Chris Jordan: Picturing excess – great for a world printing trillions of dollars
A photographer compares statistics about American consumption with photographs to help us understand just how much, how big, or how tragic this just might be.
The talk dates from 2008, but I find it fitting for today. In my travels, I am constantly explaining to speakers of French, Spanish and Portuguese just what a “trillion” dollars means. Their language usually stops at billion, and must only proceed to thousand billion, which is instantly nonsensical. To properly understand our future, we must wrap our collective heads around our true impact.
Jim Kunstler: This is about Peak Oil
Oil is the proxy for the end of the growth paradigm.
The Peak Oil story was never about running out of oil. It was about the collapse of complex systems in a world economy faced by the prospect of no further oil-fueled growth. It was something of a shock to many that the first complex system to fail would be banking, but the process is obvious: no more growth means no more ability to pay interest on credit… end of story, as Tony Soprano used to say.
For those of you straining to achieve industrial sustainability, this is actually a major step forward. Not only was the old system bad ecology, it’s now bad economics, too. We get to rebuild the next system aligning both the planet’s balance sheet and our own.
California forges ahead with climate balance, despite hard times
This strikes us as a really positive sign: despite calamitous financial events everywhere on earth, California is not throwing its ecological goals out the window, still adopting one of the most aggressive plans to put carbon back in balance in the world.
In crisis, it’s easy to forget our long-term plans we had just moments before. If the world’s fifth largest economy can keep from losing its head, think about how the rest of us can make positive moves in 2009!
The future of natural resources: aluminum prices plummet
At this moment , you can really see the effect of speculative markets on our economy the past few years . Gasoline in Washington is now cheaper than my morning coffee – around $1.70 at the time of this post. This shows how incredibly powerful speculation has been. The world economy has not been cut in half, but many resources are falling dramatically in price.
Today, the global cash price for aluminum also fell to around half of what it was earlier this year. It may seem crazy, but then again, there are THOUSANDS OF YEARS left of aluminum in the Earth’s crust.
The future of scarcity is not what many have been led to believe! More below:
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