Thanks to a couple long-time readers for attending today’s panel discussion, which I described briefly a couple days ago. One of you asked me to post the transcript, so I’ve cleaned up my notes and posted them below.
While I’m developing a post about the ongoing decline into negative territory beyond Hubbert’s Peak, today’s brief post satisfies two purposes: (1) shameless self-promotion, and (2) short-term prediction.
I’ve returned to the U.S. after a trip to Italy. My goals for the trip were three-fold: (1) Visit the heart of western civilization before we complete our ongoing trip to the new Dark Age and then the neo-Neolithic, (2) collect anecdotes about the collapse of a large, powerful, seemingly invincible empire, and (3) try to determine if the hatred for a living Earth by Homo sapiens, which at this point is nearly all-consuming, was initiated — or at least accelerated — by the Renaissance. These goals echo the general themes I’ve considered throughout the history of this blog, so they seem appropriate to my one hundredth post.
As the sucker rally on Wall Street passed the four-week mark, your president, Congressional delegations, and media worked themselves into a lather explaining how a recovery was under way. To which James Howard Kunstler appropriately asks, “recovery to what?”
I appreciate the sentiments, expressed on and off the blog, by those who asked me to come back. As I’ve come to expect, you’re kind. You give me yet another reason to slog on, through the fog of misery shrouding the empire.
Last week’s contentious Viewpoints piece in the Arizona Republic stirred some long-overdue interest in peak oil. On the first of six pages of online comments is this one: “We’ll check back with ya in 10 years Guy. You might have some ‘splanin’ to do.”
I suspect there will be no need for explanation in a decade, by which time we’ll be well on our way to the post-industrial Stone Age. So I’ll provide the explanation now, before the power goes out and the Empire collapses under the weight of its own hubris. Actually, I gave a partial explanation in a follow-up piece in the Republic, but more details follow .