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Richard Heinberg (author of the seminal work The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies) lays out a clear program for Obama, to move the US away from its current suicidal path and towards a green economy. However, the danger may be that Obama has surrounded himself with people who are telling him to do the exact opposite of each of these recommendations. Our job, as a movement, is to move the country away from fossil fuels by blocking the construction of more death machines (coal plants, oil-guzzling cars, the military…), and by simultaneously creating irresistible alternatives. [alex]
Memo to the President-elect on Energy Realism and the Green New Deal
MuseLetter 200
December 2008 by Richard Heinberg
Executive Summary
Our continued national dependence on fossil fuels is creating a crippling vulnerability to both long-term fuel scarcity and catastrophic climate change.
The current economic crisis requires substantial national policy shifts and enormous new government injections of capital into the economy. This provides an opportunity for a project whose scope would otherwise be inconceivable: a large-scale, coordinated energy transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy.
This project must happen immediately; indeed, it may already be too late. We have already left behind the era of cheap and plentiful fossil fuels, with a permanent decline of global oil production likely underway within three years. Moreover, the latest research tells us we have less than eight years to bring carbon emissions under control if we hope to avoid catastrophic climate change. Lacking this larger frame of understanding and action, a mere shift away from foreign oil dependence will fail to meet the challenge at hand.
The energy transition must not be limited to building wind turbines and solar panels. It must include the thorough redesign of our economic and societal infrastructure, which today is utterly dependent on cheap fossil fuels. It must address not only our transportation system and our electricity grid, but also our food system and our building stock.
Our 21st century nation’s dependence on 20th century fossil fuels is the greatest threat we face, far more so than the current financial crisis. A coordinated, comprehensive transition to an economy that is no longer dependent on hydrocarbon fuels and no longer emits climate-changing levels of carbon—a Post Carbon Energy Transition—will be the Obama Administration’s greatest opportunity to lead the nation on a path toward sustainable prosperity.
Overview: Need and Scope
As a new Administration prepares to take the reins of power, America’s economy is descending into a recession or, quite possibly, a depression. Read the rest of this entry »
The US government is becoming more and more a tool for huge corporations and banks to eliminate their risk despite insanely short-sighted and self-serving policies. The American public will not accept our money being handed to those who don’t deserve it, and never intend to pay us back. That is fascism.
“We, the people” need a bailout too. Today I attended a rally in Philadelphia, to stop the mayor from making budget cuts to close down 11 libraries around the city. How are you supposed to provide educational opportunities for inner-city youth if you’re closing libraries? Closing doors, eliminating opportunities for advancement – this fuels the cycle of violence and crime.
We have to demand money for human needs, not corporate greed! It’s our government, it must work for us, not just the rich. [alex]
Originally published by Forbes.
Washington’s $5 Trillion Tab
Elizabeth Moyer, 11.12.08
Fighting the financial crisis has put the U.S. on the hook for some $5 trillion a report says. So far.
For all the fury over Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700 billion emergency economic relief fund, it seems downright puny when compared to the running total of the government’s response to the credit crisis.
According to CreditSights, a research firm in New York and London, the U.S. government has put itself on the hook for some $5 trillion, so far, in an attempt to arrest a collapse of the financial system.
The estimate includes many of the various solutions cooked up by Paulson and his counterparts Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve and Sheila Bair at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., as the credit crisis continues to plague banks and the broader markets. Read the rest of this entry »
Now I hope people don’t see this article as ‘support for the Soviet Union’ or something ridiculous like that, but I think this is a very insightful and amusing article, based on a powerpoint presentation. The question is, was the USSR more prepared for the economic collapse it suffered than the US is for the collapse it will soon suffer? Orlov lived through the former and seems to think that it was.
Also note that I strongly disagree with his recommendation to abandon politics – he’s right that politicians are swine but i think he’s wrong in overlooking people’s ability to build a resistance movement that can make real changes to our society, despite politicians best efforts to derail it. So with that, enjoy the article! [alex]
Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US
by Dmitry Orlov
Originally published be Energy Bulletin, December 4, 2006.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am not an expert or a scholar or an activist. I am more of an eye-witness. I watched the Soviet Union collapse, and I have tried to put my observations into a concise message. I will leave it up to you to decide just how urgent a message it is.
My talk tonight is about the lack of collapse-preparedness here in the United States. I will compare it with the situation in the Soviet Union, prior to its collapse. The rhetorical device I am going to use is the “Collapse Gap” – to go along with the Nuclear Gap, and the Space Gap, and various other superpower gaps that were fashionable during the Cold War.
Slide [2] The subject of economic collapse is generally a sad one. But I am an optimistic, cheerful sort of person, and I believe that, with a bit of preparation, such events can be taken in stride. As you can probably surmise, I am actually rather keen on observing economic collapses. Perhaps when I am really old, all collapses will start looking the same to me, but I am not at that point yet.
And this next one certainly has me intrigued. From what I’ve seen and read, it seems that there is a fair chance that the U.S. economy will collapse sometime within the foreseeable future. It also would seem that we won’t be particularly well-prepared for it. As things stand, the U.S. economy is poised to perform something like a disappearing act. And so I am eager to put my observations of the Soviet collapse to good use.
Slide [3] I anticipate that some people will react rather badly to having their country compared to the USSR. I would like to assure you that the Soviet people would have reacted similarly, had the United States collapsed first. Feelings aside, here are two 20th century superpowers, who wanted more or less the same things – things like technological progress, economic growth, full employment, and world domination – but they disagreed about the methods. And they obtained similar results – each had a good run, intimidated the whole planet, and kept the other scared. Each eventually went bankrupt. Read the rest of this entry »
Students for a Democratic Society:
Drop Debt Not Bombs Dance Party
on the 5th Anniversary of the War in Iraq!
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FUNK THE WAR with Philadelphia Students for a Democratic Society on March 21st as we dance through Penn and Drexel Universities to demand an end to war and student debt! We are celebrating the launch of our Drexel and Penn chapters with a sonic boom for the 5th anniversary of the War in Iraq. Across the nation, Students for a Democratic Society is holding walk outs, nonviolent actions for student power, peace, and affordable education.
The $500 billion dollar war in Iraq has been paid for with cuts in education and student aid. A struggling economy, rising tuition, predatory loan companies and expensive textbooks have shouldered more than 2/3 of students with an average of $19,000 in individual debt. Universities should be actively rejecting the Federal cuts to education by funding loan education programs, providing more need based financial aid, freezing tuition, and creating more opportunities for low income students.
Meet us on FRIDAY, MARCH 21st:
UPENN MEETUP: 12 noon at the Compass (37th + Locust)
DREXEL MEETUP: 1 pm at MacAlister Hall (33rd + Chestnut)
Join us on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=10449978635
Philly SDS website: http://www.phillysds.org
DC SDS Funk the War 2 Video http://www.vimeo.com/736378/
Nationwide Actions on the 5th Anniversary of the War
http://www.newSDS.org/march20/
http://www.5yearstoomany.org/
This great, short essay “Against School” targets modern, mass, mandatory schooling as an educational fraud, arguing that the real purpose of school is to divide, demoralize, and train youth for lifetimes as workers and consumers. In other words, to produce obedience and helplessness on an industrial scale. I think a second function, which the author does not address, is that mass mandatory schooling takes children away from their parents for the entire day, freeing up the adults for higher levels of work and consumption. Thus the “daycare prisons” we send our kids to every day help facilitate the “daily grind” that imprisons our parents in the rat-race of toil and buying that powers industrial production and profits.
How public education cripples our kids, and why
By John Taylor Gatto
John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year and the author, most recently, of The Underground History of American Education. He was a participant in the Harper’s Magazine forum “School on a Hill,” which appeared in the September 2003 issue.
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: The said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Originally on the DC SDS Blog.
11 Students for a Democratic Society, including 9 members of DC SDS drove out to Annapolis Wednesday morning to participate in a rally and civil disobedience to bring attention to the neglect of students in Baltimore public schools.The Baltimore Algebra Project, a student-led inter-school coalition of inner city youths, called for a die-in at the State House in Maryland’s state capital of Annapolis. Chanting “No Education, No Life!” 25 members of the Baltimore Algebra Project and their supporters were arrested for presenting a coffin to Governor O’Malley in absentia, representing the social death (and, chillingly pointed out by the picture on the coffin of Zachariah Hallback, a Baltimore Algebra project member who was recently shot to death in a robbery, actual deaths) of students who are denied a proper education. No charges were filed on any of the participants. Students for a Democratic society were 7 of the 25 arrests.
DC Students for a Democratic society applauds the self-organization of students for student liberation and the democratization of education that the Baltimore Algebra Project organizes, and hopes to work with them again in the future. Read the rest of this entry »
A little 20-min. video that gives a basic lesson in political economy for the average American consumer. Brilliant!
The End of Capitalism 
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