Dmitry Orlov's Blog, page 40

Real Communities are Self-Organizing

John Michael Greer, Sharon Astyk and Rob Hopkins have made some interesting points on the interesting topic of community, and I wish to join the fray. In all of my experience, communities — of people and animals — form instantaneously and rather effortlessly, based on a commonality of interests and needs. What takes a lot of work is not organizing communities, but preventing them from organizing — through the use of truncheons and tear gas, or evictions and mass imprisonment, or, more recentl...

The Oceans Are Coming — Part III: Remaining Afloat

Keith Farnish, Dmitry Orlov

[The first two parts of this series drew a surprising amount of vitriol from people who vehemently deny the merits of the case for adapting to rapid climate change and rising sea levels — greater even than the piece ridiculing the Teabaggers. The torrent of comment spam got so bad that I had to shut down comment submission altogether. It was probably fed to some extent by the various interests which were fighting to make the Copenhagen Conference a fiasco. I really ...

Predictions

Around this time of year, some brave souls venture to put their reputations at risk by attempting to predict what the next year will bring. Some do so with uncanny accuracy, others — not so much. Being a serious author who hardly ever makes jokes, I generally sit out this annual bout of frivolity, but, noting that a new decade is about to burst upon us, I thought it reasonably safe to paint a picture of how I see the next decade. (In the unlikely case that my predictions turn out to be...

Cracking Jokes at a Wake

As we approach the end of a year, and the end of a decade, it is a good time to draw some conclusions and think about the future... of the blog you are currently reading. I started it a few years ago, as part of an effort to promote a book I was writing. That went quite well, and in the process I built a small but enthusiastic audience of people who clamored for more.

They tended to be forward-looking, independent-thinking types who couldn't help but see that an American collapse was coming an...

Selling Climate Change

[Late yesterday I killed this post, along with the previous one, because comment moderation got to be too much of a chore. The fellow depicted here has a lot of cousins, and they all have internet access. Then quite a few people wrote to me to ask me to bring it back. As a compromise, I am bringing back just this post.:]

As some of you might have guessed by now, the topic of climate change is very important to me. I believe that all sorts of people should be made aware of climate change in...

I pruned back the last couple of posts, which had to do w...

I pruned back the last couple of posts, which had to do with so-called "Climategate," and which turned out to be unfair to my readers, who got lost among the flood of comments from human spambots. I got tired of looking at the nonsense that kept pouring in. It was my mistake to broach the subject in the first place, and I would like to apologize to my readers if this wasted any of their time.

The vast majority of the human spambots was quite easily identifiable as American based on their diale...

Selling Climate Change

As some of you might have guessed by now, the topic of climate change is very important to me. I believe that all sorts of people should be made aware of climate change in ways that will make it very important to them as well. By "all sorts" I mean not just the intelligent, educated people with an ability to understand what a "climate model" is, but the sort of people you can see exhibited here.

I spent a year working in advertising, and have gained some understanding of what sort of ammunitio...

Please Change the Climate. Thanks.

I have been trying not to write this blog post, but in the end I couldn't resist. I know full well that I should just ignore this Climategate nonsense, but since what I have to say is quite short, I'll just go ahead and say it.

1. The UEA emails were stolen. Data theft is a criminal activity. Use of stolen data is a criminal activity as well. People who get paid for publishing articles that are based on stolen data are dealing in stolen goods. This is no different from selling a house that you...

Giant Monsters

A few years ago I bought a sailboat from a fellow who I am sure wishes to remain unnamed, but who at the time made much of his boat restoration skills. He had made a number of alterations to the boat, some ambitious, some less so, while I was, at the time, quite inexperienced. In spite of my relative inexperience, I was already able to discern certain imperfections in the results of the seller's efforts. But I was very impressed with the boat itself (and the boat did turn out to be quite exce...

Interview — Radio New Zealand

Sunday Morning with Chris Laidlaw

Russian-born and now resident in the US, Dmitry Orlov has a theory that the United States is heading for collapse just as the Soviet Union did — and for the same reasons: a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil, a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget, and ballooning foreign debt. He talks to Chris Laidlaw about what he calls 'The Superpower Collapse Soup'.

At the end of the interview, I misspoke when Chris ...