Well, yes….and no. Oil is short of supply already in a very big sense, because global production has not kept up with demand, erasing much of the global spare capacity. So any interference in current production is likely to have magnified effects, esp in pricing.

If you took out all of Iran’s capacity to serve its customers, it would be a mess, regardless of their optimistic view on opening up strategic reserves and having the Saudis open the tap more. Can the Saudis open the tap more? Big question. But it had better be a lot if the sanctions, both current and new ones targeted at Iran’s oil shipping industry, take maximum effect. Iran normally produces about 4 mbd. Sanctions thus far have reduced that by up to 0.5 mbd. If sanctions hit Iranian oil container ships, then they won’t be able to sell much oil at all – unless the Chinese step in to help – which of course they will. Can the Saudis open their tap that much? I think not. And neither does the Empire, thus the comment on opening strategic reserves. Doing that, of course, would lead to a stand-off. Strategic reserves are just that – reserves – once gone, they are gone, introducing great risk to the markets. On the other hand how long can Iran go with seriously reduced oil income? Not long, I should imagine. So who will blink first? If Obama is wrong and the prices do go up as a result of his insane actions, then what? Iran wins big as the Americans are forced to ease off on sanctions. And Iran has already shown that at the current level of sanctions, it can survive, though with difficulty.

And in the midst of all this, you have the oil markets going wild. Obama says they won’t do anything to disturb the volatility of the markets, but he is full of shit. Just looking at the markets the wrong way will ensure a price increase. Remember – the oil price reached $147 per barrel before the wheels came off the economy in the last round. We have a much more fragile economy now attempting to come out of a depression – a depression caused by an oil spike in the beginning. How much of a further increase in price can it take before the wheels come off again? I think it would happen at a price point something below the $147 level. But who knows? Obama is taking a BIG risk here.

I have in the past described it as “not being programmed to win the lottery”. His book is a long slog but attempts to frame all of “sapiens” 200,000 year history into a theory – perhaps it always had to be true that at some point a top predator would evolve that would be too damn good for its own good.

I expected to find the book depressing, I found it long and sometimes tedious but strangely comforting.

I have been thinking about this the last number of days since Mary P posted her essay. The monks she mentions are doing something but even she notes it is not something that is going to save anyone in Japan, just something that gives some people comfort. In the movie The Grey Zone, based upon the story written by a Dr. who was there, there is an attempt by the prisoners to blow up the Crematoriums. In the process they face a number of moral choices, the major one based on whether to kill one girl to save the plan, or try to save her and risk the plan. In the end two crematoria are blown up. Does this lessen how many died? It was near the end of the war. Perhaps it saved a few, but the plotters are captured and layed on the ground where a German guard methodically shots them one after another. Our two main characters are next to each other. As the German nears they meet eyes and reach out to hold hands just before they are shot.

To me the answer is just to do what feels right to you to do, and hold someone’s hand as our future rises up to meet us.

I’ll see you with a slug-ridden gogi bush and a handful of strawberries.

I still have my money on Climate Change, though Fukushima is coming up fast on the inside lane. Should be nose-to-nose at the finish, however.

TRDH

You have hit upon a current problem being worked on by preservationists (here in the UK, it is the National Archives tasked with this challenging mission) all over the world, I suspect. Your main problems here are language, the media used to communicate that language, and the preservation of that media for long periods of time.

Language
What was English 500 years ago? Hardly understandable from a modern view. What about 2000 years? Didn’t really exist. What about 1 million years? What about the audible aspect of language? Would English be a known spoken language? Likely not. Would the character base of a future language be translatable to our Latin, or Oriental, or Cyrillic styles? Nope. The only reason we can translate any of the ancient languages is because we have found things like Rosetta Stones that help us to do that. If, however, you have a break in species, and a new species arises after winning a long, long, long, long series of lotteries, then will that species communicate in the same ways as we do? Probably not. And will they have Rosetta Stones to help them? No at all.

Media

What will you store the message on? Person-to-person stories down through the ages? Not likely – no people. Paper? No, it disintegrates and rots. Parchment? Not likely. Electronic media? How would you then read it? What with? Would the technology be there to do it? You would need hardware and software that could do the job. What are the chances of someone in the far future even knowing that our media is…well….media? We could leave a PC behind to read it with, but would they know what a PC is, and how to turn it on, and navigate to the message? Would they have the electric grid infrastructure in place to plug the PC into? Perhaps they are just lumps of metal and plastic forged for some unknown cause.

Media Preservation
And today, we do not have any form of media that can hold electronic forms of media beyond a hundred years or so (and I’m being very optimistic with that!), much less the technology required to read it. You might be able to preserve a disk, but its electronic content would have likely disintegrated many years prior. You will need an entirely different technology to hold the message, and a whole set of technologies to then read from that media. And as with the PC, would their technical infrastructure be equivalent to ours?

If and when mankind is made extinct, all our knowledge will go with us. Never to return. It will have to all be re-created in the Great Lottery of Nature. Our civilisation will be the subject of archaeological digs of the future, as those creature of the future forage through our landfills and buried cities, looking for clues as they try to solve the puzzle of these mysterious creatures of old and how they, in the midst of flourishing, seemed to suddenly disappear from the scene.

Perhaps, but nature seems to hit an amazing number of lottery odds, doesn’t it!…..

Nearly sixty million years later, one-fifth of a million years ago Homo sapiens was on the scene. One-twentieth of a million years ago, they burst out of Africa. They  are adapted to a very tropical climate. By the invention of clothes they have technologically adapted to places where they do not have a biological adaptation. So they act as an invasive species over most of our planet. Mea culpa. 

I was thinking that if we could do anything to make our time here on this planet into something other than a complete and total loss, it would be to document where we went wrong and what we did right and preserve that information in such a way that when it is dug up in a few million years, maybe we could prevent our successors from making the same mistakes. Does anyone know of such an effort?

“To all brothers and sisters who hold the dream in their hearts of a future world in which humans and all other beings live in harmony and mutual support — a world of sustainability, stability, and confidence. A world something like the one I described, so long ago, in Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging.”

http://carolynbaker.net/2012/05/07/ernest-callenbach-last-words-to-an-american-decline/

Any of you who felt the pull of Ecotopia and believed after reading the books that Ralph Nader was right when he said that “None of the happy conditions in Ecotopia are beyond the technical or resource reach of our society” might be interested in this assessment. Most of you on NBL would question whether those resources are still available. In any case, Callenbach does not come off (to me) as a total Pollyanna, and he does not paint a very pretty picture of the world we are leaving to the next few generations. But he does see some reason for hope that if people find a way to embrace the decay of our present civilization they will be able to make it through the collapse of empire and invent a new and better society.

It’s worth a look just to revel in his anger with the looter class, the maggot class, as he characterizes the 1%.

Michael Irving