James Howard Kunstler warns: American society is sliding into a greater depression than the one Grandma lived through. On the technical side, there has been unending controversy as to whether we’re gripped by inflation or deflation. It’s certainly deceptive. Food and gasoline prices are rising faster than the rivers of Iowa. But the prices of assets, like houses, stocks, jet-skis, GMC Yukons and pre-owned Hummel figurines are cratering as America turns into Yard Sale Nation.

We’re a very different country than we were in 1932. In that earlier crisis of capital, few people had any money but our society still possessed fantastic resources. We had plenty of everything that our land could provide: a treasure trove of mineral ores and the equipment to refine it all, a wealth of oil and gas still in the ground, and all the rigs needed to get at it, manpower galore (and of a highly disciplined, regimented kind), with fine-tuned factories waiting for orders. We had a railroad system that was the envy of the world and millions of family farms (even despite the dust bowl) owned by people who retained age-old skills not yet degraded by agribusiness. We had fully-functional cities with operating waterfronts and ten thousand small towns with local economies, local newspapers, and local culture.

We had a crisis of capital in the 1930s for reasons that are still debated today. My own guess is a combination of a bad debt workout that sucked “money” into a black hole (since money is loaned into existence, but vanishes if the loans are not systematically paid back) plus a gross saturation of markets, meaning that every American who had wanted to buy a car or an electric toaster had done so and there was no one left to sell to. (The first round of globalism — 1870 - 1914 — had shut down after the fiasco of World War One.)

Our debt problems today are of a magnitude so extreme that astronomers would be hard pressed to calculate them. By any rational measure our society is comprehensively bankrupt. From the federal treasury down to the suburban cul-de-sacs so much loaned money is either not being paid back, or is at risk of never being paid back, that the suckage of presumed wealth has passed through an event horizon out of the known universe into some other realm of space-time, never to be seen again in this realm. This would seem to be the very essence of monetary deflation — money defaulted out-of-existence.

This condition is partly disguised by both the loss of credibility of US currency and real-world scarcities of oil and food, but the upshot will be something at least twice as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s: people with no money in a land with no resources (with manpower that has no discipline), hardly any family farms left, cities that are basket-cases of bottomless need, comatose small towns stripped of their assets and social capital, an aviation industry on the verge of death, and a railroad system that is the laughingstock of the world. Not to mention the mind-boggling liabilities of suburbia and the motoring infrastructure that services it.

The banks have been doing their death dance for an entire year now, pretending that their problems are those of mere “liquidity” (i.e. cash-on-hand) rather than insolvency (no cash either on hand or in the vault and nothing else to sell to raise cash except worthless “creative” securities that nobody would ever buy). But the destruction of money (resulting from loans not paid back) is now so intense that the game of pretend has reached its terminal point. The question for the moment is exactly who and what will be crushed as these institutions roll over and die.

Complicating matters is a global oil predicament that is really not hard to understand, but which the organs of news and opinion have obdurately failed to explicate for an anxious public. Call it Peak Oil. There are only a few elements of it you need to know. 1.) that demand has now permanently outstripped supply; 2.) that new discoveries are too meager to offset consumption; 3.) That under under the circumstances, the systems we rely on for daily life are crumbling. I’ve called this situation The Long Emergency.

Our chances of mitigating this, and of continuing our current way-of-life is about zero. (07/01/08)
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George Monbiot writes: Almost everyone seems to agree: governments now face a choice between saving the planet and saving the economy. As recession looms, the political pressure to abandon green policies intensifies. A report published yesterday by Ernst and Young suggests that the EU’s puny carbon target will raise energy bills by 20% over the next 12 years(1). Last week the prime minister’s advisers admitted to the Guardian that his renewable energy plans were “on the margins” of what people will tolerate.

But these fears are based on a false assumption: that there is a cheap alternative to a green economy. Last week New Scientist reported a survey of oil industry experts, which found that most of them believe global oil supplies will peak by 2010. If they are right, the game is up. A report published by the US Department of Energy in 2005 argued that unless the world begins a crash programme of replacements 10 or 20 years before oil peaks, a crisis “unlike any yet faced by modern industrial society” is unavoidable.

If the world is sliding into recession, it’s partly because governments believed that they could choose between economy and ecology. The price of oil is so high and it hurts so much because there has been no serious effort to reduce our dependency. Yesterday in the Guardian, Rajendra Pachauri suggested that an impending recession could force us to confront the flaws in the global economy. Sadly it seems so far to have had the opposite effect: a recent Ipsos Mori poll suggests that people are losing interest in climate change. Opportunities for energy populism abound: it cannot be long before one of the major parties abandons the pale green consensus and starts invoking an oil cornucopia it cannot possibly deliver. …

Oliver Tickell proposes setting a global limit for carbon pollution then selling permits to pollute to companies extracting or refining fossil fuels. This has the advantage of regulating a few thousand corporations - running oil refineries, coal washeries, gas pipelines and cement and fertiliser works for example - rather than a few billion citizens. These firms would buy their permits in a global auction, run by a coalition of the world’s central banks. There’s a reserve price, to ensure that the cost of carbon doesn’t fall too low, and a ceiling price, at which the banks promise to sell permits, to ensure that the cost doesn’t cripple the global economy. In this case companies would be borrowing permits from the future. But because the money raised would be invested in renewables, the demand for fossil fuels would fall, so fewer permits would need to be issued in later years.

Tickell calculates that if the cap were set low enough to ensure that the world became carbon neutral by 2050, the total cost of permits would be about $1 trillion a year, or roughly 1.5% of the global economy. The money would be spent on helping the poor to adapt to climate change, paying countries to protect forests and other ecosystems, developing low-carbon farming, promoting energy efficiency and building renewable power plants.

But his figure seems too low. Like many of the world’s climate scientists, Oliver Tickell proposes that the concentration of greenhouse gases should eventually be stabilised at 350 parts per million (carbon dioxide equivalent) in the atmosphere, and his calculations are based on this target. …

If the price of the carbon permits sold at auction were much higher than Tickell suggests, the extra money could be used for massive tax rebates and social spending, aimed especially at the poor. But could the world afford it?

This money doesn’t disappear, it gets spent. Tickell’s proposal could represent a classic Keynesian solution to economic crisis. The $1, $2 or even $5 trillion the system would cost is used to kick-start a green industrial revolution, a new New Deal not that different from the original one (whose most successful component was Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, which protected forests and farmland(10)). This would not be the first time that business was rescued by the measures it most stoutly resists: there’s a long history of corporate lobbying against the kind of government spending that eventually saves the corporate economy. (07/01/08)
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BBC Science – A lack of suitable flowers may be forcing bumblebees to seek out aphids to feed on their sugary secretions. The Bumblebee Conservation Trust (BCT) said it was a behaviour that appeared to be becoming increasingly common.

Images captured by the BBC Scotland news website in a garden in Nairn, in the Highlands, show the bees visiting tree leaves covered with aphids. The secretions offer a substitute for nectar, but do not contain the protein the insects need to stay healthy.

There have been warnings that bumblebee and wild bee populations around the UK are experiencing “catastrophic declines”. Bees are important pollinators of flowers and crops. The bumblebees’ behaviour of feeding on secretions from aphids could be a further sign of the problems facing the insects.

Dr Ben Darvill, a BCT director and research ecologist based at the University of Stirling, said there have been several reports of the behaviour but the reason for it remained unclear. He said: “It’s hard to say for sure, but it does seem as if this behaviour is becoming more common. Bumblebees are known to feed from aphid secretions, and from extra-floral nectaries on unlikely plants like bracken - but it’s more usual to see it in upland areas where there are few other flowers around. The fact that it is now frequently observed elsewhere may suggest that there are fewer of the right sorts of flowers around in people’s gardens and in the wider countryside.”

Research work at the University of Stirling, has demonstrated that certain pollens are particularly rich in protein, said Dr Darvill. He said to help declining bumblebees, gardeners, farmers and land managers need to ensure a constant supply of forage plants from March through until September. Flowers from the pea and mint families seem to be particularly beneficial.

Craig Macadam, Scottish officer with conservation group Buglife, said aphids were considered a garden pest but he would not wish to see them wiped out. He said: “Ants often protect the aphids from other predators such as ladybirds and in return they take the honey dew secreted by the aphids. “There is a fine balance to be struck in the garden - the answer is to put plants in the garden that are of benefit to bees.” (07/01/08)
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BBC Science — Almost one in four secondary schools in England no longer has any specialist physics teachers, a survey suggests. The report into the supply of physics teachers, published by academics at the University of Buckingham, warns of a threat to the subject’s future.

The government has set targets to promote the number of physics teachers in secondary schools. But the report’s authors warn that half of the schools in inner London do not have specialist physics teachers.

The report, by Professor Alan Smithers and Dr Pamela Robinson of the Centre for Education and Employment Research, says that 26% more physics teachers are leaving or retiring than are being recruited. From September, pupils who do sufficiently well in tests for 14-year-olds will have an entitlement to be taught physics. But this report highlights concerns that this will have to be provided by non-specialist staff. The survey shows substantial differences in the availability of physics teachers - both regional differences and by the type of school. And it raises concerns about the viability of physics as a separate subject.

In inner London, there is a tendency to have general science teachers rather than specialist physics teachers - and 50% of secondary schools do not have any physics teachers. …

Meanwhile Scotland’s science centres are to get an extra £250,000 this year in an effort to improve primary school teachers’ delivery of science subjects. Last month the annual Scottish survey of achievement in science showed that too few pupils were achieving the expected levels in science.

Scotland’s education and lifelong learning secretary, Fiona Hyslop, said: “Scotland’s economic future is increasingly dependent on science, engineering and technology.” She added: “Our children must be inspired by the world of science and, in order for that to happen, they need the best teaching available.” (07/01/08)
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