WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Freeknowledge:

In one of the articles that you cited, it stated:


“While it is generally agreed that government intervention played an important role in China’s demographic transition (Feeney and wang 1993; Hesketh et al. 2005), ample evidence suggests that China’s current low fertility is not simply a prescribed result of the one-child policy (e.g., Chen et al. 2009; Gu and wang 2009; wang 2009; Zheng et al. 2009). Also, as Johnson (1994) argued, policy alternatives to the one-child policy existed that might have produced fertility decline perhaps even more rapid than was actually achieved—namely, by removing pronatalist elements in Chinese institutional structures.”


Granted, the author then challenged the consensus, and arguably validly. Ward cannot be faulted much, and I get it, that you see the white man’s bias shining through in his work. There is hardly a white man alive in which it doesn’t, even among the most enlightened of us. We are raised with it from the cradle. I recall once reading about some “liberal” issue and British debates on it, and how skewed it was. A rad lefty asked Chomsky about it, and Chomsky replied that it would be good to remember that the Eurocentric bias has been so pronounced over so many centuries, particularly in the past 500 years, that even the most “free thinking” British intellectuals cannot escape British conceits that are centuries old. They ate imperial ideology with their breakfast for centuries, and their imperial bias is like the air they breathe. The USA is the same. We own the world!

You see me skewer the USA’s imperial and racist conceits constantly, but I am virtually alone among all other American white men that I know. Just yesterday, I read Uncle Ed’s latest in Z Magazine, and he summarized media fabrications that I have seen him write about for 25 years, and I am in awe that Ed will be 91 next month. That Wikipedia bio on him is a great example of white imperial bias. Ed and Noam have been explicit about their thrust from the beginning, in that regarding foreign affairs, their focus was always on the West, not its victims. Their focus was not so much on the reality of Vietnam, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, the Ukraine, or the Middle East, but on how the Western media’s treatment of the reality was pure propaganda. When I have read attacks on their work for the past generation, the attackers invariably engaged in the straw man argument of pretending that Noam and Ed were arguing for the objective reality in our imperial targets, when they really weren’t. They always stood on the high ethical ground of taking on the motivation of their nation and the crimes it committed/abetted, but their critics could never go there and turned their work upside-down, pretending that they were arguing for the objective reality in our targets, so that Ed and Noam were irrationally put in the position of seeming like defenders of the programs of our victims. It is irrational at best and deeply dishonest at worst, but I have almost never seen an exception to that kind of attack on Noam and Ed. The fact is that USA has never cared about any nation other than the USA. That is how nationalism works, with its in-group bias.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I’ll continue the athletic posts, and probably conclude them with this one. Humans have our arboreal heritage to thank for the large range of motion in our arms. Most athletics take advantage of our limber arms and ability to run, which our great ape cousins cannot do. But as humanity began relying on our brains and tools, our physical prowess has declined. Studies have shown that the average hunter-gatherer of 30,000 years ago would have smoked current athletes in contests.

In my freshman year, throwing over 180 feet was not the big time, but it got me into the big meets so I could at least gawk. Bakersfield is like Oklahoma, a semi-desert environment where many “Okies” settled after being driven out by the Dust Bowl, including my redneck relatives. As an aside, at Easter an aunt told me that she had her DNA read recently, and there was no Indian DNA in it, which means that I don’t have any either, which is going to surprise my father, among others, who always though that the redneck side of our family had some Indian blood, too. Some of my relatives sure look it. I’ll get my results back soon.

As God-forsaken as Bakersfield seems, it hosts one of the premier junior college track events, with its tartan track, which I rarely encountered in junior college. The javelin is kind of a bastard stepchild event, and when that thrower that I competed against set the world record several years later, they redesigned javelins to sail shorter distances, because they were in danger of sailing out of the stadiums. Then the javelin throw would be banished from stadiums and become a moribund event, happening in the pastures where nobody would see it. When I was a freshman, I was in the lower flights, and competed in the field next to the Bakersfield stadium. In my sophomore year I competed in the stadiums, and that was a very different experience, competing in front of thousands of people.

But at that Bakersfield meet in my freshman year, I still got to walk around in the “infield” of the track, where the field events take place. I still think about that day in amazement. At the shotput event, a boy who grew up in the town where I lived next to that baseball pitcher was the big man, but lost that day to another shot-putter who everybody thought was on steroids and likely was. That local boy held the American record several years later and was a threat to set the world record. At that meet a couple of years later, at the high jump pit I watched Dwight Stones’s cousin jump seven-foot-three or so, who eventually went higher than Stones ever did and is one of the highest jumpers ever. On the track, I watched Billy Mullins blow away the field in the 400 meters. A few years later, Mullins had the best mark in the world that year. But the big star of the meet was Houston McTear, that poor black boy who co-held the world record in the 100-yard dash. McTear was one of those small sprinters. If you watch Usain Bolt’s races, he is never the first out of the blocks, as the little guys blast out first, but once Bolt’s legs get going, his long strides blow away the field. McTear was one of those little guy quick starters. He set the world record in the 60 meter dash the next year, and one of his times would still be the world record if it was not thrown out. That year when I regularly saw him at the meets, he was ranked number one in the USA and number two in the world. California junior college track in those days was nothing else like I have seen or heard of, and I was fortunate to be in that milieu. Junior college, a step away from high school, with national champions and world record holders competing. It was kind of bizarre, as I look back at it.

While the javelin throw was being held in the stadium, the 100 meters was run. I still marvel over the level of competition. That Canadian champion dominated with 260-foot throws, but that eventual world record holder was at that meet, as I recall, and he threw over 250 feet that year, and there was another 250-foot thrower, a boy named Wayne Guy. We were all teenagers. The javelin is a weight event, but is heavily technique dependent. I was a skinny 155 pounds in my freshman year, but my pitching background came in handy. My javelin always went exactly where I wanted it to. I never made wild throws. My throws were like a sniper’s. Not so with Wayne Guy. He was a big, burly, wild thrower. He actually threw farther in junior college than he did at Berkeley.

When McTear ran the 100 meters, it seemed like he had a ten-meter lead ten meters into the race! Within a couple of seconds, he had a several meter lead, which was never challenged in any of his races that I saw that year. At that Bakersfield meet that year, at the finish line for the 100 meters was a wall of cameramen to photograph the finish. I doubt that I ever saw a crowd of cameramen like that at any other event in my track career. I was on the infield, to the side of the javelin runway, looking over at the track where the 100 meters was about to begin, and Wayne Guy was running down the javelin runway. He made a mighty heave, trying to outdo the Canadian champion who usually just made one throw at the meets that I witnessed, which nobody else came close to matching. Wayne Guy made his heave, but it was wild. It sailed high and right at that wall of cameramen at the 100-meter finish line. I vividly recall watching it flying right at those cameramen, who were oblivious of what was heading toward them. It landed right in the middle of them. A crowd quickly formed and an ambulance took away the hapless cameraman who got hit. People die from javelin injuries, and in my sophomore year, one competitor attended the meet with a huge bandage around his foot. The day before, his foot was pierced by a javelin thrown by a member of his team.

After college, I was pals with a guy whose father once held the world record in the discus, who was one of many unfortunate throwers who lost to Al Oerter at the Olympics. The guy was a world class high jumper and javelin thrower himself, and knew many the big names in track. The high jump and javelin throw seemed to go together, and javelin throwers usually made good decathletes. The American record holder before that other guy set the world record high jumped, and in my sophomore year, I came in fifth at the Mt. Sac Relays, which I suppose was my best finish. I threw nearly 200 feet that day. I threw further at the university, but that was my best throw in junior college (I had to borrow a javelin for that throw, as mine did not pass the weight test – javelins failing the weigh-in for big meets were common). The guy who came in fourth ended up at my university, and we became friends. He eventually threw 240 feet and was the best thrower in NCAA Division II, and we won the national championship both years when I was on the team. I could tell scandalous tales of under-the-table money and the like, but not today.

That day at the Mt. Sac Relays, the javelin thrower who came in second, at about 210 feet, was also a seven-foot high jumper. The next year, he was at UCLA throwing 240 feet, the javelin crowd was amazed, and he made the Olympic trials in the javelin in 1984, which I watched (Carl Lewis was in the long-jump trials as the javelin trials were being held, as I recall). But he became a decathlete, had the best mark in the USA in 1983, and was being groomed to be the next Bruce Jenner. In this interview, his hair even looked kind of like Bruce’s. But 1984 was not a kind year for him or that world record holder in the javelin. Leading up the LA Olympics, on a building next to my office, a mural at least eight stories tall featured that javelin thrower. In the wake of his world record, he was on a celebrity show called Superstars and smoked the field with a record showing. But in 1984, which was boycotted by the communist nations as vengeance for the USA’s boycotting the 1980 Olympics because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (with breathtaking hypocrisy, as later became clear), an East German obliterated that astounding record with a throw that will likely never be equaled, especially with the new javelins. Steroid fueled? Likely.

Not only did that American lose his world record, he lost the trials to that 300-foot throw that I witnessed (which was almost certainly steroid-fueled), and failed miserably in the 1984 Olympics as well as the 1988 Olympics. In 1985, he was a has-been and was not even invited to defend his Superstars title. When he was riding high, he bought a Corvette, and from those who knew him I heard how large his ego had swelled, which was typical of those swaggering days. He eventually competed in South Africa for the money, was banned from the track circuit because of it, and then moved to South Africa and competed for them.

That high-jumper/javelin-thrower who became a decathlete fell off the map in 1984. He came in eighth in the javelin at the Olympic trials but did not place even in the top eight in the decathlon. I asked a pal who should know what happened to the guy, and the reply was that he had to go off of the steroids that were responsible for his world-class marks, as they began testing for them (Ben Johnson was stripped of his 100-meter medal at the 1988 Olympics).

As I look at the Olympic trials marks in 1984, it is like a trip down memory lane, of all the American and world record holders, guys that I competed against or saw in my track days. None of them knew my name, but I was around them and witnessed people competing at a world-class level. It was really something to see up close. During those days in LA, I saw a couple of Lakers games from the floor, and once from half-court, a couple of rows back. I could have been a benchwarmer on my high school and junior college basketball teams, and could dunk a basketball when I was 20 (my small hands meant that I had to get up to about 11 feet in order to dunk), but watching Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and gang from that close was an amazing experience, seeing giants move with that speed, grace, and power.

But when people devote their lives to those pursuits, they are often stunted in other aspects of their lives. Magic Johnson was a legendary womanizer, and him and three women at once, of different races, was one of his specialties, which he called a “rainbow.” That shot putter was murdered by his wife, allegedly in self-defense. Even though Muhammad Ali bought McTear’s parents a house, when I was in LA, McTear became homeless, living on the beach, and tried to make a “homeless” comeback in track. That American record holder in the javelin fell out of a pickup truck and died, in his prime. During my track days, two brothers from Oregon were noted weight event competitors, and during the prime of one of them, while he was still in college, right after setting the all-time collegiate record, he came down with testicular cancer. Those in the field assumed that it was a side-effect of steroids. That world record discus thrower just sat on his couch, watching TV and getting fat, and died a few years later, at a relatively young age. Right around that time, Bruce Springsteen released a song called Glory Days, about those washed up old athletes reminiscing about those days of glory.

In the Fifth Epoch, I don’t foresee competitive anything, as it is born of scarcity, much less people putting their bodies on the line, questing after riches and fame.

Time for chores, then hiking.

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

Posted by Wade Frazier (here)
Ward cannot be faulted much

I agree. I only recently understood in 2014 that the UN population projections are wrong, most likely for political reasons. Specialists like Yong Cai did say that One-Child policy had no effect, but even he says that it is because of socio-economic development. There was a famous slogan from activists saying that "Development is the best contraceptive" Even that is wrong. Only recently in 2014, has the major driver of demographic transition and demographic dividend been understood to be education.
See The Demographic Dividend is an Education-triggered Dividend
The best population projections come from this research. (in short 9.5 billion at peak around 2070 and a decline from then, assuming no catastrophes)

The late date for this research coming 50 years after the book "Population Bomb" can be attributed to the normal paths that science takes, but also to the lack of interest and investment in truly understanding the lives and interest in hearing the voices of the powerless.

Coming back to China. The draconian one-child policy thankfully was not as draconian because people already choose to have fewer kids, the truly terrible outcome was the missing women of China, which was made worse by the anxiety around the policy. People give the policy a lot of weight because of our implicit bias to accept anything that the powerful say. Understandably a consequence of our genetic heritage. Likewise Mao and his government are rightly blamed for the great Chinese famine that killed roughly 40 million people, but the success of education and basic health care in China prevented more than 100 million deaths as compared to India.

We need to understand the world according to the ideals of science. I try.


I am taking the course An Introduction to Global Health would recommend it to anybody interested in Human Development

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I was just talking with a pal yesterday about some of this, and I was recently asked about “suicidal” behavior in the free energy pursuit.

If a person has woken up, and by that, I mean awoken from their in-group conceits, they have already done the hardest work. Waking up is the hard part. Everything after that is relatively easy. But people don’t really awaken if their hearts are not in the right place, and there aren’t many of those to start with. Waking up like that is the greatest step on the path to true sentience, getting beyond our herd conditioning.

For instance, seeing Godzilla as some kind of “bad guy” is just another in-group delusion, making him into an out-group. The GCs are just the masters of a game that nearly all humans play. You can get into trouble with Godzilla if you are not careful, and I have long written on the unproductive paths in the free energy quest, and don’t need to belabor them. Some are “merely” life-wasting, some are life-risking, and some are suicidal. If you want to try to get killed, go demo an FE machine in a public venue, with nothing protecting you but your merry little band of supporters. Almost nobody ever gets to that stage, for various reasons, so that risk is rather remote for FE aspirants.

But the greatest threats that all FE aspirant face are their own foibles and those of their social circles and associates, not the agents of organized suppression. Dennis finally admitted it to me that last time that I saw him, and I learned that lesson the hard way in the 1980s.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Freeknowledge:

The Demographic Transition was made possible by the Industrial Revolution. England’s was the pristine instance of it, and all others were influenced by it. While education can help, without the energy to support industrial life, it is going to be a limited effect. The energy event preceded the demographic/social/cognitive one for all previous Epochs, and in fact made them possible. FE is the next one, the biggest of all, and then all humans will take that ride into the next Epoch, not just a fortunate few, like white guys.

I was just reading today on the latest study of the vulnerable Antarctic ice sheet. That one goes, and the Demographic Transition is not going to mean much. We will all go down together, although people in Bangladesh may suffer the worst, at least at first.

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

Of course Wade. The time to spend on education and for societies to invest comes from having an energy surplus, which comes from fossil fuel for now. From looking at Gapminder it seems to me that 2 tonnes of Co2 per year is enough for demographic transition (India is still at 1.8 or so)

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Before I begin my busy day, I want to make a post on what I touched on yesterday, with the Western Antarctica ice sheet, before I get back to Peak Oil. Scientific literacy does not mean blindly accepting the pronouncements of any scientific authority, but means understanding the evidence, the hypotheses, the theories, how the evidence was amassed, and one of the most important aspects of scientific literacy is understanding when the scientific process has been corrupted by vested interests and why. As Bucky Fuller noted, scientists can be rather naïve about that part. It is kind of like believing that the American plutocracy is some kind of democracy (or that we have a free press), and that America’s politicians are anything more than disposable puppets, which Fuller also noted.

It is kind of bizarre that conspiracists call Global Warming a hoax and conspiracy, when its effects are easily noticeable. Not only are they easily noticeable, but the prevailing hypotheses predict them, and the hypotheses are partly formed from studying the hot and cold periods in Earth’s past, when forests or ice were at the poles. It really is not all that hard to understand the basics of climate change, and the recent model that recreated the prior relatively ice-free period on Earth is important to understand. Take away the “girdle” of floating ice, and the ice sheets become much more vulnerable to disintegration. This latest model doubles the maximum sea level rise formerly predicted by the IPCC, which Global Warming “skeptics” decry as an alarmist organization, and conspiracist “skeptics” call the IPCC part of some global conspiracy. Conspiracies don’t work like that, in my experience, and I have some. The leading Republican candidates for the American presidency dismiss global warming as a “hoax,” etc., as they echo Professor Limbaugh at the Fox News School of Climate Science. Ted Cruz literally made his Global Warming denial statements at a Koch brothers’ event, who are infamous for funding right-wing think tanks such as The Heritage Foundation and The Heartland Institute, the kind that Brian O’Leary’s former colleague sold his soul to work for. Somehow, the conspiracists give the very obvious manipulations of the Koch brothers and friends a free pass. Those benevolent billionaires.

It can be very educational to read Global Warming denier works. The scientifically illiterate try to dismiss carbon dioxide’s role in warming Earth’s atmosphere, which has zero credibility with anybody who is scientifically literate. I have seen so-called scientists dismiss both the temperature and carbon dioxide data, as they state that it was collected near cities and other “heat islands” or sources of carbon dioxide, such as the Mauna Loa Observatory readings. I have, of course, never seen one of those naysayers ever do any of the work to demonstrate that the Mauna Loa data is faulty, or is not reproduced by other gathering sites around Earth. In fact, when there has been some contamination of the data from the active volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island, the Mauna Loa scientists then adjust out the contamination.

The more scientifically literate deniers seize on regional and oscillating data, as they try to muddy the waters, but local variation is largely meaningless (glaciers are retreating worldwide, not just the glacier that I witnessed receding), and oscillating data is normal. A great deal of effort by climate scientists has been devoted to teasing the signal from the noise. You won’t find Global Warming deniers dealing with that evidence at all, as they launch their empty theories. If you follow their work much, they nearly invariably conclude their efforts by stating the immense economic cost of reducing carbon emissions, and state that with the immense cost of reducing carbon emissions, the climate change data is not robust enough to warrant doing anything, so they finish by stating that business as usual is the best answer for now, and that more study is needed. Exxon could not have said it any better. This kind of “do nothing” response to human-induced environmental change has rich precedence, going back millennia, as ancient civilizations wiped themselves out. The “business as usual” voices could be heard even back then. As George Carlin said, inertia is the most powerful force in the universe.

Those Global Warming deniers encourage people to bury their heads in the sand, create a seeming debate where one really does not exist, and do their best, helped out by Fox News and friends (the most vociferous of whom are directly on the payroll of the hydrocarbon lobby), to lull the masses back to sleep. And I am not making up some kind of straw man argument. One of my closest friends from college, who can’t get enough of Fox News and lionized the Bush regime, like many business school graduates, just this past month informed me that there is no evidence of manmade climate change. He has also parroted another Fox News talking point, which is that there is so much oil in the ground that we can never run out of it. So, epic increases in carbon dioxide levels will have no impact on global climate, and there is so much in the ground that we can burn it with abandon, and taking the carbon dioxide PPM to 1,000 is just fine. In fact, there are “scientists” in the pay of the hydrocarbon lobby who don’t deny that our hydrocarbon age is pumping unprecedented amounts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but they then perform experiments to show how great that is for growing plants faster (a “scientist” in Arizona has done just that), while ignoring the calamitous effects, such as acidifying the oceans, which is already happening. I was even horrified to find a free energy magazine doing that, of all publications, as it went off the deep end after its founder was murdered.

100 million people live within three feet of sea level today, and a six-foot sea level rise will displace 13 million Americans, and that level is about what the latest study states is quite possible in this century. The USA is history’s richest nation, and those 13 million may be able to move without too much travail, but I would not want to live to see it. Poor nations such as Bangladesh will be affected far worse, and as one of Earth’s poorest nations, they won’t really have anywhere to go. More than a billion people live within 80 feet of sea level, but a mere six-foot rise will mean hundreds of millions of refugees. Again, these projections are not being made by wild-eyed conspiracists, but come from the state-of-the-art models, buttressed by data that gets more alarming each year. A ten-foot rise in this century is by no means an outrageous prediction, especially when the recent model doubled the previous one. With epic rises in carbon dioxide, we are in uncharted territory, as far as how quickly the changes could come.

That is just the sea level change. Vast changes to Earth’s arable land will also happen, accompanied by epic droughts and floods, which will precipitate immense crop failures.

But the smart money thinks that humanity will have World War III over the world’s dwindling oil supplies, centered on the Middle East, obviously, before an environmental calamity does us in. Choose your poison.

Of course, the answer to all of those scenarios has been on Earth longer than I have been alive, and has been studiously ignored by all factions, surreally.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

The start of my busy day got delayed, so here comes a little post. Of all the unproductive paths to FE, the one that I see advocated constantly is enlisting the masses to help manifest FE, which I call Level 10. Been there, done that, several times. One of the most important lessons of my journey is that masses have never helped any Epochal Event happen. They were always initiated by a relative or literal handful of people, and it will be no different this time. The masses see no further than the limits of their immediate self-interest, as they live in scarcity and fear. It has ever been this way. When the masses have been engaged in the FE pursuit, they all turned into Orcs lusting after the One Ring, as their egos were overcome by the immensity of the issue, FE aspirants announce that they are the Messiah, and the rest of that tawdry circus.

The masses have never even imagined the next Epoch until it happened, and the fear and denial that are constantly aimed at the idea of FE are normal. Liberating women and slaves, or the Demographic Transition, were effects of industrialization, not causes, but “progressives” get all wrapped up in social causes that really are meaningless in the big picture, as all they did was try to more equitably divvy up humanity’s scarce economic pie, not make it bigger. If you had talked about liberating women and slaves in 1720 in England, the heart of the Industrial Revolution, you would have been looked at as if you were insane. Only when machines began replacing people did the “liberation” mentality begin to rise, and in Europe, the first glimmers of it really began with the spread of the watermill during the Medieval Warm Period and the reintroduction of the Classic Greek teachings.

People who try to enlist the masses for Epochal change are deluded and hacking at branches at best, and usually are trying to fill their social needs. Acknowledging the situation is very different from judging it, and the sooner that would-be FE activists can relinquish their social consciousness, the better. Sociality is pre-sentient, and will be no help at all for manifesting the biggest event in the human journey, as it is all about in-groups and out-groups. Truly sentient beings coming together in a unity of purpose, seeing all of humanity as its in-group, however, is a horse of a different color, which is what my effort is attempting to initiate, not a social movement. I only need 5,000 of those needles in haystacks for my plan to work, which is less than one-in-a-million on Earth. I am not really asking for much, to manifest the biggest event in the human journey, when humanity becomes a Type 1 civilization.

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

Just wanted to add about how the third agricultural epoch is not enough for demographic transition to happen. While poor countries are in transition to the industrial fourth epoch, they are nonetheless firmly in the early fourth epoch in terms of energy consumption and have left agricultural epoch behind. Except for the poorest countries in Africa every country seems to be consuming 10 times what they consumed in the agricultural epoch. My calculations suggest that in India (which is a laggard in terms of energy consumption) people consume 14 times what they need to survive in terms of calories (2000). Sure agriculture produced other things not just food even then India seems an order of magnitude from the agricultural epoch.

Energy and Consciousness (knowledge) is all there is.

[Limor Wolf]

Originally posted by Wade Frazier: If a person has woken up, and by that, I mean awoken from their in-group conceits they have already done the hardest work. Waking up is the hard part. Everything after that is relatively easy

Thank you, Wade, there is a great amount of truth in that. Awakening, though, comes in stages, it has layers, it has a trail and it does not rest on laurels at any one moment. There is an awakening to the happenings of the world, and there is an awakening of self-realization to all that happens in our world and is manifesting inside us. One may come to think that they get there and that they are free and all knowledge gained that is perheps the mistake and the illusion. Illusion that some would like well kept

Posted by Wade Frazier (here)
I am not really asking for much, to manifest the biggest event in the human journey, when humanity becomes a Type 1 civilization.

If one has a divine purpose, and walks a path, it can not be fulfilled (manifested) unless all aspects of one's life are in the light, revealed, and eventually healed. This is the greatest help for the planet and a necessity to one's own cause.

So the path gets one as far as they are willing to go, and than it starts all over again, as in a loop. Sometimes spirit will nudge, knowing that the person's soul has different purpose and another way to arrive to the destination than the human front, and that the person would not like to do this all over again.. but many times many hours of work and a maitenance of a 'normal' life facade keeps one busy and they will not so much hear, will not listen to the subtle whispers of encouragments, the needed second awakening (perheps the hardest) and the clearing of the hidden hindrances that were put in their way.

This can not be done alone, but when the overlays are recognized and removed, then highest manifestation comes, clear and able



Much love,

Limor

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Freeknowledge:

Yes, it turns out that industrialized nations largely feed the world’s urban poor. That is why I refer to the pristine instances of the agrarian and industrial revolutions, and why scientists study those pristine instances. The dynamics of later transitions were influenced by them.

Hi Limor:

Yes, the journey never ends, but those who I respected the most kept going, never finished, but their hearts led them, always. It is the getting out of one’s insulated in-group conceits that it is the hard part. All the rest is relatively easy.

It took me many years to finally realize it. People would hear the FE idea, but they would react in denial and fear, and even those who accepted the idea would still get trapped in fear and denial, as they proposed those suicidal approaches to FE. I saw those reactions thousands of times, and it was not until about a decade ago that I realized what they all had in common: they were all trapped in the orbit of scarcity.

The reason why they were caught in that orbit was because they hooked up their awareness to the in-group ideologies that fed them. It is a failing of all social animals. They sought security (and rank, privileges, etc.), and sold out their sentience in the process. Almost nobody on Earth has ever shed those in-group beliefs, but those that did, to one degree or another, did so because they cared, and that caring led to their awakening. That was the hard part. Everything else was relatively easy. Those that I respected the most nearly did not survive their moments of awakening (1, 2), and mine was not easy either, but once we truly woke up, there was no going back. Almost nobody on Earth ever has ever woken up past their in-group conceits. Almost nobody wants to. Only those who have are going to be of any help for what I am attempting, which is why I know that I seek needles in haystacks.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have a busy next six weeks, so will be relatively quiet. I have been away for a couple of days. This post will be some odds and ends. The periodicity hypothesis for mass extinctions has been a kind of a Moby-Dick for many astronomically-oriented scientists. You don’t find many paleologists who hypothesize about celestial events causing mass extinctions, and even the bolide hypothesis for the dinosaurs’ demise has competition.

I recently wrote of Lisa Randall’s dark matter hypothesis for periodic bolide impacts, and another scientist recently launched his harpoon, arguing for a huge planet with a 27-million year orbit that causes those comet showers.

Mass extinctions don’t seem to have much of a fit to every 27 million years in the eon of complex life, and I am always going to be skeptical of the periodic celestial event explanation. Ever since that bolide hypothesis for the dinosaurs’ demise, which broke the Darwinian taboo on studying mass extinctions in general, the bolide hypothesis became something of a fad, IMO, similar to how explaining the dinosaurs’ demise became something of a scientific parlor game for many years. Here is a 62-million year pattern, but that is a very rough fit, IMO. This is what scientists do: they spin hypotheses based on the evidence, and then test them against the subsequent evidence. Most hypotheses are wrong. That is the nature of the beast, and scientists ideally never get too attached to their hypotheses, but they do, as they are human and successes are rewarded and failures can be penalized. But there is great virtue in coming up with hypotheses, even if it is to watch them eventually fail, as it is all part of the learning experience.

Take the Permian extinction, for instance, which is the biggest of all. Amongst specialists who have studied that extinction, there is no doubt that the dynamics of the formation of the supercontinent Pangaea were responsible, from volcanism (and the resultant greenhouse effect) to the elimination of continental shelves to hydrogen sulfide events which damaged the ozone layer. Those dynamics explain the mass extinction very well, IMO, and while bolide events may have happened, I don’t see them as being primarily responsible for the extinction. Earth was highly hostile to complex life then.

On my list is to get to Serg’s Seattle post, and get back to Global Warming and Peak Oil. Methane has long been hypothesized to have a sporadic role in global warming events, as a knock-on effect to other warming dynamics, increasing carbon dioxide chief among them. I recently saw a news item on methane vaporization in Siberia creating craters. Man, we are playing with nuclear dynamite, as we burn hydrocarbons with abandon.

I was recently asked about clarity in my approach, and I replied here, with this sentence summing up my goal:

“Make a reproducible, commercial quality FE device, let’s say to power homes and cars for starters, and give it to humanity.”

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

The “problem” with Uncle Ed’s Z Magazine writings is that they are not available to the non-paying public until 60 days after being published in Z Magazine. Ed often emails me his articles before they run, but I really can’t discuss them in public for a couple of months, and as I got home today, my reminder on this article popped up, which Ed published in January, to notify me that that article is now available to the public Internet. Ed turns 91 this week. That he keeps on chugging is awe-inspiring.

The USA and Israel are two of the Earth’s greatest criminal regimes, but while their murders are carried out under a flag, it all gets a free pass. I have that book that Ed mentions in that article, Kill Anything that Moves, which shows that what the USA did in Vietnam rivaled anything that the Nazis did. Some of the tactics were identical, as were the rationales, such as mass killings of civilians because they were “harboring” the resistance. It is a handy rational for any invader to slaughter at will.

In that article, Ed also called out the so-called human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International, which appalled me 20 years ago with its imperial bias. Of course, Ed also wrote about ongoing genocides, such as Rwanda’s invasion of the Congo.

Here is a very short clip of Ed at work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

This will be a post on oil formation. First, a warning: I am not a petroleum geologist. But I began studying Peak Oil and oil formation theory back in 2003, and while studying for my big essay, many other pieces fell into place as I studied the history of life on Earth. People have argued that petroleum geologists are either dupes or part of a conspiracy, but I don’t see it. With the rise of other sciences, the story of oil formation only gets more robust.

Those same anoxic events that often signaled mass extinctions formed the oil deposits. Paleologists generally do not work for oil companies. While petroleum geology is a prominent subspecialty of geology, it is not the only one, and other developing sciences and tools have independently validated oil formation hypotheses. I’ll cover some of them.

Plate tectonic theory began development in the 1960s, and Wegener’s hypothesis of moving continents was vindicated, although he did not understand the mechanism. At the beginning of my history of life on Earth chapters, I present world maps, such as here or here. The rise of paleomagnetism studies has provided a great deal of the evidence of continental movements in the eon of complex life, but far from the only evidence. The evidence on the seafloor is easily seen, and plate movements can be measured today, as they happen. Fossil studies have also contributed, as scientists can reconstruct biomes from the fossil and paleomagnetic evidence, combined with radioactive dating techniques and other evidence. The rise in mass spectrometers and their increasing sophistication has allowed scientists to make many inquiries which were not feasible or possible in earlier times. That data has been used in many ways over recent generations, and not just for radioactive dating, but examining isotope ratios to tell when whales began moving into marine environments, for instance. Mass spectrometers have determined that hydrocarbon deposits are all enriched in carbon-12, which is a signature of life. Not only is carbon-12 enrichment a signature of life, with the rise of molecular biology, scientists have been able to determine, step-by-step, how the remains of marine organisms were transformed into oil.

If you review the world maps in my big essay, you can see the births and deaths of the oceans that produced most of Earth’s oil deposits, especially the Tethys. The squeezing of those oceans subducted those ancient anoxic shores and formed the deep oil deposits in today’s Middle East.

Before the rise of plate tectonics, molecular biology, ubiquitous mass spectrometers, and the like, some Stalinist scientists revived the idea that oil was not formed via geological processes working on marine sediments, but was due to some primordial processes in Earth’s mantle. In the West, respected scientist Thomas Gold championed the hypothesis, but with the rise of those sciences and techniques, the abiogenic hypothesis (meaning that life was not involved in oil formation) has fallen by the wayside, and for good reason. Einstein wrote the forward to Hapgood’s pole-shift book, too, before the rise of plate tectonics, and Einstein would be the first today to disavow Hapgood’s pole-shift hypothesis.

With a process called thermal depolymerization, the multi-million-year processes that geologists think made the oil deposits has been shortened to mere hours. For those who refute the idea that geological processes can turn marine sediments into oil (Stalinist scientists, for instance), thermal depolymerization supports a powerful counterargument.

Hypotheses come and go. That is the process of science. Most new hypotheses receive harsh receptions from orthodoxy, which is just partly how science works, and it is often unfair. I know of entire bodies of theory, developed from amazing and “impossible” tools that orthodoxy has ignored for nearly a century, and I know that technologies exist on Earth today that turn the physics textbooks into doorstops. I am intimately familiar with the failings of orthodox science, and when powerful vested interests get involved, mainstream science can be misdirected or come to a screeching halt. I make no bones about that. But those dynamics and techniques work in specific ways on specific targets. With the national security state, it is easy to put the kibosh on UFO information and fools applying for patents for free energy devices, cover-up the murder of the head of state, and the like, but private interests run the show, not the world’s governments. Their “private” methods are more effective than the governmental ones, and making a free energy inventor an offer that he can’t refuse is one of their specialties. But those strategies only work when the phenomena are at the margins of perception, when the targets for neutralization are relatively few, and when the issue is important enough to warrant a huge effort.

The UFO/ET and exotic technology cover-ups are conjoined, and Ed Mitchell’s view of the UFO/ET cover-up is very close to mine. Brian’s life was shortened due to his snooping into the UFO issue, and Brian’s life was probably the epitome of the intersection of the UFO/ET and FE issues.

If you try to peddle high-MPG carburetors, the oil interests will get involved, up to and including the Rockefellers, and even they treat the sitting American president as stooge. We encountered them more than once on our journey, or more accurately, they encountered us. But they are not at the top. Arab sheiks also have an interest in foiling FE attempts, but they are not at the top, either, or anywhere near it. The ploys by those at the top are highly sophisticated and subtle and rarely need to get overtly violent.

But none of that seems to have much relationship with oil formation or Peak Oil hypotheses. There are thousands of scientists traipsing across the globe, in various disciplines, gathering data, studying it, and forming their hypotheses. I have yet to hear of a fossil bed being classified, mass spectrometers being outlawed, or scientific papers on those issues being put under the national security kibosh. Of course, armchair conspiracists (or “whistleblowers” with little credibility – Ralph is an example of a credible one) spin wild yarns with almost no evidence, and as Ed Mitchell said about UFOs, a lot of that conspiratorial hyperventilating and the attendant circus is often part of a disinformation effort, to muddy the waters and portray all alternatives to the orthodox view as tin-foil-hat stuff. And the masses oblige them, in their paranoid, tabloid-reading, scientifically illiterate fervor.

To be scientifically literate on oil formation hypotheses does not mean uncritically accepting any of them, but means that the observer is familiar with the evidence, the hypotheses, the state of debate (or lack thereof), and so on. Only when you have some familiarity with the orthodox hypotheses and evidence can you credibly digest the alternative hypotheses, but I have found that almost none of the prominent challengers have any, but they regurgitate lists of talking points provided by dubious sources.

Has anybody noticed that for every mass killing in the USA (which happens with numbing regularity as the American middle class crumbles), that the Internet is filled with “false flag” “analyses” within hours of the events? There is an entire conspiracist cottage industry that floats “false flag” “evidence” for any and all mass killings, often before there are even any suspects. That is not how credible investigations are performed, and I am very familiar with non-credible ones.

To this day, I am contacted regarding the so-called faked Moon Landings, as scientifically illiterate people with minimal familiarity with the evidence regurgitate “evidence” that does not add up to anything. Amongst the scientifically illiterate, those “hypotheses” will never die, just as there is still a Flat Earth Society, and it is not a parody.

The so-called “Climategate” was a great deal of ado about nothing, in which conspiracists and their enablers tried to make a mountain out of a molehill. Anything of real importance on keeping the lid on anything that could be disruptive to the world’s power structure is going to be highly secure, not something that university professors are in on. Trying to portray the “Climategate” emails as some sort of scientific conspiracy only demonstrates the scientific illiteracy and political-economic naïveté of the accusers.

You can still find interested-conflicted academics and scientists who advocate the abiogenic oil hypothesis, as they try to raise money for drilling deeply into Earth’s crust. The only abiogenic hypothesis “success” that I ever heard of was a hole drilled miles deep that yielded 80 barrels or so of oil, which was likely the drilling mud. The EROI of such oil is going to be abysmal, and EROI is coming in future posts. The thought that drilling into Earth’s mantle for oil is going to solve humanity’s energy problems is ridiculous, for a number of reasons.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

This will be a short one, to begin the reply to Serg’s Seattle post. Of course, I am going to expand it a little (and it will have its own thread on my forum), and have it be on the benefits and detriments of my heritage and culture. Seattle is a world-class city and where I came into the world, and may be where I leave it, too. But I am in no rush to find out.

When those few hundred people left Africa and conquered Earth, they were all black-skinned, like sub-Saharan Africans today, and the different skin colors in today’s humanity are due to geographic isolation and evolution, including sexual selection. My white skin, blond hair (at least while young!), and blue eyes (blue-green in my case) is a very recent evolutionary adaptation to the relatively sunless environment of northern Europe, where my ancestors hailed from.

The big human migrations, powered by new energy technologies, were usually disastrous to those on the receiving end of the migrations, from the megafauna to the hunter-gatherers to the hapless peoples that Europe conquered. Many peoples are kept in bondage by the West today, as we exploit their oil, labor, and resources while destroying entire nations in the process. As Jefferson did, I tremble to think that the Creator is just, because my great nation has a great deal to answer for.

The European/American invasion and subjugation of the Western Hemisphere is one long tale of genocide and other horrors, as incredibly rich continents were plundered and “settled.” The American theft of temperate North America is history’s greatest swindle, architected by its most illustrious Founding Father, and my home state is named after him, as it marks the ultimate reach of empire in the Continental USA.

Being that what we call Washington State was conquered near the end of the process, it was the least genocidal in nature of temperate North America’s conquest process, as the natives did not present much of an obstacle by that time and the noble savage meme was rising. There is still plenty to answer for, regarding the white invasion and “settlement” of what became Washington State, but because it was the least genocidal in nature in the Continental USA, the state is filled with Indian reservations and they were not prisons that made for easy slaughter, as happened eastward and southward.

Seattle was a frontier town, and like Alaska and Hawaii are today, it attracted societal dropouts and those looking for a new start. Hawaii is the most socialist state in the USA today, and Seattle has been the home of many “progressive” movements. The Wobblies have a longtime presence here, and my cooperative supermarket, the most successful in the USA, the biggest in North America, is staffed by Wobblies. Seattle’s history is rich with labor strikes. While my grandfather came to Washington Grapes-of-Wrath-style, he eventually became the president of the painters’ union (and my aunt worked for him there) and lived on a hilltop in Seattle. I lived with them for six months between 1982 and 1986, when I met Dennis, and it was a blessed experience. I was in the WTO Jubilee march in 1999, marching alongside the former Washington governor and grandmothers, the night before the tear gas (which I am happy that I missed), so I suppose that I am partly living out my heritage, although I went to business school, after that voice in my head spoke up.

Off to work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I just wished Uncle Ed a happy birthday, as he turns 91 today.

I’ll make another Seattle post and then do more on Peak Oil, and alternate the topics until I finish them.

One goal of my big essay was to show the trajectory that led to the rise of Europe. Because the Fertile Crescent’s peoples first domesticated plants and animals, because they had draft animals, and because they had communication with Eurasia and the Mediterranean, they had advantages that Earth’s other inhabitants did not enjoy, and it led to the first civilization. Europe was a beneficiary of the migration of agrarian and pastoral peoples, and the rise of the watermill, oceangoing sailing ships, and reintroduction of the ancient Greek teachings were all part of a wave that Europe rode to global conquest. I am a result of that wave. That wave crashed across North America, destroying everything in its wake, to establish “civilization.”

The Mediterranean was lushly forested before the rise of civilized humanity, but North America has not been raped for as long, so it is still relatively verdant. The Pacific Northwest was the last part of North America to be invaded by white people, and the natives never adopted agriculture (they could rely on salmon runs), so the vast forests were not raped until white people arrived less than two centuries ago. North America’s Pacific coast Indians south of the forests did not adopt agriculture either, so the lands were relatively untouched.

In my home state of Washington, 95% of the forests have been logged, and the remnant is in the mountains, the conservation movement gained momentum before the chain saws could get it all, and that is where I hike so happily. That is a big reason why I live here, and I hike year-round. After living in an asphalt jungle to begin my career, I have never taken that for granted.

I had my sights set on Seattle when I was still in college, and it took four attempts to live here before this last successful attempt. I have lived here since 1997, and don’t plan to leave. Actually, the city of Seattle is not where I live, but in the suburbs, across the street from Microsoft’s headquarters. Seattle is turning into a metropolis, and I am not happy about it. I was born in Seattle and lived there each time I tried to live up here, but now I only go into Seattle when I have to. The traffic is getting horrible (this past year, it was ranked the third worst in the USA, behind LA and San Francisco – here it is ranked “only” fourth), as Seattle falls victim to its success. No civilization has ever been sustainable, as they all relied on energy resources that were plundered to depletion, and cities are born of energy scarcity. In the Fifth Epoch, cities as we know them will go the way of slavery, and nobody will lament their passing.

I do not need to belabor the downsides of cities: they are dysfunctional energy-concentrating devices that never last very long. Watching Detroit literally crumble has been “interesting.” But while they last, cities can provide numerous benefits, and I am a member of history’s most privileged demographic group: a white, educated American baby boomer man. I have always been mindful of the benefits. I have had opportunities and experiences that 99% of humanity can only dream of, and I have taken advantage of them, mostly to live relatively comfortably as I try to prevent humanity from going straight down the toilet and taking Earth’s ecosystems with it. We are far closer to “achieving” that “feat” than almost anybody wants to admit. Biologists and climate scientists understand, as do a few other professions that don’t have their heads in the sand, but the vast majority of humanity is oblivious, with the horizons of their awareness being the limits of their immediate self-interest. When the perils come to light, a faux debate is launched by vested interests, enabled by a compliant media, and the public eats it up, such as with Global Warming. So, it remains business as usual, and if activists like me even survive our experiences, we are voices in the wilderness.

Bill Gates is a very bright boy and lives quite modestly, for the world’s richest man. He does not engage in the gauche displays of Paul Allen and Larry Ellison, in a world’s biggest yacht competition. But you would not want Gates over for dinner, either, and his fortune, like all such fortunes, was not built honestly. Capitalism is a rapacious system and always has been, and big capitalist winners becoming “philanthropists” is something to be very wary of, and Gates’s philanthropy is not very different from John Rockefeller’s.

That said, I live in the Bill Gates Bubble, and my neighborhood is like a little World’s Fair, with all continents represented, especially Asia. Microsoft’s capitalistic success is responsible for that. To the people who really run the world, Gates is just a boy with his toys, as a member of the retail elite.

And I live in the middle of all of that, although my personal life is rather quiet, as I want it to be. I’ll get to Serg’s music interests soon, and yes, Seattle was responsible for some music trends, and has been a leading influence in progressive movements, conservation movements, and the like. But when those grunge bands made it, they bought waterfront homes near Gates if they could. One pal lived next door to Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love right after they made it big, on the shores of Lake Washington, like Gates and Allen do. I saw in the news recently that Cobain’s daughter is fighting to protect her $450 million inheritance from her father. If anything, that is The American Way.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

This post will be on Peak Oil. Energy-resource-depletion dynamics are nothing new. Humanity had experienced Peak Megafauna, Peak Wood, and Peak Soils before a desperate England turned to coal. Heck, the Spaniards had Peak People as they raped and plundered the Western Hemisphere, having it nearly alone to themselves for a century.

Oil formation theory is well established and has been used to find the oil deposits that humanity mines and burns with such abandon. The shores of the Tethys Ocean are where the majority of Earth’s oil deposits were created. The vast majority of oil seeps back out, and only fortuitous geological situations make oil then trap it, so that oil companies can later come along and drill it.

When the USA’s first commercial oil well was drilled in 1859, the oil industry was off and running. It was soon taken over by an ingeniously ruthless John D. Rockefeller, who became Earth’s richest human in the process. The Rockefellers’ influence has usually been malign. We ran into them a number of times and they helped wipe us out. But Rockefeller built his empire by controlling refining, not exploration and drilling. When people began drilling East Texas oil a century ago, it was the peak of easy oil. The coveted oil is light and “sweet” which means that sulfur content is low and the oil is easily refined into gasoline (and does not need expensive and energy-intensive coker units, for instance). Also, East Texas oil was relatively close to the surface, and hence, easier to drill and extract. The concept of Energy Return on Energy Invested applies, and is called EROI. That East Texas oil of nearly a century ago had an EROI of more than 100-to-1, meaning that for every unit of energy invested, more than 100 units were extracted for use.

Only about a third of all oil (called conventional oil) is extractable from an oil field. The reason is that the oil just does not sit in a pool, but is impregnated into the rock. Only the first third is easily extractable, and the rest is the field’s dregs. The oil well’s EROI falls to one for that remainder, and there is no longer any point in mining that oil. All of Earth’s easy oil is gone, and the last relatively easy oil of note sits in today’s Middle East, which is the only reason why the USA has had a military presence there ever since the Soviet Union collapsed. No other proffered reason survives the barest scrutiny. Middle East oil is history’s greatest material prize. Oil provides 90% of humanity’s fuel used in transportation. Liquid fuels are highly superior to gaseous (natural gas) or solid (coal) fuels, with its energy density and ease of handling. When the British Navy converted from coal to oil in 1911, the Middle East’s fate was sealed. The West has yet to stop meddling in and invading the region, lying all the way (although even prominent right wingers admit why the USA invaded), and has no plans to leave anytime soon, although the Empire is in steep decline today, as all empires eventually collapse, being as fundamentally evil and unsustainable as they all are/were.

The Peak Oil idea was first proposed by M. King Hubbert, a petroleum geologist who worked for Shell Oil in Texas. Peak Oil refers to the phenomenon in which oilfield production peaks when about half of its recoverable oil is extracted. There is often a brief plateau of production when the peak is reached, and then comes a steady slide to the end, as the oil well’s EROI declines toward one and production ceases. Of course, there is a fledgling industry to suck the dregs out of those abandoned oil fields with new technological tricks, which may increase their ultimate recovery by a little.

There is virtually no debate in scientific circles on these issues:

• Oil was formed by specific geological processes acting on the remains of marine organisms that were accumulated during anoxic events;
• The high-quality oil sits in well-known deposits (there have been no significant discoveries since the 1970s), and when about a third of the oil is mined, it is no longer energetically worth it to mine the rest;
• All of Earth’s easy oil has been discovered and mined, and what remains are the dregs of Earth’s hydrocarbon deposits.

What made Hubbert famous was that in the 1950s he assessed the state of oilfield discovery and production and predicted that the USA would reach Peak Oil in 1970, which it did. The USA has been mining the dregs of its hydrocarbon deposits ever since. In 1974, during the USA’s first oil crisis, Hubbert also predicted that global oil production would peak in 1995. It was reached in 2006, so he was a little off in his timing, but the idea is unassailable. You can find reporting that world oil production keeps increasing, but that is misleading, as it includes non-conventional oil (AKA “the dregs”), which has a far lower EROI than conventional oil. In 1990, the global EROI for oil and gas was 30, it fell to less than 20 in 2014, and will fall below 10 in the 2020s, which is about the lowest EROI that can run a civilization.

Take the now-ended fracking boom in the USA. Fracking for oil is an environmentally catastrophic dregs-sucking operation with an EROI of about five. The Canadian Tar Sands that fueled another boom that has ended for now has an EROI of about three for producing “oil.” It is an even greater environmentally catastrophic method, which turns the lands into something resembling Mordor. When you see graphs that the USA’s production increased by five million barrels per day from its nadir in 2008, as it has doubled, those are highly misleading statistics for dismissing the Peak Oil argument, for a few reasons.

One reason is the production increase is not an increase in conventional oil, which is what Hubbert was referring to. It is the dregs, called tight oil, which is responsible for that increase, which is why North Dakota became a short-lived boom state in recent years, which has already turned into a bust.

Another reason is that at an EROI of five or less, that five million barrel-per-day increase is misleading. A million barrels should be deducted from that gross production, to come up with net production, as it was burned to extract those five million barrels. As EROI keeps declining as the dregs are increasingly sucked, the net barrels will decline as a proportion, and Peak Oil for conventional oil has already been reached globally.

To be fair to Hubbert, he did not project the doom that today’s Peak Oilers, led by Richard Heinberg, predict. Hubbert thought that once Peak Oil was reached, nuclear energy would supplant oil as civilization’s primary energy source. That has not worked out so well, and is partly responsible for the drums of austerity and doom that Heinberg and friends beat endlessly. Deepwater drilling in the oceans is another high-risk, low-EROI operation, going after those dregs. We are nearing Peak Gas (and may have already reached it), Peak Coal, and even Peak Uranium. After this century, if we do not go to FE or something similar, the only energy resources left of note (wind and solar are way overblown as solutions, which Brian O eventually realized), will be coal, that low-EROI conventional “oil,” and stuff like the tar sands, as we will have a global EROI of four or so, if civilization can even function at those levels. Of course, if we go that route, there will be 600 PPM carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or so, which will rapidly melt the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, displacing hundreds of millions of people. You don’t want to live long enough to see that show, much less star in it.

All that the fracking and tar sands booms did was put off the grim day of reckoning by a few years. Conventional oil will be completely depleted in this century at current rates of extraction. What Heinberg and friends got right, however, was that the energy crisis begins when Peak Oil is reached and supply and demand curves intersect and prices spike, not when the last barrel of oil is mined. Back in 2003, when I first encountered Heinberg and the Peak Oilers, he called the West’s strategy “Plan War,” in that industrial nations would simply invade and steal the oil from the world’s poor nations that sit on that oil, and today’s genocidal mayhem in the Middle East, led by the USA, is Plan War playing out. We are toying with having World War III over the world’s dwindling oil deposits before environmental calamities such as Global Warming clear Earth of billions of “excess eaters,” in the parlance of those in the milieu. Choose your poison.

Of course, the Fox News School of Oil Exploration and Global Warming denies that any of the above will impact humanity at all, or at least white humanity, with their “school” taught by blowhards such as Rush Limbaugh. They parade well-funded Global Warming deniers on their shows, who sold their souls to the hydrocarbon lobby, and declining EROI is not even a concept to them.

I’ll wrap up these Global Warming and Peak Oil posts soon, and discuss their relevance to scientific literacy and my work.

Best,

Wade

[Ernie Nemeth]

Hi Wade,

I've been thinking about the differences between ethics and morality. It came about from another thread that was discussing the immigration problem in Europe. I noticed an inconsistency between proponents of opposing views. Though both abhor the violence perpetrated by the refugees, some blame the refugees, others the world leaders that bomb the countries these people come from. I noticed that it seemed to be a problem of keeping morality and its resulting play on modern ethics in perspective.

That's just the superficial argument however, because as one continues contemplating the anomalies between ethics and morality it becomes increasingly obvious that ethics are the excuse we employ or fabricate to absolve us of our moral responsibilities. To feed everyone is laudable, but not if your family has to go hungry in the process (extrapolate to any scarce commodity). As we hurtle past peak oil and into the horrors of defunct nuclear reactors and depleted forests, as we grapple with the financial crisis, as wars rage across the planet, as _________ (fill in your own blank), ethics become increasingly antithetical to our sense of morality.

Perhaps the way to see into the effects of a truly FE economy is to imagine what a world would look like that, because scarcity will be eradicated, weds its ethics based firmly on moral principles. A world of FE allows or frees us to align our lives with our best intentions without the need to include exceptions.

Just a thought

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Ernie:

Great post, big subject. Where to begin? Michael stated that morality is a form of terrorism inflicted by the dominant class on others. The highest ethical principle is that which comes from the Infinite Spirit, which states: “We are one.” Nice ideal, but in a world of scarcity, it becomes me or you, as there is not enough to go around. The only solution that I see is abundance, and only FE can do that. Then, all the arguing ceases, all the attempts to more equitably slice up humanity’s scarce economic pie, etc.

I was talking with relatives about a related issue this weekend. Those Middle Eastern “refugee” men who see all women without burkas as fair game reflect the agrarian cultures where they hailed from. Yes, the West has purposefully kept those people back in agrarian economies so they would not use the oil that they sit on. Overthrowing Iran’s government, invading Iraq, and all the wars that the USA has recently inflicted onto the region, such as Libya and Syria, is how empires work, especially when they covet somebody else’s energy.

Where I live is a little World’s Fair, and the West Coast in general is filled with people who migrated from all over the world, and plenty have come from India and China, which were peasant nations until very recently. Our Chinese and Indian neighbors work for Microsoft, and they often bring their parents over, who care for their children, so three generations live under the same roof. That is long gone amongst white Americans. Those Chinese and Indian kids who are being born and raised here are living in an affluent industrial culture. They are growing up as Americans, and there is no way in hell that their parents or grandparents are going to convince them to move back to the old country and marry a stranger in an arranged marriage, etc. Once a person has a taste of industrial life, there is no going back to agrarian societies to live.

There is a pastoral fantasy of agrarian life, but it is brutal and primitive in many ways. My grandparents were very happy to leave behind their homesteader ways.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have a little time to write this weekend, and I’ll start by continuing those Seattle posts. To the good, I am going hiking in a little while, and it is leprechaun time, with lush blossoming forests and clear weather. It is a relatively brief time of the year for the lowlands (April to June). I was going to take a pal to one of my favorite early season hikes in the mountains, but I just looked at the trail reports and it is still under snow, and the trail is clogged with blowdowns from this past winter’s wind storms. It will be few weeks before that trail will be in leprechaun shape.

Being that Seattle has become quite the international city with the rise of high-tech, initially led by Microsoft, I meet people from all over the world and work with them each day. In the office where I work today, in the cubicles and offices near me, there are Asians, African-Americans, Africans, Eastern Europeans - our CEO is from New Zealand - and I deal daily with our offices in Europe, Asia (China and Japan, mostly), Latin America, and Canada. That is typical, and we are not really all that high-tech of a company. I worked for nearly 15 years for software companies, and when my last high-tech company was flying high, of the several hundred people in our office, English was a second language for about a third of the employees, and we even had a transgender bathroom.

What I have regularly heard, from people with extensive travel experience, is that on days like today (and we will get many like them until October), the Pacific Northwest is arguably the most beautiful place on Earth. I won’t argue against it. I have lounged around in Hawaii’s most beautiful spots, and while it could be an awe-inspiring experience (in several ways), give me Cascade meadows in bloom, or while the berries are ripe, I am in my heaven, and nobody who has seen them will argue with me.

Ironically, apes do not belong in conifer forests, as there really is not much for them to eat. Flowering plants led to the appearance of primates. So, I am not really where I belong, ecologically. Set me loose naked in the local forests, and I would not last long. Humanity’s toolset allowed for our dominance of Earth’s biomes. Humanity became energy windfall opportunists long ago. Heck, all organisms go for all the energy that they can, so humans are far from unique, but no species has ever been so “successful” at it. That success has kind of baked a blind optimism in humans, and this is endemic among all peoples. The intermittent reinforcement of games of chance that humans easily become addicted to also influences rats and other experimental animals, so that proclivity seems almost baked into our DNA.

More coming after I get back from hiking.

Best,

Wade