John Michael Greer's Blog, page 78

The Costs of Complexity

It's a bit ironic, given the events now in the headlines, that I started last week's post by commenting that it had been an interesting week for connoisseurs of decline and fall; it might have been better to say "You ain't seen nothing yet." About the time the volcanic ash from Iceland began settling out of Europe's airspace, to begin with, another black cloud began to rise from the lava vents of Wall Street, caused by the spontaneous combustion of whatever might have been left of Goldman Sa...

Economic Superstitions

It has been an interesting week for connoisseurs of decline and fall. As I'm sure all my readers are aware by now, a small volcano in Iceland managed to chuck a sizable monkey wrench into the gears of business as usual across Europe by filling the upper atmosphere with a massive plume of what amounts to finely ground glass: just the thing you want to put into the intake of your favorite jet engine.

Most volcanic eruptions don't do this, but Eyjafjallajokull – say that three times very fast –...

A Blindness to Systems

"I feel my fate in what I cannot fear," poet Theodore Roethke wrote in his most famous poem, "The Waking." He could have been speaking for any of us; as individuals, communities, or societies, it's not the problems we dread but the ones we're unable to take seriously, or fail to recognize as problems at all, that end up dragging us down.

Some of the responses to last week's Archdruid Report post brought that point forcefully home to me. The theme of that post, as regular readers will remember,...

The Twilight of the Machine

The end of the age of cheap abundant energy, as last week's Archdruid Report argued, brings with it an unavoidable reshaping of our most basic ideas about economics and, in particular, economic development. For the last three centuries or so, the effective meaning of this phrase has centered on the replacement of human labor by machines. All the other measures of development – and of course plenty of them have been offered down through the years – either reflect or presuppose that basic econ...

Riddles in the Dark

Any number of metaphors might be used for the predicament today's industrial societies face as the age of cheap energy stumbles to its end, but the one that keeps coming to mind is drawn from a scene in one of the favorite books of my childhood, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. It's the point in the story when Bilbo Baggins, the protagonist, gets lost in goblin-tunnels under the Misty Mountains and there encounters a gaunt, slippery, cannibalistic creature named Gollum.

That meeting was not exact...

The Logic of Abundance

The last several posts here on The Archdruid Report have focused on the ramifications of a single concept – the importance of energy concentration, as distinct from the raw quantity of energy, in the economics of the future. This concept has implications that go well beyond the obvious, because three centuries of unthinking dependence on highly concentrated fossil fuels have reshaped not only the economies and the cultures of the industrial West, but some of our most fundamental assumptions ...

Energy Concentration Revisited

For those watching current affairs with an eye sharpened by history, it's been quite a week since the last Archdruid Report post came out. For starters, American politicians and pundits have gone in for another round of China-bashing, insisting that China's manipulation of its currency is unacceptable to us. Since the US is manipulating its own currency at least as shamelessly, the strength of their case is open to question; one gathers that the real grievance is that China's manipulations ha...

Barbarism and Good Brandy

A taste for irony is a useful habit to cultivate if you happen to write about energy issues in the declining years of a civilization defined by its extravagant use of energy, on the one hand, and the dubious logic it uses to justify that extravagance on the other. One of the things you can count on, if that description fits you, is that any time you discuss one of the fallacies that has helped back that civilization into a corner, plenty of readers will respond with comments that demonstrate...

An Exergy Crisis

In last week's Archdruid Report post, I discussed the difference between energy and exergy, or in slightly less jargon-laden terms, between the quantity of energy and the concentration of energy. It's hard to think of a more critical difference to keep in mind if you're trying to make sense of the predicament of modern industrial civilization, but it's even harder to think of a point more often missed in the rising spiral of debates about that predicament.

The basic principle is simple enoug...

Energy Follows Its Bliss

Industrial civilization is a complicated thing, and its decline and fall bids fair to be more complicated still, but both rest on the refreshingly simple foundations of physical law. That's crucial to keep in mind, because the raw emotional impact of the unwelcome future breathing down our necks just now can make it far too easy to retreat into one form or another of self-deception.

Plenty of the new energy technologies discussed so enthusiastically on the internet these days might as well be...