselves ( the rest imported, and a lot of that from decommissioned Soviet bombs ) to build more nuke plants that take fifteen years to construct to desalinate sea water. Oh, wait, we could use coal. Coal, which peaked in energy output over ten years ago ( we are mining more but getting less BTU’s out of it ) and which we will need to start importing some of in just a few years ( competing with China for it ). All great solutions, but not realistic given our current resource shrinkage. The solutions that can work are already being used, and they can’t save us, only slow the sinking.

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